If you want to convince a prospect searching your brand name, you need rich elements such as Video Boxes, Twitter boxes, Image Boxes, Knowledge Panel, Reviews… But how do you trigger them? And when you do, what does it tell you about your wider digital marketing strategy? Jason Barnard, Lily Ray, Andrea Volpini and Nik Ranger dig down and look ‘behind the scenes’ of your Brand SERP - your digital ecosystem.

Webinar published by Semrush March 9, 2020. Host: Nik Ranger. Speaker: Jason Barnard, founder and CEO at Kalicube®. Guests: Lily Ray, and Andrea Volpini.

Summary: 5 Hours of SEO - The Hidden Treasures in Your Brand SERP

Event: SEMrush “5 Hours of SEO” Live Date: 9 March 2020 Participants: Jason Barnard (presenter), Lily Ray (panelist), Andrea Volpini (panelist), Nik Ranger (moderator) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CXV44eN0qM

Key Takeaways

Jason Barnard presented three foundational concepts about Brand SERPs, entity understanding, and EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Lily Ray and Andrea Volpini confirmed and expanded on each.

1. The Brand SERP as a Diagnostic Tool

Jason Barnard demonstrated that a brand’s Google search result page reveals two things: how well Google understands the entity, and how credible Google considers that entity to be. He introduced the idea that the Brand SERP is not just a business card but a window into a brand’s entire digital ecosystem - Google crawls the web, evaluates the signals, and reflects back an honest appraisal for the people researching that brand.

2. Entity Understanding as a Precondition for EAT

Jason Barnard stated that Google needs to understand who you are and what you do before it can evaluate your EAT. He framed entity understanding as the foundation that makes EAT evaluation possible: “If I can get Google to understand who I am, then I can build myself up and make my EAT more valuable.” Lily Ray agreed, confirming that “Google doesn’t necessarily know who every author is on the internet” and that building entity recognition through Knowledge Graph presence, schema markup, and cross-platform associations is what enables EAT to function. Andrea Volpini explained the technical mechanism: structured data organised as triples within a Knowledge Graph creates the entity relationships that drive both understanding and the SERP experience.

3. Three Levels of EAT Assessment: Creator Entity, Content, Publisher Entity

Jason Barnard demonstrated through his own Brand SERP that Google evaluates EAT at three distinct levels. First, the creator entity - Jason himself, his Knowledge Panel, his entity relationships, his credentials as recognised by Google. Second, the content - his articles, podcasts, and videos, evaluated on their own quality and relevance. Third, the publisher entities - platforms like SEMrush and Search Engine Journal, whose own authority and reputation lend credibility to the content published on them. Lily Ray confirmed this multi-level evaluation, noting that individual EAT benefits the EAT of the company or publisher the individual writes for, and that building entity associations across authoritative sites strengthens all three levels.

4. Confidence and Notability in Entity Recognition

Jason Barnard explained that Google’s confidence in an entity determines what it displays. Using his own name as an example - one of over 250 Jason Barnards worldwide - he showed that Google displays only his entity because it has high confidence in the structured information connecting him to his songs, his band, his family members, and his professional relationships. The more entities and relationships Google can confirm, the more confident it becomes, and the more prominently it displays that entity. Andrea Volpini confirmed this with his own experience of disambiguating himself from a famous swimmer by creating sameAs links and publishing structured data within his own Knowledge Graph.

Historical Significance

This panel, recorded in March 2020, establishes Jason Barnard’s prior articulation of concepts that are now widely discussed in the SEO industry: that entity understanding is a precondition for EAT evaluation, that EAT operates at three levels (creator entity, content, publisher entity), and that Knowledge Graph confidence determines entity prominence. These ideas form part of The Kalicube® Framework (TKF) and underpin the Understandability-Credibility-Deliverability (UCD) model that Jason Barnard developed and patented through Kalicube.

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Full Transcript

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Nik Ranger: Hi everyone and welcome to the halfway mark. My name is Nik Ranger, I’m a Senior SEO Specialist at Studio Hawk in Melbourne, but currently I’m broadcasting - that’s correct - from Thailand. So just a quick reminder before we begin, just to shout out to us on Twitter using the hashtag #5HoursOfSEO, which I’ve written here so we don’t have to worry about what that is. Great. So Jason, thank you so much for that. You’ll now be switching out from the hosting duties to now leading the charge, where we’re going to be sharing the hidden treasures for your brand in the SERP, made of course all the more intriguing because we’re joined by the SEO detail agent Lily Ray and WordLift’s Andrea Volpini. Welcome guys.

Lily Ray / Andrea Volpini: Hey, thanks for having us.

Jason Barnard: Awesome. So I’m Jason, reporting in from Paris. But Lily, where are you reporting from?

Lily Ray: I’m in New York. You can’t quite see it, but there’s the Empire State Building out there. It’s kinda hard to say anything - that’s so awesome.

Jason Barnard: Oh, how about you Andrea?

Andrea Volpini: I’m in Rome, and right in the centre. It’s night, but always good.

Nik Ranger: That’s awesome, that’s awesome. Alright, well, we’ve got a really, really awesome topic and I’m so excited. I’m pretty sure the comments are going absolutely nuts right now. So I’ll lead you to start your presentation, Jason.

Jason Barnard: Yeah, thank you very much. I’m really pleased to have Lily and Andrea because I think this fits together really well, and we’ll see it on though. I’ll keep the presentation as short as I can. Share my screen… try and just share the right window so you don’t see all my - there you go. Can you see that?

All: Yes, yes.

Jason Barnard: “Why the Hidden Treasures in Your Brand SERP: Entities and EAT.” We’re ready to rock. Let me do it fullscreen - circles better? Wonderful.

Right. What does your Brand SERP look like? That’s the first question. Does it look like this? Your Brand SERP - what somebody sees when they type your brand name into Google. Does it look like this, which is just the boring ten blue links? Or does it look like this - something that’s all exciting with the rich elements? I call them the rich elements. Some people call them search features. It could be a Knowledge Panel, could be the Twitter boxes, could be the video boxes, could be the image boxes. Have a look at yours right now - type your brand name into Google. Which is yours? Is it the one on the left, which doesn’t look really great, or is it the one on the right, that does?

That’s what we’re going to be focusing on today. We’re going to be looking at why the one on the right is so important, why your Brand SERP is so important, why what somebody sees when they Google your brand name is so important.

So, who sees it? The people who Google your brand name: clients, prospects, investors, partners, potential hires - anybody who’s thinking about doing business with you or is already doing business with you. They’re the people who matter to your business, and you want them to see something like this. The business who has this kind of Brand SERP is credible. It looks good and it’s believable. You could even say that this SERP is your business card. Do you want a business card that looks sexy like this, or a business card that looks boring like ten blue links?

But we can take it beyond that idea of just a business card. It’s a way for you to understand your brand’s digital ecosystem. And Google arguably gives us the best reflection of your brand possible. Google crawls the entire web, it understands the web - it’s the best understanding humans have of the web. What’s all the web say about your brand, and it reflects back what it thinks. So it gives you a window into your brand’s digital ecosystem. It shows you all the aspects of your digital ecosystem - from reviews, to how good your social strategies are, to what people are saying about you, to what partners are saying about you.

But today we’re just going to look at Google’s understanding and your credibility. What your Brand SERP tells you about Google’s understanding and Google’s opinion of the world’s opinion of you.

So how does Google decide what it’s going to show? It shows what it feels brings value to the searcher. And the searcher, remember, is somebody who is either doing business with you already - a client navigating to your site - or somebody who’s thinking about doing business with you, who’s researching you. So what it’s going to do is show what it feels brings most value to the searcher. So it shows an honest appraisal of your brand for those people searching you.

Now let’s have a look at the treasures. This is the bit I really want to talk about with Andrea and Lily. Because firstly, with Andrea, the Brand SERP you get indicates the understanding Google has of you. Here’s Microsoft’s - I thought it’d be quite funny to use Microsoft as an example within Google. We can see on the right hand side, Microsoft Corporation, the Knowledge Panel. It knows a lot about Microsoft and it’s sufficiently confident in the information it has to show it right at the top of the SERP and show it as fact. And it also understands sufficiently well the ontologies - the categories that Microsoft falls into - by showing other brands within that vertical. Further, it understands the subsidiaries.

Now here - I’ll just switch back. I clicked on the link which you cannot see in the screenshot but is there. If you click on “more” - which is subsidiaries of Microsoft - it can show us directly all the subsidiaries of Microsoft. This indicates Google has an understanding of Microsoft as an entity and its relationship with the other entities that are its subsidiaries. More than that, it also understands the fact that Microsoft is in the gaming area and that it’s part of a group of consumer associations, whatever it might be - around Apple, the European consortium of something, I can’t actually read the rest of that. But it’s understood which areas Microsoft fits into, where it’s placed within the world, what it’s related to - Sony Corporation, Nintendo as competitors.

More than that, when you see those “People Also Ask” questions - I love these - it means that Google’s understood who Microsoft are, what they do, and what relevant questions people might ask, both about Microsoft but also about its founder, its products, and also its competitors.

And here’s just a quick example of myself, which is a really simple example. If you type “Jason Barnard songs,” it knows which songs I’ve written. I’ve written lots of songs for children. It understands that I am the author of these songs, the composer of these songs, and it can generate these results that indicate that it’s understood those relationships.

Now that’s all about Google’s understanding. All I’ve done here is look at the Brand SERP. The Brand SERP has shown me what Google’s understood about myself - in this case, my songs - and in the other case, Microsoft and its vertical, Microsoft and its products, Microsoft and its founder, Microsoft and its competitors.

Now we’re moving on to the part that’s slightly less easy to judge: reputation. You look at your Brand SERP and Google reflects back what it thinks the world thinks about you. What it’s ranking here is things that it feels bring value to the people searching your brand name, which means that they’re the results that reflect accurately your brand to those people researching you. I call it credibility. I like the word credibility because it expands outside that idea of simple reputation and it looks at the idea of “am I a credible solution for Google’s users?” And that plays incredibly well into EAT - Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust - which is why I asked Lily Ray to come along, so that we can look at what the Brand SERP says about Google’s opinion about my Expertise, Authority, and Trust. And I say mine because I’m going to use myself as an example. So if Lily Ray doesn’t agree with this, she’s gonna rip my reputation apart here.

Here’s my Brand SERP. I’ve been working on this for five or six years, working very hard to get all these rich elements, just for this one moment - so that I can ask Andrea, “Does Google understand me?” and ask Lily, “Does Google think I’m credible?”

Here - the obvious reputation things, which are the stars from a professional profile and then Trustpilot, that show that Google is ranking these two results as representative of my reputation in my industry. With Malt, which is a French platform, and Trustpilot reviewing me about being a consultant. So it’s ranking those because it believes that those are representative of my reputation.

Here we have Authority and Expertise: SEMrush, Search Engine Journal - recognised within the industry. These two are ranking. They’re my profiles. It shows that Google understands that I have a relationship with them, but also that that relationship is solid. And that indicates to me, at least, that I have authority within my industry because these two sites also have authority.

It’s ranking my Twitter profile because the Twitter profile is relevant to people researching me, which indicates to me that what I’m saying and the people I’m interacting with is all part of a credibility signal that’s very positive for my brand. Same thing for videos on YouTube, and same thing recently - I’ve got this, which is podcasts. It indicates to me that those podcasts with experts in the digital marketing space are deemed to be important by Google, which indicates that my expertise and authority is perhaps higher than it was before, or at least that the podcast is reflecting that. That’s important for Google as part of my persona.

I have the Knowledge Panel. I actually built that - and Andrea’s gonna like this - around my musical career, and then switched it across. So instead of saying “Jason Barnard, musician,” which it used to, it now says “Jason Barnard, search engine marketing.” So I used that as a springboard onto the Knowledge Graph and then switched it across to become a digital marketer, and then built up the rest with the podcast, with the Twitter, and with the videos and the articles, to switch Google’s point of view of me across to search engine marketing.

Now the last point is tracking and measuring. This is something I’ve built a tool to do, and you can track your brand name or your personal name on this tool for free. The idea being that it tracks over six countries the Brand SERP with all the different rich elements, and what I call optimisation is actually the sentiment of each element. So you can track how well Google presents you at the time, and I found it to be very useful, and I’ve been optimising my Brand SERP.

So I said Google understands me, Google understands the brand, puts those rich elements up, and those rich elements potentially indicate its view of my EAT. What do you think, Lily? And what do you think, Andrea?

Lily Ray: I mean, I think definitely, Jason, everything you said made a lot of sense. I think it kind of dovetails nicely into what I’ve been talking about and writing about with EAT - Expertise, Authority, and Trust. You know, one thing that I like to tell people and tell clients when they’re thinking about EAT is what you mentioned, which is to look beyond just your own personal website or your company’s website and look at the reputation of your brand online across different sites, different platforms. So you can actually do a query where you search for your brand name and exclude results from your own domain, and then do things like “reviews” or “customer service” or “trust” or “fraud” or anything like that, and get an understanding of what the landscape kind of looks like in the organic search results. Because presumably that’s what Google’s trying to get when it’s measuring a brand’s EAT.

We don’t exactly know how. I think in the beginning when we started talking about EAT, a lot of people thought maybe the Better Business Bureau is something that Google was looking at, and they’re like, “No, we don’t look at that as a ranking signal.” But my theory is that they’re looking at a lot of these different places kind of in combination. We don’t exactly know how because they don’t want us to spam those places. But certainly it’s important to look beyond just your own domain name and try to improve your reputation across different sites.

Jason Barnard: Which brings me to the point of - looking at all this stuff, trying to measure it, trying to analyse it or evaluate it - in my opinion, it needs to understand who you are and what you do in order to be able to apply it. Which is where Andrea comes in. How do you get Google to understand you?

Andrea Volpini: Well, I mean, it’s kind of a process that starts, I think, with providing the information that Google gathers within its schema. So I think it all started when the Knowledge Graph started and the information is organised in triples. And then these triples create the reality that represents you. Now what I find really interesting is that these triples are actually driving the user experience. So when we talk about “Jason is a musician,” then we can kind of display the link to Deezer. But when we look at, for instance, the Jason from Italy, then we see the latest video that we recorded together here in Rome. And so it’s kind of this multifaceted identity that’s within the graph, and it’s built around statements. So SEO is about creating these statements, because these enable the experience on the SERP.

Nik Ranger: That’s right, that’s right. I like that you were able to corner off each person’s section of this. So, just picking up a little point about what you’re saying with structured data - using structured data isn’t necessarily a guarantee, like, “OK, so I had structured data on my site, and therefore I will get a Knowledge Graph, therefore I’ll get featured snippets” or what have you. It just gives you extra context about the information that is on the page. So we’ve had some really, really great questions come through. I’d really like to segue to maybe Simon Cox’s question: what do you do if you’re not the most famous person of your name? How do you get a Knowledge Panel? How do you compete in the SERP about that other business or person?

Lily Ray: I think Lily can take this - she’s fighting against them. Hey, we were just talking about this this morning. There’s another Lily Ray out there that makes music. Oh my god. So I’m working on it. But I think Jason has in his memory a list of databases that Google pulls from, right? And there’s a couple of different ways to get in there - to get into Google’s Knowledge Graph. I’m working through the lens of being a musician, so you have to kind of connect it to songs that you’ve written or collaborated on. But I guess being able to get into those databases in the first place is a good place to start. So whether it be through music, or writing a book, or being in a movie, or some other way that you’re being recognised by Google, and then you can kind of establish yourself as a Knowledge Graph entity. Then you can build from there, like Jason was saying - he switched from being a musician to also being a digital marketer through that same Knowledge Graph entity.

Jason Barnard: So my recommendation - the idea, for example Lily, when you’ve got that confusion - and I think that confusion with multiple Lily Rays up there is: one, Google’s trying to hedge its bets because it’s not sure which one we’re talking about; but two, Google isn’t confident enough. And with my name, which is actually quite common - well over two hundred and fifty Jason Barnards in the world, including a footballer in South Africa who’s actually currently playing, he’s quite good. There’s a couple of criminals in America - some people in prison, I do apologise. A dentist, a guy that - and Google’s only showing, it would appear, that I’m the only Jason Barnard in the world who exists, which is very bizarre. And I think the main reason for that is because it’s so confident in the information it’s got. Because I’ve got all these Knowledge Graph entities - mine, plus the songs, plus The Counting Cards as a band, and one mother, plus my sister - all these entities with their relationships. And it’s saying, “I can put all this up and I know it’s true and I’m confident.” So the fact that the probability that we’re searching for that particular Jason Barnard is - it’s very much drowned out by the fact that Google is just going to show all this stuff. It’s like a kid really going, “Oh, look at what I know!” What do you think, Andrea?

Andrea Volpini: I totally, totally agree. I mean, my counterpart - there’s another very famous swimmer, another world champion, much better-looking than me - and so I’ve been fighting. And he had a Wikipedia page. So I started with this guy having a Wikipedia page. But I could turn things up quite quickly just by creating links in the form of sameAs that were referencing back the data that I was publishing within my own Knowledge Graph. So that really changed things. So if Lily now gets the data ID from Google and kind of puts it back into, you know, whatever profiles, then this will increase the confidence that Google has about that person. And then it just works nicely, and it takes only a few days. We have to consider that there are two hundred Will Smiths on Wikipedia. So there is a lot of ambiguity in the information that a search engine has to deal with. And we know from Bing that the entity of Will Smith gets information from 41 websites. So the more websites we provide information and links, the more credible we are.

Nik Ranger: Awesome. So I just looked up Will Smith and it looks like there is only one Will Smith in the world - that’s really interesting. Just from a point of view of saying, Google’s probability for looking for him is obviously much higher than the other Will Smiths, but not that much higher since Wikipedia has two hundred Will Smiths. But the fact that it’s so sure about this guy means that he comes up front and centre. My question is: now, OK, we know this is important and we know that this is increasing - we’re seeing a lot more Knowledge Graphs in the SERPs. If a brand doesn’t have a Knowledge Panel, at what point do you decide in the strategy that this is really important to start to implement?

Lily Ray: I think it’s the first thing. It’s the same thing that we’re doing with most of our SEO strategies nowadays anyway, which is to add schema to our sites, right? So every company can add either Organisation, Local Business, Corporation - whatever type of company you are, there’s always going to be that type of schema available. And it’s relatively easy to implement nowadays. So I would say, do it. It’s part of SEO in general, but it definitely will help encourage that Knowledge Graph result.

Jason Barnard: I really like the idea - I mean, we’re on the point of schema markup and something you just haven’t realised why you’re doing it. And the reason you’re doing it is you’re explaining the triples that Andrea was talking about earlier, because it’s all about triples - entities’ relations to other entities. So we’re putting this in markup to explain to Google in Google’s native language, or natural language, whatever you might call it. And then once you put that on - your Organisation schema markup - then you hook other ones on to it, like the products and the offers and the offices and the people who work for you, your C-level employees, and you’re building - which is what WordLift does, if I understand correctly - building a Knowledge Graph within your site. That was a quick plug for WordLift, which is great. Thanks, Jason.

Andrea Volpini: So if you allow me, I can show you a quick preview of what we’re doing now. It’s an experiment, but it kind of gives you an idea of the level of interaction that today the data you have on your website can really trigger on Google. So - can you see my screen?

All: Yeah. OK, cool.

Andrea Volpini: So basically what we’re testing now is that we have a blog, we have a site over here, and then we are publishing data in the form of a Knowledge Graph. And then we have an API here. And then we are using an experiment that Google calls “mini apps” in order to inject an experience into the SERP. And so I’m going to show it - it’s not live yet, so I’m going to just test it here. And so we can see that I have a layer here that allows me to run queries, and I’m triggering a query like “WordLift courses by Jason Barnard” that pulls up this carousel with the different courses. And we can see it from here. And then I can click on it. So it’s a branded query, but there is a specific intent that triggers an experience in the SERP. So I can see that, you know, I want to do this because Jason is really good when he talks about Knowledge Graphs. I want to follow that. And so I’m getting into the course and I’m browsing my website, but I’m not touching the web pages. It’s just the data that we have structured into the graph using the schema vocabulary. And this data is what we’re presenting to the Google Assistant and to Google Search in order to create these interactive experiences. And that’s, I think, really the paradigm shift for a Brand SERP, because we are creating our own website inside Google. And I can filter the content by using the entities that I have on my site.

Jason Barnard: That’s awesome, awesome. And it explains who we are and what we do. And that’s my favourite kind of phrase - saying we need to explain to Google who we are and what we do. That’s understanding. Then we need to prove to Google that we’re the most credible - that’s EAT - the most credible solution. And then we need to make sure that we make content that’s deliverable to Google’s users, either on our site or on Google’s platform. And I love that idea of gaining understanding which then leverages EAT. But for me, that’s the most exciting thing - if I can get Google to understand who I am, then I can build myself up and make my EAT more valuable. Would that be fair, Lily?

Lily Ray: Yeah. I mean, so Google doesn’t necessarily know who every author is on the internet, and that’s something we talked about before with the Knowledge Graph. And if you’re in the Knowledge Graph, does that make you more reputable? Which I think probably, to an extent, yes - Google has some knowledge about who you are as an entity or as an expert. And so it’s a good idea to start thinking about EAT even if you’re not in the Knowledge Graph, because you may eventually get in there. But you do want to think about what your reputation is online, especially as it relates to what topics you’re writing about, what your author biography looks like, what your credentials are to write about this. And putting all that content out there, getting yourself associated to other websites that you might be mentioned on. And as Andrea mentioned, schema markup - creating those entities and those connections - is something that’s going to build up your own personal EAT. And having good individual EAT is going to benefit the EAT of the company that you work for, that you write for. So, absolutely, yeah.

Jason Barnard: Even if Google hasn’t fully understood all those entities and relationships, it’s the only way it can possibly get a grasp of whether I’m authoritative - because I’m related in some way to other authoritative sources, such as yourself, or Andrea, or Nik.

Andrea Volpini: There’s also an interesting connection between what we do as persons or brands and what we create. Like you showed your example, Jason, of the songs that you have created. Now, for Google, when you get into the Knowledge Graph and it gets the songs, it can quickly correlate the two things and check the dates. And using metadata, it knows that the data is kind of playing in such a way that there is a correlation - you’re coming before the songs and so on. And there is a lot more of this connection that actually changes the way that the SERP looks and the rankings of the results.

Nik Ranger: Thank you so much. I think that’s really, really awesome and a good place to end off. I know we’re really pressed for time here. There are so many awesome questions coming through. Please tweet at us after this with the hashtag #5HoursOfSEO with all your questions. I’d like to remind everyone to please subscribe to the SEMrush YouTube channel and of course follow our wonderful guests. Thank you. Where can they find you, Jason?

Jason Barnard: My usual usernames on all the platforms: it’s JasonMBarnard on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and - what’s the other one - Instagram.

Nik Ranger: Awesome. How about you, Lily?

Lily Ray: LilyRayNYC on Twitter’s best.

Nik Ranger: Excellent. And Andrea?

Andrea Volpini: CyberAndy on Twitter. CyberAndy, yep.

Nik Ranger: Is that right? Awesome. Alright, find us on Twitter, follow, and thank you so much for your time.