Unlock Your Potential: Mastering Google for Your Business Growth with Jason Barnard

Ready to Master Google?

In this episode, Jason Barnard unpacks powerful strategies for mastering Google to boost your business growth. Did you know that focusing on a niche market can significantly decrease competition and enhance your credibility online? Jason shares how his own experience led to a 600% revenue increase while engaging a compact audience. He emphasizes the importance of providing Google with detailed, granular information about your business to build trust and visibility.

Optimize Your Online Presence

Jason details how to educate Google about your business through consistent content creation, including FAQs and well-crafted articles. This approach not only improves SEO but also establishes your authority in your field. Furthermore, he demonstrates how gaining customer reviews can propel your ranking on Google, making your business more accessible to potential clients.

Achieve Lasting Results

To see real growth, remember that mastering Google’s algorithms is an ongoing process. With patience and strategic engagement, you can transform your online presence and create a lasting impact on your target market.

Listen here: Unlock Your Potential: Mastering Google for Your Business Growth with Jason Barnard

Published by  Grow Your Impact, Income & Influence February 4, 2025. Host:  Steve Werner. Guest: Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO at Kalicube®.

Dominate Google and Skyrocket Your Business Growth with Jason Barnard

S​teve Werner [00:00:00]:

Are you looking for clarity to grow your business in the sea of overwhelm? Make sure to check out the podcast notes for access to our exclusive 12 person mastermind. All right, let’s go ahead and jump into the show. Welcome back to Grow Your Impact, Income and Influence. The number one show helping you reach millions. And today we are talking about millions of page views through dominating Google. Today’s guest has a phenomenal resume. He started off with more than 800 live concert shows, then launched a cartoon that has more than a billion views worldwide. 1B with a billion.

S​teve Werner [00:00:40]:

And most impressive, he has got his revenue for Kalicube, his business that helps you dominate Google to 6x revenue in just a few short years using what he is going to teach you today. If you want to stand out on Google, this is the show for you. So shut up, sit down and plug in your headphones. Let’s get going. Jason Barnard, how are you doing today?

Jason Barnard [00:01:02]:

I’m doing very well, thank you very much, Steve.

Jason Barnard’s Journey from Concerts to Google Mastery

S​teve Werner [00:01:05]:

Awesome. Well, it is my pleasure to have you here. How does one go from concerts to a cartoon with a billion views and then to mastering Google? Where did all of this start for you?

Jason Barnard [00:01:18]:

Mastering Google is actually something I think was always in me. But Google didn’t exist and didn’t have the algorithms it has today when I was younger. And so I took some time out to play 800 concerts and build a website that had a billion page views just in 2007. So it was one year and it had 5 million children coming to the website every single month.

S​teve Werner [00:01:42]:

Wow.

Jason Barnard [00:01:42]:

It was huge. And that was a really fun career and I enjoyed it greatly. But I think deep down in my soul I was maybe not born, but I was brought into this world and my world and made me end up being the person who has figured out how to master Google’s algorithms without the geek.

Learn How to Control Your Brand’s Presence on Google

S​teve Werner [00:02:05]:

I love that. So if you guys are listening to this, Jason has made this super, super simple. If Google scares you, if you are not tech savvy, if you can’t figure out your email autoresponder, keep listening. This show is going to simplify it for you in a way that you would not believe is possible. If you guys are interested to see what I’m talking about, you can click in the show notes. Jason has put together several very well worded, easy to follow guides. You can click the link that is down below in the description. It is kalicube.com/guides.

S​teve Werner [00:02:37]:

It’s linked down below. All right, let’s jump into this like people are so scared of Google, like the algorithm, like air quotes around that they’re, they’re scared like, oh, something bad is going to show up. Or worse yet, nothing is going to show up for my brand. How do people master Google?

Jason Barnard [00:02:56]:

Right. Which is a great question. Start with a huge question as well. I mastered Google with the Boowa and Kwala cartoon, the billion webpage views, because Google was very simplistic. It was founded on geek, and if you were a geek, you could beat it. Now it’s grown so complex that however geek you are, you’re never going to master it because the algorithms are so incredibly complex. The AI algorithms are so incredibly complex, nobody knows what’s going on inside, even the Google engineers. So from that perspective, the secret is we can predict what will come out given the input.

Jason Barnard [00:03:41]:

So if we put in ABC, we know X, Y, Z is going to come out the other side and it doesn’t actually matter what happens in between.

S​teve Werner [00:03:47]:

Got it.

Jason Barnard [00:03:48]:

And the ABC is very simple. And luckily for people who aren’t geeks, it’s all about great brand marketing.

Help Google Recommend You as the Best Solution

S​teve Werner [00:03:57]:

Okay, so I am traditionally a direct marketer, which means I don’t usually care that much about brands. I care about whether people take action on what I say? But I will put a big asterisk on that. I love ranking well on Google because I know it gets people to the pages where I can put direct marketing. So you said you were going to simplify this for us. What are the actions, the ABC actions that we can put in on the front end.

Jason Barnard [00:04:25]:

Right. Well, in terms of getting Google to recommend you to its audience, which is what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to get Google to recommend you as a solution. Because when somebody uses Google, they’re looking for the solution to a problem or the answer to a question. You need to convince Google that you are the best solution, and you have the best answer. Because Google is obsessed with making its users happy, solving their problems as efficiently as it possibly can. And your job is to help it. If you can help Google, excuse me, serve its audience as efficiently as possible with the right solution, the best solution, you’re winning the game. And the best solution isn’t the one that has the most geek in it.

Jason Barnard [00:05:08]:

The best solution is the one that actually solves the problem of the person.

S​teve Werner [00:05:12]:

I love that because I think most of my listeners, myself included, I’m here because I love solving people’s problems. I love seeing people smile when they get a result. So if I’m actually just helping Google do that I’m fulfilling my purpose. I think a lot of people would say, I hear this all the time from my people. They say, you know, I am the best in the world at what I do. I’m the best nutritionist, I am the best yoga instructor, I’m the best therapist. But they can’t, they’re like, but I don’t know how to get people to me. And that’s what we’re solving right here.

Jason Barnard [00:05:45]:

Exactly. 100%. And if you look at it from a perspective that Google and Bing, Microsoft Bing and ChatGPT are the same, the new technologies don’t need to frighten you either. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Alexa, Siri, they’re all the same, they all work the same way. They’re all trying to solve people’s problems as efficiently as they possibly can. And they’re all an interface between my services, me and what I offer, and my audience who would benefit from my services. So I just need to convince the machine, sorry, first I need to explain to the machine who I am, what I do and who I serve. Then I need to convince it that I’m credible as a solution. And then I need to demonstrate to it that I have the right solution and give it the content that allows it to present me to the subset of its users who are my audience. Looking at it from that perspective, we call it the Kalicube Process, which is the guide that you talked about earlier on understandability, credibility, deliverability. Do the machines understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve? Do they believe you’re the most credible, the most authoritative, the best in the market? And do they believe you will deliver and do they have the content that they need to present you to their audience, their users?

Showcase Your Authority and Win the Game

S​teve Werner [00:07:01]:

Okay, so let’s, I love that you just laid out that framework because that’s a simple three step framework. Can we dive into that a little bit deeper so that people understand how to actually do this? I’m sure this stuff is covered in your guide, but let’s just dive into these simple nuts and bolts so people can understand that this is not complicated. This is something, I’m guessing just simple daily actions will get us there.

Jason Barnard [00:07:26]:

Yeah, well, if you think about machines simply emulating the world, the online world is the same as the offline world. It’s just a representation of the offline world on the Internet, on a computer. And these machines are watching us every day, everything we do online, looking over our shoulder and analyzing who we are, what we do, which audience we serve, are we credible and can we deliver? So all you need to do is walk the walk. Walk the walk as a brand with great marketing materials, make sure the machines can get their little fingers on that material, digest it and use it and you’ve won the game. So it’s branding and marketing packaged for machines, and it’s the branding and the marketing that’s going to be the most powerful. The packaging, the machines are a great bonus if you can do it and are a little bit of a geek. But the packaging for the machines is actually just being very clear. If you don’t want to be a geek, you just don’t be a geek.

Jason Barnard [00:08:29]:

If you’re really, really clear and you join the dots for the machines, they will understand. If you demonstrate your credibility to your audience, the machines will see it. If your audience is engaging with you, the machines will see it. You’ve won the game. And I haven’t said anything geeky.

Build Credibility by Linking to Trusted Sources

S​teve Werner [00:08:45]:

Awesome. I love it. Can we, can we get kind of tactical with that? What does that mean? What does that actually mean to be clear about what you’re doing? What are. The first step you said is to be clear about what you’re doing. The second step that I understood was then gain credibility, which is I think people going to your page and people saying, yes, this person knows what they’re doing. Right. How do we get those two things?

Jason Barnard [00:09:10]:

Well, the first thing is not to focus on your website too much. Your website is important. It’s a source of information for the machines and it’s a place that you want your users to come to. But the machine doesn’t just look at your website because your website is you saying who you are, what you do, which audience you serve, you saying that you’re credible, you saying you can deliver. What the machine wants is for you to say all of that certainly on the website you have to say it and you have to be very clear and you have to have a great website that’s well organized. But what you need to do from the website is point out, using links, normal HTML links in the pages that you can put into WordPress, really simply point out, link to the corroborative sources that prove what you’re saying.

Jason Barnard [00:09:54]:

If you say, I have an award from my industry for being the best in the market, have a page that says I’m the best in the market. This award proves it. Link out to it, to the page on the website, the third party website that says it. The machine will see it and say, okay, yeah, that’s true. I trust this person a little bit more or this company a little bit more. So what you need to do is use your website as a hub. It’s a hub with spokes that point out to the wheel that is your digital ecosystem and that is how the machine will understand you. And in effect, if you think about that idea, your wheel should be only the places that your audience is looking naturally.

Jason Barnard [00:10:36]:

You should go and hang out where they’re looking, stand where your audience is looking. Don’t focus on Twitter if all your audience is on LinkedIn. Don’t focus on LinkedIn if all of your audience is on TikTok. Figure out where your audience is hanging out and stand there. That’s for your audience. So your audience will see you and they’ll think, oh, there’s somebody who can potentially help me. If the machine sees you doing that, the machine will understand who you are, what you do and who you serve.

Jason Barnard [00:11:05]:

So what do you have to do?

S​teve Werner [00:11:07]:

Got it. So should a blog, like, should a website not only link to blogs, should it link to social media?

Jason Barnard [00:11:15]:

Yeah.

Boost Credibility by Connecting Your Digital Assets

S​teve Werner [00:11:15]:

Should we be posting face to face, like, should we be linking to either articles or profiles or posts on social media as well as blogs? Am I understanding you correctly?

Jason Barnard [00:11:28]:

Yeah, exactly. You should point the machine and in fact, your users to all of the resources that are relevant about you and for you and link back from them to your website. Because there are a couple of things that happen there: the machine, Google, ChatGPT, Bing, doesn’t matter. All of them are the same. Go to the hub and then they follow the spokes that you give them and they go and look at it and they go, oh, brilliant. And then if they go along the spoke and then there’s a link back to your website, they just come back again. Then they go to the next one, they come back and they go to the next one, they come back and they keep seeing that you’re standing in the right places.

Jason Barnard [00:12:05]:

They keep seeing the confirmation that what you’re saying on your website is true and they end up believing you. But the other great bonus is if you’re standing where your audience is looking, then you’re already talking to the right audience and the machine is a bonus.

Optimize Content for Engagement and Visibility

S​teve Werner [00:12:20]:

Got it. Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me. So to not geekify this, if you’re using a WordPress website, you just need to put blog posts up that point out two different things. How often do we need to do this?

Jason Barnard [00:12:41]:

Well, a lot of people write blog posts just because they think it’s a good thing to do and it doesn’t actually serve any purpose because they never really think, how am I going to get people to this blog post? So at Kalicube, when we create content, the first thing we think is, when I’ve created this content, how are people going to find it? Are they going to find it through the search engine because I’ve done some great SEO, or am I going to push it in front of them using direct emailing or social media, or getting a journalist to cite me? Those are all different ways that I can imagine getting somebody to that web page. And once again, we’re looking at creating useful content for a use that is actually human.

S​teve Werner [00:13:22]:

Right?

Jason Barnard [00:13:23]:

So if I’ve got a great Facebook post, I’m already engaging with my Facebook audience. I then link to it from a blog post on my website. Google then finds it, understands it’s me, sees me engaging with people, sees how many wonderful likes we’ve got and shares and comments, and it says, oh, this person is engaging with an audience that I understand to be the correct audience, the relevant audience, and they’re getting lots of engagement. That looks really good. So at this point, we’re starting to demonstrate to Google and ChatGPT and Bing that we are a credible solution because they see that the audience is engaging. So what we’ve done is we’ve stood where the audience is looking and we’ve demonstrated to them our credibility with great content or by telling them about our awards or our education. And Google sees all of this. So stand where your audience is looking, demonstrate your credibility, give them the content that makes them want to come down the funnel, visit your website, which is ultimately what you want them to do.

Jason Barnard [00:14:23]:

So stand where your audience is looking, demonstrate your credibility, invite them down the funnel. Google is watching all of this. And if your hub and spoke model with the wheel around it is clear enough for Google, it will understand using your hub as the focus point from which it can go out and understand that you are indeed in the right places for the right people, offering the right service and really engaging your audience.

Outrank Competitors by Becoming the Best in Your Niche

S​teve Werner [00:14:48]:

Okay, I love it. I do have a couple questions. The first one is how can somebody that’s getting started, maybe they have a couple employees, Maybe they’re doing 100, 200, $300,000 a year. How can they compete against the big dogs in space? Because you said at the beginning of the interview, Google wants to know that you are the best. How can somebody compete? Because it is what I hear you saying, this is a process that anybody can do by writing some articles that are relevant, standing where their audience is, and linking back and forth between them. How can somebody compete against a big player in space? What are the things that are going to allow them to dominate the space even though they might not be as big as that person?

Jason Barnard [00:15:35]:

Right. Well, the first thing is niche. The more niche you are, the easier it is to dominate, less competition. And the big players are not able to demonstrate the same level of credibility and deliverability that you can in a very small, in a very tight niche. So the first thing is focus on a really tight niche because you can be the best in that tight niche. For example, we’re the best in Knowledge Panel management. Knowledge Panel is the information box on the right hand side on Google Search.

Jason Barnard [00:16:03]:

There are very few companies who do that. There are very few people who specialize in that. We’re top of the pile because it’s so niche. Also because we’re the best. But that goes without saying. If you can niche down, you can focus on Google’s understanding. You can focus and create more credibility by engaging with an incredibly niche audience.

Jason Barnard [00:16:28]:

Because Google has a capacity of understanding niche to a level that we simply cannot conceive of as human beings. It’s got, we would think of a category, for example dentistry. Google is able to understand dentistry. Who’s the best at actually putting the fillings in. So if you’re the best dentist for fillings, go for it and get your clientele who come in for the fillings. And there are multiple ways it will do that. And here’s another great marketing strategy that will work for Google. Get a lot of reviews.

Improve Your Search Rankings by Encouraging Descriptive Reviews

S​teve Werner [00:17:02]:

Absolutely. I think reviews. I think reviews are. I know in my experience we’ve helped several customers build their reviews and that alone has brought them to the first page of Google.

Jason Barnard [00:17:17]:

Yeah, well, it does multiple things. Number one, it proves your credibility. Number two, Google analyzes the reviews to understand exactly what services you offer. So the more you can get people to say in reviews the details about what you’ve done for them alongside how happy they are, the better you’re going to be placed. Because if somebody says, and I’ll use a different example, I want a coffee in a coffee shop that has good wifi and a comfy chair. The cafe around the corner will never write, we’ve got really comfy chairs and our wifi is wonderful. But a review will.

Jason Barnard [00:17:55]:

And so if you search for something like that, try it on Google, you’ll see on Google Maps, on the Google Business Profile, you will see it will be bold. If you search for coffee, comfy chair, great wifi it will bold coffee, comfy chair and wifi and it will pull up the reviews that contain that information. So when you’re getting reviews, you not only want a five star review, but you want a review that goes into the details of what you’ve done. And the trick there is not to ask people questions that have yes and no answers. Did you enjoy your service? Ask them what did you appreciate about the service and you guide them that way. And Google is feeding immense amounts of information, detailed information from the reviews so you can actually let your clients, your customers drive the niche for you.

Boost Your Google Rankings with Trusted Reviews

S​teve Werner [00:18:41]:

Okay, so I have a question on reviews. How do you get the best Google reviews? So we’ve always, we, we try to script it for people.

Jason Barnard [00:18:50]:

It’s not just on Google, any review platform, it doesn’t matter. Google’s more powerful because it injects directly into the brain of Google. But Facebook’s good, Trustpilot’s good. Even collecting your own reviews is okay. The only thing about collecting your own reviews, I had a client who collected 15,000 reviews and Google paid no attention to it. Then I convinced them to pay for a Trustpilot account for a year. They collected 2,000 reviews on Trustpilot and all of a sudden the reviews that they had collected became more powerful and they were ranking for pretty much everything, pretty much everywhere. Google was indexing the reviews, understanding the details of the reviews and the different parts of the service through the reviews because they got the approbation, if you like that Trustpilot provided.

Jason Barnard [00:19:38]:

And I’m not particularly selling Trustpilot, I mean any of these respective platforms will do it. So you can actually collect lots and lots and lots of reviews yourself. But you can’t expect Google to believe you on your own good word that these reviews are legitimate. You need to collect them somewhere else that are very similar. So Google says, well actually these are pretty much the same. Yes, it is probably very honest. Off we go.

Find the Best Third-Party Review Site for Your Industry

S​teve Werner [00:20:01]:

I love it. Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me and I like that because I think that is something that anybody with a viable business can do. They can start asking for reviews. It doesn’t have to be Google they can use, but it should not probably start with their own platform. Use a third party platform of some kind. Okay, that’s a good point. And we will get right back to today’s show. If you are looking for clarity in the sea of overwhelm that is out there when it comes to business, make sure to check out the show notes for our workshops, our webinars and our exclusive 12-person mastermind.

S​teve Werner [00:20:36]:

All right, let’s go ahead and jump back into it.

Jason Barnard [00:20:38]:

Yeah. Well, with third party platforms you can generally also embed the reviews with a piece of a snippet which isn’t very complicated. You copy paste it or they give you a WordPress block, but you can do both if you want to, or you can just use the third party platform or you can use two or three third party platforms. Be careful in your choice because review platforms can be niche specific. So have a look at your competitors, search for competitor name reviews and see what’s ranking, see which platforms are dominating. It might not be Trustpilot, it might be something else. It might be a localized one. If you’re in Germany or in a particular state in America, there might be a shoemaker review site, I don’t know.

Jason Barnard [00:21:23]:

And if there is, that’s where you need to be if Google is prioritizing it. So take a look at Google results. And this is one of the tricks that I explain in my book which you can see behind me but the audience can’t because this is a video where I talk about looking at the search engine results page for your brand name and your competitor’s brand name and using that to understand what Google thinks about you and what Google thinks about your competitors and what Google thinks about your market. What Google thinks is what it sees. And if it sees that your market is dominated by a particular review platform or a particular social media platform, it will be obvious when you’ve looked at 14 or 15 of your competitors. That same platform will keep popping up and you can say, okay, that’s the one to go for. Not because Google says so, but because Google has observed that that is the dominant platform in that particular industry.

Build Trust and Authority With an FAQ Section

S​teve Werner [00:22:15]:

Got it. Okay, I’ve got, I’ve got two questions that are top of mind for me. The first one is what if I don’t like blogging? What if blogging is not the thing that I want to do? How can I grow my site regardless? Because I think a lot of people I know, some people would say I don’t have time, I don’t have the energy. They should, in my opinion, not go to ChatGPT and say write me a blog because that’s just going to actually push you down and make it worse. So what can they do instead of writing?

Jason Barnard [00:22:46]:

Well, I would say instead of writing, but I would recommend doing an FAQ section because answering questions that your clients are asking about your company has multiple benefits. Number one, it forces you to think about what it is you’re offering your clients and what it is they’re looking for. And the first questions that come into your mind are not going to be the first questions that come into your client’s mind. So you can ask your sales team or the social media team or even your clients, what questions have you got for me? What do you need to know about my services in my company? And answer them. And they don’t need to be long answers. And this is a great thing, if you can answer the question. It’s a question and answer per page. So one question with an answer on one page, the answer can be anything from 50 words to 300 words.

Jason Barnard [00:23:30]:

It just needs to answer the question. And the advantage of that is, number one, people will find you for questions around your company and about your company, which is huge, huge win that people often miss. And number two, you’re going to be educating the machines about you. That understandability I was talking about becomes very, very granular. So it’s like the reviews you’re giving Google, Bing, ChatGPT, very granular information about what you do, what you offer, who you offer it to and how you offer it and how you provide your services. And that’s going to build trust. So you still have to write in that particular scenario. Podcasting, brilliant. Videos, brilliant.

Jason Barnard [00:24:11]:

If you do podcasting and videos, always do a transcript and human correct it.

Help Google Understand Your Content with Human-Edited Captions

S​teve Werner [00:24:17]:

A transcript or show notes. So if I made it. Let me ask you. So I was just thinking about the video. If I make a YouTube video that answers a question, then I put it on my site, I write the blog and maybe I give like the bullet points of the video and I link out to the video. Is that good enough or do I need the full transcript of the video? Should I write like the bullet points and then maybe put a line and say below is the full transcript for you and then post the full transcript.

Jason Barnard [00:24:45]:

Yeah, it would be ideal to post the transcript. It might not be a great user experience, in which case you don’t need to do it, but you can at least put the captions. So in YouTube, for example, you can auto generate the captions and you will see that it gets it wrong a lot. If you say my name, it often gets it wrong. If you say Kalicube, it always gets it wrong. Go through and correct all of that. Because as soon as you’ve human corrected it, it’s shown in a different way in the YouTube video. And Google will then use that video, read the video and know that you’ve human corrected the captions and it can therefore be more confident that it’s getting it right.

S​teve Werner [00:25:24]:

Interesting, I like that one. That’s a good tip.

Jason Barnard [00:25:28]:

Well, I mean Google is analyzing all of the videos and all of the podcasts, but because we don’t speak clearly, because we don’t, we start sentences, don’t get quite to the end, and then we restart them without completely finishing the sentence and we’re a bit confused. And I just did that then. And now the machine has suddenly lost track of what I’m trying to say. I can go in and correct that to make it a clear sentence that the machine will then understand. So if you don’t like writing, record.

Fill Information Gaps to Boost Your Visibility

S​teve Werner [00:25:57]:

Got it. I love it because that definitely falls more in line with me. And I think a lot of people find that easier because they might not be able to blog, but they could do a video a week. What’s that would be my next follow up to this. How often should people be doing this? I’m sure if they could put out five blogs a day that would be ideal, but in reality one or two posts a week is enough to get you there. What do you recommend as a minimum viable product? We’re going to go through your timelines that you have listed next. So, let’s back this into the timelines.

Jason Barnard [00:26:30]:

Well, I hate to say, but you can publish as much or as little as you want. The more you publish new information, the more you will educate the machine, the more the machine will understand who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve in great detail. And that’s the foundation of everything. I mean, I would argue that the more granular the understanding of the machine, of what you do, who you serve, how you serve them, the higher the probability that you will be presented by the machine at some point in the customer’s journey, when you’re potential client is using the machine, that credibility, you can prove it as an overall kind of umbrella. But the details of what you do is hugely important. And in very slightly geeky terms, we talk about the information gap. What doesn’t the machine yet know? What information can you provide the machine that it doesn’t yet know? Focus there. And information it doesn’t know is actually at its foundation, information about you.

Jason Barnard [00:27:29]:

So start with you, your clients, what you do for them, specifically you. And don’t write about something very generic. If you’re a dentist, don’t write about white enamel teeth. It’s too general.

S​teve Werner [00:27:41]:

Write about something.

Jason Barnard [00:27:42]:

Write about. Yeah, how I specifically apply polish to people’s teeth to make the white enamel whiter. I don’t know, I’m not a dentist. I’m making this up.

S​teve Werner [00:27:54]:

It’s all good, I like it.

The Brand SERP Guy® (Jason Barnard) [00:27:56]:

But be very specific about how you implement and how you serve your clients within that particular, very generic idea. So talk about yourself, educate the machine about you, and you’re always filling an information gap.

Strengthen Your Online Presence to Trigger a Knowledge Panel

S​teve Werner [00:28:11]:

Awesome. Okay, let’s go to the Knowledge Graph that goes on the side of Google. How soon can people start to see what is included in it? What is that for people that don’t know? Maybe we should start there.

Jason Barnard [00:28:25]:

Yeah, on the right hand side, Knowledge Panel, it’s an information box. It’s Google’s understanding of the facts. And that’s a way that you can know that Google has understood who you are, what you do, which audience you serve. And that in the Kalicube Process is understandability. If you do the hub and spoke, standing where your audience is looking, linking from the hub to those places and back from those places to your hub, you can expect Google to create and give you a Knowledge Panel within six months. So it’s quite a long process because Google takes time to digest and it’s quite reticent about putting facts front and center if it isn’t 100% sure. But when you do get that Knowledge Panel, you know the machine is incredibly confident in what it’s understood about you. And that’s a hugely, hugely good sign, because that understandability is the foundation of the rest.

Jason Barnard [00:29:18]:

If it doesn’t understand who you are, it cannot apply the credibility signals, reviews, engagement on social media.

S​teve Werner [00:29:26]:

Got it. So that on the side appearing means that Google understands who you are and they know how to recommend you.

Jason Barnard [00:29:35]:

Yeah. And to whom they need to recommend. So if that information box is there, you have that foundational knowledge and you’ve basically mastered Google’s understanding of who you are, what you do, which audience you serve. And that also means that the AI machines like ChatGPT and Bing and Perplexity, Alexa, Siri have probably understood too. So you can master Google today in order to dominate AI tomorrow. So you can actually push AI as a problem for another day because you’re focusing on Google in the right way, which is understandability, credibility, deliverability. And it’s a timeless strategy that’s universal.

Take Control of Your Knowledge Panel on Google

S​teve Werner [00:30:17]:

Can you control what is in that sidebar on Google? Is that. Do you get to pick what’s there or does Google pick it?

Jason Barnard [00:30:25]:

The algorithms pick it. No human being on Earth picks it. So you get a Knowledge Panel and you can claim the Knowledge Panel and you therefore get ownership of it. But all ownership means is you go to the front of the queue when you suggest feedback of things that they might want to change. If you then submit the feedback, a human being at Google will reply to you. Either there’s nothing we can do because that’s algorithmic, or we changed it for you and you think, brilliant, great, wonderful. But if the machine, if the algorithm disagrees with it, if the algorithm thinks it’s wrong, it will switch it back, you wasted your time. The algorithm is in charge.

Jason Barnard [00:31:07]:

So that Knowledge Panel is something that you need to manage from through the content that you publish. So it’s a very difficult thing to do because you’re always one step away from it. That’s what we specialize at Kalicube, is that we can manage it. We don’t control 100%, but if something is wrong, we can fix it. If something is missing, we can add it. If something is there that you don’t want there, we can replace it.

Build Your Brand and Grow Your Business

S​teve Werner [00:31:32]:

Got it. Okay, so we’ve kind of talked about how to do this from a non geeky, very simplistic way. You need to make some posts a few times a week, link out to high quality content and hopefully get some links back to you. Build some reviews on a third party platform, preferably whatever third party platform your audience uses already look at your competitors. That’s a really easy to follow 1, 2, 3 process. And you said you could see results from this in somewhere between three to six months. Is that about, about right?

Jason Barnard [00:32:10]:

Yeah. If we take Kalicube as an example, we apply our own process to our own company and we do it both for me as the CEO and the founder and the company at the same time. So we build my personal brand as the face of the company and we build the company’s brand obviously as the company who actually serves people. And we have six times our revenue in three years. But the amount of traffic coming to our website has only gone up four times because we’re standing where our audience is looking, showing them that we’re credible on all these different platforms. YouTube, LinkedIn, Forbes.com, Search Engine Land. Showed them they’re credible and then invited them down the funnel. So what we’ve done is some great branded marketing around a relevant place.

Jason Barnard [00:33:03]:

Sorry, around relevant places on the Internet. So we’ve already got the clients. Google sees this and replicates it and gives us a bonus. So we didn’t get the traffic that one would expect from pure SEO because we were getting people when they were ready to buy. And that’s going to be the secret moving forwards is your website is going to be somewhere where people will tend to come increasingly frequently, only when they’re ready to buy.

Common SEO Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

S​teve Werner [00:33:30]:

Got it. Okay, let’s pivot a little bit. We’ve talked about what to do. Let’s talk about the things when we. When we were going through this before the podcast, you said you could spend hours here. Let’s talk about the things that people should not do. What is all the stuff? Because you can look around and you can see all kinds of things. Do this, do this for SEO.

S​teve Werner [00:33:52]:

Do this to drive more traffic. You should be posting at this time. What are the top two or three things that people should not do?

Jason Barnard [00:34:00]:

Right. Number one is don’t obsess about the website web page speed. You will be told that it’s really important. It isn’t important. If you want a technical explanation of why, I can tell you. But in America, for example, most people have a very good Internet speed. So for the user, the speed of your website, between 2 and 4 seconds, sorry, 1 and 2 seconds makes a very little difference. If you hit 4, 6, 8 seconds might start to make a difference because people get impatient.

Jason Barnard [00:34:32]:

But in terms of Google, it doesn’t make a difference.

S​teve Werner [00:34:35]:

Got it.

Jason Barnard [00:34:36]:

Sorry. It makes it if it’s a tiebreaker, I mean, Google themselves say it’s a tiebreaker. If we have two results and we think they’re more or less the same, it’s the fastest one that will win. But how often does a tiebreaker happen in a very complex algorithm? Very, very little. So don’t obsess about it. It’s important to your users. For Google, you can safely put it to one side.

Jason Barnard [00:34:56]:

Unless it’s really terrible, like 10 seconds, then you would be a sensible human being to look after it because it is a problem. The second is don’t post blogs for the sake of posting blogs. When you post a blog and people often say, just keep blogging, you said, how many times a week? Once, twice, three times? Blog when you have something to say that’s useful. But when you blog, think about how you’re going to get people to that blog and what the next step is after that blog. So if I write a blog and I know Google isn’t going to rank it because nobody ever searches for the term. I need to figure out a different way. Cold email outreach, social media, getting in front of people on different platforms, creating a video out of it.

Jason Barnard [00:35:38]:

All of these are good ideas. Get people to the page and at the end of the page, tell them what to do next.

Turn Awareness into Meaningful Action

S​teve Werner [00:35:44]:

What’s a good call to action? What do you mean? Do you. Should they be opting in for something? Should they? What are the things that people should be doing next?

Jason Barnard [00:35:54]:

Well, ultimately, what we’re doing, for example, for the Kalicube guide, we’re saying, go on down out of the guide. In exchange for downloading the guide, you give us your email and we can then communicate with you. So we no longer have to rely on Google or social media to send you to us. We now have an open communications channel with you. Of course, you can unsubscribe at any moment if you don’t feel what we’re sharing with you is useful. But getting somebody’s email allows you then to control the communication with them, which is incredibly important. So a call to action can be downloaded as a free guide, it can be bought straight away. It can be read in this next article.

Jason Barnard [00:36:34]:

What we find at Kalicube is if we can guide somebody through the education process to get from the point where they’re thinking, what Google understands about me, what ChatGPT understands about me, and how they represent me is completely out of my hands. We need to bring them into one article. At the bottom of that article, we send to the next article that explains a little bit more. And after three or four articles, you go, right, I can control this. I’ll download the guide. They won’t go from that first realization that we’re talking about. It’s important that you think about how Google represents you. They won’t go straight to downloading the guide, but they will if we educate them and they go through it and say, actually it is important for my business.

Jason Barnard [00:37:18]:

It’s also important for ChatGPT. I can control it. I’ll download the guide because I want to know how to control it and how to build my digital strategy around that simple precept. Does Google, does ChatGPT understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve? Do they believe you’re credible?

Write Clearly to Help Both Machines and Humans

S​teve Werner [00:37:37]:

Got it. Okay, I like it. What else should people avoid? We covered speed. We covered not blogging just to put out content. Instead, be thoughtful about it. What else should people avoid? When it comes to the SEO slash website game.

Jason Barnard [00:37:55]:

You should avoid being unclear. But that actually goes for humans too. Machines understand human language. They understand English, they understand French, they understand German. They don’t have culture, they don’t understand poetry, they don’t have a sense of humor. They don’t understand irony. So if you’re aiming at a search engine, you don’t do any of that.

S​teve Werner [00:38:23]:

Got it. That makes sense.

Jason Barnard [00:38:24]:

But it’ll work with a person.

S​teve Werner [00:38:26]:

Yeah.

Jason Barnard [00:38:28]:

So the thing about it is, what I find is, once I tell people, try to be clear about the machine. Think about it, will the machine understand this? Is the structure of your sentence sufficiently simple that the machine will be able to digest it? Then I find that people start writing more clearly and it actually benefits the human user as well. Doesn’t mean don’t put any humor in. It just means thinking that the machine will realize the machine won’t understand. So you can make your joke and you can make your human user happy. But around it you need clarity. But a human needs clarity. You’re not going to sell anything just by telling jokes.

Follow the Proven Kalicube Process for Success

S​teve Werner [00:39:03]:

Got it. I like that. Okay, so we talked about the guide. You were just talking about it quite a bit. It’s going to be linked down below. What’s the timeline for reading the guide? Is this like a 20-minute guide? Is this like a three-hour guide?

Jason Barnard [00:39:17]:

Oh, 60 pages.

S​teve Werner [00:39:19]:

So it’s beefy.

Jason Barnard [00:39:22]:

It’s beefy, but it explains everything you need. So you would not want to read it, just sit down and read it in three hours. I mean, I would advise you to skim read it and then you go back to the beginning. You start at the beginning, you just go through it step by step by step by step. Because if you read or skim read the whole thing, we’ve got lots of nice kinds of chapters all broken down. You could actually just read the headings for the chapters and you would understand what the whole process is. It’s a good idea to have the overview before you go into the details. But then you start with understandability.

Jason Barnard [00:39:53]:

Get the machines to understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve. Move on to credibility. Build up your credibility. Demonstrate your credibility both to the machines and to your audience. Then focus on creating a lot of content that gives the deliverability aspect. Don’t rush it. The understandability is the foundation. If you can get that right, the rest will follow naturally.

Jason Barnard [00:40:13]:

Don’t be too impatient. As you said, three to six months for the understandability part. It’s two to three years for the whole thing. But in two to three years, Kalicube 6 folded our income.

S​teve Werner [00:40:24]:

I love it. On that note, guys, make sure you check out the show notes for the guide. We have it linked down there for you as well. Jason, I want to say thank you so much for coming on and sharing everything in a very clear and non geeky manner. That people can follow. It’s been my pleasure to have you on.

Jason Barnard [00:40:41]:

It’s been absolutely delightful. Thank you so much, Steve.

Master One-to-Many Sales and Visibility with Expert Guidance

S​teve Werner [00:40:44]:

It is my pleasure. Guys until next time, take action, change lives, make money and live free. We’ll see you soon. Thanks for tuning in to today’s show. If you’re looking for support to grow your business, we have the best small group mastermind on the market. Mastermind focuses specifically on one too many sales and visibility, how to build your own workshops, live events and virtual events, as well as how to market to the affluent. How do you bypass all the people who say we don’t have enough money for that and really market to the top 10% who have money and are ready to spend it? Last but not least, how do you do all of this without Facebook ads? That is the focus of our small group mastermind. It’s led by me along with 12 other people.

S​teve Werner [00:41:30]:

We’re there to give you support, surround you and take your business to the next level. You can click in the show notes down below for more information. We’ll see you next time here on Grow Your Impact, Income & Influence.