Jason Barnard is the CEO of Kalicube, a marketing agency specializing in Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels. Jason is one of the most charismatic figures in the world of SEO. If you want to expand more on your knowledge about SEO, you need to watch this interview.
Introducing Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy), a Brand SERP Optimisation and Knowledge Panel Management Expert
[00:00:00] Felipe Bazon: [speaks in Portuguese] Don’t panic, it’s organic. [speaks in Portuguese] in Brand SERP, Knowledge Graph, entity optimisation, and CEO of Kalicube Pro. [speaks in Portuguese] ladies and gentlemen, Jason Barnard. Jason, thank you for having to be here. Thank you for being with us in the show. Please, for those that don’t know you yet, especially the Brazilian SEO community, introduce yourself please.
[00:00:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Brilliant. Thank you very much, Felipe. Yeah. I’m Jason Barnard. I call myself The Brand SERP Guy. Brand SERP is what your audience sees when they search your exact match brand name. And from my point of view, it’s something that brands don’t pay enough attention to. It’s phenomenally important.
[00:01:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Because the people who are searching your brand name are the most important people to your business. They’re either about to do business with you or already doing business with you. So, they’re the people you want to impress. And you want that Brand SERP to be a great business card, because that’s what it is. It’s Google providing you with a digital business card.
Besides Optimising Brand SERPs, Jason Barnard Is Also an Expert in Managing Knowledge Panels
[00:01:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the second side to my personality is the Knowledge Panel, which appears on a Brand SERP. If Google has understood who you are, what you do, and who your audience is, it will present on the right hand side on a desktop search a Knowledge Panel that actually shows what it considers to be fact. And that’s incredibly important moving forwards, as you talked about entity based search, facts.
Google’s understanding of the world is going to be the single most important thing in SEO and even in digital marketing
jason barnard (the brand serp guy)
[00:01:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Google’s understanding of the world is going to be the single most important thing in SEO and even in digital marketing, because it goes beyond Google. It goes to Amazon. It goes to Microsoft. It goes to Apple. It goes to Facebook. It goes to Twitter. All these big companies have Knowledge Graphs where they’re trying to understand the world, and they understand the world through entities and relationships. That’s a Knowledge Graph. The public representation of a Knowledge Graph is the Knowledge Panel in Google search. Boom.
[00:02:24] Felipe Bazon: Whoa. Before we dive more into that.
[00:02:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I was quite pleased that I managed to get from one end to the other without actually completely moving my track.
The Life Journey of Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) From the Music Industry to the World of SEO
[00:02:34] Felipe Bazon: I’ve got loads on that one because I’m dying to ask you about how the hell do I get my Knowledge Panel, but we’ll get to that. But everyone that is in the SEO industry, everybody you talked to, it’s not something that you went to uni to get a degree. You ended up doing SEO. How and when Jason Barnard got into SEO? I’ve heard a very interesting story, but I don’t want to get too much into that. I’ll let you tell us how did you get interested or how SEO came into your life?
[00:03:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, it was a multi-step process. I actually got my degree in economics at Liverpool John Moores University. But instead of actually paying attention to what I was supposed to be with the degree, I was playing music and I played the Cavern Club where the Beatles played. And I was at the same university as John Lennon, which doesn’t make me a better person or more interesting person, but I think it’s pretty cool. And then I moved to Paris. And because I’d been playing in a band, I was invited to play in a punk folk band. We became professional. We traveled around Europe. We released four albums.
After His Career as a Musician Who Plays the Double Bass, Jason Barnard Started a Cartoon Website With His Songs for Kids
[00:03:43] Felipe Bazon: You play the cello, what do you call it, the bass.
[00:03:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, no, the double bass. I absolutely love the double bass. I’m so happy that they forced me to play it. Basically, they said, if you want to be in the band, you have to play the double bass. And I was lucky because it happened to be the instrument I was quite good at. And if they’d said you have to play the penny whistle or the harmonica or the drums, I would’ve been rubbish and I never would’ve had a career.
[00:04:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then when that ended, I wrote some songs for kids. And I tried to make a music album for kids, and nobody would sign it. And so, we created with my ex-wife cartoon characters for the web. We developed that. And it became one of the biggest sites in the world, the 10,000th biggest site in the world at the time. We were competing with PBS and the BBC, which was a bit weird, and Disney in fact. We were basically, in terms of the actual segment, which was kids up to 10 years old, we were competing with the really big guns at the time.
Like Other SEOs, Jason Barnard Segued Into the World of SEO After Coming From Different Industries
[00:04:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then when that stopped, the way I could actually get work was by doing SEO. So, I said to people, one of the reasons it was such a success is that we could pull in a million people a month just through Google. This was in 2007. And when I really needed jobs, because after that I had debts. I didn’t have any money. I had to find a job. I had to figure out how to make some money. And the easiest way was to say, if I can pull in a million people a month through Google to a kids’ website and compete with PBS, then I can help your business dominate Google. And that’s basically how my SEO career started.
[00:05:25] Felipe Bazon: That’s interesting because that’s another fact about SEOs. We always started doing our own projects and then, oh, this is working. Where do I get all this traffic from? Then you find out it comes from Google. Then you say, oh, hang on, how do I work this out? Oh, SEO, and then boom. I think 90% of the people that I interviewed here so far, that’s the story. I was doing my project. All of a sudden I was ranking in Google. Then I started reverse engineering that, and boom, here I am with this SEO expert that I am.
Some Changes in the SEO Industry Since Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Started His Website in 1998
[00:05:58] Felipe Bazon: But since then, Jason, when you started, obviously you had SEO in mind, maybe in the long run or the later run, but how much has that changed from early 2000s days to nowadays? How much has that changed in SEO?
[00:06:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): My first webpage was in 1998 in the same month, in fact, that Google was incorporated, September 1998. I can actually name the day. And that’s where it all started for me. And at that time, it was Lycos, it was Excite, it was HotBot, it was Magellan. It was all of these search engines that have now disappeared off the face of the universe. And we had to create one page per keyword iteration per search engine.
Before Focusing on Google, Jason Barnard Was Creating Different Iterations of a Keyword for Multiple Search Engines
[00:06:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, I would have, for example, kids game, kid game, kids games for 15 different engines. So, that would be immediately 200 pages. Then you would multiply that by the number of keywords you wanted. And I ended up with 50,000 pages for the simplest core keywords and then 200,000 pages just to try and please all these different engines.
[00:07:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I think the moment that it all switched for me was the day I said, I’m just going to focus on Google. I don’t know if that was intelligent or if it was lucky. But I basically said, I’m going to throw all the other ones out the window and I’m just going to do Google, because it reduces by literally 30 fold the number of pages I need to create. So, I focused on Google and that was what worked for me through the 2000s till 2008, when I left the company.
The Story of How Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Segued From Managing a Website to Being a Digital Marketer
[00:07:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And from there on, in fact, I’ll tell you the story, even though you didn’t ask, I’m going to tell you the story anyway of the segue.
[00:07:51] Felipe Bazon: We want to know that story.
[00:07:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, why I ended up talking about Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels, why I’m so obsessed by it, and why I think it’s so important. And it all comes from a tiny little story, which was when I got back to France, I was pitching to clients in 2011. I would get the meeting with the client. I would go in and I would say, I’m going to do your digital marketing, look at what I did. And I would sell them the strategy, and I would walk out. And the boss and everybody would go, wow, this guy is great, yeah, this is going to be amazing.
After Figuring Out the Reason He Doesn’t Sign Clients, Jason Barnard Realised the Importance of Brand SERPs
[00:08:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then I didn’t sign. Why didn’t they sign? And one day, one of my clients who did sign said, what we did as soon as you walked out of the room, we all sat around the table and we googled your name, and what came up is Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog. And what I then realised is everybody who didn’t sign thought, I’m not going to give my digital marketing strategy to a cartoon blue dog
[00:08:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And so, I then thought, okay, the cartoon blue dog, it’s cool, it’s really fun, and I think it’s groovy, but it doesn’t convince a client. So, what I need to do is relegate that to part of the story that the Brand SERP tells. And what the Brand SERP does is tell my story, and what it was doing was telling the story of the blue dog or me as a blue dog. And that dominance meant that I wasn’t signing clients, I wasn’t convincing, I wasn’t a credible solution for them, so they simply didn’t sign the contract.
Jason Barnard Then Set Out to Optimise His Brand SERP to Tell His Current Story While Also Keeping His Previous Careers Further Down
[00:09:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, what I then did was set about working to make sure that the Brand SERP showed Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, the Twitter boxes, the video boxes, the image boxes, and that Knowledge Panel on the right hand side that says Jason Barnard, description from Search Engine Journal, associated entities: Rand Fishkin, Joost de Valk, Andrea Volpini from WordLift, Cindy Krum.
[00:09:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that makes me look incredibly credible, if we can say that. And the blue dog is still there, but he’s a small part of that Knowledge Panel. So, you can still see that part of my life story, so it’s not lost, but it doesn’t dominate. What does dominate is my respectability, the convincing nature of me as a digital marketer. And that was the day that I thought this is a trick almost everybody is missing.
Diving Into the World of Brand SERPs, Knowledge Panels, and Educating Google
[00:10:32] Felipe Bazon: Let’s dive into this Knowledge Panels and Brand SERPs. The time, I think it was 2019, when we met. I give you the interview at for the Kalicube podcast at BrightonSEO. And then we talked about, I think it was in the SEMrush party or so. We had long chats that event. And you were talking about your new business card being your Brand SERP, even for your brand and for your name. I must say now that since then, I have been using it in all my presentations, training sessions, and so on.
[00:11:09] Felipe Bazon: The way I introduce myself, without putting those two or three slides of I graduated here, I did these, I did that. You know what, google my name. That’s thanks to you. Because you said, there’s no better way of introducing myself, if you want to see. And that is why I want desperately my Knowledge Panel. Are you going to tell me how to do that in a minute or at least guide me through it?
[00:11:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I will tell you exactly how to do it. And it’s incredibly simple.
[00:11:33] Felipe Bazon: Because my SERP, I think it’s good because I’ve got my LinkedIn, I’ve got the places that I’m an author, like SEMrush, some other blogs here in Brazil, my own blog in Hedgehog. It’s nice, looks nice, videos, images, and so on. What is lacking is what you have, a massive, nice Jason Barnard Knowledge Panel, available in YouTube, this, that, and the other. Talk to us a little bit more into depth about it. How can brands and even persons can really tailor their Brand SERPs? And how does the Knowledge Graph ties into that? Where does that come from? How do we trigger that?
Fixing Your Content Strategy, Making Sure Your Content Has Quality, and Engaging With Your Audience
[00:12:15] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. You’ve actually brought up multiple points there, which is really interesting. If we take one step back and we say that Brand SERP, you say you’ve got your images and your video boxes. That’s amazing. And that means you’ve got a great content strategy, and Google can see that your audience is interested in engaging in that content strategy. It means you’re a good SEO and a good content marketer. Most brands don’t have that.
[00:12:35] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, number one thing is to fix your content strategy and make sure that Google can see that your content has quality and that your audience is engaging and that it is valuable and relevant to your audience searching your brand name on Google. Because if it’s relevant to them, Google will show it. Google doesn’t have a bias. It doesn’t want to show one thing more than the other. It wants to show what is most engaging and valuable for your audience on that left hand side.
The Left Hand Side of the Brand SERP Contains Recommendations, While the Right Hand Side Contains the Knowledge Panel Which Are Facts
[00:13:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Now, that left hand side, what is it? It’s Google’s opinion of the world’s opinion of you. It’s a representation that Google throws back to your audience about who you are, what you do, and what your audience tends to be interested in. So, it’s a judgment of who you are and what you do. But the right hand side, and that’s what you are talking about with the Knowledge Panel, it’s fact. Google is sticking its neck out and it’s saying, this is what I consider to be fact. And that is a very big difference. Left hand side: opinion, recommendation; right hand side: fact.
Educating Google Like a Child, Where It Will Not Present Anything That Might Be Wrong and That Might Make It Look Foolish
[00:13:40] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And like anybody, I like to talk about educating a child. We’re educating a child here. The machine that understands these facts is trying to understand the facts like a human being, but it’s a small child and we need to educate it. And like a small child, it’s not going to shout from the rooftops something it isn’t sure about, because it doesn’t want to look stupid.
[00:14:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, Google will not put anything on that right hand side if it thinks it might be wrong or it might look foolish. Take that another step forwards and we say, what deserves a Knowledge Panel? I think that’s probably the question that most people ask me most often. And the answer is everybody.
[00:14:25] Felipe Bazon: It’s the one that bothers me the most.
[00:14:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Everybody deserves one.
Who Deserves to Have a Knowledge Panel: The Question of Notability Between Wikipedia and Google
[00:14:29] Felipe Bazon: Who deserves it? I said, I don’t deserve it then.
[00:14:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, in fact, that’s interesting. The reason it’s interesting is because we think in terms of Wikipedia, Wikidata, where there are notability guidelines, where the Wikipedia editors are there to say, this is for human consumption. If nobody spontaneously is going to search your name and research you, you don’t belong in a human encyclopedia.
[00:14:55] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Wikidata has a lower bar. But it says if you have no notable references, there is no point in putting you in this database and filling this database up with junk. And having actually pinged Wikidata over the last couple of years, it’s absolutely stuffed full of junk, because people just keep putting stuff in there because they want to look more important than they truly are.
Unlike Wikipedia and Wikidata, Google Doesn’t Have a Notability Aspect to Its Judgment; It Just Wants to Understand
[00:15:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But Google doesn’t have any of that notability aspect to its judgment. It just wants to understand. So, whoever you are, you can have a Knowledge Panel. The question then is a) can you get Google to understand so it can potentially show the Knowledge Panel, b) when people are searching on Google, is that Knowledge Panel likely to be relevant and helpful to Google’s users? If you are not famous and notable, probably not.
[00:15:46] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you can have the Knowledge Panel. It will exist. I can find them. I can dig into the Kalicube tool, and I can pull up Knowledge Panels that never appear in the search results. So, there is a difference between being understood by Google and having a Knowledge Panel, which is one thing, and actually appearing in Google as a Knowledge Panel, which is another.
The Important Concepts of Probability, Understanding, Confidence in That Understanding, and Relevance
[00:16:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that appearing in the results is based on two things: the confidence Google has in the information, which is probably your problem, and the notability. And in fact, the notability has actually much more to do with what Dawn Anderson would say is probability. What is the probability that this information is what the person is actually looking for?
[00:16:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): For example, Jason Barnard. What’s the probability that somebody’s actually looking for this Jason Barnard and not another Jason Barnard? And the answer to that question is in the UK, highly probable, in New York, probable, in San Francisco, much less probable because there is a professor at San Francisco Golden Gate University called Jason Barnard, who is probably more relevant in San Francisco, so my Knowledge Panel does not appear in San Francisco.
[00:16:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, if we come back two steps, you are saying, I want a Knowledge Panel. You have to have several things. One of which is Google has to understand who you are, it needs to be confident it’s understood who you are, and then it needs to believe you are relevant to the audience searching your name, which is ambiguous.
The Problems With Multiple Entities and the Important Steps to Take for Google to Recognise Those Entities
[00:17:13] Felipe Bazon: Right. One of those that I have is because I have various different online properties, if you will. I have the YouTube channel, which is Don’t Panic, It’s Organic. There is my name tied to it, but it’s not Felipe Bazon, which is obviously my name. It’s not a very popular name. Then I have Hedgehog. Does that have to do with something similar to when we’re doing local SEO, the name, address, and phone number? Do I need to be consistent or can Google pick those things up and say, now this is Felipe Bazon?
The Problem With Inconsistency, Contradictory Data, and Information That Is Not Corroborative
[00:17:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. There are two questions there, in fact. One of which is yes, the consistency of name, address, phone number of local searches are incredibly applicable, and you need to be consistent across all platforms all the time. And as human beings, we tend to be inconsistent.
[00:18:04] Felipe Bazon: Yeah. I am.
[00:18:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, no, we all are. However hard I try, I’m still not as good as I would like to think I am. We put something on one platform. And when we go to another platform, we forgot quite what we put on the first platform. We change it slightly. Then we go into another platform. Then we wait four weeks, and we forgot what we put anywhere. And then we start again.
[00:18:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And then you end up with lots of contradictory or at least not corroborative information all over the place. And Google, like a child, wants to just see that same information confirmed over and over again by trustworthy authoritative sources. And it will end up understanding and believing and being confident in its understanding. That’s problem number one.
The Problem of Distinguishing Between Multiple and Distinct Entities, Which Could Be Solved by Identifying Those Entities
[00:18:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Problem number two is you’ve just talked about at least three different entities. Felipe Bazon is one entity. Hedgehog is a company. It’s another entity. The podcast is another entity. That’s three different entities. Felipe Bazon has a very close relationship with Hedgehog as co-founder or founder and owner and CEO. He has also a close relationship with the podcast as host, and the podcast has relationship with Hedgehog, which is podcast of Hedgehog.
[00:19:26] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you’ve got three different entities. And they’re distinct, and they would all potentially have their own Knowledge Panel. And if you don’t think about it like that, you are dead in the water, because that’s how Google has to think about it and that’s how we have to think about it. So, the first step, and I had never really thought of it quite like this, the first step is to identify your entities.
After Identifying Entities, the Next Step Is to Establish an Entity Home for Each Entity and Then Add Schema Markup
[00:19:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Second step is identify one page on one site that you own. That is the Entity Home and what Mike Blumenthal from the local search world calls the canonical. And it’s basically saying this, Google, is where you should go to get the information about this specific entity. So, you would have one, Hedgehog would have another, the podcast would have another. On that page, I state the facts about who I am, what I do, who my audience is. In the case of Hedgehog, who the company is, what it offers, who its audience is, and same thing for the podcast.
[00:20:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Once you’ve done that, you add the Schema Markup. Schema Markup is not at all obligatory. You don’t have to have the Schema Markup, but it is very helpful. Schema Markup is basically Google’s native language in the sense that it can digest it in a manner that it can be very confident it’s understood, but it still understands what’s in your page.
[00:20:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Quickly, I’ll come back. And this is a little bit confusing, but don’t ever put two entities on one page, one entity homepage. The Entity Home is one entity only. You can’t have Felipe Bazon and Hedgehog having the same Entity Home. It has to be a unique Entity Home per entity, point number one.
Depending on Your Industry, the Last Step Is to Corroborate Information From Relevant Sites, Which Then Links Back to Your Entity Home
[00:21:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Then you move forwards and you say, okay, I have this Entity Home. Now what I’m going to do is point to all the corroborative information online that proves what I’m saying on third party, trustworthy, authoritative, relevant sites. And that means pointing to your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook profile, Crunchbase, Wikidata, if you have one, Wikipedia, if you have one, if you’re lucky enough to have one, and ZoomInfo, Owler, if you’re a company. For people, IMDb is potentially a source of trusted information, MusicBrainz, if you’re a musician.
[00:21:47] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, it depends on your industry, it depends on who you are, it depends on what you’ve done, it depends where the information is. And you need to point to that. Then you need to go to those sources, and you need to correct every piece of information there is about you. So, what then happens is Google goes from your Entity Home, which is on your site, to this third party site, sees the same information, sees a link back, comes back, says, all right, goes to another one, sees the same information, comes back, goes, okay.
Due to This Process and Never Ending Cycle, Google Will Then Become Confident in the Information That You Are Providing
[00:22:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And it does that literally in this infernal cycle, this incredibly boring cycle. As a human being, you think that it must drive it nuts, but it’s a machine. It loves it. And it goes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That was me ping-ponging backwards and forwards. Getting corroboration from information that in fact you’ve actually just placed there or you’ve made sure is true.
[00:22:37] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And after a while, Google ends up like a child becoming confident. So, you think of your Entity Home as the parent. The parent explains to the child, this is the fact. The kid goes, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, but my parent is not a hundred percent reliable. But if the headmaster says it, the teacher says it, the baker says it, the post person says it, the police person in the street says it, I’m beginning to believe. And after a while, it will say yes, okay, this must be true, because all of these different trusted sources that I have in my life confirm what it is I was initially told by my parents.
The Concept of Link Strategies and Recognising Entities by Creating Relationships
[00:23:17] Felipe Bazon: So, let me see if I understood this concept about the Knowledge Graph and how to get one and so on. It’s a mixture of obviously stuff that are facts, and the way Google validate facts are with references, links, and entities. So, brands and people out there wanting to be professionals, wanting to get in control or trigger their Knowledge Panels, they need a mixture of a good link strategy with an entity optimisation strategy. Am I correct in thinking that term or as an SEO, I’m just over complicating things as usual?
[00:23:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): No. Well, in fact, I think where you are perhaps over complicating it very slightly is they want an entity strategy. They want a clear explanation on a lot of third party, trusted, authoritative, relevant sources. The link strategy is not actually a link strategy, but it does generate links. I want Google to go backwards and forwards through these links to these corroborations. So, you end up with links. It’s actually a link building strategy without wanting to be one, which is lovely. So, the bonus is you got links.
A Relationship Between Yourself and an Entity, Along With Confidence, Will Help Google Understand Much Easier Who You Are and What You Do
[00:24:27] Felipe Bazon: It’s natural linking, isn’t it?
[00:24:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yes. And the second thing is to identify as we were talking earlier on. Felipe Bazon is one entity, Hedgehog is another, and you want to piggyback on other entities that Google already recognises. So if you can find an entity already that understands and it’s confident it’s understood, and you can create a relationship between yourself and that entity and explain that relationship to Google, Google will find it much easier to understand who you are, what you do, and believe in it.
Hooking New Information Onto Something You Already Understand Will Make the Memory Stick
[00:25:00] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And one interesting thing, I was talking to a guy called, what was he called? I’ve forgotten his name now. Chester, International Memory Man, who can remember an entire deck of cards in 20 seconds or something. I can’t remember. And it’s nuts, but it’s a memory trick. And he was saying, that I find very interesting, people immediately said, but you remember all that junk, doesn’t that just throw lots of other memories out of your head? So, you’re remembering all these rubbish decks of cards or whatever it might be.
[00:25:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And he was saying, actually, no. The memory is completely flexible in the sense that you can stuff as much things and many things as you want in there. There isn’t a limit that we found. And the trick is that whatever you already have in your mind, if I can hook some new information onto something you already understand, that memory will stick. If I hook it onto something that you don’t already understand, that memory will be lost.
Considering How Human Brains Work, Google’s Memory Is Helped by Corroboration, Truthfulness, Consistency, and Relationships
[00:25:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So if I talk to you about sheep in your Yorkshire, you don’t know anything about sheep in your Yorkshire. That’s a memory. If I explain to you about how to shave a sheep, for example, that would probably something you would’ve forgotten within 20 minutes. But if I hook that piece of information onto something you’ve already understood, for example, how to optimise a page about shaving sheep for SEO, you will probably remember it because I’ve hooked it onto something you already know.
[00:26:33] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s where you grab Google by the memory sticks or whatever you’re going to call it. Basically, it’s corroboration, truthfulness, consistency, and finding what entities it’s already understood, and hooking yourself onto those in a piggyback style.
A More Detailed Explanation About Entities According to Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)
[00:26:58] Felipe Bazon: Right. I bet there are quite a few people watching this by now. And then when it goes live, obviously, it would be seen. We said entities quite a few times. You are one of the guys who have been doing a lot. I saw the other day, I think it was an article or some podcast, your own video, whatever. And you know your entity under Google. So, let’s explain to people that doesn’t understand what entities are and how important that is nowadays from an SEO standpoint, let’s say.
[00:27:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. Yeah. Well, an entity is a thing. It’s anything you can identify. We often say named entities. So, it’s something you can identify with a name, and that’s maybe critical. Because traditionally, what Google did was look at strings of characters. So, look at my name, Jason Barnard, and it would simply count the number of times that string of characters appeared in a page and say, this must be relevant. But it wouldn’t be able to distinguish between Jason Barnard, me, Jason Barnard, the footballer in South Africa, Jason Barnard, the hockey player in Canada, Jason Barnard, the professor in San Francisco University.
Aside From Considering What a String of Characters Represent, Google Considers What Is the Relevant Entity
[00:28:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And what it’s now trying to do is say, what does that string of characters represent? What thing does it represent? And one string of characters can potentially, in the case of my name, represent multiple things. And so, Google is now trying to say, not only do I want to understand what it represents, but which one of the versions of this particular string of characters, what that represents, what we’re talking about, what is the relevant entity.
[00:28:42] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, an entity is a thing, a place, a business, a price potentially, a product, but it can also be a concept. Economics is an entity. SEO is an entity. Digital marketing is an entity. Voice search is an entity. So, as entities, we are saying, okay, I’m something physical, I’m a person. A company is a philosophical idea, basically. We think it’s terribly solid, but it’s actually just in our imaginations, just like economics.
The Focal Entities of Your SEO Strategy Should Be the Topics Which Are Significant to Your Audience
[00:29:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And so, you need to start taking a step back and saying, okay, the focal entities of my SEO strategy are the things that are going to be useful for my audience, which are my products, my company, myself. My website is an entity, strangely enough. Then you get into the things that’s difficult enough to do, but then you start talking to people like WordLift. And you start saying, okay, now I need to associate my entity, the company, or my entity, myself, to entities that are concepts such as voice search, Schema Markup.
Get Google to understand who you are as an entity, what you do, and who your audience is. And that’s the key for the future.
Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)
[00:29:57] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that’s where the trick for the future is going to come. We’re not there yet, so don’t freak out, don’t panic. Step one, get Google to understand who you are as an entity, what you do, and who your audience is. And that’s the key for the future. Your audience is interested in topics. And Google talked about the topic layer a couple of months ago. Topics are entities too, and it’s part of the Knowledge Graph.
[00:30:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, what Google are now trying to do is say, I understand Jason Barnard is a digital marketer. He’s a digital marketer who doesn’t know much about social media, which is an entity. So, that relationship is very weak. He knows a little bit, but we’re not going to really push that. He knows absolutely loads about Knowledge Panels and Knowledge Graphs.
The Concept of Google Discover: Pushing Content or Topic That Google Knows the User Is Interested In
[00:30:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, that relationship, my relationship as an entity, as a person with Knowledge Graphs is that knows about, which is a really interesting concept. Because when you look at what Google is now doing, it’s saying, when somebody opens up their Android phone, we’re going to show them Discover. If they open up Google Chrome, we’re showing them Google Discover.
[00:31:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And what Google Discover does is say, I have a topic that I know the user is interested in, Knowledge Graphs, in this case. I know an entity who knows lots about that, so I’m going to push their content towards that person on that platform. So, potentially, if Google understands that I, as a digital marketer, entity, knows about Knowledge Graphs, entity, when somebody, for example, yourself, who is interested in Knowledge Graphs, opens up their Android phone, it will push my article to you and not somebody else’s.
Entity Optimisation, Entity-Based Content Models, and Their Importance for Google and SEO
[00:31:33] Felipe Bazon: Right. So, entity optimisation is definitely becoming a huge thing in SEO. I saw an article in Moz the other day when someone showed, in fact, it was a Brazilian girl called Larissa Lacerda, how to get featured snippets using entities. She reverse engineered what the content was on the featured snippet, got her content, used the natural processing language, the NPL from Google, which showed her some entities, that this content is related to this entity, like books, charts, microphones, and this.
Entity optimisation, that’s the future of SEO.
Felipe Bazon
[00:32:09] Felipe Bazon: She went down and tweaked the part of she wanted to appear on the snippet and reindex the page. In a few hours, she got the snippet. She got the featured snippet. So, it’s a very interesting article using entities based on what Google is telling you to optimise your content. So, entity optimisation, that’s the future of SEO.
Finding Out What Entities Google Associates With Other Entities and Considering Your Content and Audience as Distinct Entities
[00:32:32] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. And what she did that’s incredibly smart is not just say, oh, what do I think these entities are? She just asked Google. And it’s one of those idiotically simple things when you say it. Don’t make it up. Ask Google. It’s got the NLP API, ping it in there, find out what entities Google associates with this, that, and the other. Bob’s your uncle. And you can create these things.
[00:32:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I work a lot with WordLift. I do an entity based content model around my podcast, and that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re saying, what are the entities that underpin this article, the subject of this article? What are the entities around or that are important for this particular audience?
[00:33:12] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And an audience is an entity as well in the sense that you’re saying, who is my audience? It’s a group of people that represent, technically, perhaps not an entity. But if I can match my audience and their interest in specific entities that Google understands, and that’s where your friend was incredibly smart, that Google already understands, I can immediately start to tickle Google, as we like to say, tickle Google’s underbelly in exactly the right way.
Identifying Each Unique ID of Entities and Using Kalicube as a Tool to Look Into the Knowledge Graph
[00:33:42] Felipe Bazon: Yeah. That’s super interesting. So, an entity, is that like an ID, a number that Google attributes to me, to you, to things? Because it’s not strings now. Is there a way to understand, to know what’s our entity or your entity, what’s Jason Barnard’s entity? Is that possible to know the ID?
[00:34:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): All the entities that Google has understood have an ID. It either starts with /m/ or /g/. And there’s a historical reason for that. It doesn’t actually really matter. It has an ID for every entity. So, what you will find, one thing I find, if I use my name, Jason Barnard, there are 250 Jason Barnards in the world. Right now within the Knowledge Graph, there are 3 who have an ID.
[00:34:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But given a couple of years, there are going to be a hundred in there with an ID. And each one will be unique, and each one will be represented by the same string of characters, Jason Barnard, even if I can’t say it. But each one will have a unique ID that Google can recognise and Google will use to disambiguate and recognise each one of those different Jason Barnards. So, that is key.
Kalicube as a Saas Platform Allows You to Have a Peek Into Google’s Brain, Which Is Also Known as the Knowledge Graph
[00:34:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): At Kalicube, we have a tool where you can look into the Knowledge Graph, and you can search for a name, and it will show you what the Knowledge Graph ID is. I also added a reverse lookup. If you have the Knowledge Graph ID, you can find out what entity it corresponds to. And basically, Kalicube is being built out as a SaaS platform that allows you to peek into Google’s brain, Google’s memory, Google’s knowledge, and start to influence it.
[00:35:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): For me, I like the word educate. Because it really is just saying, here are the facts, how can I best explain it to this child, so it will understand and believe and be confident in its understanding, so that it will then shout that understanding from the roofs, which it won’t if it’s not confident.
How Can You Harness the Connection Between Entities to Make It More Visible to Google?
[00:35:47] Felipe Bazon: It’s very interesting. I was thinking here, we talked about a lot of people, like a person, me, you as an entity, or Knowledge Graph. How do you see brands harnessing that towards, for instance, e-commerce? How can you harness this entity optimisation or this entity connection things to be more successful and be more visible to Google? Is that possible or am I tripping balls here?
[00:36:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, I like to look at it from the point of view of all the Rich Elements, the SERP features that are coming up. I like to divide them into multiple groups, and one of those groups is entity based elements. And if you can start to get involved or start to be present in those entity based elements, that’s the future. That’s where we’re going. Google wants to know I’m an e-commerce company. I sell product A, product B, product C, product D. And we think it’s understood, but it’s actually just matching strings at the moment for much of that.
[00:36:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If we can explain and educate Google to the fact that as an e-commerce company, I sell these specific products, and Google can recognise exactly what product it is, what version it is, what colour it is, what size it is, what price it is, is it available. All of this information we can wrap in Schema Markup and present it to Google so that Google can be confident that when it presents that solution, that offer, that product to its user, which you are offering.
Google wants to be confident that you will satisfy its users, and that’s the bottom line.
Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)
[00:37:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But you’re still offering it to Google’s users. They’re not your users. They’re Google’s users. When it does offer it to their users as a solution to their problem or the product they’re actually looking for, that it can be really confident that it can present it. And I think the biggest single word that I’ve said this entire interview is confidence. Google wants to be confident that you will satisfy its users, and that’s the bottom line.
The Process of How Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Created Kalicube as a Tool and Used It to Help Clients
[00:37:51] Felipe Bazon: That’s a very strong phrase. I think it summarises SEO nowadays. I was talking with my team yesterday, in fact, with the on-page team. And I said, guys, the question you need to ask when you’re optimising a page is, is this page worthy of the first position of Google? I think what you’re saying is even better. Can Google trust this page to rank it first? I think it’s even stronger than that. So, with your authorisation, I want to use that with my team now because this is what we are looking for nowadays. And it does open up a lot of ideas here to how can we move forward with SEO.
[00:38:38] Felipe Bazon: And you’ve built quite a set of tools around the Knowledge Graph, the Knowledge Graph explorer. Talk to us a little bit more about that and how can brands use it or if they need to pay for it? Are you looking for more people to test it out? Because I saw you have a few countries there, and Brazil is not one of them, but I think that the more you have, the better. No, it’s not a problem. I followed your work quite a bit, and I can see that it’s growing up by the day. But how can friends and people use those tools? How beneficial is it for them?
Because He Doesn’t Have Enough Clients Yet and Doesn’t Have a System, Jason Barnard Didn’t Build Any Kind of Tool at First
[00:39:11] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): 100%. What actually happened is that I’ve been doing this for 7 years. I started with that blue dog story we talked about earlier on, and it grew. And I got lots of clients, and I’ve been working on this for different clients for years and years and years and years, but I never got enough clients to actually make it worth my while, building any kind of tool.
[00:39:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the other problem I had is I didn’t have a system. I hadn’t understood what the system was. It just seemed very fragmented to me. And over the last year, it’s become very clear to me that it’s a very simple system, that I described to you earlier on, Entity Home, Schema Markup, point out, corroborate, get that machine going backwards and forwards, make it confident that what you are saying is actually true.
[00:39:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the single most important thing is that the Entity Home, the trusted place that Google goes to look for the first information, is your site or page on your website. And once I figured that out, I realised that I could start building. I built these tools for my own use. So, all these tools have existed for 2 or 3 years, and I just didn’t make them public because there was no reason to do so.
Kalicube’s Purpose Is to Provide the Course of Action, in Order of Priority, You Need to Take Based on the Data for Your Specific Case
[00:40:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And I started making them public. And you’ve obviously been stalking me and watching the evolution. And when I do get a useful tool that I think will help people, like yourself, who have the knowledge to be able to actually look at them and understand what the results of these tools are actually showing them, I share it.
[00:40:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): What I then realised is that as a platform, and that’s what I’m now building, is a lot of people don’t have the knowledge and the understanding to be able to apply the data that I’m showing them, to actually understand what it means and what they need to do. And that’s what Kalicube does. It takes this data, which is public and simple. And you can look at the data all day long, if you like, no problem at all.
[00:41:01] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The point is what Kalicube can do is say, this is the conclusion, this is the action you need to take based on the data for your specific case, and this is the order of priority of these different tasks that we’ve identified. And that’s what Kalicube does. And the reason I developed the tool, and literally it’s been three months. Every weekend, I spend Saturday and Sunday, I just develop the tool. And all week I work for my clients, keep a roof above my head, and so and so forth.
Jason Barnard Started to Build a Tool When He Got Big and Important Clients, Which Pushed Him to Scale Up and Systemise His Process
[00:41:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the reason that I started building a tool is because I got Yoast as a client. And then I got SE Ranking as a client. Then WordLift started talking to me about them integrating some of their work with us. And I got three Hollywood stars, who I can’t name, as clients, which all sounds incredibly impressive, but it’s only three. There are hundreds of thousands of Hollywood stars.
[00:42:00] Felipe Bazon: They’re Hollywood stars.
[00:42:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The point from my perspective was that it started to scale up, and I couldn’t deal with it. So, I basically said, what can I systemise and how can I build a system that allows these people to actually look at the conclusions of the data? Because, obviously, Joost de Valk is an incredibly intelligent guy. He knows more about this than most people in the industry.
[00:42:27] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And he was basically saying, yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I just don’t have the time to actually look at the data. I just want you to give me a list. And that’s really smart on his behalf. Basically, he’s saying, I could understand everything that you’re doing if I really wanted to, but there’s no point. I understand what I need to do. I understand where we’re going.
Through the Use of Kalicube, Jason Barnard Discovered That on a Specific Day, 60-80% of the Knowledge Graph Changed
[00:42:48] Felipe Bazon: You’re already starting to help me.
[00:42:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, exactly. And the point of Kalicube is that. It’s to say to people, here you go, we’ve figured it out for you, you just need to go and do it. And I’m very happy and grateful to have Joost as a client, simply because it’s very encouraging to have somebody that smart say to me, what you are doing is valuable, what you’re doing is helpful, and I’m willing to pay to have that available to me.
[00:43:19] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And what we’ve seen over the last few months, I don’t know if you saw the article in Search Engine Journal. I’ve discovered, in inverted commas, obviously I’m making myself sound bigger than I really am, the Knowledge Graph updates. And what happens is that on a specific day, 60-80% of the Knowledge Graph changes. And I wrote an article in Search Engine Journal about that.
Also, Jason Barnard Saw an Increase in the Confidence Score of Everyone Who Is Using the Kalicube Beta Platform
[00:43:43] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And one thing that I didn’t write in the article, because I don’t really want to get too involved in that right now, is everybody using the Kalicube beta platform saw an increase in the confidence score that the Knowledge Graph had in their understanding of their entity, and pretty much every other entity went down.
[00:44:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): One thing you need to know is that the Knowledge Graph has a ceiling, so it attributes points to different entities. And basically, if somebody wins, somebody else loses. And what I’ve seen is that Kalicube means that you’re winning and not losing. And we’ve had two updates since I’ve actually been looking at this in detail. So, give me a few months, and I might actually have some data where I can say this is actually true, but for the moment on a very small scale of 20 entities.
Jason Barnard’s Experiments Around Knowledge Panels Are Still in the Infancy Stage, But It Has a Potential to Improve
[00:44:36] Felipe Bazon: That’s fantastic. I’ve seen that when you show the different update, how you keep feeding it. And then when the update comes, you see the changes and it’s also very interesting. As you said, it’s small scale, but I think it proves some points and some hypothesis and the fact that you got some big guns after your data. I think that validates that you’re on the right trend.
[00:45:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. I think I’m on the right track, and this is really recent, literally. It’s a couple of months, and so it’s new for me as well. In the article, I showed my own Knowledge Graph confidence score, which is going up at each update because I work on it actively. And I’ve got 20 entities of which 15 went up, 15 entities who are clients, to be very clear. I’ve got 500 experiments. And of those 500 experiments, 100 have Knowledge Panels and 80% went up, let’s say. I can’t remember the exact number.
[00:45:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But right now, we’re still in the infancy. And that isn’t data that I would say, I’m sure that I’m a hundred percent right, but I’d like to say I’m confident, but I resist that. But give it 2 or 3 months, I think we’re going to have an amount of data where we will be able to see that correlation and I will be more confident.
The Important First Step of Searching Brand Names, Looking at Their Brand SERPs, and Providing Information Around That
[00:45:58] Felipe Bazon: That’s super interesting. I hope that sounds like you’re turning into a very interesting product and service that you are offering. So, that’s amazing. So, look forward to seeing the evolution of that. I’ll keep monitoring it because this fascinates me. This is one of the areas of SEO that I’ve really been diving into. Probably not as much as you, but I’m trying to learn as much as I can about entities, Knowledge Graph. Not just for myself, but as SEOs, that’s what we do. We always get ourselves, first one, we understand how it works, and then we turn into a product.
[00:46:35] Felipe Bazon: I think there’s a lot in it. Sometimes when I do an audit for brands, we’ve been working with some interesting brands here in Brazil nowadays and in the UK as well. The first thing I do is do a search for their brand name, look how the SERP looks, and provide them information around that. You have this, you have that, this is where you can improve. You haven’t claimed your Knowledge Graph. What annoys me the most is people that have a Knowledge Panel and haven’t claimed it yet. I’m dying to get mine. And you have one hanging in there, and you haven’t done it.
Searching the Brand Name First Will Give You an Insight Into What Google Thinks the World Thinks About Them
[00:47:07] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): No, a hundred percent. What you are saying is so true. And it’s rare that I hear anybody in the SEO industry say, the first thing I do is search the brand name, because that gives me an insight into what Google thinks the world thinks about them and what Google thinks about them and the content they’re creating. And I’m a big fan now of yours because we agree, and anybody who’s on the Brand SERP bandwagon is my friend.
[00:47:36] Felipe Bazon: I’m glad. Good.
[00:47:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): You were my friend before. That sounded really rude. You were already my friend.
Jason Barnard’s Focus for Entities: What Is Google’s Perception of the World’s Perception of This Entity?
[00:47:41] Felipe Bazon: I’m more a friend now. Don’t elongate this one too much, but you’re coming out to the hour. And I know you’re a very busy guy as well. I’ve been doing that with the terms that I want to rank for as well, looking at what the SERP tells me, and reverse engineering, like the basics. If there are images and videos and carousels, I try to bring that, how can I reverse that and add that to the content?
[00:48:09] Felipe Bazon: So if a tool out there, and if you’re thinking about it and scaling up your tool, that can help us scale that analysis up. I think that’s where we are heading, because that tells a lot about user intent, about entities, what Google’s bringing. And the way I see it, picking up those, I want to use the term that we are using here, those entities, images, video entities, and adding them to the content. I think that enriches and that builds the trust that we want to show Google. Am I correct in thinking that?
Considering Everything as an Entity, Kalicube Looks at What Google Throws Back, Reverse Engineer It, and Help Google Understand
[00:48:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And as you rightly said, everything is an entity. The video is an entity. This is an entity. This podcast episode is an entity. The image is an entity. Websites are entities. Web pages are entities. Once you start digging down, your head starts hurting. I’m focusing on the higher level of entities of people, companies, websites, music groups, music recordings, music albums, software as a service, services, products. I’m focusing on that and saying, what does Google understand and what’s Google’s perception of the world’s perception of this entity?
[00:49:16] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And whether you are the company, the C-level employee, the founder, a product, a service, a music group, a podcast host, a podcast, it doesn’t matter. At Kalicube, what I’m trying to do is say, let’s look at what Google throws back at us and start to reverse engineer it and help Google to understand. And it isn’t cheat Google, it’s educate Google.
Whether They’re Seasoned or Just Starting, What Is Jason Barnard’s Advice to the SEO Community?
[00:49:44] Felipe Bazon: No. I’m now then your friend, because I can validate those ideas. I got to be your friend now. That’s super interesting, because although I’m following your work and doing my own researches, it’s been amazing to be able to validate these ideas here and get to understand a bit more about entities. And hopefully, the audience will also see that. I’m going to leave all the details, so people can reach out to you, follow your work with your authorisation, obviously.
[00:50:16] Felipe Bazon: But we’re coming up to the end. And what advice would you give to the Brazilian SEO community or the SEOs in Brazil? What should they be looking for, even if they’re starting or they’re seasoned, what would your advice be?
Things to Constantly Think About: What Are You Looking At, What’s the Entity, Where Does It Fit, and What Are Its Relationships
[00:50:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. It doesn’t matter whether you’re seasoned or a beginner where you are in the journey in terms of being an SEO geek, person, enthusiast, expert, whatever you want to call yourself. Jono Alderson from Yoast is one of my favourite people. I love the guy. He does the Schema Markup for Yoast. And he wakes up in the middle of the night and he’s going, oh, that’s how it all fits together.
[00:51:05] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And my advice to everybody is to do what he and I are both doing, and I know Andrea Volpini from WordLift does the same thing. Constantly think, what am I looking at, what’s the entity, where does it fit into the overall picture, and what are its relationships with the other entities that surround it?
The Important Question of How You Can Best Educate Google to Understand the Entity and Its Relationships With Other Entities
[00:51:28] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And so, when you’re looking at your product, what’s its relationship with the manufacturer, what’s its relationship with you, what’s its relationship potentially with the client, what’s its relationship with delivery dates, what’s the relationship with how you’re going to deliver it. All of this is looking at entities with relationships and identifying correctly what is an entity, how you can best describe that to Google, how you can best educate Google to understand the entity and the relationships that entity has with the other entities around it.
[00:52:02] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if you start to do that, and it’s really, really painful to start with, because it isn’t obvious. A typical example would be something like SE Ranking, which is a SaaS platform, but SE Ranking is also a company. That’s two different entities, two different Knowledge Panels, two different explanations, two different Entity Homes, because one is a company, one is a software as a service. And if Google doesn’t understand that, Google’s going to struggle to understand absolutely everything that comes down from there.
Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) on Clarifying Entities and Their Relationships for the Last Time
[00:52:41] Felipe Bazon: And I think they’re doing a pretty good job to diversify that this is the software, this is the company. Are they still struggling?
[00:52:49] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): No. SE Ranking is one of the companies doing a better job, but it’s a typical example of something that people think SE Ranking, for us as human beings, we don’t really think of it in those terms. You look at Jason Barnard as an entity. Kalicube is an entity. Boowa and Kwala, my animated characters, is an entity. The Barking Dogs, which is my group, is an entity.
[00:53:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): If I start to dig down, I’ll do it now really quickly, because it’s freaky once you start doing it. Jason Barnard, relationship with entity, Boowa and Kwala, fictional characters, Boowa and Kwala, stars of TV series called Boowa and Kwala, already ambiguous. Boowa and Kwala, TV series has season 1, which is an entity. Season 1 of the Boowa and Kwala TV series, starring Boowa and Kwala, the fictional characters created by Jason Barnard, the entity, has 52 episodes. Each of those episodes has a title. It has characters. Each of those characters is voiced by somebody. Somebody wrote the script. Somebody else was a director of the episode.
Once You Start to Dig Down Into Entities, It Quickly Gets Confusing; So If You Are Not Clear About It, How Can Google Possibly Understand?
[00:53:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It contains a song. Now I’m going to get really, really freaky. The episode, which has a parent, which is the season, which has a parent, which is the series, which has a parent, which is related to the characters, which was created by Jason Barnard, contains a song that was written by Jason Barnard. So, now we’ve got this loop going on. The song was written by Jason Barnard, and the actual episode contains a recording of a song, which is an entity. And the song itself is another entity.
[00:54:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, I’ve already gone seven levels down, and I didn’t even start to think about it, and I could go much further. So, what I mean is once you start to dig down into that, you realise how confusing it gets so quickly. And if we aren’t clear, how can Google possibly start to understand?
Understanding Entities and SEO No Matter Where You Are in the World
[00:54:50] Felipe Bazon: I think that’s amazing. And what you were saying, I was processing one thing here. Let’s see if I can summarise everything. If you are an SEO nowadays, no matter where you are in the world, and you’re still thinking about repeating keywords within your content, you’re going to starve. Am I correct in saying that?
[00:55:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yes. I like the idea of wherever you are in the world, because the thing about the Knowledge Graph is theoretically it’s language agnostic, which means it doesn’t matter. Jason Barnard the entity is the same in Portuguese as he is in English, but also, what’s the word for music album in Portuguese?
[00:55:37] Felipe Bazon: Album de musica.
[00:55:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Album de musica is the same thing for Google in a Knowledge Graph in Portuguese as it is in English. So, whether or not you write the words music album, if it’s in Portuguese, if Google has understood what a music album is, it doesn’t matter what language it’s in.
To Find Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Online, Just Search His Name
[00:56:01] Felipe Bazon: Interesting. That gave me even more ideas here, but maybe we leave that for another chat. We could talk here all day. Jason, once again, thank you very much for accepting this invitation. I look forward when these things go back to normal, so we can meet at some events like we did at Brighton and some other events. Everything just goes back to normal. I’m really looking forward to that. So, yeah, any final words?
[00:56:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. One question you were saying earlier on about looking people up, what I now say at the end when people say, where can people find you online, I say, just search my name.
[00:56:44] Felipe Bazon: Great one. Thank you very much. It’s been nice. [speaks in Portuguese] Don’t panic, it’s organic.
Video by: Don’t Panic It’s Organic. Host: Felipe Bazon. Guest: Jason Barnard. April 2, 2021.
