SEO in 2022: 66 of the world’s leading SEOs share their number 1, actionable tip for 2022 by David Bain (Author)

Summary of: Educate Google about your brand - with Jason Barnard from Kalicube

The number one SEO tip for 2022 (and 2021) is to educate Google about your brand.

This involves clearly communicating who you are, what you do, and who your audience is. While Google may already have gathered some fragmented information about a brand from various sources (like LinkedIn or Crunchbase), the key is communicating it sufficiently consistently for the machine to be confident in its understanding.

Key Strategies for Educating Google

1. Consistent Repetition: To build confidence, you must repeat the same information across multiple platforms (e.g., website, LinkedIn, Crunchbase) using the exact same phrasing and manner,. Varying the information confuses the machine, similar to confusing a child,.

2. Use Google’s Native Language: A phenomenally important aspect of communication is using schema markup on your website, as this is Google’s native language and explicitly restates your information so Google can digest it natively.

3. Establish the Entity Home: Google seeks to identify the “entity home” to reconcile fragmented and contradictory information gathered from around the web,. The best place for this “defragmented version from the horse’s mouth” is the About Us page, not the homepage,.

    ◦ The About Us page allows for factual content about who you are, what you do, and who your audience is, presented in a way the machine can understand, without needing to be “salesy” or appeal primarily to a human audience.

    ◦ On the About Us page, brands should state their core identity and point to all corroborative sources (e.g., social media channels, Wikipedia, Crunchbase).

4. Detailing Your Offerings: The About Us page covers the basic core message of what you do, but the rest of the site should provide the detailed, nuanced messages and specific solutions you offer to Google’s users. Content that doesn’t drive direct traffic is still useful because it acts as supporting evidence of the brand’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T), allowing Google to trust the brand. This foundational trust can even allow a site to rank for short-head terms with minimal inbound links.

5. Defining the Audience: Start by stating explicitly who you serve (e.g., digital marketers), allowing the machine to corroborate this information from other sources, similar to a child gaining confidence by hearing the same lesson from different credible adults. This understanding helps Google match its users to the correct audience subset and offer the brand as a relevant solution,.

The Result: The Knowledge Panel and Brand Leadership

Google demonstrates its confidence and understanding by triggering a Knowledge Panel and assigning the brand a place in its Knowledge Graph,. The Knowledge Panel acts as a reconciled “Google business card,” consolidating facts about the company from across the web, thereby improving the user experience,.

To obtain a Knowledge Panel, Google requires understanding, confidence, and probability; an ambiguous brand name makes this process more difficult.

To move beyond being a recognizable brand to being the brand leader in your space, you need Credibility, which Google refers to as Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-A-T),. If Google is confident that a brand is a more credible solution for its target audience than the competition, that brand has “won the game”.

Avoiding Counterproductive Practices

A common mistake is rewriting or paraphrasing company descriptions on external platforms to avoid perceived “duplicate content” issues. This is counterproductive because repeating the same information in different variations confuses the machine,. Duplicate content concerns originally focused on plagiarism; copying yourself as the original source is acceptable and necessary for educating Google. Google will then pull different valuable chunks of information from these repetitive descriptions to represent the brand’s full palette in search results.