SERP and SEO for Bands and Brands with Jason Barnard

TSP S7 Ep07: SERP and SEO for Bands and Brands with Jason Barnard

In this episode of the Talking Sound Podcast host Christopher Jordan is joined by Jason Barnard, Founder and CEO of Kalicube, a digital marketing agency that is pioneering the concept of Brand SERP optimization. Whether you are a band, a brand or an artist trying to reach a larger audience, little happens in the modern world without a presence on the internet. But is that enough? Once you are on the internet how do people find you? That is where SERP and SEO for band and brands comes into play, and that is exactly what we talk about with author, speaker, podcast host, musician and “The Brand SERP Guy” Jason Barnard of Kalicube!

[00:00:00] Narrator: Copy that. We have a go from you, guys. This is Talking Sound Podcast.

A Background on Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) and on the Topic About the World of Brand SERPs and SEO

[00:00:27] Christopher Jordan: Anytime I get to hear an upright bass, much less an upright bass playing Blue Moon of Kentucky coming to you from France, I’m down with it. And that’s somebody that I have to have on the show. Welcome, everybody. Chris Jordan here, Talking Sound Podcast. Welcome back.

[00:00:49] Christopher Jordan: Our guest today, the amazing Jason Barnard, not only the musician playing that incredible upright bass right there, but also one of the best darn SEO people in the world. We are going to be talking about the world of SERP, search engine return page, how to make yourself pop up on Google, how to make yourself discoverable on the internet. This is quite literally one of the hardest hitting episodes of Talking Sound that we have ever produced. It’s going to be fantastic. I cannot wait for it today.

[00:01:28] Christopher Jordan: When we come back from our commercial break, we will be talking with Jason Barnard, CEO and founder of the amazing Kalicube.Pro website, where you can go and learn all kinds of great stuff about discoverability, tools to help yourself be found on the internet. We’re going to be learning so much about what is the nebulous world of SEO optimisation today, folks, when we come back from this message from our sponsor, Podcast Cadet.

A Commercial From the Podcast’s Sponsor, Podcast Cadet

[00:02:08] Narrator: Have you considered starting a podcast, looking for a way to make your business a voice of authority in an industry? Then Podcast Cadet is the solution for you. Whether starting a podcast for yourself, your brand, business, school, church, or just plain fun, Podcast Cadet is here to help you navigate the waters of the podcast industry. Specialising in one-on-one consultation and training with industry professionals and fields ranging from podcast technology and editing to distribution, monetisation, and even social media strategies, Podcast Cadet tailors their services to the specific needs of you and your podcast.

[00:02:50] Narrator: Do you already have a podcast and trying to find ways to engage and grow your audience? Sign up for your Podcast Cadet audit today, and let us help you explore new and exciting ways to leverage your content and elevate your podcast brand to whole new levels. From consultational workshops to affordable podcast production and maintenance packages, Podcast Cadet is your one-stop shop for everything podcast related on the internet. Visit podcastcadet.com today to sign up for your consultation or training, and use code TALKING20 to save 20% off your entire purchase. That website again is podcastcadet.com.

Welcoming Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) on the Show

[00:03:33] Christopher Jordan: That’s right, folks. And well, full disclaimer, I, of course, am one of the founders of Podcast Cadet. The whole reason that I started Podcast Cadet, folks, was I spent years in broadcast. I spent years behind the soundboard as an engineer for bands, things like that. And I saw people getting really, really bad advice on starting podcasts, on hosting media, things like that. And I teamed up with a couple people that I knew who were speaker trainers, a couple of people that I knew that were brand coordinators, social media folk, and even people like our guest today, the amazing Jason Barnard. How are you doing today, good sir? 

[00:04:24] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I’m doing very well. Thank you very much for having me on the show. It’s delightful to be here. And I’m, for once, talking about my current subject in the context of one of my favourite ex or even actually current context, which is sound, music, being a musician, and even in fact, doing TV shows.

Jason’s History of Being a Blue Dog on a TV Show and Creating an Entertainment Company to Release This Cartoon for Kids 

[00:04:45] Christopher Jordan: Absolutely. And before we get too buried in the topic of SEO, Jason, you have a storied history when it comes to these things. You actively were the voice of a dog on a children’s show. You helped start a production company for children’s content. 

[00:05:11] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yep. I was a blue dog on a TV show, basically, with my ex-wife. We created these two characters. And when we tried to get TV companies, book companies, or record companies involved in our project, they all said out. Two characters, Tom and Jerry, whatever other pairs of characters you can think of, been done before, no point. And we did Boowa and Kwala. And we believed that it was going to be really, really valuable, I think, as an educational tool, and it would entertain kids. And we were determined, so we created a company and released it ourselves.

Christopher Jordan as a Serial Entrepreneur Who Always Sees and Fills the Need of a Certain Industry

[00:05:53] Christopher Jordan: And that’s what I love is I, myself, as I was telling you in the pre-show conversation, I’m a serial entrepreneur. It’s one of those when I see a need in an industry that I am involved in, I am compelled to move to fill that need. If I have the knowledge, the know-how, and the perseverance to be able to do it, I’ll do it every time.

[00:06:24] Christopher Jordan: And to know that even yourself, whenever you came up with this idea, and other production companies were like no, not really something that we’re interested in. You went out and made a production company to actively make it happen. And I can’t give you more kudos in the universe than that, because it literally is what you have to have as anybody in a band, any artist, even as an engineer, as a freelance engineer, there is that not necessarily swagger, but that confidence of the fact of I can see this through to the end if I put my effort into it.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) on Creating a Record Company to Release Records and Tour With His Band

[00:07:11] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Oh, absolutely. And it is true. And from my perspective, I created a record company before I created this company. The record company, I then created a gig organising company. And the gig organising company and the record company were all about the fact that I had a group called The Barking Dogs, which is down at the bottom of this page. And we played folk punk, and we wanted to release records. We wanted to play gigs, and we were playing in the street, and we wanted to play in clubs, we wanted to play festivals. We actually ended up playing on the same bill as Bob Dylan.

[00:07:51] Christopher Jordan: Oh, wow.

[00:07:53] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah, exactly. And the guy from Black Flag, I can’t remember what his name is. Rollins, his name is. And what was interesting there is, once again, it was people saying we don’t want to release your records, we don’t want to organise your tours.

[00:08:11] Christopher Jordan: Yep.

[00:08:12] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And I believed that the group was worthy of records and tours. So, I created the company that allowed me then to do that. And obviously, the company is simply a way to present it to people and a way to fit into the society, the business side of things that you have to deal with, unfortunately. But the motivation was simply, I wanted to play music in front of lots of people, I wanted to make records and sell records, and I wanted to play a gig with Bob Dylan.

The Wonderful Moment of Playing Gigs With Musicians Who Were Your Heroes and Seeing Them Side Stage

[00:08:43] Christopher Jordan: Who doesn’t want to play a gig with Bob Dylan? 

[00:08:47] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. I didn’t know it at the time though. I have to say when I started, I didn’t think, oh, I’m going to end up playing a gig with Bob Dylan. I also played with Captain Sensible, the guitarist from the Damned, in a club in Berlin, sorry, in Germany. I wasn’t in Berlin. But we ended up, what was really interesting is you end up playing music. We ended up playing music in festivals with all of these people, who were my such heroes when I was younger, The Pogues as well.

[00:09:14] Christopher Jordan: Oh, wow, wow.

[00:09:16] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And that’s a dream come true. It really is. I’ll have to say Bob Dylan was a bit of a sulky guy. He had his dressing room. And I didn’t talk to him. I never met him. I just saw him on stage, and he was on the same bill as me. So, there’s absolutely no kudos there at all in terms of anything I actually did. But when you’re standing there, you’re just going, isn’t this really bizarre and weird and wonderful all at the same time? 

[00:09:44] Christopher Jordan: Yeah. There’s nothing like standing side stage at a moment like that and going, wow, this is my life. And before I went into the corporate AV environment, I spent years in rock and roll, Jason, as not only a venue audio engineer, but as a large venue audio engineer in stadiums, stuff like that. And man, to be able to be on the video crew for stuff like Roger Waters, The Wall, things like that. Yeah, I was standing side stage watching Rush play. I got to tear down Neil Peart’s drum kit. Those are just moments in life where it’s like wow, yeah, that happened, that was a thing.

[00:10:31] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Absolutely brilliant.

A Story Where Jason Barnard Almost Had an Encounter and Conversation With Robert Plant

[00:10:32] Christopher Jordan: And to know that you with your music got to have that beautiful moment in life, where you got to stand side stage and see Bob Dylan playing on the same stage that you were just on, seeing the Pogues, people that had moved you to wanting to record music.

[00:10:52] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Exactly. And I’ve got another great story, which is absolutely rubbish in terms of actually achieving anything or doing anything good, is that we recorded an album in France. And I then decided to have it mastered by a guy in the UK, because he’d been recommended and he’s a really nice guy and I’d met him before.

[00:11:15] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And then I woke up late the morning I was supposed to be going to do the mastering with him. So, I rang him up and I said, I’m really sorry, I’m going to be about an hour late. And he was going to come and pick me up from the station, from the train. And he said, it’s okay, don’t worry about it, I’m not going to charge you anything extra. But the money, obviously from my perspective, was a big deal because we were a pretty poor group.

[00:11:36] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And then when I got to the station, he picked me up in his super duper Jaguar and drove me to his house. And he said, it’s a real pity you missed the train you were supposed to be getting, because the person who was in the studio just before you is Robert Plant. And I had convinced him to stay for a cup of tea, so you could have a conversation with him. And he had gone. He had his cup of tea and he had gone. He had left. So by getting up late in the morning, I missed the possibility of having a cup of tea with Robert Plant. How horribly frustrating is that?

Another Story Where Christopher Jordan Got a Chance to Watch Robert Plant and His Band Performed in a Small Venue

[00:12:14] Christopher Jordan: Oh, that is a heartbreaker right there, just to even hear about it, man. I had a similar Robert Plant story. I didn’t get to almost have a cup of tea with him. But when I first moved to town, I made very, very quick friends with the part owner of one of the live sound companies in town. And the first South by, I wasn’t working that gig. I had my own gig with the house of Miles Davis that I’d booked out, providing the sound. And that was awesome. I worked with them for many years, doing that showcase during South by.

[00:12:52] Christopher Jordan: But he told me and he was like, hey, Chris, I know you’re a huge Zeppelin fan from our conversations. I just wanted to tell you, you may want to show up to this free show tonight at 10 o’clock. You may just want to be at this bar. I know you got a gig early in the morning, you’ve been working all day, but you may want to just show up. There’s going to be a pretty cool surprise guest that hops on stage for a little while.

[00:13:18] Christopher Jordan: And yeah, it was Robert Plant, who has a house here in town. And yeah, it was so cool, wow, that’s awesome. I just got to see Robert Plant on stage, which was really cool, in a very, very small venue. So, yeah.

Being Naive, Dreaming of Filling Stadiums, and Thinking That the Band Is Going to Make It One Day 

[00:13:37] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): It is lovely. You throw yourself into these places. And I think part of that is I wouldn’t have had that career if I hadn’t created the company, which is the entrepreneurial part of it. But right deep down in my heart, it’s all about playing music, entertaining people, wanting to be a rockstar, obviously, but also the kind of naivety of actually thinking you’re going to make it.

[00:14:02] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And that’s one of my abiding memories of The Barking Dogs was that we all were convinced that we would be filling these stadiums one day. And it was so obviously not going to happen or unlikely to happen. And yet you keep traveling. We did 10 years and 660 concerts. And we truly, truly believed, I think, that we were going to be megastars.

[00:14:26] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And I love the fact that that naivety survived such a long period of time and so many obvious disappointments. Because the number of times you’ve got those stories with Robert Plant or Bob Dylan or The Pogues, you’ve got another hundred stories of when you broke down on the motorway and you couldn’t get to the gig and you didn’t get paid. And then you had to sleep in the snow in the middle of Germany because you were in the van and it was awful, but it makes for a lovely, lovely, lovely set of stories.

Jason’s Cartoon TV Series Was Much More Successful Than His Career as a Musician

[00:14:59] Christopher Jordan: Oh, absolutely. There’s nothing like the actual Blues Brothers’ stories of bands, where you walk out owing the bar money because nobody showed up and you had to do something.

[00:15:11] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): A hundred percent. And so many good stories, also disappointing stories. And the TV series, interestingly enough, the TV series was much more successful. It was a website and TV series. We made two albums, released a TV series produced by ITV International, the UK company, and Radio Canada. It was released around the world, 25 countries, I think.

[00:15:39] Christopher Jordan: Oh, wow.

[00:15:40] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And it was much, much more comfortable. And I’ve got, in terms of famous people, I’ve met loads, lots of good stories, but different stories. And I’m thinking about it now, I’m thinking as I talk, but it was for kids. So, the stories are much more within that.

The Story of How Jason Barnard Chose Their Address for the Kids to Send Their Drawings of the Cartoon Series

[00:15:58] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And I’ll give you one really nice interesting one, because we moved to Mauritius, which is in the Indian Ocean, just off Madagascar, tiny little island. And we moved there because we thought we can do the internet from anywhere, we can make this TV series anywhere. And we moved into a little house near the beach. And the postman walked by. And I said to him, what’s the address of this house? Because we want people to be able to send their drawings, their kids’ drawings of these characters to us.

[00:16:29] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And he said, well, there isn’t an address. It’s the house of Jean Don de Vidier. And that’s how we recognise the house. And we were renting it from this guy. And I said, well, can I just give it an address? And he said, yeah, go ahead. And I said, oh, between the sea and the post office. He said, okay, that’s the address, that’s fine. And our address was then Boowa and Kwala, between the sea and the post office, Mauritius. And these people, these parents got their kids to draw, had the Boowa and Kwala drawings. And we would tell them to send it. It’s like Father Christmas, the North Pole.

[00:17:07] Christopher Jordan: Yeah, yeah.

[00:17:07] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): They must have sent it, thinking this is never going to get there. And it did every time. 

[00:17:12] Christopher Jordan: What’s great though is that, as a marketing person, you could not ask for something more niche than an address like that. You know what I mean? You’d pay crazy money to get a street name, to have a private road coming to your place, to be able to name it after your character or something. It literally sounds like part of the show. It’s great.

Jason’s Experience of Living in Mauritius With His Family While Making Cartoons for Kids 

[00:17:37] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. And it was a total luck because the guy basically just said to me, you can choose your own. And that’s the first thing I said. I actually then tried to change it. I said, oh, can we have between the cemetery and the post office? And he said, nope, you’ve chosen between the sea and the post office. That’s where it’s going to be, and I won’t accept anything else. And it was delightful because in Mauritius, it’s a small country, very friendly people, very naive. And you end up living this terribly naive, out of focused life. You’re off the rest of the world. It was slightly strange for 12 years, to be honest. 

[00:18:16] Christopher Jordan: Wow. Yeah. I bet that would be an interesting place to live. 

[00:18:23] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): It was phenomenally interesting from the perspective, it was nothing like I’d ever lived on before. And basically, it’s living on a desert island with coconut trees and beaches and making cartoons for kids, which is a very, I painted a delightful picture. And it’s a very, very, very strange thing to have decided to do, but it worked out really well.

[00:18:43] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): My daughter, who’s now grown up, had a whole childhood in a place where it was warm every day. It was sunny pretty much every single day. You wake up in the morning and go, god, another sunny day, how awful. And she would run around on the beach in bare feet. She would go and see her friends. And it was an incredibly naive and delightful childish upbringing right up until she was 15, which I think we couldn’t have got anywhere else.

The Pivot From Having a Website for Kids to Moving Into the World of Digital Marketing, SEO, and Brand SERPs

[00:19:12] Christopher Jordan: To know that you had your children there, that everything revolved around that show while you were there, at what point did you start going down the road of full on marketing consultant and moving into the realm of SEO and search engine result page, research, stuff like that? 

[00:19:38] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. Basically, what happened is…

[00:19:40] Christopher Jordan: Because that’s a hard pivot.

[00:19:42] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Well, it is and it isn’t. When I tell the story, it doesn’t seem like such a big pivot. One of the successes of Boowa and Kwala was that we were a very successful site, and we were competing with people like Disney and PBS. So, we were up there. And we had 5 million visits a month, a hundred million page views a month, so it was really big. We were one of the biggest sites in the world for kids.

[00:20:09] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And as I say, we were on the same level as PBS Kids, we were on the same level as the BBC or the CBS as it was called. And we were a tiny, independent company in the middle of a country, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, absolutely surrounded by the sea and beaches. And it was wonderful. And a million visits a month came from Google. We were ranking number one for kids games, colouring books, colouring pages online, children’s songs. We were ranking number one for absolutely all of this stuff at the time.

After the Cartoon Business Fell, Jason Barnard Found Work by Pitching That He Can Get a Million Visits a Month for a Website

[00:20:44] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And unfortunately, the business fell apart due to internal debates with my business partner. And I had to find a way to make money to support my family very quickly. And I had to do it from Mauritius, where there wasn’t any work for me. And I basically pitched to companies in the UK and said, if I can get a million visits a month for a blue dog and a yellow koala, think what I can do for your company.

[00:21:14] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And that’s how I pivoted to digital marketing is basically saying if I can rank number one for kids games, colouring books, children’s songs, I can help you rank for selling cars, buying red dresses, and business card printing services, whatever it might be. And it worked. It was fine.

Set of Standard Practices in SEO Learned by Christopher Jordan From Attending SEO Conferences 

[00:21:36] Christopher Jordan: And that’s absolutely true, because it really doesn’t matter when it comes to SEO. I guess it somewhat matters what the business is as to what the keywords will be. But when it comes to the principles, the practices, it’s wash, rinse, repeat. There’s a lot of it. We were discussing before the show. I get to sit in the back of a lot of conferences, what people like you speak at.

[00:22:06] Christopher Jordan: So, I have learned a lot of those white hat SEO techniques and white hat Google techniques. As long as you’re doing these good standards and practices, whenever you make a post, make it 350 words or more, put in at least five links to something else that’s relevant material, put in a media player, put in two or three pictures that are backlinked and have alt tags. As long as you’re doing these standards and practices, you will rank okay. 

[00:22:44] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): You’ve obviously been listening to all these people giving the conferences and taking it all and taking notes.

[00:22:49] Christopher Jordan: Madly.

The Difference Between Black Hat and White Hat Techniques and How SEO Is Now More About Marketing and Branding

[00:22:50] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But that is very true, especially back in the day in the noughties when I was doing my Boowa and Kwala site and up until about 2015. It really was. There was a set of standard practices you could follow. And you mentioned white hat. And to point out to people that the opposite of white hat is black hat.

[00:23:10] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Black hat basically means trying to gain the machine, trying to cheat, trying to trick the machine into putting you number one, even though you don’t deserve it, in inverted commas. White hat is to use best practices in an honest and helpful manner and try and help the machine understand that you have the best content for its user in the circumstances they’re finding themselves, i.e. what they’re searching for.

[00:23:36] Christopher Jordan: Yeah.

[00:23:36] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And the white hat techniques, now what’s interesting from my perspective is we used to be able to just please the machine with some quite simple technical tips and tricks. And it’s more and more about marketing and branding now. The machine has got much, much, much, much smarter. So, all of the things you said are a hundred percent true still today.

The Key to Be a Success in SEO Is Building Great Content That Will Serve and Please Your Audience  

[00:24:01] Christopher Jordan: Good. Otherwise I’m wasting a lot of time with every post. 

[00:24:07] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Because in fact, what you are doing is building great content that will serve your audience. And now, if I take that a step further, you are building great content with images, videos, podcasts, content, enough content to actually explain to me what it is the page is going to help me with your audience, who are a subset of Google’s users. And that’s the key.

[00:24:31] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): You need to create content that actually pleases the audience, your audience, that you are relevant for, who you will be able to help, who are a subset of Google’s users, who are whatever, 6 million, 6 billion people in the world. And if you focus on that, you are going to be a success in SEO. And if you think about it, focusing on your audience is marketing.

Google’s Role Is to Answer Its Users Questions as Efficiently as Possible; We Are Asking Google to Recommend Our Answer to Its Users 

[00:24:56] Christopher Jordan: Absolutely. Because it’s all about demographic. It is all about knowing that bell curve of where your audience meets the information that you’re giving them. 

[00:25:10] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. A hundred percent. And so, if we come back another word, another point of view on that is Google’s role in life, as it were, it’s sole role is to solve its users problems or answer their questions as efficiently and effectively as possible. And if you bear that in mind, you realise that there is no point in trying to rank in Google, get onto page one to Google when you do not provide a helpful, valuable answer or solution to its user. So, you really need to focus on who are we trying to draw in and who do we feel Google can legitimately recommend us to? So, we are asking Google to recommend our answer or our solution to its users.

[00:25:57] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And in the context of music, you can look quite deeply into that in terms of where would I want to rank, best song. You aren’t going to satisfy Google’s users. Even if you manage to rank for best song in the world, you won’t satisfy Google’s users. Unless you have, Britney Spears might conceivably manage to do that with Toxic, which is one of the best songs in the world in my opinion. I’m not actually a fan of hers, but my daughter listened to her so much that I ended up listening to it.

[00:26:28] Christopher Jordan: That song is a beast.

[00:26:30] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): It is a beast, isn’t it? And you end up just thinking, wow, that’s really cool. Anyway, back to what we’re talking about. And the other thing about best song is that it’s subjective. So Google would be looking to rank something that would give a range of choices. And the site or the person that’s giving that range of choices, preferably for Google, in terms of it serving its users as best it can, would be somebody independent, who doesn’t have a terrible bias, which obviously as musicians, we all do.

How Do You Find Keywords That Are Relevant to You and Stay on Top of the SERP and Get Your Site Found? 

[00:27:06] Christopher Jordan: Yeah. Now, when you’re talking about especially a subjective search like that, because like I was saying, there are definitely those best practices. But let’s get into, I guess, let’s put the big boy pants on real quick and get into SEO and what this literal nebulous world of SEO is. Because my wife is one of those that when I try to explain at least my knowledge of SEO, I see the shark eyes happen. You can see the glaze happen where it’s like wow. And it really is an ever changing environment. How do you find things like keywords to put in your posts that are relevant, that kind of stuff?

[00:27:59] Christopher Jordan: Because I guess a lot of it, especially whenever you’re talking about a band, whenever you’re talking about website pages for bands, that kind of stuff, a lot of it comes down to keyword search, if you’re not, let’s say, like a blog or like a podcast where you’re putting out content every week. Maybe you have an RSS feed that Google’s seeing with pertinent information to the field, all that kind of stuff that help literally guide Google’s eyes to your website.

[00:28:29] Christopher Jordan: It’s like forming a gravitational field. Once you start putting things like that out, Google just looks at you. When you start putting out content on a relative topic every week, it will start to see you eventually. But when you’ve got, let’s say, a static band website with four pages, and maybe once a year, you’re putting out an album. Maybe once a month, you’re making a band post. How do you find those keywords and stay on top of that and get a site like that found?

Tools Like Semrush or SE Ranking Can Help You Understand Which Keywords and Search Queries Are Relevant to You 

[00:29:07] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Well, there are actually two things. I think that’s an interesting perspective. If you’re running a blog or a music site or you’re posting regular and you’ve got this old podcast and you’ve got this content coming out regularly, then you would need to research keywords. And we were talking about it earlier on. A tool like Semrush or SE Ranking or Rank Ranger are great, great tools for that.

[00:29:33] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): The idea here is that they will be able to help you understand which keyword terms, what search queries people are actually typing into Google. So if you’re going to be doing that, go to Semrush, go to SE Ranking, and type in the keyword you think might be relevant for whatever article you’re writing. And it will show you a list of related keywords that you can potentially think about.

[00:29:57] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And you want to be sure that you are not aiming for what we call short head queries. So, I wouldn’t be aiming for music. I would be aiming for folk punk music in France, something pretty specific, because I’m a small potato. I’m not going to outrank Rolling Stone magazine. I’m not going to outrank a major radio station, who would be aiming at music and they could potentially rank for that.

[00:30:27] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But I would be able to rank, I would be able to get my site in front of people, on page one of a Google result for something specific where I am incredibly relevant. And that relevancy is where you need to focus is saying, where am I going to be more relevant than Rolling Stone? And the answer is folk punk music in France. There I can probably nail it.

The Importance of Aiming for the Topics Where You Are More Relevant, More Pertinent, and More Authoritative

[00:30:54] Christopher Jordan: Well, and the thing is folk punk will narrow down that search query to begin with to probably about three pages on Google. Put in France after that, I would merely guess that there would be more than three actual pages of stuff.

[00:31:12] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Well, you’d be surprised. Google will find several hundred thousand, probably millions of pages that are more or less related to the topic.

[00:31:19] Christopher Jordan: Okay.

[00:31:19] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But truth be told, nobody ever looks beyond page one.

[00:31:22] Christopher Jordan: Absolutely not.

[00:31:23] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Maybe page two.

[00:31:24] Christopher Jordan: Yeah.

[00:31:25] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But really, not so much. So, basically, you are looking and saying, if I’m not on page one, I might as well not exist. Therefore, and really importantly, therefore I need to aim for things where I am truly pertinent, where I will give a better answer than the big players. And I am more relevant, I am more pertinent, I am more authoritative. I’m authoritative about folk punk music in France, especially in the 90s because that’s where I come from. So, that’s a really, really important consideration for you to be making when you are thinking about what kind of terms you’re aiming for.

[00:32:00] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And you might think, oh, but there’s only 10 people a month or 20 people a month who are searching for that term. But of those 10, 30 people, let’s say 30 people, I’ll get incredibly interested in my topic and who are potentially going to love my band. If I aim for music, a) I will rank 1,050th. And so, nobody will ever even see my page and I will never have a chance of getting anywhere near that page. But if I do rank, they’re probably a Britney Spears fan and they don’t care about my music. They will never be a fan, null point.

The Problem of Having the Same Podcast Name and Solving It Through Regular Updating of Episodes and Social Media Posts 

[00:32:32] Christopher Jordan: Yeah. To bring up what you were talking about earlier that the odds of taking somebody over on Google in a search, one of my other podcasts, Dudes n Beer, I am getting ready to totally rebrand it. Because five and a half years down the road, the show has gone in a different way. We’re getting different guests. We have guests we didn’t originally. It took me probably about six months into my show, I found out that there was a show in France called Dudes and Beers.

[00:33:13] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Wow.

[00:33:14] Christopher Jordan: And they were the first three pages of Google, literally. My stuff was buried, my friend. But within a year of me posting an episode a week, posting it on social media, putting out all those things, putting in back tags to topics that we talked about, to relevant news articles, and all that kind of stuff. Within a year, I was at the bottom of the first page of Google.

[00:33:43] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. Brilliant.

[00:33:44] Christopher Jordan: And that was with paying no SEO person. That was literally just following these standards and practices. And within doing that for another year or so, now, god bless the guys, I know that they’re still out there, but they cannot be found on Google whenever you search Dudes and Beer.

To Be Able to Dominate in Your Brand SERP, You Have to Build Google’s Understanding Over Time

[00:34:08] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. That’s what you’re saying. In fact, I call myself The Brand SERP Guy, because I’m a digital marketer who now specialises in what appears when somebody searches your brand name or your personal name or your band name or your album name or your book name or your podcast name.

[00:34:23] Christopher Jordan: Yep.

[00:34:24] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And it’s very much underestimated. Now, what you are talking about is basically saying that Google understands who you are, what you do, and who your audience might be. And when somebody types in Dudes and Beer, you are the most pertinent result now, but you had to build that over time. And it’s very important, I think, that you said that took me two years and now I dominate. If you search my name, Jason Barnard, you’ll see I dominate totally.

[00:34:54] Christopher Jordan: Yes, you do.

[00:34:55] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): It looks like I’m the only Jason Barnard in the world, but there are actually several hundred Jason Barnards in the world. There’s a footballer in South Africa. There’s an ice hockey player in Canada. There’s a university lecturer in San Francisco.

Google Tends to Show the Results Where It’s Most Confident and Where There Is a Higher Probability That Somebody Is Searching for This Name

[00:35:10] Christopher Jordan: Yeah. There were about four or five that I found on LinkedIn. There were quite a few that I found on Facebook, all that stuff. You were not the only person with that unique name in the world. The question is how do you make your common name unique to the search engine?

[00:35:30] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And that’s a really interesting point, especially with band names that can sometimes be ambiguous, but band member names as well, terribly, terribly ambiguous. And things are evolving pretty quickly in the Google world, but what it will tend to do is show the results where it’s most confident. So, what you did with your podcast was produce content, indicate that you exist, that you’re covering a specific topic and ensuring that Google understands who you are. And there you start to nail that SERP. You start to be the result that Google trusts to show its users.

[00:36:10] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But in fact, in truth, what it’s trying to do is say, what is the probability that somebody is searching for this specific name? And if you are, I haven’t looked at this, but the podcast you are talking about is in France, I would bet my bottom dollar if that podcast is still active, you don’t dominate page one. They probably do, because the probability that somebody in France is looking for the French one is much higher than somebody in France looking for your one. Oh, we’re going to test this out.

Looking at the Google Result of Searching for the Podcast Dudes n Beer in France 

[00:36:42] Christopher Jordan: Let’s give it a shot. Let’s see what happens. I’m a brave guy. I’m not afraid to show my Google result. There’s their stuff, Dudes and Brewery, and yeah.

[00:36:57] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I see Two Dudes. Yeah. So, as you can see, it’s very geo sensitive. And in fact, if you were in France, I’m sitting in France, so I can actually do the search. You will see that what Google will try to do is serve what it perceives to be the user’s intent. What am I looking for in France? More likely to be the French guys than you. 

[00:37:22] Christopher Jordan: Now, granted you take France away, the Dudes’ Brewing Company, the Dudes’ Brew, and Dudes n Beer podcast. So, even if you look up their name without the country, I come up before them. And that’s what I’m talking about. There they are, boom, Dudes and Beers. But my Audible and my Facebook comes up before them, and my homepage comes up right after them.

[00:37:56] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right.

The Podcast Dudes n Beer Still Ranks in France, Which Means That Google Understands Incredibly Well Who They Are

[00:37:57] Christopher Jordan: So, it’s one of those, whenever I speak at conferences, Jason, the one thing that I try to explain to anybody getting into podcasting is it comes down to two things. It doesn’t matter if it’s your production, social media, show notes, SEO, website. It’s time or money. Which one do you have? If you’ve got time, just work on it, man. Keep working on it, keep working on it, keep working on it. It will eventually pay off with Google. If you have money, you can make it happen a whole lot faster. 

[00:38:35] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Sure. And just one thing I’ve just looked in. I’ve used google.fr, which you didn’t, and I’ve searched in French. And I’ve got their Facebook, I’ve got their Twitter, I’ve got their website, I’ve got another thing, which is a brewery. And in fact, you are there, which is really interesting, is it’s pulled up your podcast.

[00:38:56] Christopher Jordan: Nice.

[00:38:57] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): In podcast boxes, which actually indicates something really interesting. Google has understood you so incredibly well that it’s willing to put you out there in France, because it thinks it might potentially be something I might be interested in. Although the probability is much more towards the French versions. So, what you are saying is very, very true is that you can easily dominate or relatively easy dominate your local geo market. But potentially, you can do what I’ve done with my name, Jason Barnard, or Dudes n Beer. And you can actually get presence where you don’t necessarily deserve it and get that visibility on somebody else’s brand name.

A Great Podcasting Strategy of Getting Visibility by Being on Other People’s or Entity’s SERP

[00:39:37] Christopher Jordan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s literally riding their wave. It’s interesting because with that show in particular, it’s been around for so long. I’ve got a bunch of pretty world renowned authors in those realms that come on the show. And even they sometimes after their third appearance, they’re like, man, I search myself and I find you now. Because they’ve got a static author website, and that’s cool.

[00:40:14] Christopher Jordan: But if you aren’t changing those keywords, if you aren’t keeping up with that kind of stuff, if you aren’t putting out some kind of regular content, I am and I’m back linking you and I’m back linking your stuff and I’m tagging your photo with your name and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, whenever they go to find pictures of themselves, they see one or two of them at a conference, then my episode tile with their name on it, that kind of stuff.

[00:40:43] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Which is a great, great, great strategy from a podcasting perspective. It’s squatting other people’s SERPs and getting yourself some visibility by being on their search engine results page when people are searching for them.

[00:40:58] Christopher Jordan: Yeah.

Some Important Points: Brand Yourself, Bring on Board People Who Are Bottom-of-Funnel, and Create Content Focused on Your Audience

[00:40:58] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And that brings me to the point, the second point is if you are a band or even a podcast, one strategy you might want to look at is not so much looking for keywords to rank for, but looking to brand yourself so people search for you. Because one of the strongest signals for Google that you are relevant to its users is people searching for you in volume. That’s point number one.

[00:41:26] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Point number two is once people are searching for you, obviously they’re interested in you. So, it’s an audience that are almost won over. So if we talk in marketing terms, rather than being top-of-the-funnel, they’re going to be bottom-of-the-funnel. So, they’re very easy to bring on board and get involved in what it is you’re doing.

[00:41:45] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And another interesting point is all of these other platforms, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, the social platforms, even Bing obviously, and Apple, they’re all building very similar kind of algorithms that try to understand who it is we’re talking about. They’re trying to match their users with you, if you are an appropriate source or piece of information or piece of content for them. And so, creating that content that you were talking about becomes incredibly important, and making sure that content is incredibly focused on your core audience is incredibly important.

How Google Discover Works and Why It Is Going to Be Very Big in the Future

[00:42:20] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And the last thing I’m going to say about this is Google Discover, which is what’s coming or started to come already. And I don’t know if how many people are actually using it. When you swipe right on your Android Google phone, you get Google Discover. And it shows you what it thinks you might be interested in. And for a podcast or a musician, that’s the place to be. That’s when Google is saying, we understand you as a user. Let’s say I’m searching. It understands what I’m interested in. It knows that I like folk punk music.

[00:42:52] Christopher Jordan: Yeah.

[00:42:53] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): It knows that I like swing jazz music. So if I’ve been searching around those topics a lot, and then I swipe right on my Android Google phone, it will show me the group that it has understood to be that type of music, i.e. the music that might well appeal to me.

[00:43:15] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So if I’m a folk punk group, if I can get Google to understand that my page, my homepage is about folk punk music, it will potentially show me in Google Discover to a user who didn’t even search for me or didn’t even search for the folk punk aspect of it. I’m being pushed. My folk punk page is being pushed to somebody who Google thinks is going to be interested in my music. And that is going to be very big.

The Whole New Realm of AI Algorithmic Search With Machines Like Google and YouTube

[00:43:48] Christopher Jordan: Wow. Yeah. That is literally a whole new realm of AI algorithmic search to have it because, of course, who doesn’t ubiquitously have a Google account of some sort. If you’re watching any type of YouTube or anything like that, you’ve got a Google account. If you’re listening to podcasts on Google Play, I’m trying to remember is Google Music even still a thing? I think they dropped it.

[00:44:16] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): No, I think it’s now been integrated into YouTube Music. 

[00:44:19] Christopher Jordan: Yeah, it has. You are correct. So even then, YouTube Music, anything like that, it will algorithmically know what you would be looking for on a Wednesday anyway.

[00:44:32] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And it’s looking to push that towards you.

[00:44:34] Christopher Jordan: Yeah.

YouTube’s Ability to Build Playlists Much in the Way That Spotify Does, Which It Did for the Songs of Jason’s Cartoon, Boowa and Kwala

[00:44:34] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Another interesting thing about YouTube, which I really enjoy, if that wasn’t big enough, we’ve got another biggie here, is that it builds playlists much in the way that Spotify does.

[00:44:47] Christopher Jordan: Yeah.

[00:44:47] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And for example, Boowa and Kwala, the music we did, we never created a playlist for it. Google did it or YouTube rather did it algorithmically. So, there is a whole playlist with all the songs. And all it needed to do was understand which songs went together for the specific artist and presumably also, which groups go together or which songs go together within a specific genre.

These Machines and Push Technologies Which Curate Content That They Understood the User Is Going to Be Interesting

[00:45:12] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So, you end up with this idea of these machines, be it YouTube, Google, Google Discover, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, obviously LinkedIn is less and less appropriate to musicians but certainly good for podcasts, is that they are curating content, using machines to curate this content, bring it together and say, this is a list of songs, podcasts, whatever it might be that you, the user, we have understood is going to be interested in.

[00:45:40] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So, we’re looking at these push technologies. They’re pushing us towards their users. And what we need as artists, podcasters, musicians, or writers for that matter is to ensure that they’ve understood who we are, what kind of content we’re writing, what kind of content we’re creating, and who our audience is, which is the crux, who we are, what we do, who our audience is. And we need to communicate that to Google incredibly clearly on our own websites.

[00:46:11] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Because, just to finish this point with this whole round here, is you think, oh, there’s no point doing it on my website because my website doesn’t rank in Google, Google doesn’t think it’s important. Google is actively looking for the place where each and every group lives online. It’s actively trying to figure that out, and all you need to do is help it figure it out. Once you’ve done that, you can explain to Google who you are, what you do, and who your audience is. At which point, you have that opportunity to be included in Google Discover, to be included in YouTube playlists. And all of these other machines are going to be the same.

Your Description Should Describe Who You Are, What You Do, and Who Your Audience Is and It Needs to Be Clear and Understandable by a Machine

[00:46:50] Christopher Jordan: Wow. Now, how much does that come down to, just to bring it back to the uber-nerd level real quick, how much does that come down to the description that you put into tools like Yoast SEO, things like that, that are the description of your website?

[00:47:12] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Well, Yoast SEO isn’t actually necessarily a good example, because Google doesn’t use the description that Yoast provides when you put it into Yoast. It doesn’t use it to rank and it doesn’t use it to understand. It uses it to double check it has understood the content of the page. So, your meta description, which is what you are talking about, in the Yoast is actually designed simply to confirm to the machine that it’s understood what’s in the page, because the machine is now reading the page.

[00:47:39] Christopher Jordan: Got you.

[00:47:39] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And writing on the fly a summary of your page. What does that mean? It means that if your description isn’t clear, if your description doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t describe who you are, what you do, and who your audience is, I keep saying it but it’s incredibly important, you’re dead in the water. Your description on your homepage of your group needs to be clear and it needs to be understandable by a machine.

An Example of Using the Semantic Triples, Subject-Verb-Object, in Constructing a Description That Makes Sense to a Machine

[00:48:05] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So, typically, what people will do, I’m going to make up a silly sentence off the top of my head and say, The Barking Dogs, amazing musical geniuses of the 1990s in France, are one of the amazingly best ever Pogues-like, Tom Waits-esque, folk punk groups. What I’ve done there is I’ve separated what we call the semantic triples, which is actually just subject-verb-object, with lots of superlatives and different words that just confuse the message. And what I need to say is one of the leading groups in France in the 1990s, The Barking Dogs, is a folk punk group who have been compared to The Pogues. And I forgot who else I said.

[00:49:02] Christopher Jordan: Yeah.

[00:49:04] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And so, what I’ve done is brought the subject-verb-object very close together. Now, a) that makes sense to a machine because a machine can get to grips with it because that’s how it functions. It’s trying to break your sentence down and understand your sentence as a human being would. But in fact, as a human being, that actually makes more sense to me as well.

Simplifying the Structure of Your Sentence Doesn’t Mean Being Boring; You Can Still Use Great Adjectives and Be Expressive 

[00:49:23] Christopher Jordan: Yeah. It’s really skipping a lot of hardcore descriptors skipping, not being so verbose, really simplifying sentences down to the nuts and bolts of what they are. 

[00:49:41] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. And simplifying the sentence or the structure of the sentence doesn’t mean being boring to people. You can still use the great adjectives. You can still be expressive. My phrase was, in fact, one of the leading groups in France in the 1990s, The Barking Dogs is a folk punk group. I’ve still said all the things I wanted to push out to my audience, so they understand how incredibly important The Barking Dogs were or in fact were not, but that’s another debate.

[00:50:13] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I didn’t make it more boring. I simply put the parts that were important together, The Barking Dogs is a folk punk group, allowing Google to understand that and then match it to the audience who might potentially be looking for me or might potentially appreciate me. So, don’t mistake writing so that the machine can understand for writing so boringly that nobody’s ever going to be interested in what you’re saying.

Kalicube Pro Can Help People Write Better for Machines Whilst Also Remaining Pleasant and Attractive to Human Beings

[00:50:37] Christopher Jordan: Yeah. And that’s a really good point, because you don’t want to strip things down totally. You just want to make it, you don’t want to make sentences wordy. You don’t want to make them long. I will admit I am an offender in that way when it comes to post. The day that I hit orange on my SEO rankings with Yoast and stuff on my descriptions and everything else, I just stopped, man. I was like, I’m sure I could dig this hole forever to figure out how to write every single post this way.

[00:51:19] Christopher Jordan: Are there tools that help you do that, Jason? Are there things that you, guys, at Kalicube Pro have gotten together made for people? Let’s start getting into you, your service specifically. What you all do there at Kalicube? 

[00:51:37] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. There are lots of tools working out there trying to get us to a point where we’re writing better for the machines. And I think what Kalicube does better than most is to try to get people to write better for machines whilst also remaining pleasant and attractive to human beings. But we are actually specialised in a really specific area, which is the Brand SERP, what appears when somebody searches your name or your band name or your company name or your book name or your album name.

Kalicube Pro Also Helps in Representing You in a Manner You Want to Be Represented by Understanding Where You Live Online

[00:52:12] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And that actually, a lot of it comes down to the thing we were talking about earlier on, which is Google is actively looking for where the band, the brand, the person, the album lives online. And if you search my name, Jason Barnard, you’ll see that jasonbarnard.com comes up top every single time, because it knows that Jason Barnard lives at jasonbarnard.com.

[00:52:33] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): It could actually have been thebrandserpguy.com, and it would still rank number one if I pushed it hard enough. But it’s looking for that understanding of saying, who is this person and how can I represent them? And it’s representing me in a manner that I’ve convinced it to represent me using Kalicube Pro. So, that’s what Kalicube Pro does.

The Knowledge Panel Shows the Facts That Google Has Understood About You; Kalicube Pro Can Make Your Brand Message Look Positive, Accurate, and Convincing

[00:52:55] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And on the right hand side, you can see that Knowledge Panel, which is basically Google saying, on the left hand side, it’s here are some options. On the right hand side, it’s saying here are the facts that we’ve understood. And I’ve been feeding Google with these facts for years and years and years. And it knows who my parents are, my songs are, my social media accounts, and people I’m associated with within my industry today.

[00:53:21] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And it’s incredibly important to get that to work. If you are going to do the work to get your brand name or your band name or your personal name, whatever it might be, out there so that people are searching for it. So that when they do see this result, they see something positive, accurate, and convincing that reflect what you want them to see, your brand message. And that’s what Kalicube does.

[00:53:50] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And part of that is we’ve got a tool within Kalicube Pro, which actually helps you write the description. And the description is phenomenally important. How well does Google understand what it is describing?

[00:54:01] Christopher Jordan: Yeah.

Using Boowa and Kwala as an Example Where Google Trusts Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) With Information About Them

[00:54:02] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And in my case, when the description I have for myself, it’s very clear to Google that I’m describing this Jason Barnard and not another one. For a group, it will be the same. And if you actually look up Boowa and Kwala in Google, we should be able to have a look at something quite cool from a musician point of view.

[00:54:24] Christopher Jordan: Oh, god.

[00:54:25] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Boowa. Oh, there you go, Boowa and Kwala, musical group. Oh, you had it.

[00:54:29] Christopher Jordan: Did I? What? There it is.

[00:54:32] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Third one down. 

[00:54:32] Christopher Jordan: Wow. And that in and of itself will show you, folks, the intelligence of Google. I have not searched Boowa and Kwala on here. 

[00:54:42] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But you searched for Jason Barnard.

[00:54:43] Christopher Jordan: But I searched you.

[00:54:44] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And it knows that Jason Barnard and Boowa and Kwala are related.

Google Immediately Recognises the Relationship Between Jason Barnard and Boowa and Kwala

[00:54:46] Christopher Jordan: I searched not just that. I also clicked on your Boowa and Kwala page earlier, all that kind of stuff. So, that’s why Google presented that to me when I just put in the letter B within a certain time window even of searching you in this information.

[00:55:06] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And that’s the important thing. Once it’s understood that I created Boowa and Kwala with my ex-wife, once you search for me, it knows that you’re likely to be interested in Boowa and Kwala, especially if you’ve already clicked on the link. But if we go back to Boowa and Kwala on your screen, I think we might be able to do something pretty cool.

[00:55:24] Christopher Jordan: Yeah.

[00:55:25] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): If you scroll down a little bit, it’s a musical group. It’s really focused on the music. You can see there just below. You’ve got this big description on the right hand side. And that comes from my site. Google trusts me to explain who Boowa and Kwala are, and it’s presenting it as fact to its users. And I get to write that text. I get to communicate to Google who Boowa and Kwala are. The ultimate aim for myself would be that it would allow me to do that on my own Knowledge Panel, i.e. when you search for my name, the description on that right hand side, which is fact in Google’s mind, is my own description.

Google Lists Out All 53 Songs From Boowa and Kwala’s Album Because It Recognises Jason’s Site as an Authority for This Information

[00:56:01] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): If you keep scrolling down, we come to the songs. There you go. Hang on. Oh, sorry, go back up a little bit. Oh, yeah, and as you can see, it’s associated The Barking Dogs with Boowa and Kwala because I was in both groups, just below. There you can see The Barking Dogs there. It’s associated and my mother. So, it understands those relationships. And if you click on albums, 53 Bright Songs From the TV Series, up, up, up.

[00:56:31] Christopher Jordan: There we go.

[00:56:32] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yep. There you go. And you can see, if you scroll down a little bit, that it’s got the, if you click on songs on the left hand side, on the left hand side, yeah, there you go, it should list, there you go, songs. It’s listing out all 53 songs from the album.

[00:56:51] Christopher Jordan: Wow, wow.

[00:56:54] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): What’s interesting there is it won’t do it for most albums. The reason it’s doing that is because I created a page on my website for the album and for every single song on the album. And I explained to Google that all of these songs belong together on this one album. And it has reproduced it in the SERP, thanks to the work I’ve done on my own site, that it recognises as an authority for Boowa and Kwala.

The Effect of Linking Pages to Your Site, Having a Decent Site Speed, Being Mobile Friendly, and Using an HTTPS

[00:57:22] Christopher Jordan: Now, I’m going to be straight with you, man. I’m going to have to go back and rebuild some of my sites right now. No, literally, because at one point, I had been paged out like that. Page and page and page and page and page, where the page wasn’t public up on a tab, but if you clicked something, it would take you to a page. And I stopped doing a lot of that. How important is that?

[00:57:51] Christopher Jordan: And I think a lot of it was my fear for the fact that it was affecting my site speed, having so many pages. How important is hosting company when it comes to such things and how important are the pages and things like that to your general site speed? Which is now up within the top three Google search algorithm rankings.

[00:58:24] Christopher Jordan: If you don’t have decent site speed, if you were not mobile friendly, and they’ve been telling us this as designers for years, folks, years, the last at least three years, get ready. The big one now is, of course, if you don’t have an HTTPS, that’s number one. You will be delisted. If you are not mobile friendly, be ready to be listed at the back of the line. If your page lags, be ready to be listed toward the back of the line. Those are, if I’m not mistaken right now, pretty much the top three things in the Google search algorithms, right?

Being Mobile Friendly Is Important; HTTPS Only Becomes Important in Very Tight Situations 

[00:59:03] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I would actually beg to differ, I’m afraid.

[00:59:06] Christopher Jordan: Okay, go ahead please.

[00:59:08] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Mobile friendly is phenomenally important. If you’re messing up on that, go home. HTTPS is a tie breaker, basically. If you’re tying with somebody else for second place, it will give you the second place if you’ve got HTTPS. So, it only becomes important in very tight situations.

[00:59:32] Christopher Jordan: All right.

Site Speed Does Not Have a Very Big Effect on Any Rankings on Brand SERPs

[00:59:33] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): The site speed is very important but not in this kind of search, i.e. when I’m searching for a brand, the site speed will not have such a very big effect on any rankings, because Google is trying to present me with the brand or the band or the person that I’m looking for. And the fact that the site is slow is not necessarily such a big problem.

[00:59:54] Christopher Jordan: Okay.

[00:59:55] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So if I’m looking for these specific songs within an album, it’s not going to say, oh, this particular song page is a bit slow. I’m not going to show it. It’s going to say, they’re looking for the song, so I’m going to give them the song. And the fact that it’s a bit slow, bad user experience. That’s not great for anybody. I wouldn’t advise anybody to have a slow site. But it shouldn’t be your obsession in this particular context. If somebody’s looking for you specifically, your album specifically, your podcast specifically, yourself specifically, the most important thing is that Google understands who you are and it understands where you live.

The Idea of Entities and the Importance of Having a Place Where That Entity Lives Online

[01:00:31] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And we call them entities. They’re things. I’m an entity. You’re an entity. Your podcast is an entity. Boowa and Kwala are an entity. The album is an entity. The songs are each entities. And what Google is trying to do is say, where does this entity live online? So that when somebody searches for that entity, that thing, you, me, your podcast, my album, the song, whatever it might be, I want to send them to that place where that entity officially, in inverted commas, lives. And that is the crux in this specific context.

[01:01:07] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So, we’re not talking about keywords, like buy red dress or best song in the universe. We’re talking about specific names of specific people, bands, podcasts, songs, whatever it might be, but specific things that we’re looking for. And this is my specialist subject. So, you should never start me talking about it because I go on and on and on.

Google Understands That Jason’s Entity Home Is His Own Personal Website 

[01:01:28] Christopher Jordan: You’ll notice I’m just quiet right now. I’m soaking it up, man. 

[01:01:34] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): It’s actually my specialist subject, and I think I’m the only person in the world who’s actually specialising in this. And as you can see, there are 11,900,000 results for the term Jason Barnard, my name, and yet everything on that page is me. And that’s because I have worked so very hard over seven years to make sure Google understands who I am, what I do, and who my audience is.

[01:02:02] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And all of these results represent me in the way that I want to be represented, because I have convinced Google that the home of Jason Barnard is jasonbarnard.com. And I can just explain to it from that what I call Entity Home what I want, what message I want it to present to my users or my audience rather, its users. And as long as that representation that I’m asking it to present is honest, helpful, and valuable to my audience, it will basically say what I want to say.

The Case of Another Jason Barnard Who Is a Famous Podcaster But Does Not Get a Look in the Brand SERP 

[01:02:34] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And a really interesting point here. If you search Jason Barnard, the Strange Brew, there is actually another Jason Barnard who has a podcast. And he doesn’t get a look in. He absolutely doesn’t. There he is, Jason Barnard, Strange Brew. He comes up as an option. And this guy has got a podcast which is actually more popular than mine, but you never see him. And it isn’t because he isn’t important. It isn’t because he isn’t popular because he is. He’s got some amazing interviews. If you’re interested in really groovy interviews with really groovy musicians. 

[01:03:18] Christopher Jordan: Goodness, man. He is one of The Daily Telegraph’s recommended podcasts. That’s huge.

[01:03:24] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): It is, but he doesn’t get a look in. And I really, really feel bad for him because it’s not fair. And he doesn’t get a look in because Google’s so confident in its understanding of me.

[01:03:36] Christopher Jordan: Yeah.

[01:03:37] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): It thinks, I’ll just show what I’m really confident. And here you go. We’ll show you this Jason Barnard because I know what we’re talking about. And that is very indicative of the fact that he’s actually more famous than I am, especially in the UK, but I still dominate because Google is so confident in what I’ve fed it. And he hasn’t actually done that work of having the Entity Home, the place that he lives on the internet for Google to hook onto. And I’m sorry, Jason Barnard, if you’re watching.

Using Blubrry Podcasting to Help With the Description and Other Stuff in Creating Podcasts  

[01:04:09] Christopher Jordan: Jason Barnard, I hope you are watching. I really do, because this is something that I’m very, I’m good friends with Todd Cochrane. He’s the CEO and head of Blubrry Podcasting. 

[01:04:27] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Oh, I use Blubrry. I think they’re great.

[01:04:29] Christopher Jordan: Oh my god, man. Todd and his team are so fantastic. And Todd is one of the straight up, if you’re ever at a conference, man, and you have a chance to hang out and have a beer with Todd Cochrane, do it.

[01:04:40] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I will.

[01:04:40] Christopher Jordan: He’s one of the greatest guys in the world. 

[01:04:44] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): When I set up my podcast, I asked a friend of mine who does broadcasting. And he gave me lots of advice, and one of them was Blubrry. And that was the right piece of advice.

[01:04:55] Christopher Jordan: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because it takes care of that description stuff. It makes sure that you’re doing all of that. 

[01:05:02] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And when you ask the support guys, and you’ve done something really stupid with your RSS feed, they explain it to you and they don’t judge you. They just say, ask us what you need to. And they explain it.

[01:05:14] Christopher Jordan: They don’t IT guy you.

[01:05:16] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. I love them. I think they’re great. Yeah.

You Want to Make Sure That You Control the URL or the Entity Home of Your Podcast 

[01:05:19] Christopher Jordan: The thing is we are so huge in the podcasting community about telling people own your URL, stop doing the SEO work for the platforms. Because by the time, if you ever intend to do this and monetise it, if you ever intend to monetise your stuff, anything like that, you’re eventually going to get to a point that when you do have a URL, goodluck ever getting that to list over iTunes, goodluck ever getting that to list over whatever hosting platform you were using, because you’ve been doing all that SEO work for them, not necessarily for your brand.

[01:06:09] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I think that’s an incredibly important piece of advice. And I think it’s vastly overlooked. It comes back to what I was saying, the Entity Home. Google wants somewhere for your podcast to live. It wants to understand where it lives. And if you just use iTunes and Google Podcasts and whatever the other platforms are, Google will think it lives there.

[01:06:32] Christopher Jordan: Yep.

[01:06:33] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): You want to make sure that you control the URL, the Entity Home, as I was calling it. You want to control that URL, because you want Google to understand that that is the number one result for your podcast when somebody’s searching for it. And if you, as you said, hand it all over to iTunes, you are going to really struggle to get that back. And I think that’s a really, really, really important piece of advice that you’ve spotted right off the bat.

[01:07:04] Christopher Jordan: Thank you.

[01:07:05] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And most marketers, most SEOs, most podcasters, most groups completely fail to see.

Every Song, Podcast Episode, Music Group, and Music Album Should Have a Home on Your Website 

[01:07:11] Christopher Jordan: And the thing is it’s the rush to be found inside as an artist. That’s what leads people to putting their music up for free on SoundCloud before they buy URL. Cool. Use SoundCloud as an embedded player, what have you, absolutely. Don’t not put your music there. But, man, buy your URL, embed that in there, but have everything come, as Todd Cochrane puts it, have everything coming out of Moonbase Alpha. You and everybody are going back home. 

[01:07:45] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. And SoundCloud being a great example of saying, I was talking about the songs that I got listed for Boowa and Kwala. Every song has a home on my website. The song is embedded from YouTube, which is great, but Google understands that the song has a home. And that home is my site that I control, that I can, as you were saying, eventually monetise maybe. It goes for my podcast. It goes for each podcast episode. It goes for my music group, my music albums, my music songs. I don’t know why I said music songs, because the music song is saying the same thing twice. Isn’t it very stupid?

When Setting up a Site, It’s a Question of Time Before You Rank, So Don’t Give up and Stick With It

[01:08:26] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But I think that’s phenomenally important. And you think, oh, it’s going to be difficult. And one last thing that I’d like to add to this, which is really important, is you will set up this site. And it will not rank and it will not rank for a long time, multiple months potentially. And you will get frustrated and you will think it is not working. It won’t even rank for the exact term of your name or the exact term of your podcast episode or the exact term of your podcast.

[01:08:56] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Don’t give up. Stick with it. Make sure that SoundCloud, Blubrry, iTunes, Google Podcasts, whatever it might be, they all point and link back from each and every one of these to that place where your podcast episode lives. Google will end up understanding. And once Google understands, it is actually very keen and very enthusiastic to use you, the creator, the owner of this thing, and correct it for yourself.

[01:09:29] Christopher Jordan: It would prefer to.

[01:09:29] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah, exactly. And it’s just a question of time.

[01:09:30] Christopher Jordan: It would prefer to. It would be easier if you gave it a place to just find you.

Jason Barnard’s Google Trick When You Search for Who Played the Double Bass in the Ace of Spades 

[01:09:36] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. And the other thing, let’s try another trick, because the other thing is once it’s understood where you live on the internet. If you search for who played the double bass on the Ace of Spades, it’s a bit of a long phrase, but we all know that it was Lemmy Kilmister. Who played the bass, sorry, it needs to be who played the double bass on the Ace of Spades.

[01:10:07] Christopher Jordan: There we go.

[01:10:08] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): The query, rather than double bass on the Ace of Spades, it’s who played the double bass. It’s a question of who played the double bass. There you go, Jason Barnard. And that’s on my site. I told Google. Now, if you try taking out the word, sorry. To explain to people, what I’ve done is create a page that says I played the double bass on a version of the ASIS spades. And now, when you ask Google the question who played the double bass on the Ace of Spades, it says me.

[01:10:35] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Now, if you take out the word double from the query. I never said I played the bass on the Ace of Spades, but sometimes, there you go, it says Jason Barnard played the bass on the Ace of Spades, which is totally not true. So, what I’ve done is I’ve convinced it so much that I’m the great source of information about me. It’s taken that to be, it’s said bass, double bass, same thing. We’ll just show Jason Barnard. And it’s frankly not true. And it wasn’t my aim. But that shows you the power and the control you can have if Google understands you to be an authority on yourself.

Whether It’s Music or Podcasting, We Need to Be as Passionate in Promoting Our Art as Making Our Art 

[01:11:14] Christopher Jordan: Yes, yes. And that’s one of the biggest things that, whether it’s music, whether it’s podcasting, what have you. We were saying earlier, as artists, we need to have that swagger. We need to be ready and willing to put ourselves out there in that way. And we need to be ready to literally push the envelope when it comes to getting ourselves and getting our art. We need to be just as passionate about promoting our art as we are about making our art.

[01:11:46] Christopher Jordan: And I think that whenever bands would ask me to come in and be their sound guy or help them produce, things like that, the one thing I would always tell them is whatever time we spend in this studio together, we all have to promise each other that we will spend three times as much time that week outside of that studio promoting this band.

[01:12:10] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Brilliant.

[01:12:12] Christopher Jordan: And it’s very much the same way with this. Aside from doing your due diligence, you got to put work behind it. Whether it’s telling Google about your band, about your podcast, about your t-shirts for your band, what have you, you’ve got to put the work behind it. You can’t just put it up and expect it to happen.

Don’t Give Other People Control Over Your Entity Home Because That’s Where the Official Creator Actually Is

[01:12:34] Christopher Jordan: The example I give people is you’ve raised this beautiful fish from a minnow. And you’ve decided to let it free, to free range in the ocean of fish. Have you found a way to find your fish in the ocean? Do you have a way to let people know how to find your fish amongst all those fish in the ocean? Because that’s what you’re trying to do with SEO is geo tag that fish. You’re trying to make it so that it’s easy to find that fish amongst the ocean of very similar fish. 

[01:13:19] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. Interesting. I like this because we can also say, we also want to make sure that Google can really quickly, easily, and reliably identify your fish when somebody’s looking for it and just pluck it out the water and show them the right fish.

[01:13:38] Christopher Jordan: Yeah.

[01:13:38] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And we forget that. And I think, as you are saying, this idea of Entity Home, having a website, buy your URL, control that domain. If you’ve got a record company or a production company, don’t think they’re going to do a great job. Don’t give them ownership of your URL, your Entity Home, the place that you live on the web. Keep that to yourself because that is where all the, I was going to say power, but that’s not the word. It’s that when somebody is looking for you as an artist or as a podcaster or a music album, Google will send them to you first if it understands that that is where the official artist, creator, producer, whatever it might be, actually is. 

[01:14:26] Christopher Jordan: Yeah. And I’m here to tell you, folks, any producer or label that’s telling you otherwise, you really need to reconsider that relationship, because that means they’re trying to get their stuff found over yours. And that I think is hugely important to point out.

[01:14:45] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. 

[01:14:46] Christopher Jordan: Go ahead.

Comparing the Entity Home of Steve Carell and Jason Barnard

[01:14:47] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): No, it is very important. Because if you look at some artists, I think it was Steve Carell. If you pull up Steve Carell on your screen now, we’ll see something actually quite interesting. I’m going to compare myself to Steve Carell. So if we pull up Steve Carell, you will see on the right hand side, that factual result, you will see that there’s a little world icon there with Twitter next to it. That means that Google thinks that Steve Carell lives at Twitter on the internet.

[01:15:24] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Basically, that is the reference point for Steve Carell on the internet for Google. That’s its Entity Home. Now, that means that Steve Carell, the truth that Google understands comes from his Twitter account, which is great. But what happens if Twitter closes down? What happens if Twitter closes his account? What happens if Twitter gives his handle to somebody else? He’s got a big problem.

[01:15:49] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Now, if you search for Jason Barnard, you will see that same little world icon and you will see jasonbarnard.com. Nobody else controls that. Nobody’s going to change that site without my permission. I own the place that Google associates with the most authoritative, trustworthy, and valuable information about me. Steve Carrell is leaving that to Twitter, which is a foolish mistake.

Some Clients of Kalicube Pro Don’t Care About Their Google Results, Which Should Not Be the Case

[01:16:16] Christopher Jordan: Oh, absolutely. I didn’t even see a stevecarell.com in that first half of a page that I scrolled down. And as anybody, what image consultant do you have? What management do you have that has not purchased your .com or had you purchased it and build at least a splash page, man? 

[01:16:36] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Interestingly enough at Kalicube Pro, we’ve got quite a lot of PR companies using it. Steve Carell isn’t one of my clients, but we do have some very famous clients. And the number of times that they turn around to us and say, but I don’t care about Google results. And my immediate reaction is what planet are you living on? Oh, yeah, but I’m focusing on Facebook or I’m focusing on LinkedIn. And you’re saying, at some point, your fans, people who are interested in you are going to be searching for your name on Google. And saying I don’t care about Google is stupid in the extreme.

In the Dudes n Beer Podcast, They Engage With Clients Through Facebook and Give Documents Through Their Site 

[01:17:18] Christopher Jordan: And that’s just it. There is an ocean, as well as a chasm added to that ocean of difference between discoverability and presence on the internet and interaction with an audience. Totally different. What I do on Dudes n Beer on Facebook is totally different than what I do on the website, 180 degrees. The Facebook is where I go to engage my audience. That’s where I go to ask them questions. That’s where we go and we interact and we post each other articles and things like that.

[01:18:01] Christopher Jordan: If you want documents from us or anything like that, they know to dial home. They know to phone home. They know to come to the website. If we’ve got a guest on and we’re going to be talking declassified documents that night, they know to go to the website and the documents there. And they can download it and they can read it with us, stuff like that. And that’s what your website is supposed to be used for. And your social media is supposed to be used for engaging people and telling people about home. If you want more, come on by the house.

The Relationship Between Your Social Accounts and Your Website Should Be Clear to Google 

[01:18:36] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. I really like the way you put it this, because it really does speak volumes. Come on home, come on by the house. Exactly. Not by the house as in purchase it. Come on by the house as in come around and see us. But the really important thing there is your Facebook page needs to link to your house, and your house needs to link to your Facebook page. That two way relationship needs be very clear to Google.

[01:19:01] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And number two, you’ve made a very interesting point that I hadn’t really thought about before. Which is that when podcast name, Google wants to show the Facebook page, because it’s another aspect of the way you are presenting yourself to your audience. And so it’s going to say, here’s the website, that’s the home, here’s the Twitter account, here’s the Facebook account.

[01:19:24] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And that’s why social accounts rank so well for brand names, podcast names, people’s names, because it’s a communication with the audience that’s different from the home that you were talking about. And Google wants to show that balanced view and that balanced way of interacting with us to give the choice to its users of how it wants to interact with this entity, this person, this podcast, this brand, or this album, whatever it might be, that we’ve searched for, which is delightful. Thank you very much for teaching me that.

[01:19:56] Christopher Jordan: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Keep your mind open to different perspectives, because different perspectives move you forward.

Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)

[01:19:59] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): We learn every day, however much I think I know about this stuff and I’ve been doing it for seven years. I talk to people, they say something, and I think I hadn’t thought of it from that perspective. And I think that’s really important is keep your mind open to different perspectives, because different perspectives move you forward.

[01:20:14] Christopher Jordan: Keep your mind and your ears open, folks. Because if you’re not challenging your realm of knowledge on the daily, you are not doing yourself a favour. 

[01:20:23] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Brilliant. Absolutely.

Kalicube Pro Can Identify Social Media Platforms That Dominate Within an Industry

[01:20:25] Christopher Jordan: Like I said, I wanted to have you on. This is probably hands down, folks, the most selfish episode of Talking Sound that has ever occurred. I’m not going to lie, because I need this information, man. Like I said, I’m a front-end designer. I know a lot of these good practices, like having the social media account. But it’s also the fact of meet your audience where they are.

[01:20:54] Christopher Jordan: If you’re in a band or you’re a musician that’s focusing on 50-plus as your audience, if you’re like Spyro Gyra, let’s say, hey, maybe you don’t have a TikTok. I don’t know a lot of 50 plus people engaging in TikTok. So, maybe you don’t put your effort there. And you also don’t waste your SEO by having a TikTok that does nothing. 

[01:21:22] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. That’s actually something we’ve built into Kalicube Pro. I’m not trying to sell it because it’s an agency tool.

[01:21:27] Christopher Jordan: No. I want you to sell it.

[01:21:29] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Well, it’s actually an agency tool, so I don’t sell it directly to clients. You have to go through an agency because it’s actually really complicated, high level stuff. An agency can use this, and you can work with an agency who can do the work. And it’s relatively simple. But one of the things that we do is identify social media accounts, social media platforms that dominate within an industry.

[01:21:56] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So within the music industry, I can tell you which social platforms will dominate, as you said. We can go for industry, entity type, i.e. music group or person, and country. And we can tell you what’s dominating and therefore where you should be focusing. So, for example, TikTok will not be dominating for old people’s music in the US.

Having a Smaller Audience Means You Have an Audience Who Is Actually Interested in What You Have Got to Offer

[01:22:22] Christopher Jordan: And that’s just it. Whenever I speak at conferences, a lot of the times Podcast Cadet even is focused a lot toward people looking to podcast for business, people looking to, as we say in the commercial, to become a trusted voice in an industry. That’s how we put it in the broadcast terminology. You aren’t tuning in to, the reason you buy products that Rush Limbaugh recommends is because you trust what Rush Limbaugh says. That’s why you buy it. It’s that trusted voice concept.

[01:23:03] Christopher Jordan: And it’s the same thing whenever you’re selling ad space or whatever. It’s the fact of, no, this podcast may not be going out to a hundred thousand people like a print ad locally, but it is going out to 10,000 people. And those 10,000 people are directly in the niche of your marketing. So, the odds on favour of converting to a sale are a whole lot better than you taking an ad out in a general circular in your area.

[01:23:30] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Brilliant. And it actually comes back to what I was talking about with the keyword research. If you do want to write an article, write an article where you are incredibly pertinent, even if it’s a smaller potential audience. Because the search volume is smaller, it’s an audience who are actually going to be interested in what you’ve got to offer. So, don’t get greedy. Don’t try to rank for music. Try to rank for folk punk groups from France in the 1990s. Because even though you will only attract 20 people, those 20 people are going to be phenomenally interested in what it is you’ve got to offer.

Don’t Be Afraid to Link to Other Sites Because You’re Linking to Helpful Resources

[01:24:03] Christopher Jordan: And it’s not just that. It’s also the fact of that the interaction is quality interaction, much like any back link. A back link to any website in the world, the question is do they get quality traffic? Do they have quality SEO? Those are the back links that you want. You want back links to quality websites that Google is already recommending to begin with. So, it’s no good writing a surfer’s weight that doesn’t know how to surf. 

[01:24:32] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. And I think that’s an important point as well with the linking is don’t be afraid to link to other sites. A lot of people are afraid. They think, oh, I’m giving away my super duper SEO juice. You’re not.

[01:24:45] Christopher Jordan: You’re growing it.

[01:24:46] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): You’re linking to helpful resources. This is how Google functions. This is how bots function. This is how human beings function. I’m on your site. I’m not going to spend my entire life sitting on your site, listening to your music, and reading your rich descriptions. I want to discover more. And if you provide me that springboard, the link to a resource that is interesting to me, I will remember you fondly.

[01:25:10] Christopher Jordan: That’s right.

[01:25:10] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And that’s incredibly important. I think even outside of the marketing, outside of the idea of building up my fan base, just being a good human being and helping people out is delightful because I love it when people do it for me.

[01:25:25] Christopher Jordan: Oh, yeah.

[01:25:25] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And I would like to do it for other people.

Your Audience Will Appreciate if You Link Out and Give Handy Hints and Recommendations

[01:25:27] Christopher Jordan: I’ve literally gotten cease and desist for doing it. 

[01:25:30] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Oh, right. You maybe do it too much then.

[01:25:34] Christopher Jordan: Well, granted at one point, I started a Drudge Report style site that was RSS populated, but it was just news. It was not monetised in any way, shape, or form. Everything came in full, raw RSS. It all was attributed to the authors. I did not replace any images, used their images. And yeah, I got a cease and desist from NBC News. But that’s also how you know you did a decent job in some Google stuff, if NBC found you and found out the fact that you were posting their RSS, so yeah. But doing old school things like having a links page that link back to other bands that you enjoy or that kind of stuff, so hugely important and overlooked. 

[01:26:30] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I agree a hundred percent. I link out to bands that I appreciate. My audience appreciates that I’m giving these handy hints and recommendations. And the other bands appreciate it and potentially link back to you, but you don’t need to. You don’t need that link back. It’s not an exchange. It’s I like you, guys, there you go.

You Need to Find Where Your Audience Are Hanging Out, Reach Out to Them, and Bring Them to Your Home

[01:26:51] Christopher Jordan: Yeah. It’s a curse.

[01:26:52] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. And the web is built that way, and that’s the way it should be built. And I think the long term payback is coming back to marketing and music group. Marketing is this maybe dirty word for a lot of artists. It’s actually just, as you said earlier on, and I think I’d love to circle back and perhaps end on this point of saying, you need to go and find your audience where your audience are already hanging out. You need to communicate to them. You need to reach out to them. You need to bring them in on that social platform, on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on TikTok, if it happens to be TikTok, if you’re young, and bring them back to your home.

[01:27:36] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Then you will have this fan base who are going to be searching your name on Google. Google will start to understand who you are because your site, your home is so brilliant. You’ve described who you are, what your albums are, what your songs are, who your audience is. And it will start to a) provide the people searching for your name because they saw you on Twitter with a great presentation of you when they do search your band name.

[01:28:04] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But it will also start pushing you towards new people through Google Discover. And all of these other algorithms, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Bing, will also do the same thing. So, we’re ending up in this situation is these machines want to understand who you are, what you do, and who your audience is. And at that point, they can start to offer you up to their users when they think their users are going to be incredibly interested in what it is you’re doing. And that’s where you start to win the game.

It’s a Lot Easier to Play the Long Game When You’re Making Art for Art’s Sake 

[01:28:31] Christopher Jordan: Yeah. Precisely. And like you said earlier, it may take a hot ticket minute. It takes a good 3-4 months for Google, if you’re even posting once a week, to see you and to algorithmically figure out, okay, that dude on a regular basis is doing this. So, you got to play that game. I remember one of the first articles I ever read about podcasting was literally titled podcasting, be ready to be alone for a long time. And it was like, you may seem like you’re talking to yourself, but keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it. You will be found. It will happen. You just have to keep doing it.

[01:29:17] Christopher Jordan: And coming at it from that artist’s perspective of, does it matter if you sell an album or are you making music for art’s sake? Because if you’re making it for art’s sake, you’re going to keep making it and you’re going to keep doing it. That discouragement of, well, I guess that album didn’t sell to anybody, doesn’t really hit as much because you’re making music for music’s sake. You’re making art for art’s sake. And then at that point, it’s a lot easier to play that long game and see that turnaround happen.

You Need to Be Consistent and to Make Sure That You’re Communicating With the Right Audience in the Right Places 

[01:29:52] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. And that is a great one. You just said play that long game. And I think a lot of people imagine the internet as this magic bullet, where it all works incredibly quickly, incredibly successful. And we suddenly get a hundred thousand people coming to our website or buying our album because we happen to put a webpage online. It’s not it. Like anything in life, it’s a long game.

[01:30:14] Christopher Jordan: Yep.

[01:30:14] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And you need to be good and you need to be consistent. You need to be convinced and you need to make sure that you’re communicating with the right kind of audience in the right kind of places. It’s a long game. Stick with it. Don’t give up, but be intelligent about where you’re placing your efforts.

Kalicube Pro Offers to Build Your Brand Presence, Manage Your Knowledge Panel, and Optimise Your Brand SERP 

[01:30:33] Christopher Jordan: Yes. I could not agree more. We’re going to go out on that and give you one last chance for shameless self promotion before we let you go, Jason. I cannot thank you enough. I am so glad that we met via mutual virtual handshake. Man, my fingertips are tingling. I cannot wait to start applying things today that we have. That’s how I know my brain is activated. My fingers are wanting to move. They’re wanting to do things.

[01:31:05] Christopher Jordan: So, tell everybody one last time where they can go to find out about Kalicube, the tools that you provide, where they can even come if they are a record label, anything like that, where they can come to become part of that upper tier of product that you provide. 

[01:31:27] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. Yeah. Kalicube Pro is basically a platform that helps you if you are a big company or an agency to build that presence, the Knowledge Panel, the Brand SERP. I’m not saying that other people can’t use it. I’m saying that it probably isn’t appropriate. But if you’re interested in this stuff, read my articles. If you search for my name, Jason Barnard, you will see Search Engine Journal about halfway down on the Google results page.

Read the Article Written by Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) About How to Get a Knowledge Panel

[01:31:55] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And at that point, I recently wrote an article how to get a Knowledge Panel for people. And it describes exactly what I’ve been talking about today, which is create that Entity Home. Make sure you’ve got, as you said earlier on, the URL that you own, where you can describe who you are, what you do, and who your audience is. And you can really, there you go. That’s the one. And it’s the latest article there. And it explains basically what you need to do. You don’t need Kalicube Pro. Kalicube Pro is there to help people save time. And this is a simple explanation, a professional do, but you can actually just do it on your own. So, there isn’t any need to buy a product.

[01:32:34] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So, I’m obviously selling myself short here, but I really want to share this information because I think it’s incredibly important, incredibly helpful. And it empowers people to start controlling what Google is showing about them when people search their name, their brand name, or their band name. And start to make sure that when they’ve built that audience on other platforms, Google is showing what they want to be shown, what you want to be shown, your message, so that you can keep, retain, encourage, charm that audience through their activity on Google. And I would love it if everybody could do that for free.

You Can Go to the Kalicube YouTube Channel to Watch All the Videos Made by Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) 

[01:33:18] Christopher Jordan: The fact that somebody like you with your years of experience and with the consulting program is vast in covering as this is even, hey, here it is for free, man, just go do it. I love that. I love that. I love it. Because it is all about that sharing of information. That’s what makes the world go around, man. 

[01:33:41] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Exactly. And that’s the point is I’m writing all these articles. I do videos. If you go to the Kalicube YouTube channel, I’ve got videos on there that explain all the theory, all the practical advice. All Kalicube does is make it scalable for agencies in big business. So for anybody who isn’t an agency or a big business, you can just do it yourself. You just need to watch all these videos and read the articles because I’m sharing it, because I don’t think that this is any enormous secret that I need to keep for myself, because I’m never going to be able to serve a hundred million people in the world who need this service.

[01:34:18] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): 99.999 million people can do it themselves. And I will keep the big clients, who then try and scale out. Obviously, I’m giving away my business model, but my business model isn’t to make an enormous amount of money. It’s to make a decent living and to keep researching and keep understanding, keep chasing that machine that I’m never going to catch, trying to understand how Google functions in its little brain, so that we can make sure that Google presents us in the way that we want to be presented. And we don’t just leave it to chance.

Visit the Websites kalicube.pro and jasonbarnard.com to Learn More About Jason’s Podcasts and Other Information

[01:34:50] Christopher Jordan: Absolutely. Well, once again, everybody, that website is Kalicube.Pro. Feel free to stop on by jasonbarnard.com. You can find all of his podcasts, everything there, musician. Just search his name, Jason Barnard, and I guarantee you, you will find everything that we have been talking about today. Jason, once again, I cannot thank you enough for coming on. I cannot wait to talk to you for the Podcast Cadet series and go into this even deeper for those folks, such valuable information. Please do hold the line while we close things out real quick.

Visit the Talking Sound Podcast’s Facebook Group and Website to Read Articles and Listen to More Podcasts

[01:35:33] Christopher Jordan: While you are online checking out all of the amazing work of Jason Barnard and Kalicube Pro, make sure to stop on by Facebook, everybody. Join the Talking Sound group. That’s where you can join the conversation. The page is where all the articles post, all the episodes post, and then come here. But we also post articles from great manufacturers, fantastic stuff, just all about the audio video industry, even web design, graphic design, all kinds of stuff. Stop on by and check that out. Become a member. It’s on Facebook. It’s free. We charge nothing, great conversations. Come join us.

[01:36:12] Christopher Jordan: While you’re there, make sure to stop on by Talking Sound Podcast or stop talkingsoundshow.com. That’s where you can find all the episodes. That’s where you can find the gear shop. We are busy rebuilding our industry news feed right now with all kinds of new great stuff and great manufacturers.

[01:36:33] Christopher Jordan: And of course, while you’re doing that, make sure to stop on by True Hemp Science, our sponsor. True Hemp Science is some of the greatest CBD product that I have found in my time on the road. They are based right here in Austin, Texas. I am actively a user of them. Stop on by. Use the code talking7 to get 7% off your entire cart of $50 or more and get two, count them, two free edibles on your way out the door at truhempscience.com. Until next time, everybody. Take care of yourselves, take care of your hearing, and keep reaching for 11. We’ll talk to you soon. Bye bye.

Talking Sound Podcast’s Ending Message

[01:37:18] Narrator: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Talking Sound Podcast. For more episodes, industry news, and information, visit us online at talkingsoundpodcast.com. Subscribe to the Talking Sound Podcast on Amazon Audible, Spotify, Spreaker, SoundCloud, iTunes, or your favourite podcast service. Get the latest Talking Sound videos on Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, ReachTV, or your Roku or Amazon Fire device with the APR TV app.

[01:37:54] Narrator: Talking Sound is a proud member of the HC Universal Network family of podcasts. For more great shows and content, subscribe to hcuniversalnetwork.com today. Until next time. Watch those meters, gig safely, and keep reaching for 11.

Listen here >>

Published by Talking Sound Podcast July 11, 2021. Host: Christopher Jordan. Guest: Jason Barnard, founder and CEO at Kalicube.