Episode 028 – Jason Barnard Kalicube Brand SERPs, Knowledge Panels by Jason Barnard, SEO Researcher.
[00:00:00] Paul Andre de Vera: Hey, everyone. I just want to offer my condolences and prayers to Hamlet Batista, who was actually supposed to be on the show this past week. If you guys don’t know who he is, I actually prepared his reel, which I was supposed to air when he was supposed to be on, but please check it out. There’s a GoFundMe. You can check it out. The link is in the description, but here who is Hamlet Batista.
[00:00:32] Paul Andre de Vera: And you could find his GoFundMe page link on the description. And now, I will start the countdown. And for those watching the replay, go ahead and skip this countdown.
[00:01:35] Paul Andre de Vera: Bradley, what’s up? Happy Friday. I see a few of you out there. Don’t be shy. Say hi. Tim, what’s up? How are you? Carol, hello. Llokdawg, what’s up, nephew? Checking out uncle’s stream today, huh? What’s up, Greg? Happy Friday. Brian, what’s up?
[00:09:28] Music: Yeah. Yeah. Hey, time to get it started, no delay. Let’s work. Want to see you be an SEO expert. Paul Andre de Vera, steady dropping knowledge. Over 15 years in the game so he knows all about it. Master the art of SEO. You will be amazed. Time to get your brand off page to on page. Dropping knowledge, legendary, sure. When the gift is getting started of self-employed entrepreneur. Yeah. Let’s go subscribe to the SEO Video Show. Hey.
SEO Video Show Introduction and Greeting the Show’s Viewers
[00:09:55] Paul Andre de Vera: Hey. Welcome to another episode of the SEO Video Show, where SEO’s alive and fun. My name’s Paul Andre de Vera, aka Dre. And a cute SEO video is released within the past week. It’s about one minute clips. My favourite part of the show is when I get to introduce my guest. And my guest this week is the founder of Kalicube, Jason Barnard.
[00:10:12] Paul Andre de Vera: Before I get started, I want to say hi to everyone in chats. We had Bradley, Tim, Carol, Llokdawg, Greg, Brian, and A Nomad Overseas. I see you. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the show. And before we get started, I want to pick last week’s winners. We’ll pick three viewers from last week to get the copy of Leveling Up book by Eric Siu. So here we go.
[00:10:44] Paul Andre de Vera: Winner number one, Edwin Dickerson. Winner number two, Brian Schalkx. I think this is your second time winning here. Thank you, everyone, for participating. Be sure to put I love SEO in the chats or in the comment below to get entered for next week’s drawing. Next week, I’ll be actually choosing a winner for membership to IMG Courses. I’ll pay your first month to the course. I’ll pick three winners. The first one to reply back with the information will get access to the site. So let’s get on with the show.
[00:11:33] Music: This is Ted DiBiase, The Million Dollar Man. Where is the best place to hide a dead body? Page two of Google.
John Mueller Talking About Link Building
[00:11:58] Paul Andre de Vera: John Mueller talks about link building this week in Google Search Central News.
[00:12:05] John Mueller: Google uses links to find new pages and to better understand their context in the web. Next to links, we use a lot of different factors in search, but links are an integral part of the web. So it’s reasonable that sites think about them. Google’s guidelines mention various things to avoid with regards to links, such as buying them. And we often get questions about what sites can do to attract links.
[00:12:32] John Mueller: Recently, I ran across a fascinating article from Gisele Navarro on content and link building campaigns that she saw last year. While I obviously can’t endorse any particular company that worked on these campaigns, I thought they were great examples of what sites can do. It’s worth taking a look at these and thinking about some creative things that you might be able to do in your site’s niche.
[00:12:57] Paul Andre de Vera: So all the talk about links are bad. And Google is saying that’s not true. John Mueller says they’re okay, but this moves me to my tweet of the week, where John gives us a hint on acquiring backlinks. On this tweet, he talks about PR. Digital PR is a great way to get backlinks. PR is an SEO’s best friend. I recommend this using PR press releases whenever you can. I’ve actually used press releases to build up the authority of this channel itself.
A Few Tips About Video Ranking Factors on YouTube and Google
[00:13:27] Paul Andre de Vera: Speaking of building authority to your YouTube channel, Ignite Visibility gives us a few tips on video ranking factors on YouTube and Google.
[00:13:37] Music: So if you want to rank on YouTube and Google, the more popular your channel is, the better it’s going to rank. The less competition, the better chance you rank. The more on theme your channel is, the better chance you rank. You can’t be talking about everything out there in the world. You got to stay on theme, right?
[00:13:52] Music: If it’s a new topic, the quicker you get on it, the better chance you rank. The more niche the keyword, the hashtag is, the better chance you rank. The more optimised your page and video are, the better chance you rank. The more comments, likes, and embeds and views you get, the better chance you rank. These are all things that you want to be thinking about.
[00:14:10] Paul Andre de Vera: Video SEO is my thing. You can go ahead and try and search that on YouTube and see what pops up.
Factors to Consider in Amazon SEO
[00:14:17] Paul Andre de Vera: On the topic of Amazon, not on top of Amazon, we actually barely talk about Amazon. You can actually do some Amazon SEO. Here’s some few factors that the Amazon guys gives us.
[00:14:33] Music: So, text based, relevancy based, conversion based, so what does that mean? So, text based is the ability to just simply have a reference or referral to the keyword at large. So, if you don’t have the phrase on your listing, you will not index for it most likely. Relevancy based factors are choosing the right keywords to target your audience. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to convert on all of them, which is why there’s a third bucket, which is conversion based factors.
[00:15:04] Music: If you rank in slot one for any term and a hundred people click on that term and not a single one of them buys, you’ll be deranked very quickly. Amazon wants to make money and they want us to make them money. And to do that, we got to convert them. And so, by having a conversion based relevancy factor, you will accelerate your keyword rankings. Whatever listings Amazon makes the most money on, you better believe it they’re going to put at the top of search result.
The Value of Google Merchant Centre According to Loren Baker
[00:15:34] Paul Andre de Vera: On the topic of e-commerce, Loren Baker reminds us the value of Google Merchant Centre.
[00:15:39] Music: One thing Cindy brought up was Google Merchant Centre. And if you are working on the e-com side, any site that sells product get access to Google Merchant Centre right now, not only because it helps that site. There’s things that you can do to help that site rank organically, but that Google Merchant Centre or that organic shopping data, I do not believe is accessible within Search Console. It’s solely reported within Google Merchant Centre.
[00:16:11] Music: So, if you don’t have that access and the ability to report on that traffic, because there is some coming through already, get that access ASAP because that goes to prove the ROI of the work that you’re putting in. And it’s a much more direct ROI, especially with e-com.
[00:16:29] Paul Andre de Vera: I love saying Google loves Google. So be sure to take advantage of all their free products. It’s about owning your Brand SERP, and we’ll be talking more about that later on.
Reasons Why SEO Is Still Worth Offering to Clients According to Ryan Stewart
[00:16:38] Paul Andre de Vera: Is SEO still worth offering to clients? Ryan Stewart gives us six reasons why it is.
[00:16:46] Music: SEO is still, by far and away, one of the best skill sets that you can learn online in today’s internet. Reason number one, SEO is the best still. There is no traffic ceiling. Traffic from search is, by far and away, the most profitable, because it is by far the most scalable when it comes to your time as an agency or consultant is because the industry is mature, paid up front.
[00:17:25] Music: Reason number six, why I love SEO is long term contracts. Again, this is very, very different than any other marketing industry that you’ll see. If you want to hire an ad agency, it’s probably going to be in a 2 to 4-month sprint while they set up your campaign. And then you wait and evaluate your performance before you decide whether or not you want to move forward. With SEO, you’re not engaging with us unless you sign a 12-month contract.
[00:17:52] Paul Andre de Vera: Be sure to check out the whole video. The link is in the description.
How to Make Your Images Load Faster According to the Guys at Yoast
[00:17:56] Paul Andre de Vera: With core web vitals, such a hot topic about faster loading things, check out what the guys over at Yoast are talking about how you can make your images load faster.
[00:18:09] Music: What are your thoughts and experiences with the WebP format for images?
[00:18:12] Music: Converting stuff to WebP is a lot of work. We have this service called Cloudflare. Now, what Cloudflare does is it will automatically turn all your PNGs into WebP files. And it will serve it to every browser that supports us, which is a growing group, which is good. It’s faster. It’s lighter. It’s great. And yeah, we love it.
[00:18:38] Music: Yeah. If you try and do that conversion yourself, there are drawbacks on every approach. You have to generate two sets of each image. You have to detect the browser support. That’s all stuff that you don’t really want your server to be doing. Just run it through Cloudflare. With that said, there is a newer format than WebP, AVIF, which looks like that will really take the world by storm. It’s still a bit experimental, but WebP is old news. But if you’re still using JPEGs and PNGs, you are super slow. Definitely get on Cloudflare and take advantage of WebP.
[00:19:06] Paul Andre de Vera: I’m curious, how many of you guys are actually looking into those different type of image formats? Let me know in the description. I’m curious on how it’s working for you.
The Importance of Doing Schema Markup in 2021 According to The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard)
[00:19:13] Paul Andre de Vera: Another hot topic we talk about every day or almost every week here on the show. From my guest today was on Semrush live this week, explaining why it’s a must do in 2021.
[00:19:25] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): To do in 2021: Schema.org Markup, it needs to be simple, accurate, and corroborated. I think that’s really important. Don’t get overexcited with Schema Markup. I got overexcited with Schema Markup, added much too much of it. And of course, it just created more confusion than it actually resolved. So, keep it simple.
[00:19:43] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): There are some tools there that I’ve put on the right hand side. WordLift, Andrea Volpini, absolutely brilliant, Schema App, Canadian company who do a Schema Markup, SaaS Platform, Yoast integrated in WordPress, brilliant, done by Jono Alderson who you mentioned earlier on. And at Kalicube we do a very simple version, which is aimed just at companies and people. But you want to mark up in this order of priority: your company, then your products, then the people, and then carry on with the rest.
[00:20:11] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Aleyda was mentioning the Rich Elements you can get in the SERP. I think they’re great and I think they’re really important. And they can give you an excuse to do Schema Markup to your boss, but the fundamental basis of Schema Markup is to speak Google’s native language. Schema Markup is your content recreated in Google’s native language that it can digest like that.
Presenting Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy), the Founder and CEO of Kalicube, Contributor to Digital Marketing Publications, Speaker, and Podcaster
[00:20:35] Paul Andre de Vera: This brings me to my favourite part of the show. I encourage you to ask questions in the live chat. It’s a fantastic way for us to learn together.
[00:20:52] Paul Andre de Vera: Jason is a digital marketing consultant who specialise in Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels. He is the founder and CEO of Kalicube, a groundbreaking digital marketing agency that pioneered exact match Brand SERPs. Jason is a regular contributor to lead digital marketing publications, such as Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land. He speaks at major conferences worldwide, including BrightonSEO, PubCon, SMX, ITB Berlin, and YoastCon. He has a podcast where conversations are always intelligent and very interesting and fun. Please welcome, The Brand SERP Guy, Jason Barnard.
[00:21:30] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Wow.
[00:21:55] Paul Andre de Vera: Jason, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
[00:22:01] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Thank you very much. Multiple things to say there. Number one, absolutely delighted to be here. Number two, I’m sure people come on the show partly at least to get that kind of wrestling arena introduction that you just did. Absolutely amazing. I suddenly feel terribly important.
[00:22:19] Paul Andre de Vera: Oh, no, you are.
[00:22:21] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Well, the montage you just did, brilliant. You do your research. I saw Anton Shulke in there. I saw Craig Campbell. I saw SE Ranking, who did a delightful interview. It represents who I am and what I do. And that’s a really good piece of work you just did. Brilliant. Wonderful.
[00:22:41] Paul Andre de Vera: Love it. Love it. Love it. Thank you. Thank you, Jason.
[00:22:43] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I can relax already.
[00:22:45] Paul Andre de Vera: Of course. Of course. Of course. You’re very important, Jason. So I want to bring it back a little bit. Okay. I gave your introduction. And it’s funny how you mentioned the whole wrestling thing, because I do like wrestling. I incorporate little things that I like in the show, wrestling and this 90s theme and this whole talk soup type vibe.
Started as a Musician, Created a Cartoon, and Built a Website for Children Which Then Involved SEO
[00:23:07] Paul Andre de Vera: So I wanted to bring it back, way, way back to when did you actually start SEO and how did you learn it?
[00:23:20] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I started in 1998, but I was a blue dog at the time. Story is really, really, really simple. I was in a punk folk band playing the double bass. We toured for 8 years. I made a living playing punk folk around Europe, supported some pretty groovy groups. We’ve played with The Pogues, played with Bob Dylan, not literally with him on the stage but supported Bob Dylan in a festival, which I was really, really pleased about.
[00:23:52] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): As all rock groups, you are convinced, naively convinced that you’re going to be a star and you’re going to play in front of stadiums and get the kind of announcement you just gave but in a music scenario, didn’t happen, group broke up.
[00:24:06] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And with my wife, we created a blue dog and a yellow koala cartoon. We couldn’t sell it to the companies. I couldn’t sell it as a record, couldn’t sell it as a book, couldn’t get signed up for a TV series, so just decided to make a website. And that was in 1998.
[00:24:24] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): In fact, I started building the site in September 1998, which is the exact month that Google was incorporated, and launched the site in December. And SEO became part of it. We ended up attracting a million visits a month by 2007 just from Google, 5 million visits a month in total. And so, the SEO comes from there, comes from building a website for children that really took off from an SEO perspective.
Building the Website Using Macromedia Flash 3 While Looking After Their Daughter
[00:25:02] Paul Andre de Vera: Love it. Love it. Okay. So I’m curious, back in 1998, how did you code this website? Were you using some software? Were you doing it in Notepad? How did you actually build this website when you got out there in 1998?
[00:25:15] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. Well, I was a musician. So, obviously, a lot of people who started in the web and are still in the web today didn’t start with any kind of qualifications. What it comes down to is I thought if I can make cartoons on the web, it will be really good fun. And my wife had a good job. So she was making the money for the family. We had a young daughter. I looked after the baby daughter at home.
[00:25:42] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And while I was looking after her, I made the games and the songs and the animations using Adobe Flash, at the time it was Macromedia Flash 3. And it was an awesome opportunity. It was really nice having a working mom who allowed the dad to stay at home, look after the kid, and lays around all day making games for kids. And it worked out. And that was wonderful.
After 22 Years, the Site of Boowa and Kwala Still Exists
[00:26:06] Paul Andre de Vera: Wait, did you say you actually built your website in Flash or it was just the cartoon?
[00:26:12] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah, no, the whole website was in Flash. I started it out and I had an HTML version, which had pictures and text, and then another version with Flash, which had the games. And at this time, Flash was compatible with 30% of browsers. So if I didn’t do the HTML version, I was throwing 70% of the audience out of the window.
[00:26:31] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And I had a neighbour, who’s completely mad and delightful and lovely chap. And he said to me, go with what you think, go with what you believe, Flash is what you want to do, just do that, drop the HTML version. If people want to see this content, they will download Flash. They will install it on their browser. And he was so right. And I’m so glad he told me that, because it really was stick to your guns, do it in the format that functions.
[00:26:58] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And obviously, Flash then ended up dying. And by 2007, it was starting to lose its attraction or usefulness. And today, the site still exists. The games are still running. 22 years later, the initial games still run if you have Flash, which is an astonishing achievement from Adobe and Macromedia. And I do doff my hat to them because that backwards compatibility is astonishing.
[00:27:29] Paul Andre de Vera: So what’s the URL?
[00:27:33] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): BoowaKwala.uptoten.com. If you just look for Boowa and Kwala, Boowa is the blue dog, Kwala is the yellow koala. If you look for that, you will find the site. And if you have Flash installed, which is improbable these days, you can still see it. And I’m pretty sure soon it’s just not going to be possible anymore, which is going to be a pity. Unfortunately, the games and the songs and the characters, at least in that format, are going to die over the next few years.
Using JavaScript That Allowed Google to Index and Their Pages Ranked
[00:28:00] Paul Andre de Vera: So I’m curious. I felt like Flash actually started dying down is because Google wasn’t indexing these pages, because there were just one file on a page, right? I’m curious, how were you actually ranking your Flash light?
[00:28:18] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): You’re about to ask me if I was doing some black casting. And the answer is of course I wasn’t.
[00:28:22] Paul Andre de Vera: Okay.
[00:28:24] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): What we actually did was we had a piece of JavaScript that took ages for me to write because I’m not very good at coding. And what it did was fill up the entire above the fold with the Flash game.
[00:28:38] Paul Andre de Vera: Okay.
[00:28:38] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So if you loaded the page and you didn’t scroll, all you saw was the Flash game. And all Google saw was that one line of code that inserts the Flash game. Then if you scroll, underneath was the whole text, which describes the game and the context and the keywords and all the rest of it. We did traditional SEO. So, for children and parents visiting the site, most of them didn’t ever realise that underneath was all this textual content that allowed Google to index. And as I said, we got a million visits a month because we managed to do that.
[00:29:08] Paul Andre de Vera: Yeah.
[00:29:08] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But actually, nobody ever or I don’t know who scrolled and who didn’t scroll, but I would imagine most people didn’t bother. And if they did, they would’ve been pretty put off by it because it was ugly.
Getting People to Pay for Subscription to Have an Ad Free Version of the Site
[00:29:18] Paul Andre de Vera: Got it. Yeah. When I was making Flash lights back then as well, I was hiding my text and same colour background and all that stuff, but, hey, that’s what everyone else was doing so I was doing it too, but then it died off. Okay.
[00:29:34] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. We just put it below the fold. On the idea that if you don’t see it when it loads and the Flash games are engaging, people don’t scroll. And that turned out to be a pretty good bet.
[00:29:45] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I also actually built, interesting enough, a Flash browser. So if you paid for a subscription, you would get an ad free version of the site. So, obviously, we had the ads on the side. So if you didn’t want to pay, you got the ads. If you paid five euros a month at the time, you would get an ad free version with the option to download a browser, which I now realise is basically PWA. It’s a PWA, basically.
[00:30:13] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And I built it in Flash and you would download it. It became this little application you put in your desktop. You opened it up and it would load all the games but only from our site, which meant that the kids would be in this kind of blocked open window or the closed wall garden thing going on. And they could only access the UpToTen games, the Boowa and Kwala games.
[00:30:33] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): We did pretty well with that at the time. And that was in 2004 or 2005. So, that’s actually how we made the money, basically, is advertising pure volume on one side and then subscriptions for parents who wanted the full screen CD-ROM-esque version of the games and so on.
[00:30:54] Paul Andre de Vera: Got it. CD-ROM, that’s pretty long ago, right? Those CDs.
Learning SEO Through Building a Complex System of HTML Files for Keyword Variants per Search Engine
[00:31:01] Paul Andre de Vera: Okay. What were your sources for learning SEO? Where were you going to forums? Were you just reading any books at the time? I think there was maybe only one or two books. What’s your source of knowledge for SEO?
[00:31:17] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): When I started in 1998, I was talking to Bill Slawski. We were having a name those old search engine challenge going on. And of course, Bill Slawski won, hands down. But it was a case of building one page per keyword variant per search engine. So I had a server with literally tens of thousands of pages for a keyword set of about a thousand. So you would have kids game, kids, games, kid game, kids games, whatever, preschool. I can’t remember. But then I would add the tag on the end. It would be one for HotBot so it’d be HB, another one for Google which would be G, another one for Lycos which would be L.
[00:32:02] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So, I had this incredibly, incredibly complex system of HTML files for keywords, keyword variants, very, very simple keyword variants per search engine with keyword counts in each one, which worked really, really well. And in the end by about 2002, I gave up on all the other search engines and just focused on Google because I couldn’t deal with the number of files I had to build.
[00:32:26] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And as you said, there was very little information knocking around at that time. We went to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Madagascar. And in Mauritius, there are even less people who knew about the internet in 2000 when we moved there. And luckily, we found some great people. We built a brilliant team, building cartoons, and got away with it, basically.
[00:32:52] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): The idea at the time was you could do the internet from anywhere in the world, but very few people were. And we just decided let’s do it. And it was really, really, really difficult from the point of view, if you’re in the middle of Africa. Mauritius is down the south coast of Africa. It’s part of Africa. We paid 1000 euros a month, $1,200 a month for 64k connection.
[00:33:21] Paul Andre de Vera: Oh, yeah.
[00:33:23] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Exactly. And we ran this 100 million paid view a month website from there. And it really was string and sellotape all the way down the line. It was brilliant.
The Start of How Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Got Into SEO Education and Made a Series With Great Guests
[00:33:33] Paul Andre de Vera: Got it. So, you’re a digital nomad for quite some time, right? Because I know this is something that you mentioned. You are this digital nomad. And you started into becoming educating. You started doing a lot more SEO education. I saw some bunch of videos. You have a series on SEMrush. You have your own courses. So I’m curious, how did that even come about? When did you feel like you were able to teach this what you’re learning? Like SEMrush, how did you get onto SEMrush and become an educator on there?
[00:34:07] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. I think the education idea comes from the blue dog and yellow koala was this whole kind of preschool education thing. So I come from an educational background. The idea of the blue dog and yellow koala was to inform children about the world. It wasn’t teaching. It was just saying here’s the world, here’s some fun stuff, here’s some stuff you might need to know, like don’t jump into a swimming pool without a rubber ring if you can’t swim, for example. So it was terribly educational but fun at the same time.
[00:34:38] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): In fact, SEMrush, it was Anton Shulke who gave me my opportunity. I’d been writing articles for a couple of years thanks to Melissa Fach, who is an astonishingly kind lady, who took my writing and sent it back to me saying this isn’t good enough, this is rubbish, this is great. And she was the editor. Danny Goodwin is the same at Search Engine Journal. Love them both.
[00:35:05] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Basically, being very constructive about what you’re saying, and saying you’re not actually helping people here. One of the criticisms was that I kept putting my brand name in. And I appreciate that and I agree with them. I overdid it. And they corrected me both on my presentation, what I was actually saying, and cutting out the fluff and helped me to learn to teach as it were through writing.
[00:35:31] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And then Anton Shulke, when I asked him, could I do a 15 part series about SEO is AEO, search engine optimisation has become answer engine optimisation, he said yes. And I can’t thank him enough, because he gave me that opportunity. He showed faith in me when I hadn’t really done anything like that before. He helped me get some great guests like Barry Schwartz and Bill Slawski on board, Dawn Anderson, got them on board. We did the series. And as they say, the rest is history.
[00:36:06] Paul Andre de Vera: Love it. So, you brought up a good point again, because we were talking about other shows. How do you get to get on these websites? How do you get to present? And how do you get to get some videos? And all you did was you just asked. You just asked and you’re able to put that in front of them. And they loved it and gave you a chance. That’s so awesome. You get a bomb for that one. Just ask, right? Okay.
When they give you the opportunity, you don’t mess them around. You make sure that you deliver what has been promised.
Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)
[00:36:30] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I think that is the thing is that somebody gives you a chance that gives you that opening, and that opening then leads to other openings. And if you are courageous enough to take them and people are generous enough to give you the opportunity, and when they give you the opportunity, you don’t mess them around. You make sure that you deliver what has been promised, what you said you will do. And you deliver it with good grace, as much intelligence as you can muster.
[00:36:58] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And basically, people like it if they can rely on you. And I think that’s what I managed to build up right at the beginning. Craig Campbell, I think, was the first person to ask me on a show and then he mentioned it. And then that’s when Anton got to know me. And that’s when he gave me the opportunity because he had seen that I was reliable.
[00:37:18] Paul Andre de Vera: Got it. Love it. Love it. Being reliable, being very intelligent.
The Darwinism in Search Concept According to Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)
[00:37:25] Paul Andre de Vera: Speaking of being very intelligent, have you talked about this Darwinism in Search concept? I know this is something that you talked about. You wrote about it. For those that are just watching, tuning in, and don’t know about the Darwinism in Search, can you quickly give us a high level of that concept?
[00:37:44] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. The Darwinism in Search thing is it was almost two years ago now. I had a theory about understanding credibility. And I was desperately trying to think what the third pillar of such an idea would be. Understanding, Google needs to understand who you are, what you do if it’s even to think about offering you as a solution to its users. Credibility, it’s going to choose the most credible of the solutions it has understood. What’s the third one? The third one is deliverability. Can it deliver your result? And can you deliver the solution to its users? That’s basically it, understanding, credibility, deliverability.
[00:38:19] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And I was on the plane on the way to SMS Australia to give a talk, and that’s when I hit that third one. And I thought, yes, oh, this is really fun. I got a bit overexcited. And I’m sure the people in the plane thought I was a bit strange because I shouted very loudly. And that’s one of those things is that you tend to work so hard on stuff. And in the planes, they would say half an hour before you land, turn off your computer, put everything away. And then you sit there going, I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored. Oh, I’ll have to think about something.
[00:38:50] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And that’s when it comes. It’s that kind of moment when you’re forced not to do anything. And that’s, I think, a great source of inspiration. We would all perhaps do well to actually just stop and force ourselves to not do anything and to just think and let things go around in your brain a little bit.
Getting the Idea of Darwinism in Search From Gary Illyes; It’s Survival of the Fittest Between SERP Features and Blue Links
[00:39:07] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And I got to the conference. And there was a private meeting with Gary Illyes where the speakers were allowed to ask him one question. And I asked him one question, because I was going to give a talk about featured snippets. And my question was: is there a separate featured snippet algorithm? And Gary Illyes being Gary Illyes laughed in his sardonic manner and said, no, of course there isn’t, but I will explain how it works.
[00:39:35] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And he went on to explain what they explain to new Google engineers when they start working at Google. And it’s basically, I’ll explain it incredibly quickly. There’s an article on Search Engine Journal that explains it much better than I’m going to explain it. Now, you have the blue link algorithm that ranks obviously the pages, the results. And each of them puts in what he was calling a bid, which isn’t a monetary bid. It’s a bid of value to the user for the query they have made in the context they find themselves in at the moment they make that query. So, obviously, mobile makes a difference, geo makes a difference, search history makes a difference.
[00:40:16] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And you’ve got those results and they sit there. And then you have all the other verticals that come in. And they use the same basic algorithm but iterations of it and adaptations of it and extra bits they add on top. So it’s all very modular as I understand it. And they have their exact same system of ranking and they each give in a bid. Now, if the top result of one of those verticals, let’s say video or it could be news, puts in a bid of value to the user for the search in the context they have made, it gets a place on that SERP. If it can’t, if the top result isn’t good enough, it doesn’t get a place.
[00:41:03] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So it’s Darwinism in the sense that they have to prove these extra elements for such as that SERP features, Rich Elements, whichever one you want to call them, news, videos, images, featured snippets, podcast boxes, People Also Ask, have to put in a bid that indicates that they will bring more value to the user than the blue link that is currently there. So, basically, survival of the fittest.
[00:41:30] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And from there, I actually asked Gary after the event, can I write about this? And he said, yeah, sure. Nothing I have said is not already out there somewhere. It’s just nobody has ever said it as this one cohesive unit. And since then, I’ve actually looked around on the web and he’s right. All of these little bits of information are out there. It’s just nobody had put it together before. And I didn’t put it together from any glorious intelligence on my own. I put it together because he told me. So it’s not like, oh, Jason did something very clever. Jason just listened to Gary and then repeated it in an article. It’s a bit rubbish, really.
Talking With Frederic Dubut About Machine Learning, With Ali Alvi About Featured Snippet Algorithm, and With Nathan Chalmers About Whole Page Algorithm
[00:42:09] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Then I talked to Frederic Dubut from Bing at PubCon. He’s really, really, really generous, kind, delightful chap. He just said, yep, and I can tell you more. And then he explained some more information on top of that. He gave me more details. He talked to me about how machine learning works, that ranking factors is a rubbish idea to start talking about that, because we don’t really know anymore. We’re talking more about what are the aims that we’re giving the machine, what are the measurements by which we judge the machine, what is the data we’re feeding into the machine. That’s another whole story.
[00:42:48] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And then he allowed me or introduced me to the people at Bing to do a series of articles. And I talked to Ali Alvi who explained, finally, I got my explanation of the featured snippet algorithm. And Ali Alvi explained to me how it works at Bing, pretty sure it works almost the same at Google. There isn’t going to be enormous amounts of difference and incredibly interesting. We won’t go into it today.
[00:43:11] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But Nathan Chalmers, with the whole page algorithm that sits on top of all of this and vetoes. So even though something has won the bid to be on the page, the whole page algorithm can sit on the top and say, actually, now that’s not going to serve our client or our user. So it has the right of veto and the right of boosting something up and pushing it up onto the first page, even though it shouldn’t have got a place, which I find stunningly, stunningly interesting. And I’m a long way from having understood the whole lot.
[00:43:42] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And to finish this one, the irony is that he was laughing his head off when we started off the interview because he said, oh, I read your article about Darwinism in Search. And I thought, oh, no, he’s been researching. He said, it’s a really good article. It says pretty much how all this works. The irony is that the whole page algorithm is called Darwin.
[00:44:07] Paul Andre de Vera: Oh, interesting.
[00:44:09] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Obviously not a coincidence.
Your Brand SERP Is Your Business Card or Your Homepage
[00:44:11] Paul Andre de Vera: Yeah. All right. All right. Since we were talking about SERPs now, I wanted to bring it to Brand SERPs. You are The Brand SERP Guy. So I’m curious, how did you even start the concept of the Brand SERP and using it as, I believe you call it as like it’s your business card or your new business card? Yeah. Can you tell me more how you got into it and more about the whole Brand SERP concept?
[00:44:40] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. Yeah. I say the business card because I think business card makes sense to people. Mike Blumenthal from the local SEO community says homepage. I think in local SEO, you could argue it’s the homepage. For the rest of us, maybe homepage. But I think for the rest of the world who aren’t in local search, business card is evocative and helpful to understand. Homepage is perhaps pushing it too far for it to really mean anything to people.
[00:45:05] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But the idea that somebody searches your brand name because they are thinking about doing business with you or are already doing business with you is, basically, they’re going to be looking at what is the equivalent of a digital business card, a Google business card. And once you get that into your mind, you start thinking this must be really important.
To Get More Brand Searches, You Need to Consider If What People See When They Search Your Brand Name Is Positive, Accurate, and Convincing
[00:45:25] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And John Mueller from Google was saying the other day, brands need to be looking to increase pool searches. And what he means by pool searches is brand searches, which means from my point of view, that means once you start saying I need to get more brand searches, you need to start considering what do people see when they search that brand name. Is it positive? Is it accurate? Is it convincing?
[00:45:48] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And the answer a lot of the time is, yeah, it’s okay, but it could be a lot better. And a lot of people tend to think either it’s too easy or it’s really easy and it’s simple and there’s no real energy need to be pushed into there, or I can’t make it any better. And the answer is yes, you can make it pretty much as good as you want. Google wants to represent you to your audience in an honest manner, honest and balanced. And it will present the results that it sees as relevant and valuable to your users. Now, if you can prove to Google or indicate to Google or convince Google that as particular result is valuable and useful and relevant to your audience, it will show that result. And that’s the art of Brand SERPs.
The Reason Why Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) Started Optimising His Brand SERP
[00:46:28] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And the reason I started doing it comes back to the blue dog is that I started to pitch for work. I would go in to a client. I would say, yes, we’re going to do this work, we’re going to do that work. This is going to be amazing. I’m going to drive your digital strategy. I’m going to do your SEO. And we’re going to nail the top spot on Google for your entire industry and we will boost your business. And I thought, oh, yeah, that’s sold. That’s great. I’ve just made a sale. And I walk out and then I would only actually convert about 50%.
[00:47:00] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And it turns out that what they were doing was googling my name right after I walked out of the office. And at the time, what they were seeing was Jason Barnard is a cartoon blue dog. He’s a voice actor and a musician in a punk band. And what that immediately says to them is we cannot trust a blue dog from a cartoon with our digital strategy.
[00:47:23] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So, I then went out and said, right, what can I do? I was going to say to drown the blue dog, but that sounds rotten, to push the blue dog to a secondary position, where I could get Search Engine Journal to rank. I could get SEMrush to rank. I could get my Twitter boxes to show. I could get videos of interviews that I had done. The one you showed from SE Ranking earlier on is one of the more fun ones. They did an interview about being a digital nomad and SEO, and it was really good fun. And that one’s been ranking incredibly well.
[00:47:55] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And immediately, people see that. They think this guy is a credible digital marketer, oh, and he happened to be a blue dog. And there, all of a sudden, I was converting 80% instead of 50%.
Brand SERPs Are the Most Important KPI You Probably Never Looked At
[00:48:08] Paul Andre de Vera: Love it. Love it. And this goes to this quote that you actually mentioned to me right here. It’s Brand SERPs are the most important KPI you probably never looked at. This is something that we should all be paying attention to, and you’re actually putting it out there with everyone. And I’m curious. We actually got a question here from the chat from Brian. He goes, ask Jason how he deploys his Schema using Gutenberg blocks for people wanting an easy way to implement Schema without using plugins, please.
[00:48:39] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There are two different things here. Brand SERPs are the most important KPI you never looked at is this idea that it’s your business card and that your audience, at some point in their journey with you, will google your brand name. So at some point, everybody you’re working with will see it. So it’s incredibly important. You need to measure it.
[00:48:57] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Number two is it’s a great reflection of your content strategy. If you are investing in video and your video boxes aren’t appearing on your Brand SERP, it means that your videos are rubbish, your audience aren’t engaging, or Google can’t see that they’re engaging. So it’s a really important KPI from the point of view of saying it’s a great measurement of how Google perceives you, how it perceives your content. And also, it’s a reflection of your digital ecosystem, how Google perceives the world’s opinion of you, which I really like as a kind of little phrase, because it’s going to show what it thinks is a balanced opinion, a balanced view of your brand.
Say Something Simple With Your Schema Markup First, Then Move Step by Step Into Something a Little More Complicated
[00:49:34] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): The second question that you asked was about Schema Markup. And I was talking about it earlier on. I think it was in fact in the clip that you just showed is that I went mad. I just thought, oh, I’ll put Schema Markup and I’ll do all this really detailed stuff. And it’s all really good fun. And I spent my weekends writing this incredibly nested Schema Markup.
[00:49:55] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And as a piece of advice, never look at my site and think that Schema Markup is what you should be using, because my site is a constant experiment. So if you happen to go on a day I’m doing an experiment, you will get Schema Markup or a presentation that simply isn’t what I would recommend. So just going at my site and trying to see what I’m doing isn’t necessarily a very good idea.
[00:50:18] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But that Schema Markup thing is I’m moving backwards and saying, I’m simplifying more and more or move step by step. Say something simple with your Schema Markup, then say something a little bit more complicated, and so on and so forth.
Using Plugins Like WordPress, Schema App, and WordLift
[00:50:33] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And I like the question about plugins. I understand a hundred percent why people are wary of plugins. If you’re using WordPress, Yoast does, Jono Alderson, absolutely brilliant, Joost de Valk, genius, brilliant bunch of people, install theirs and it does what we call in French the minimum syndical. It’s the union minimum in what you need to do. And it does it incredibly solidly and incredibly well.
[00:51:01] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): If you want to push to the next level, you could use something like Schema App, Mark and Martha van Berkel from Canada, very good. And you can write Schema Markup. And it’s really good fun, and it’s incredibly flexible. If you want to go to the next step up, you use WordLift. And WordLift writes the Schema Markup whilst building, in fact, sorry, I’ll go back one step. It builds an internal Knowledge Graph, writes the Schema Markup from your own internal Knowledge Graph that allows you then to communicate your internal Knowledge Graph to all the machines, including Google, the Open Graph, Apple, Microsoft, and all the others.
[00:51:37] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And it’s this approach where you’re saying, I’m going to build my own representation of my own company within my website. And then I will be able to present it to these machines in the manner that I want to. So there you’ve got three different levels.
Another Option You Can Do in Order to Communicate to Google Who You Are, What You Do, and Who Your Audience Is
[00:51:52] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Now, if you really don’t want to get involved in all that stuff and I can a hundred percent appreciate that, what I’ve been trying to do, and it works incredibly well, is just say I install Yoast because it does the minimum. And then I use a Guttenberg block, convert to HTML, copy paste the Schema Markup I’ve written, click on save, and works absolutely fine. So, it’s a nice way of doing it a little bit manual, a little bit, how can you say it, MacGyver, but it works very well and I’ve done it multiple times. And it’s a very good way to do what I’m trying to do with Kalicube.
[00:52:30] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Because with Kalicube, what we’re now doing is saying, in order to communicate with Google who you are, what you do, and who your audience is, you start with the Schema Markup on what I now call the entity’s home. I have an entity. It’s my brand or my person or the person. It has a page on my website on which it lives. On that page, I describe what the entity is, what it does, what its audience is. I explain it in text. I reproduce that in Schema Markup, which I can write by hand. And then I point to the corroboration all around the web that proves what I’m saying.
[00:53:05] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And that’s when you get Google to believe. That’s the educating the machine aspect of all this. And that’s where the foundation of everything we’re doing in SEO is now going to move from. Entity based search is the future. This is the start of entity based search. And so with Kalicube, we’ve built a system whereby we can produce that minimum Schema Markup. And I say to companies, people, brands, music groups, music albums, all very simple stuff, stick it in your page.
Schema Markup Is Google’s Natively Digestible Language
[00:53:35] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And it gives Google what I would call a native language version of what you’ve written in your page. Schema markup is Google’s native language. It basically presents what you’ve written in human language, whatever your language is in Google’s natively digestible language, which is Schema Markup.
[00:53:55] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And obviously, this is very philosophical. But if Google has read your page using BERT or whatever algorithm it’s using at the moment, it will have understood, let’s say, 90% of what your page is talking about, but it’s confidence in what it has understood is going to be, let’s say, 30%. If you then reproduce exactly what it’s already understood about your page in Schema Markup, which is its native language, that confidence level goes up to, let’s say, 60%. I don’t know. These numbers are rubbish. I’m just making them up. It goes up to 60%. It’s 60% confident it’s understood. That confidence is going to mean that it’s more likely to present you as a solution to its audience. And then if you go further…
[00:54:43] Paul Andre de Vera: Oh, there’s more.
[00:54:44] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): You can get a double exposure moment if you take it further. And then you corroborate that information on trusted third party sites. And you point to it from your Entity Home using your Schema Markup. It gets 90% confident.
[00:55:02] Paul Andre de Vera: Yeah. Wow. Okay. That’s great. Brian, I hope that those knowledge bombs answered your question.
Analysing Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels Stored in a Database in Order to Understand More
[00:55:10] Paul Andre de Vera: You’re talking about experiments. I’m curious to hear more about the experiment that you’re running with people’s Brand SERPs. I know you even said you’re looking at my Brand SERP, because I’m confused of what I need to do with my Knowledge Graph and my Knowledge Panel. I’m curious. What’s your current experiment? What are you doing right now on Kalicube with Knowledge Panels or the Brand SERP, your current experiment?
[00:55:32] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): For me, there are two levels. One is that I’ve got 77,000 brands, people, music groups, podcasts, events in a database. And every month I grab the Brand SERP in 11 countries and the Knowledge Panel, obviously, within the Brand SERP, and the Knowledge Graph API output for that entity or the string of characters. And I store it all in the database. And I’ve got 10 million Brand SERPs and 20 million Knowledge Graph API lines in a database. And I’m tracking it. And I’m using that massive data to analyse what Google shows in what circumstances for which industries and which geo locations. So that’s one side. That’s a massive experiment.
[00:56:15] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And if you want to go along to Kalicube.Pro, there’s a button that says add your brand. You can add brands, people, music groups, podcasts, local businesses, events, pretty much any entity. And we will track it and you can access the information. So, obviously, it’s free, but it’s free not because I’m incredibly generous, but because I want to understand.
[00:56:37] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): The more brands I get in there, the more people, the more podcasts, the more events, the more I get this cumulative amount of information that I can analyse and say, for example, 85% of videos in video boxes on Brand SERPs come from YouTube. 50% of brands have Rich Sitelinks, 50% don’t. That’s rubbish. 50% of Brand SERPs should be or that other 50%, we should all have Rich Sitelinks on our Brand SERPs. 11% of brands have got Twitter boxes. 89% of brands need a Twitter strategy. If you’re a Twitter, social media expert, you’ve got a big job on your hand there, because I’ve already got 60,000 brands that don’t have them that could probably do with them.
[00:57:27] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So analysing that data allows me to understand which industries, which countries have which tendencies in terms of Rich Elements, SERP features on their Brand SERP. So then you can go in and you can look and you can say, well, in my industry, there are a lot of Video boxes. I don’t have Video boxes. Let’s get a video strategy going. In my industry, there are however very few Twitter boxes. Twitter is probably not the right strategy for my industry. That’s number one.
Jason’s Experiment With WordLift on Building an Entity-Based Content Model Around His Podcast
[00:57:51] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And number two is my personal experiments, which I’m enjoying greatly, that I do with WordLift. And that’s building an entity based content model around the podcast with the idea that the podcast series is an entity. The podcast series contains episodes, each of which is an entity. Each episode has a guest, who is an entity. Each guest talks about a topic, which is an entity, which is part of the topic layer. And we join all that together in the internal Knowledge Graph that we then create a set of Schema Markup that we communicate to the machines and hopefully push this out and get the podcast, leverage the podcast into the Knowledge Graph.
[00:58:32] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I’ve already been able to influence very heavily what the Knowledge Graph shows. For example, my Knowledge Panel on the right hand side used to show musicians, because there was a confusion with a podcast host called Jason Barnard in the UK. And his podcast is all about music and it kept showing his guests. And now, it’s showing Rand Fishkin, Joost de Valk, Cindy Krum, and Andrea Volpini. So, we can already begin to see the influence that this can have on Google in terms of with whom it associates me.
[00:59:07] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): There are two things, and I’ll come back another step. Number one, it’s disambiguated. It’s understood that I’m not the same Jason Barnard who has the music podcast. I’m the one with the marketing podcast who has the guests, who are Joost de Valk, Rand Fishkin, Cindy Krum, Andrea Volpini. And I think that’s really interesting. It’s something you dig down, every time you dig down, you just think, oh, there’s so much to learn. And that’s an experiment.
Another Experiment With the Boowa and Kwala Family Tree
[00:59:33] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And besides that, the blue dog and the yellow koala is an experiment is I’m feeding Google the family tree of these fictional characters. So you have Daddy Koala. Oh, sorry. You have Kwala, who’s the yellow koala. Her mother is called Mummy Koala, father is called Daddy Koala. And if you search for Daddy Koala, you will see Daddy Koala, fictional character, part of the Boowa and Kwala fictional universe, significant other Mummy Koala. You click on Mummy Koala, it will show that her significant other is Daddy Koala. If you search for Grandpa Koala, it will show that his significant other is Grandma Koala and vice versa.
[01:00:12] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So, this was an experiment eight months ago. Google didn’t even know who these characters were. And now, it can actually show the relationship in the family tree. And you can do what I call Knowledge Panel hopping, which is you get a Knowledge Panel. You click on something in it, for example, who is Daddy Koala’s significant other. You go onto the next one. Then you go onto the next one. You hop around. And it’s like the six steps of Kevin Bacon, whatever that’s called, is that you can get pretty much anywhere. You get to some very surprising places by clicking on these relationships in the Knowledge Panel.
[01:00:43] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I was talking to a client earlier on and he was saying, I don’t understand why Google’s misunderstood. And I went Knowledge Panel hopping through his company, the parent company, the subsidiaries. I could basically build. I could tell him how his company is built up around the world without ever having talked to him before or knowing what his company was before I actually started talking to him. And it took me literally three minutes, not because I’m clever, but because Google was just showing me. It was taking me through these steps. And I was saying, oh, the parent company is so and so, you’ve licensed products from this company, and so on and so forth.
[01:01:22] Paul Andre de Vera: Wow. Interesting stuff. You got Jo Priest here saying you’re a genius. Nice answer, Jason.
[01:01:29] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I don’t sleep at night by the way. I dream about this stuff.
Triggering Twitter Boxes on Your Brand SERP by Tweeting Regularly and Putting Out Original Content
[01:01:34] Paul Andre de Vera: Okay. So, I’m curious. There’s a few things I want to touch. I know we’re coming close to time here, but I do want to talk about, if anyone has any questions, please ask it because we’re coming close to the end of time here, but you mentioned Twitter boxes. I know you’re doing an experiment on Twitter boxes. I think I was chatting with you on LinkedIn. I’m curious. How would someone like a brand, do you have any idea or some ways so you can pop out those Twitter boxes for a brand? How can Google understand that this Twitter is part of a brand to show it those Twitter boxes?
[01:02:07] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. What’s really disappointing and sad about what I’m preaching is none of it is complicated. So, basically, everything I say is bleeding obvious once I tell you. And Twitter boxes, it’s all about tweeting regularly, getting engagement from a relevant audience, and showing to Google that your Twitter account is actually interesting for your audience. If it can see that your audience is interested in your Twitter account, it will show those Twitter boxes because they are relevant, valuable content for your audience searching your brand name. It’s as simple as that.
[01:02:40] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): The rules are basically tweet regularly. It took me six months tweeting three times a day and really generating a lot of interaction with my audience to trigger those Twitter boxes. It could be fast. It could be slow. It depends on who you are. It depends on what relationships you already have. The interesting thing is that original tweets are what you need to do.
[01:03:06] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Jono Alderson, he has an amazing, because I was looking at his account and I was thinking why isn’t he triggering Twitter boxes, because he’s got loads of followers and loads of people listen to what he’s got to say on Twitter, but he doesn’t have the Twitter boxes. And the answer is because he only ever retweets.
[01:03:25] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Google’s looking for original content that your users are engaging with, your audience is interested in, and it needs to be original, not original content in the sense that you have to write the entire thing. You can tweet an article, but it needs to originate from you. And if you can do that over a period of time and you can do it in a sustained manner, you will trigger those Twitter boxes, simple as that.
The Problem of a Person Having Two Entities With His Full Name and Nickname and the Process of Resolving It
[01:03:50] Paul Andre de Vera: Love it. Love it. Dropping those bombs. Okay. So, I have actually a question for myself, if no one has questions out there. But before I ask my last question, but the question I want to ask is I do have a Knowledge Panel but just my name and my birth. How can I build out and have my photo on there and attach it to all my entities? And it’s actually on one of my nicknames, by Dre. I go by Dre de Vera on a lot of places. And my full name where I have my Twitter Boxes is on Paul Andre de Vera, my full name. And so, I have two entities, I guess, that Google sees. I don’t know why they can’t connect it. What would be your suggestion for someone in my case where I have maybe two different entities and one has a panel, one doesn’t, one has boxes, one doesn’t? What is your suggestion?
[01:04:37] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. I obviously looked you up and had a look around, started tracking your brand name or your personal name. Excuse me. I keep saying brand name and I mean name. There are two of you out there. And it isn’t immediately clear even to a human being that you are the same person. So, for a machine, it’s obviously quite difficult as well. If I, as a human being with the imagination that I should have, can’t make the connection and can’t actually be sure. I wasn’t prepared to write to you and say, oh, there are two of you until you pretty much confirmed it to me because I didn’t want to look like a fool. So if it’s that an obvious to me, it’s definitely going to be confusing for the machine.
[01:05:22] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So, the process, once again, is very simple. You need to identify to Google where the home of that entity is. It’s on a page on a website you control, preferably for you as a person, your personal website, not your company website, because if you leave the company, you leave your home. You don’t want your company controlling your Entity Home as a person. You want to control it yourself. So I would advise everybody to have some kind of home for their own entity that they can look after, they can nurture. And nurture is the point here is that you then indicate to Google on that page that there are two ways of referring to you. They’re both the same one.
Using Schema Markup to Clarify to Google Which Entity Are You Talking About, Claiming Your Entity Home, and Corroborating the Information
[01:06:01] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): You then use Schema Markup to iterate that in an explicit manner that Google can digest natively. And then you point to absolutely everywhere on the web where these two entities that is, in fact, one entity exists. And Google will then eventually, and I do say eventually, add all that up together and believe you and say, yes, okay, I understand this is the same thing. That’s what I call deduplicating.
[01:06:26] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And duplications of entities in Google’s brain are a phenomenally big problem that we don’t even begin to realise the number of brands that have got duplicate Knowledge Panels, the number of people who have got duplicate Knowledge Panels. And that’s not to talk about the fact even that there are lots of different people with the same name, but that’s actually different entities with the same name, but individual people, products, events, brands, companies, all with these duplicated entries in Google’s Knowledge Graph or in Google’s mind is phenomenal.
[01:06:59] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And the big thing right now is to start clarifying to Google which one we’re talking about, bringing it all together, claiming, in inverted commas, your home. I’m saying claiming as in convincing Google that this is where the home is, and explaining to Google, corroborating, in short, educating Google to what we want it to understand about us.
[01:07:26] Music: Excellent.
Jason’s Tip for People Who Want to Get Into the SEO Industry
[01:07:27] Paul Andre de Vera: Love it. Love it. Okay. We’re coming very close. I know we have something very special at the very end. Hopefully, we have time, Jason, to still do that live performance at the very end. Everyone, please stay on. But I want to ask you the last question that I ask every SEO professional that comes on the show. What is one tip you can give to someone to how to become an SEO professional? What’s your one tip to get into the industry to learn it? What’s that one tip?
[01:07:56] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): If you don’t know anything about SEO?
[01:07:58] Paul Andre de Vera: Yeah. Or if maybe you’re a digital marketer. And let’s say you’re a digital marketer and you wanted to get into SEO.
[01:08:04] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Right. My one tip is to not look at Google as a means in itself. I love the idea of saying we’re creating content. Google say this and it sounds very trite, but creating content for our users on the platforms where they actually hang out. We’re doing outreach. We’re trying to get those first touches of the seven famous touches to convert somebody.
[01:08:29] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And then I would ideally take that content then package it for Google, so that Google can present my content to its users who aren’t actually, I think we need to remember, who aren’t our users. They’re Google’s users. The subset of Google’s users is our audience. And we’re trying to convince Google to recommend our content to the subset of its users that is our audience.
[01:08:54] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): And if our content is packaged in the right manner, there is no reason on earth Google would not recommend it, if the content is good enough for its users, who are our audience.
You Can Find and Get Ahold of Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) on Twitter, LinkedIn, and the Kalicube Site
[01:09:06] Paul Andre de Vera: Love it. All right. All right. All right. So here we come. Before we get to your live performance, how can someone get ahold of you? Where can they find you? Where do you play on social media? Please let this audience know.
[01:09:21] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): Yeah. I like to play on Twitter. If you search my name, Jason Barnard, you will see the Twitter boxes, and that’s because I play on Twitter an awful lot. I like LinkedIn as well. I’m probably less proficient at it. But because Kalicube.Pro is a B2B platform, I’m going to have to learn to play on LinkedIn. You play very well on LinkedIn. I need some lessons from you on that one.
[01:09:43] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): But my favourite place to play to be honest is on the Kalicube site when people share with me. I love it. Right. Okay. If people want to talk to me about their stories about their Knowledge Panels or their Brand SERPs and they give me their experience of their funny or difficult or confusing experiences, I learn. It helps me to compile the knowledge and be able to share it with the rest of the world.
[01:10:09] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): So whether that’s on LinkedIn, Twitter, or coming to Kalicube, putting your brand into the Kalicube Pro tool, which is free as I said before, honestly, I’m using the data because I want to understand. And if you want to share personally your questions or your observations or your ideas, there’s a guy called Reede Bob Brewster, who shared his story with me. I’ll tell you another day, but it’s brilliant. He’s got a wonderful story. He’s got the most beautiful Knowledge Panel. And he did it in six months with no SEO knowledge. And he’s one of my favourite people for that.
[01:10:46] Paul Andre de Vera: Oh, man. That’s a special episode that we have to do. All right. All right. Okay. I’m going to put the spotlight on you. Everyone, Jason’s a musician. And you know I love tying music within the show. So, Jason, please sign us off.
[01:11:03] Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy): I can sing a song to say goodbye, but it might be wrong to sing the song if I don’t know how to end it.
[01:11:19] Music: Thank you for watching. Hope you come back next week. Make sure to subscribe. You don’t want to miss a thing. Hope you learn something new because the vibe is incredible from the special SEO professionals. SEO Video Show, let’s work. Want to see you be an SEO expert. Paul Andre de Vera helping you step it up. No delay right now. Time to level up. Hey. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to subscribe.
Video and Published by: SEO Video Show. January 30, 2021. Host: Paul Andre de Vera. Guest: Jason Barnard, founder and CEO at Kalicube.
