Brand SERP Tips: How to Improve Your Online Business Card (Doofinder.com)
Like it or not, Brand SERPs are your online business card, what your audience sees when they google your brand name. And, because of it, they’re vital to your bottom line, what you need to know about them?
Find out in this webinar with Jason Barnard, also known as “The Brand SERP Guy®”, and Victor Aldea, Doofinder Growth Marketing Manager, a quick analysis and explanation about what they are and how to use them to improve your online presence.
Published by: Doofinder. Guest: Jason Barnard. Host: Victor Aldea. May 17, 2021.
Summary: Brand SERP Tips: How to Improve Your Online Business Card (Doofinder.com)
Event: Doofinder Webinar Date: 17 May 2021 Participants: Jason Barnard (presenter), Victor Aldea (host, Doofinder) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[ID]
Key Takeaways
Jason Barnard delivered a comprehensive presentation on Brand SERP optimisation, covering audience impact, Google’s assessment of credibility, digital ecosystem strategy, and practical tactics for improving every element of a Brand SERP. This webinar is notable for its clear articulation of several concepts central to The Kalicube Framework, including the relationship between Brand SERPs and digital strategy, the confidence mechanism, the entity home, and the child education metaphor.
1. The Brand SERP as Business Card and Strategic Diagnostic
Jason Barnard described the Brand SERP as a business card that Google controls: “I can give them the best business card in the world when we’re in the meeting, but once they get onto Google, Google makes the decision about what to show them, and that is what they then retain after I’ve left the room.” He explained that improving your Brand SERP necessarily improves your entire digital ecosystem, creating a “marketing virtuous cycle” - because every element that appears on the Brand SERP (videos, social profiles, reviews, knowledge panels) reflects the health of a corresponding part of your digital strategy.
2. Three Audiences for Every Brand SERP
Jason Barnard identified three audiences for whom the Brand SERP matters. First, your audience: clients navigating to your site, prospects evaluating you, investors, partners, potential hires - all of whom see this “business card” and form impressions. Second, Google: the Brand SERP reflects Google’s opinion of the world’s opinion of you, specifically its assessment of your Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT). Third, you: the Brand SERP is a window into your brand’s digital ecosystem, showing where your content strategy is succeeding and where it’s failing.
3. Google Must Understand Before It Can Evaluate EAT
Jason Barnard stated: “John Mueller the other day said more or less explicitly: if we are to evaluate your expertise, your authority, and trust, we need to understand who you are.” He extended this: “Your Brand SERP indicates very clearly whether Google has understood who you are or not. And until it understands who you are, it always has trouble applying the expertise, authority, and trustworthiness that you certainly deserve.” This reiterates the Understandability-precedes-EAT principle first articulated in the 2020 SEMrush panel.
4. The Entity Home and Confidence Through Corroboration
Jason Barnard explained that Google needs “a place where it can go to get the information from the horse’s mouth” - the entity home. He described the confidence mechanism: “If you can make sure that that message - what you’re saying on your entity home - is clear and coherent across the entire web, everything that already exists, Google will start to understand and be confident it’s understood.” He referenced John Mueller’s use of the term “reconciliation” for this process, noting that Google “cannot do it effectively without a reference point for that entity.”
5. Understanding + Confidence = Knowledge Panel
Jason Barnard explained: “The knowledge panel represents the fact that it’s understood who you are, what you do, who your audience is. And it’s confident it’s understood. And that confidence, beyond understanding, that confidence is absolute key. We can understand something but not be confident. Google wants to understand, be confident. Confident enough to present it to its users.” He described the Knowledge Panel as “Google shouting out in the playground, ‘I’ve understood, look at me, aren’t I clever.'”
6. The Child Education Metaphor Applied to Trust
Jason Barnard expanded the “educating Google like a child” metaphor to explain corroboration: “You’re educating a child. A child will not understand if you explain things badly. It will be confident if multiple people explain it in a structured manner. Much like a child trusts the head teacher, the postman, the baker down the road, the grandma, the mother, the father, the sister, the brother - so that it gets the point that says, ‘I have understood and I am so confident I’ve understood, I will go to the playground, I will shout it out to all my friends.'”
7. Darwinism in Search - How SERPs Are Built
Jason Barnard credited Gary Illyes of Google for explaining the SERP construction process: different verticals (news, videos, images, social) compete to place their best candidate on the SERP, with a main algorithm deciding which candidates earn a place. He described this as “Darwinism in search” - a vertical earns its place only when the content is relevant, helpful, and of sufficient quality. This explains why rich elements appear or don’t appear, and how to strategically trigger them.
8. Rich Elements as Content Strategy Indicators
Jason Barnard argued that the presence or absence of rich elements (video boxes, image boxes, Twitter boxes, People Also Ask, knowledge panels) on a Brand SERP is a direct indicator of content strategy health. If video boxes are missing, your video strategy isn’t working or isn’t visible to Google. If Twitter boxes are absent, your Twitter engagement isn’t being recognised. If People Also Ask appears but you don’t answer the questions, you’re failing your audience. He noted that 67.8% of brands with People Also Ask on their Brand SERPs don’t answer even one of the questions.
9. Google’s Understanding Is the Future of SEO
Jason Barnard stated: “We’re moving completely away from keywords and inbound links. Google used to just count words and count inbound links. It now understands, or it’s starting to understand, the world. And it’s starting to be able to say: this is what the person is looking for, and this is the solution. And I don’t just count words and count links to figure out what the best solution is - I understand what the solution is and how good the provider of that solution is in terms of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.”
10. Product Knowledge Panels and the Entity Hierarchy
Jason Barnard explained that brand SERPs work for any entity type - products, persons, podcasts, websites. He recommended starting with the brand entity and building downward to products, because “Google understands entities by their relationships to things it’s already understood. If you have a brand at the top and it’s understood the brand, it’s easy to hook products onto it.” He credited Andrea Volpini and WordLift for expertise in product knowledge panels at scale.
11. Brand SERP Audit as Digital Strategy Audit
Jason Barnard described losing a client because a 30-minute Brand SERP audit gave them their entire digital strategy roadmap: “I looked at their Brand SERP and in half an hour they said, ‘Oh actually we don’t need your services anymore. You’ve just given us all the answers we needed.'” He demonstrated that pages one through five of a Brand SERP reveal video strategy health, social media effectiveness, review sentiment, content gaps, and competitive positioning.
Historical Significance
This webinar, recorded in May 2021, documents Jason Barnard’s articulation of the marketing virtuous cycle (improving Brand SERP necessarily improves digital ecosystem), the three-audience framework, the confidence mechanism (understanding + confidence = Knowledge Panel), and the practical methodology for triggering every rich element type. It reiterates the entity understanding precedes EAT principle (citing John Mueller), the entity home concept, the child education metaphor, and the Darwinism in search model (credited to Gary Illyes). These concepts form core elements of The Kalicube Framework (TKF) and The Kalicube Process™ (TKP) developed through Kalicube.
Full Transcript: Brand SERP Tips: How to Improve Your Online Business Card (Doofinder.com)
Victor Aldea: Hello everyone, thank you for joining us today. Today we’re going to explore the topic of Brand SERPs and how they impact your bottom line. I’m very, very excited to present our guest, Mr. Jason Barnard, The Brand SERP Guy® himself. With over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, he is a professional musician, podcast host, and he’s also the founder and CEO of Kalicube, a digital marketing agency that focuses on helping clients optimise their Brand SERPs. How are you doing?
Jason Barnard: I’m doing great. Thank you, Victor. Thank you for having me, and thank you for the introduction. I was indeed a professional musician. I am now a podcast host and company owner and builder of the Kalicube SaaS platform, which we’ll see in a moment - which is a very, very, very strange mixture, because I was also a cartoon blue dog, as we will see in a moment.
Victor Aldea: It’s great to have you here. Before we start, everyone make sure to leave your questions on the question tab right above the chat. We will be answering them at the very end of Jason’s presentation. So tell us, Jason, what are we going to see today?
Jason Barnard: I’m going to talk you through your Brand SERP, why it’s important, how it’s important to which people, which entities - the people who are watching, your audience, Google, and your digital strategy, yourself. Why it’s important, and what you can do to make it better, and how that can help your overall digital strategy, with some emphasis on e-commerce. But basically this applies to everybody, and we’ll see - I hope at the end with some questions - how it really, really, really is important for e-commerce. It is.
So we can begin? Yeah. I can share my screen, which is the first thing in this whole thing. I’ve got this beautiful slide that comes from the splash screen: “Welcome. Brand SERPs Are Vital to Your Bottom Line. What You Need to Know.” This is the topic of the day. It’s my favourite topic in the entire universe, and I’ve been studying Brand SERPs for seven years.
I will tell you very quickly the story as to why I started looking at Brand SERPs. It is because I was a blue dog in a cartoon. And when you searched my name seven years ago, the only thing you saw was a blue dog. And that meant, as a digital marketer, when I was trying to sell my services to my clients, they would search my name after a meeting with me - having been convinced that I was the number one best digital marketer in the world - and they would see a guy who was doing a blue dog in a cartoon. And I lost a lot of clients that way, because they saw my result and thought, “A blue dog - don’t really want that person dealing with my digital strategy.”
And so that kind of image made me realise that my Brand SERP - what people see when they search my name - is my business card today. I can give them the best business card in the world when we’re in the meeting, but once they get onto Google, Google makes the decision about what to show them, and that is what they then retain after I’ve left the room.
And as we’ll see, in fact I just said Google decides what to show them, but we can very heavily influence it. And I would suggest, if we’re good enough at it, we can control what Google shows. And that is power indeed.
So I’m the Brand SERP Guy, because I specialise - I’m obsessed with Brand SERPs. As you can see, I’ve got a really nice-looking Brand SERP. If you remember a few years ago, you would get 10 blue links. Nobody gets 10 blue links anymore - very few people or companies have results with just 10 blue links. Google’s going multimedia. So we need to go down that path as marketers, as people, and as Google users as well. We’re really keen - and I think that’s what we were talking about earlier with Victor - as Google users, we love all this stuff. And as marketers, we need to embrace it and make the most of it.
I’m also the Knowledge Panel Guy. That’s the thing on the right-hand side. Basically, on the left-hand side, Google is making suggestions, recommendations. And if you consider that when you want Google to rank you - whatever the situation, Brand SERP, not a Brand SERP, products, red shoes, blue widgets - you’re asking Google to recommend your solution, your answer, to its user for their problem or the answer to their question. The left-hand side is all about recommendations. The right-hand side of desktop is all about fact. Google is saying, “This is what I think is true.” So that right-hand side is a deep insight into how Google perceives the world. And in particular, on a Brand SERP, that is vital - how it perceives you, how it understands you.
And as you can see, it understands me really rather very well. But I’ve been working on this for seven years.
I’ve got two decades in digital. I used to be a blue dog, as I said earlier on, and you can still see that on the Brand SERP. I got rid of it on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side, I kept a little bit of the songs I wrote, the cartoon I made, because it is part of my story. My Brand SERP tells my story.
If we go back to it, you can see a story, a life story there. Who I know, who I’m associated with. I spend too much time on Twitter. I’ve got a podcast. I’ve got video boxes. So if we go through it: I was a blue dog in a cartoon - that’s still up there. I’ve got a groovy podcast - intelligent, interesting, and fun, with lots of amazing guests. I do recommend listening to it, not because I’m on it, but because the guests are so stunningly interesting and informative. I learned more from doing that podcast - 180 episodes - than I did in the five or six years previously, just from asking people who really know what they’re talking about the questions that have been burning my brain for years and years and years. They explain. People like Bill Slawski, Joost de Valk, or Jono Alderson - incredibly, incredibly educational for me personally. I’m sure it will be for you.
Next, I’m a speaker and a host. That’s when I get to share all the things that I know and I’ve learned from these people and I’ve figured out for myself. As you can see, speaking around the world - I’ve been to Yoast, talked to Rand Fishkin, went to Ukraine and talked on SE Ranking’s site, which was really good fun. So I get asked to speak about what I do and what I know, as on Doofinder.
I’m also an author. I write for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, SEMrush, and some other publications. Unfortunately, I’m a very slow writer, so I haven’t written a great deal - or not as much as I would like.
I’m also a tutor and coach. I’ve got Brand SERP courses where you can learn how to manage your Brand SERP. And unfortunately, so far I’ve just launched this Kalicube Pro platform. Basically, it’s taking everything I know and putting it into a SaaS platform with a database behind it. I was moving the database this morning - 500 gigs of data, all about Brand SERPs. That’s all it contains. 70,000 brands over 12 countries for the last seven years, and it’s 500 gigs of data. So if you want to know about Brand SERPs over the last six or seven years, I’m probably the right person to ask. But I haven’t yet managed to leverage Kalicube Pro up onto the Brand SERP.
I started an experiment - and you’ll see in a moment, I spend my life doing silly experiments, clever experiments, idiotic experiments, and interesting experiments on Brand SERPs for myself and my cartoon characters we saw earlier on. I don’t experiment on my clients. I think that’s unfair. I try to learn on myself, like any good scientist - I experiment on myself, and then I apply what I learn to my clients and to help them. So Kalicube Pro will be there soon. The experiment started on Sunday. And if you’re interested, follow me on Twitter. I post regularly my updates there, and John Mueller sometimes gets involved and gives us some handy hints about quite how silly I’m being a lot of the time.
So the plan for today is three points of view on your Brand SERP. There’s your audience, there’s Google, and there’s you. And your Brand SERP should be a big part of your overall digital strategy. Most brands don’t even think about it. And when they do, they just think, “Yeah, I can control my brand search, no problem. I rank number one, that’s good enough, job done.” It’s not. It’s a fundamental part of your digital strategy, as you will see.
And then I’m going to talk about how to improve your Brand SERP. Basic tactics and blue links, which is the basis of Google results. And glorious rich elements, which I was talking about earlier on: the Twitter boxes, the podcast boxes, the Knowledge Panel, the video boxes. I absolutely love the rich elements - you would call them SERP features. Google’s going multimedia. Let’s embrace it, and let’s make the most of it. Because actually, when you start looking at these rich elements, you end up driving your content and digital strategy incredibly effectively and incredibly efficiently.
So before I start, what do I mean by Brand SERP? I want to be really clear. Exact-match brand search. I’m not talking about branded search where it’s company name plus reviews, or company name plus product, or company name plus problem, or whatever. It’s your company name. Just the company name. Or if you’re a person, your personal name. What appears? What does Google show? What does your audience see?
So we have an exact-match brand search. It can look like this - it’s your business card. Now, this is an example. It’s pretty small, so it’s quite difficult to see, but that’s Microsoft. Now that’s a really, really, really exciting, groovy, sexy - I would say - SERP, which is full of rich elements. You’ve got Microsoft at the top. You’ve got the Twitter boxes. You’ve got the map pack. You’ve got People Also Ask. You’ve got Twitter boxes. You’ve got news. I already said Twitter boxes. You’ve got the Knowledge Panel on the right-hand side. That’s an incredibly rich Brand SERP. It’s very convincing and very helpful to the user who is searching for Microsoft.
But there are all sorts of Brand SERPs. Over there on the left, you’ve got Microsoft - incredibly rich, lots of things to do, lots of information, lots of variety, lots of different things to control for Microsoft. And as you can see, if you think about it, that’s actually - it looks to me like a digital strategy, as we will see.
In the middle, it’s Kalicube. I’ve been working on that. We’ve got videos, we’ve got images, we’ve got a Knowledge Panel on the right-hand side. We’ve got that number one top spot with the rich sitelinks underneath, which we’ll see later on. That’s pretty good.
And then on the right-hand side - I said nobody has 10 blue links anymore. It’s not true, some people do. If you’re a company who’s still got 10 blue links, you should be seriously worried about your digital strategy. And you might want to pull your socks up and start looking at your Brand SERP and asking yourself: why is Google showing only 10 blue links? Why is it not showing my great videos? Why isn’t it showing my great images? Why isn’t it showing the Twitter boxes? And why don’t I have those rich sitelinks so that people can go easily to any section of my site that might be useful to them or helpful to them? And those are really good questions to ask yourself.
And as I say on the right: more or less convincing, more or less negative, more or less inaccurate. I would like to say that the one in the middle, Kalicube, is convincing, positive, and accurate. The one on the right is not convincing, it’s negative, and it’s inaccurate. And we obviously want one that looks more like Kalicube in the middle there.
So there are three reasons these are so, so, so very important. It’s important for your audience. Now, you immediately think of prospects, but it’s not just your prospects. It’s not just those bottom-of-funnel people who are about to buy from you. It’s also your clients. Clients regularly navigate to your site by searching your brand name. They don’t type your domain name into the address bar very often. They don’t often bookmark. They will obviously come from emails and other sites. But when they’re coming through Google, a lot of people - and I’m sure including you, when you’re a user and not a marketer - you just type the name of the company into the address bar. You expect them to come up number one, you click on the link, you go to the site. But you still see the other results. Potentially you might scroll.
So it remains very important to those clients. And also those rich sitelinks at the top - so the clients can get to the parts of the site they need - remains something terribly useful that you can provide to those clients to keep them on board. Prospects, obviously bottom of the funnel, you want to convert them. But also investors, partners, all sorts of potential hires. And all of these people see this. And it’s your business card. It makes an impression on them whether you like it or not. And it’s better that that impression is good and positive for you.
Especially reviews in the e-commerce industry - reviews are a big problem if they’re ranking and they’re bad. They’re a great boon if they’re ranking and they’re good. So you need to really work on that, to make sure that, for example, a client who comes to your site every single day or every week - whatever it might be - if they’re seeing three-star reviews, two-star reviews, just under that first result, they’re gonna jump ship at some point. They’re gonna start having doubts about you. You don’t want that to happen.
Next, it’s important for Google. It’s Google’s assessment. It’s Google’s opinion of the world’s opinion of you. If you want to know what the world thinks about you, who better to ask than Google? Google crawls the web day in and day out, billions of web pages. Here’s an interesting fact: Fabrice Canel out of Bing - it’s obviously not Google, but pretty much the same thing - 70 billion pages every day that they haven’t seen before. So you can imagine how many pages they see every day. It’s not 70 billion - 700 billion, 800 billion, a billion billion, I don’t know. 70 billion pages a day that they have not seen before. That shows you the scale at which these companies are working.
And the important thing there is EAT: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Now, if you’re new to SEO, you need to think EAT. Basically, it’s credibility. It’s Google’s assessment of your credibility, your expertise, your authoritativeness within your industry, and your trustworthiness. Now obviously, in e-commerce, trustworthiness is incredibly important. But also expertise - how expert are you? How much do you understand about the products you’re selling? How authoritative are you about those products and about your topics? And how trustworthy are you as somebody to serve, to solve the problem that Google’s user has asked Google to help them solve?
And John Mueller the other day on Webmaster Hangouts said more or less explicitly - not 100 percent, but he said: if we are to evaluate your expertise, your authority, and trust, we need to understand who you are. And I will then now take this further and say: your Brand SERP indicates very clearly whether Google has understood who you are or not. And until it understands who you are, it always has trouble applying the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness that you certainly deserve to your brand within the results in the wider world of results on Google.
So this is incredibly important for EAT. And your Brand SERP is a wonderful window into how Google perceives you, how Google understands you, and how Google sees the world’s opinion of you. Which is obviously phenomenally important, because if it’s trying to send its users to the best possible solution for that problem, it’s going to send them to the one that it thinks the world thinks is the best.
And it’s important for you. It’s a window into your brand’s digital ecosystem and content strategy. I invite you to think about your Brand SERP from that perspective. If you remember earlier on, we were looking at the 10 blue links on one side, Microsoft on the other, and Kalicube in the middle. And you would agree the one on the right is pretty certain they’ve got a bad content strategy. They don’t have a content strategy that’s functioning - it doesn’t pull up in Google’s results, so it’s not being successful. Google isn’t seeing it as being successful. And we’ll come to that in a moment.
Now, take a look at your Brand SERP. Which one is it? I’m sure we all agree we would like it to be more like the one on the left than the one on the right. If you’ve got those 10 blue links especially - and I’ve put some terrible, terrible star ratings there, one out of five, just to push the point home - you know, if it’s 10 blue links, you’ve got a bad content strategy. It’s not convincing. If you’ve got one-star reviews, you’re going to be losing clients and you’re not going to be converting prospects.
Now, by definition, improving your Brand SERP is a marketing virtuous cycle. So basically, I’m setting myself up now to say to you: if you work on your Brand SERP, you are necessarily going to be improving your entire content marketing strategy. And you are going to be improving your bottom line, because you’re going to be engaging more of your audience, you’re going to perform better in terms of when people search your brand name, and you’re going to be performing better in Google’s results more generally. And that’s incredibly, incredibly important, I’m sure you all agree.
So to improve your Brand SERP, you necessarily have to improve your digital ecosystem. I’ve got a little diagram here. I think that speaks volumes. The illustrations are a really helpful way to see - if I’m working on Twitter, on LinkedIn, if I’m pushing stuff out onto YouTube with lots of videos that are engaging my audience, obviously my digital ecosystem is going to be improving. If I’m getting those great reviews, my digital ecosystem is improving. My overall health in digital marketing is improving. And all of these will be reflected, in one way or another, on your Brand SERP.
So improving your overall digital ecosystem - obviously great for you, because you’re going to be engaging audiences on all sorts of platforms that maybe you weren’t engaging them on before. But it also improves Google’s opinion of you through Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. And its understanding of you, and its opinion of you, and its understanding of the topics with which you can deal.
And I won’t go into that today, but if you think about Google Discover - Google Discover, which is going to be probably pretty important in the coming years - is all about the topics that you are expert on, authoritative in. And you need to prove to Google, you need to demonstrate to Google, which of the topics you can help its users with.
And if you think about that: they’re your audience, but your audience is a subset of Google’s users, in this case. You’re asking Google to say, “Here, I’ve got five billion users. One million of them are your audience. The other 4.999 billion aren’t actually interesting for you. They’re not going to be interested in your product.” So you want Google to be able to neatly segment the people that are interesting to you as a business and send them to you on a regular basis. That’s the key. You don’t want them sending just any of their users. You want them to send the pertinent users who are likely to buy from you. So Google reflects all of that beautifully and simply through your Brand SERP.
I actually had a client who wanted me to do an audit of their entire digital strategy, and they organised a half-hour meeting with me on a video conference a couple of months ago. And I looked at their Brand SERP and in half an hour they said, “Oh, actually, we don’t need your services anymore. You’ve just given us all the answers we needed.” So I lost the client because in half an hour I could look through their Brand SERP - page one, page two, page three, page four, page five - and say, “Your videos aren’t ranking. Your video strategy is rubbish. You haven’t got the Twitter boxes. Do you like Twitter? Yes, we do. In that case, your Twitter strategy needs looking at again.” And within half an hour we’d gone through the whole thing, and they had basically a to-do list for their digital strategy for the coming months. And I didn’t get the client. More fool me - won’t be doing that again.
So, who’s happy when you get that perfect Brand SERP? Everybody. Your audience - they’re seeing a great result. They’re convinced. They’re well informed. The rich sitelinks at the top - which I think are underestimated - underneath your homepage, they can get easily to the part of the site they need. If they want to go to the login page, they don’t have to go through the homepage. They go straight to the login page. That’s a deeply underestimated advantage of having those rich sitelinks underneath your homepage at the top of the result.
Along with controlling more of the real estate on that Brand SERP, which means that you can be more comfortable and confident of making it positive, accurate, and convincing. And obviously, in that circumstance, you are incredibly happy because you look good to your audience and you are building a great digital strategy driven by Google’s understanding of the world’s understanding of you.
So - the anatomy of a Brand SERP. Oh, before I do that, a quick aside on how SERPs are built. This is something I learned a couple of years ago from Gary Illyes from Google - an incredibly interesting description that he gave us of exactly how it works.
Now, we kind of tend to think, “Oh, Google’s got this algorithm and it just ranks things.” And he told me, in fact, it’s Darwinism. He didn’t use the term Darwinism, but basically: you have the different verticals - news, videos, images, social - that are all competing for a place on that SERP. But they all have different algorithms with different weightings. They all work off the same fundamental algorithm, but they use different aspects of it in order to decide what content they are going to suggest. And they all suggest their best candidate to the main algorithm at the top, that then decides, “Yes, this can have a place on the SERP. No, this isn’t worth having a place on the SERP.”
So it really is Darwinism in search. If a vertical is relevant and helpful and has sufficiently large amounts of quality content, it will get a place. So why do we see the video boxes in some circumstances? Because the video is seen by Google to be useful to the query, and also it has enough quality video to actually give its user a decent experience with those video boxes.
So if you bear that in mind, you start to understand the mechanics of how these rich elements find their place and how to make the most of the death of the blue link. And make the most of this new multimedia engine that we’re looking at. And at the same time, develop a much, much richer, better, more appropriate, more engaging content strategy for your audience.
Now, there’s a link down there at the bottom. Go down there if you feel like it, obviously, and read the article. There are several articles on Search Engine Journal, including a series of interviews I did with the guys at Bing who explained even more about how all this works. And obviously Bing aren’t Google, but they work in generally similar manners. So you can actually look at how one works and pretty much figure out how the other one’s working. They have the same audience, the same data set, the same aim, the same technology. The differences aren’t going to be fundamentally different. So if you read through those articles, you’ll get some really, really great insights from these amazingly intelligent people about how all of this actually functions.
So, what does a good Brand SERP look like? That’s a good Brand SERP. As you can see, we’ve got the homepage of the brand at the top, then we’ve got the rich sitelinks which lead to specific places on the site that people might find useful. You have LinkedIn or other social media, depending on which industry you’re in and what kind of work you’ve been doing. The People Also Ask - that’s very, very frequent these days. That’s something we’ll look at later on that you really need to be looking after. Perhaps a newspaper article. Video boxes, if you’ve got a decent video strategy. A couple of reviews there.
And at the bottom we’ve got the dog. And the dog represents the fact that Wikipedia might be there, Trustpilot might be there, Irish Times might be there, LinkedIn. These are all the big hitters. But if you’re in a very niche industry, niche sites will rank. If you’re a poodle parlour in Paris, the Poodle Parlour Association of Paris will rank on your Brand SERP potentially, because it’s incredibly pertinent.
And you want it to be positive, accurate, and convincing. And as you can see here, this is the Kalicube system. We measure both quality and control. You want to control it. If you can control it, you can make sure that it’s positive, accurate, and convincing.
Quality - I would generally expect to see for a decent Brand SERP: seven blue links, three rich elements, a Knowledge Panel on the right-hand side. Under 50 percent of brands have got a Knowledge Panel, which I think is a pity, and it’s something you can definitely work to have. Google doesn’t - it’s not based on notability or importance. Every company can have a Knowledge Panel.
And the Knowledge Panel isn’t Google My Business. It’s a Knowledge Panel where Google states the facts that you do not control. The machine has understood the facts about your brand and is presenting its understanding of the facts about your brand to its audience. So that idea of the Knowledge Panel as being a bonus - we’ll see in a moment - it’s not. It’s something fundamentally important.
And Kalicube, basically - I’ve built Kalicube from my experience of seven years working for clients to help me help my clients. And now I’m going to open up as a SaaS platform to track, measure, and improve Brand SERPs and trigger and manage Knowledge Panels.
So we’ve got through about half of it now, and we’re going to look at how to improve your Brand SERP without having to pay for Kalicube Pro. I’m going to give away the secrets, because all of this is actually very, very, very simple: good sense, common sense, simple SEO, great marketing. So you will have a good Brand SERP with or without the platform, simply by being a really good marketer, half-decent SEO, and slightly self-reflecting about what it is we’re looking at when we search your Brand SERP.
And don’t lie to yourself and pretend things are better than they are. Be brutally honest, because that’s where you’re gonna find the wins here.
So the general tactics for the blue links. First thing to do: look at your homepage. Look at your homepage at the top. Look at how you can change the meta title, the meta description, make it look sexier. Look at all the content you control. So that’s going to be your homepage, but also all the pages: about, podcasts, Kalicube Pro in my case, your products, your category pages, your blog. Those can appear as rich sitelinks. Meta titles and descriptions - phenomenally important there.
You want to have your login page in there. I was talking to Joost de Valk from Yoast, who was saying, “Yeah, I hadn’t really thought about that, actually. Login pages, although it can be a security risk, are actually very important to user experience when people are searching your brand name on Google.” So that login page is potentially something you would want to show your users so that the client who is navigating to your site through Google can just click on the login page and land straight there. And they get a good user experience. And that’s good for you, good for Google, good for the user.
But also look at all the other domains you control. Could be departments, could be your blog subdomain, other domains, other countries, your subsidiaries, your parent company. All of these are things you can directly influence and improve those blue links.
And then you can improve and add the ones that you semi-control. Wikidata - a bit naughty there. You can actually edit it. Don’t edit it or add yourself to it if you’re not notable. There are notability guidelines. Don’t mess with Wikidata. Don’t create a big kind of junk field. You don’t need to. You can actually trigger Knowledge Panels and improve your Brand SERP without Wikidata.
TechCrunch, Bloomberg, YouTube, Twitter - you name it. Any of these things that you can semi-control would give you a profile page or a page that you can edit about yourself. Twitter, for example - your Twitter account, you can edit the title. You can half-control what it shows on your Brand SERP for you. You will always have the Twitter branding, obviously.
Then you want to push up the better results from below that you don’t necessarily control. It’s a mistake to think that the results that you think are great - like those amazing reviews that you’ve got on page two - cannot be pushed up to page one. It’s actually pretty easy. Push them up to page one. All you have to do is demonstrate to Google that those reviews accurately represent your business and your service to your customers.
Because Google wants to show on that Brand SERP - and here’s the key - it wants to show its users, who are your audience searching your brand name, the content that is the most valuable, pertinent, useful to them, and that means representative of you. So if you’ve got great reviews and you deserve those great reviews, there is no reason for Google not to rank them. You simply have to encourage it.
And the cherry on the top, as I said earlier, is the Knowledge Panel. But it’s actually not a cherry on the top - it’s the must-have. If you’re not working for that today, you should start working for that today. Because Google’s understanding of the world is going to be the single most important thing in SEO for the next X years - I don’t know how long.
But we’re moving completely away from keywords and inbound links. To simplify vastly and rudely and terribly: Google used to just count words and count inbound links. It now understands - or it’s starting to understand - the world. And it’s starting to be able to say: this is what the person is looking for, and this is the solution. And I don’t just count words and count links to figure out what the best solution is. I understand what the solution is, and how good the provider of that solution is, in terms of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
So once it’s understood who you are, it can apply those three key credibility signals. And it can start to make the decision that you are the best solution for its users. So the key to the future is Google’s understanding of who you are, what you do, who your audience is. If you can get it to understand that, you’ve got a much, much, much better chance of being recommended by Google to its users as the best solution to their problem or the best answer to their question. Understanding is the absolute key.
Now, the glory of rich elements. As I said earlier on, I absolutely love SERP features, rich elements, whatever you want to call them. I call them rich elements simply because I think they’re going to evolve beyond the idea and the concept of SERP features. So, for example, Discover would be a rich element - a rich aspect of what Google is doing which isn’t a search feature. So “rich elements” is a wider point of view. This is saying: let’s prepare for the future and get our vocabulary right so we don’t need to change it tomorrow.
Right now, this is the situation around the world. In the Kalicube database, as I said, we’re tracking 70,000 brands, of which some are German, some are French, some are Italian, some are Dutch, some are Spanish, UK, and the US. And we’ve actually divided them by major brands and smaller brands - local brands, national brands - to get the right measurement. As we’ll see as we go through the data, the right measurement for the country, as opposed to what I think a lot of data sets do and a lot of analysis does, which is take American companies and see how they perform in different countries. We’ve actually taken Spanish companies, Dutch companies, Italian companies, French companies, and German companies in their own country in their own language to get this data. So what I suspect is: those rich elements would be underestimated vastly if we hadn’t done it that way.
But as you can see, I said “death of the blue link” earlier on, and I was being cheeky. Because the blue link isn’t dying - it’s already pretty much died as much as it’s going to die. We’re down to about eight blue links on average, with one and a half, maybe two rich elements per page.
So Fabrice Canel from Bing - who’s the blue link algorithm person - I did an interview with him. I asked him that question. He said, “No, they’re not going to die out. They might reduce slightly.” But you have to remember that Google and Bing have based their entire business model on blue links. So they’re not going to kill them. They need the blue links. It’s the basis, the foundation, of all the rest that’s built on top of it.
What they will do is play around the blue links. But they need to keep the blue links, partially at least, because of the advertising. I think over the next few years they probably will continue to reduce, simply because Google will find other solutions. But they’re solutions we don’t yet know about. So for the moment, for the foreseeable future, blue links remain important.
But as you will have noticed when you’re searching on Google or when you’re looking at the results for the keywords you’re aiming for, blue links are less and less visible. Because as soon as you get a video box which sometimes auto-plays, or image boxes, the eye gets attracted by those. Or the People Also Ask - you suddenly start thinking, “Oh, I wonder about that, I wonder about that.” We’re getting distracted. Google’s pushing us down different rabbit holes. And the blue links are, in my opinion, less and less visible, even though they’re not necessarily going down in number.
Rich sitelinks - incredibly underestimated. 60 percent of brands globally, let’s say, have rich sitelinks. I find that stunningly bad. As a brand, on your Brand SERP, having those rich sitelinks which allow your user or your prospect or your investor or your potential hire to get straight to the page on your website that they want to get to seems to me to be a basic need.
Yeah, we can see here SE Ranking have managed to get theirs, and it’s very relevant. But Google is incredibly good. I’ve got lots of clients where we’ve tried to change them, we’ve looked at why it’s showing particular results in those rich sitelinks. Google is incredibly good at understanding, and it will adapt them country by country for international brands, and even potentially person by person.
And you can see here for SE Ranking - immediately they know the user is going to be interested in plans and prices, or their keyword suggestion tool, or their white label offer for agencies. So it’s understanding the potential intents that the user can have - its user, SE Ranking’s audience - and it’s trying to say: here is the easy path, the effective path, the efficient path for you to get where you want to go within the SE Ranking universe.
How do you do it? There you go, now we’re going to come through now on the practical stuff. I’m not going to go into details. I will assume that either you know something about SEO or you can read up about it. The idea here is to give you an overview of what you can do. And I will remind you, you can watch this whole thing back. I do speak quite quickly and there’s an awful lot to digest. For me, this is all incredibly simple because I’ve been doing it for seven years. And I do realise that for most people it’s kind of a new approach that they haven’t necessarily seen before. And although it’s very simple and it’s not complicated, it’s certainly a lot of information to digest all in one go.
So - good on-page SEO is the key to these rich sitelinks. Meta title, meta description, the content in the page needs to be useful and clear to Google. Useful to the users and clear to Google. Schema markup - incredibly important. Semantic HTML5. And if you look at the schema markup, I would advise you - because you’ll hear a lot in the next slides, and also for any e-commerce site - schema markup is phenomenally important. If you haven’t started looking at schema markup for your website, for your e-commerce site, you really, really, really need to.
And here we’ve got some page types. Adding this really helps Google to understand which one is the contact page, which is the about page, which is the profile page, which is the pricing page, and which is the blog page. Seems obvious to you - isn’t necessarily obvious to a machine. And really, having that content, the meta title, meta description filled in, plus that schema markup, semantic HTML5 - probably don’t need to worry about that so much - but if you can get a meta title that’s clear, a meta description that describes what’s in the page, the content that describes what the user’s doing there, and then using a bit of schema markup to clarify for the machine.
And I’ll just say now: schema markup is basically - if you don’t know what it is - Google’s native language. It’s expressing information to Google in a language it can natively understand and digest. And if you can do that, you’re really doing a service to a machine that is still pretty binary and does need reassurance. And this schema markup gives it reassurance that it has correctly understood what is in the page, what role the page plays. And those ones at the bottom - homepage, contact page, about page, profile page, pricing and blog - just indicate to Google what the role is. And you can immediately see why that helps it with the rich sitelinks. If it can know the role of the page, it can easily know whether it should be showing it in the rich sitelinks, and for whom.
Image boxes. What I see here is that the UK and US have got a lot less, and it seems counterintuitive. But that’s actually because image boxes are relatively low-hanging fruit, and many companies in the UK and the US have already got that fruit and moved on to video boxes. As a rule, video boxes will often replace image boxes, or People Also Ask will replace the image boxes. So what we’re seeing here is: if you’re in one of the other countries, you would want to start looking at, “Yeah, I want to get my image boxes - that’s my low-hanging fruit, easy to get.” And here, Kalicube have got them.
But I also want to look beyond that and start to think: what am I going to be getting next? Because they’re going to get replaced. They’re not the best rich content Google could provide. Videos - definitely preferable when it can get them, most of the time. Obviously in e-commerce it depends on your business. But as a general rule - easy-peasy. Absolutely easy getting good image boxes. Good image SEO and design strategy.
You can see there I’ve got a wonderful design strategy. I would love to say I designed it, but I didn’t. A graphic designer did that. And that was a year ago - I paid somebody to redesign everything, do me a set of colours, and I just use all the colours all the time. They all go together and it’s absolutely wonderful. And a few templates that I use. And the whole thing took three months to trigger the image boxes.
And I don’t want to really say this, but Google’s got some taste. I think it analyses the image and it understands when it’s pretty and when it’s not. And the image boxes tend to be reasonably pretty, given the rubbish that people throw at it. If you look in the full image results, you’ll see how rubbish it can be. And they actually tend to show reasonably pretty images. Obviously it’s still a machine - it doesn’t always get it right and it doesn’t necessarily have good taste. Although taste is obviously completely subjective. So what I think is pretty you don’t - and that might not be pretty to some people here.
So you want to go for quality images, do proper image SEO. You want semantic HTML5 with figcaptions and figures, which shows the machine with code what role the element plays in the page - in this case. And before, it was what role the page plays within the site. So the HTML5 and the schema markup really help us to explain to Google what role a page or a piece of content plays within the site. And the machine is incredibly grateful to you when you can do that.
Metadata within the images. Olesia Korobka, who’s in the middle there - the orange one - watch that podcast episode if you’re interested in extremely advanced image SEO tactics. She’s an absolute genius on that. Well worth listening to that podcast episode - full of knowledge bombs, as people say.
Schema markup, once again. But also: Google will not give you the image boxes if you keep all your images to yourself. You need to distribute them on trusted sources. So you’d want to push them out obviously to your social media channels, but also the wikis are always very good, and also Crunchbase, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo - all of these different sites that navigate around your brand.
And you want a consistent brand image. What I’ve noticed - and once again, this is not scientific - but generally speaking, if you don’t have a consistent brand image, it’s pretty difficult to get the image boxes. Or more difficult, rather.
Video boxes - absolutely no pattern there at all. Video boxes depend on the companies, how good their video is, and importantly, how much their audience engages with the video. But more than that: how much Google sees that they’re engaging with the videos.
Now, if you’re making videos and you’re saying, “Well, my audience are engaging perfectly well but I still don’t have those video boxes,” what that means is you can see they’re engaging, but Google can’t. So you’re losing the bonus that Google sees - that you’re actually very, very helpful to your users. You are expert. You are authoritative. And they do trust you. So if you can’t communicate to Google that your audience is engaging with your videos, you’re missing out big time.
And if you’re creating videos but users aren’t engaging, you’re missing out big time - both because you’re not engaging users, which would potentially bring them on to become customers, but also because Google isn’t going to show you the video boxes, and you’re not going to rank in Google for those videos. Which obviously are part of a wider digital strategy than just your Brand SERP.
Simple, like the images: quality videos, video SEO, semantic HTML5 once again, schema markup. You want to put captions - vastly underrated. Google isn’t very good, in YouTube and Google, at actually understanding what’s being said. I did an interview on my podcast about that which is really, really interesting - a guy called Ahmed. I can’t remember his second name, and I’m terribly sorry to him. I do apologise.
So you do want captions, because if Google has captions, it can understand what is in the video just by reading the text. It doesn’t need to analyse the video and it won’t make mistakes. And it will trust you - if you’ve provided captions, it trusts you to actually be explaining what’s in the video.
You want to distribute on multiple sources, in the same way as images. You would obviously think of YouTube, but you would also like to think of Twitter, which is very popular for videos, surprisingly, for Google. Facebook. When you look at video boxes, I think it’s 80 percent from YouTube, but something like 10 percent from Twitter, seven or eight percent from Facebook. The figures are probably completely wrong, but you can go along to Kalicube and have a look. But YouTube does dominate - but it only dominates because I think that’s where people put most of their content.
And Minéos Merchants from Bing pointed out to me that, in fact, for news, YouTube isn’t very good. If people are looking for news, something like CNN or the BBC will tend to dominate the video boxes, as opposed to YouTube. Because YouTube traditionally hasn’t been terribly real-time.
Obviously, it looks at audience engagement and a consistent brand image. Consistent brand image - I mean, it’s good for you, but Google also sees it. And it’s also really, obviously, incredibly good for your audience, that when they see you on those famous 7, 10, 15 touch points - whatever it might be - they spot you. My life: every time they see you, they see the same visual representation, they see the same voice, they understand it’s you. You’re much more likely to convert when somebody sees that consistent brand image - both visual and vocal and written.
So, you know, I think brand image is incredibly underestimated. I was talking to Anders Sjaastad, who’s a Danish expert in digital marketing, who was saying: actually, Brand SERP is a really, really, really good way of looking at your brand image and starting to build a consistent brand image. Because working on your Brand SERP forces you to be consistent, forces you to think about what your brand image is, what your brand message is. Because it’s reflecting - Google is reflecting back to you what it thinks your brand messaging, your brand image is. And if it’s not reflecting something back that you think is correct, it means that you’re not being consistent. Google is confused.
And moving on - Twitter boxes. Incredibly popular in the UK, for a reason I’ve never understood. Much less so in other countries. Interestingly, Twitter actually feeds direct - it’s got a firehose straight into Google. So I think Twitter is deeply underestimated. Obviously you don’t necessarily have an audience on Twitter, but if you do have an audience on Twitter, it’s well worth thinking about investing in that.
And in terms of client service, I know that a lot of people use Twitter to get hold of client service really quickly. And it can be a very effective way to deal with client problems quickly, sort them out quickly, and prevent snowball, fireball, firestorm effects of bad problems with people that you can sort out really quickly on Twitter. I had a problem with KLM Air France. They sorted it out within the space of five minutes on Twitter. And I didn’t write lots of bad reviews about them, because I thought they were ace, because they sorted my problem out.
How do you do that? Quality tweets, consistently tweeting. It took me six months to trigger Twitter boxes. I’m seeing Tweety Pie over there. And as you can see, that Tweety Pie tweet comes up in 17 seconds. That’s real-time control of your Brand SERP. 17 seconds from the moment I tweeted Tweety Pie to the moment Tweety Pie and Phil Vester appeared on my Brand SERP. So that is actually really interesting. And they tend to appear just underneath your homepage, which gives you almost half of that Brand SERP in complete control.
So you also want to use lots of images. Google wants the images, as you can see here. It won’t show them if you don’t use images. You want to use videos, which also helps with your video strategy. Audience engagement, peer approval - get people within your industry engaging with you, and your audience and your clients. If Google sees that these tweets are being engaged with, that they’re important to your audience, it will show the Twitter boxes after a while. You need to keep tweeting day in and day out. Make sure you keep getting the engagement from a relevant audience. And make sure that Google sees it.
The thing about Twitter is - because it’s got a firehose straight from Twitter - it does see it necessarily. You don’t have to guess.
Oh, and once again we’ve got the consistent brand message.
People Also Ask - incredibly, enormously popular in the UK and the US, but much less so in other countries. My guess on that is that Google will show People Also Ask on Brand SERPs increasingly. Now we’re up to 35 percent. It’s actually, since I took this screenshot, gone up to about 44 percent, I believe. It’s putting this more and more, because it knows that people are asking questions around a brand when they search for a brand, and it can potentially help them with those questions.
And I suspect the reason that the other countries are slow on the uptake is not so much that Google can’t, but that Google simply doesn’t have decent answers. So there’s a great opportunity: if you’re not working in English or in one of the main English-language countries, Google is desperately looking for quality answers to simple questions to fill the People Also Ask - not only on the Brand SERP but also in all the other results.
And I have this client Ubigi. We saw it on the previous screen. You’ll see it there. They’ve got four questions on their Brand SERP and they answer all of them. Now, that seems obvious, but it isn’t. 67.8 percent of brands who have People Also Ask on their Brand SERPs don’t even answer one of the questions. 3.5 percent answer all three or four questions, including my client.
How do we do that? We built an FAQ section. One question on one page - none of this accordion stuff. Not a good user experience, for multiple reasons. I invite you to look on SEMrush - I did a whole presentation on that which basically explains why you need to do it one question per page.
You answer questions around and about your brand first, to make sure you nail all client questions that people have. They don’t come to your site necessarily to search for the answers to their questions about your customer service or their purchase or your products. They often search in Google. Think about how you act when you’re buying or when you’re interacting with a company - you tend to just search in Google and take the answers that Google gives.
So as a brand, you really want to be answering those questions about your brand. That will mean you’ll dominate the questions on your Brand SERP, but also questions around your brand - the branded search that I talked about earlier on that I don’t talk about, but I will mention nonetheless. And then we moved on to answer questions around the brand, about the topics.
And what we’ve seen there is an incredible hockey stick of traffic, and it’s been astonishing. We’re actually now ranking for very short-head terms. They’re in the eSIM business, and we’re ranking now number four or five, just underneath Apple, for the term “eSIM” - very short-head query, big volume. And we did that not by making the best page in the world with loads of links. It doesn’t have any links. We did it by answering questions about the brand and around the brand, proved ourselves to be expert and authoritative and trustworthy in terms of giving the right answer to Google’s user, and it ended up promoting even the short-head queries to the top. Excuse me, I just knocked over my water bottle.
Next - Knowledge Panels. And we’re almost home. And it’s actually almost been an hour, because I can’t stop talking.
Knowledge Panels - my favourite topic of the moment. Knowledge Panels are spreading around the world like wildfire. As I said earlier on, this is the visual representation of Google’s understanding of your brand. And Google’s understanding of your brand is the fundamentally single most important thing for your brand in the years to come. You have to start working on how Google understands who you are, what you do, who your audience is.
And the Knowledge Panel represents the fact that it’s understood who you are, what you do, who your audience is. And it’s confident it’s understood who you are, what you do, and who your audience is. And that confidence - beyond understanding - that confidence is the absolute key. We can understand something but not be confident. Google wants to understand, be confident. Confident enough to present it to its users.
So how do you do it? It’s an information strategy. You need an entity home on your site. You need somewhere where your entity lives. An entity is a thing - so it can be a brand, a person, a website, a city, a building, even a concept is an entity. But your entity home is for your company or your website. It doesn’t matter - it needs to have a place. Google needs to have a place where it can go to get the information from the horse’s mouth, as we say in English. From you: who you think you are, what you think you do, and who you think your audience is.
It won’t believe you on your own word, because it will then go out and look for corroborative information that proves, that confirms what you say. If you can make sure that that message - what you’re saying on your entity home - is clear and coherent across the entire web, everything that already exists, Google will start to understand and be confident it’s understood.
If you can then add more information in more places - independent, relevant, authoritative, trusted sites - you’ll notice that we’ve got “authoritative” and “trusted” in there. EAT comes back yet again. Then Google will become even more confident.
And then you need to simply, on your entity home where you’ve explained who you are, what you’re doing, who your audience is - point to all of this corroborative information. So the machine goes from the entity home and says: “Right, confirmed. Right, confirmed. Right, confirmed. Right, confirmed. I now understand. Confirmed, confirmed, confirmed. And I now believe and I’m convinced.”
And John Mueller the other day, as I said, was talking about reconciliation. Google calls it reconciliation - I’m calling it the entity home. But basically what they are doing is trying to reconcile the fragmented information about your brand across the internet. And they cannot do it - and he says this explicitly in Google Webmaster Hangouts - he says explicitly they cannot do it effectively without an entity home. He doesn’t use the term “entity home,” but he says they cannot do it effectively without a reference point for that entity, for that brand. And that reference point, preferably for you, is going to be a page on your website.
And here you can see - these are my examples of my work. On the left-hand side, a client of mine, SE Ranking - great SEO tool. If you’re interested in SEO tools, I actually really am enjoying using their platform, as well as working with them on their Brand SERP. Then we have Kalicube at the top there, myself, and then Daddy Koala, who’s one of my experiments that I’ve been doing over the last few years. A yellow koala from the cartoon with the blue dog from earlier on.
I’ve built the family tree of these fictional characters in Google’s brain. It now understands, as you can see, that Daddy Koala is Mummy Koala’s husband and he’s related to Grandpa Koala. And the description, as you can see in the Knowledge Panel, isn’t from Wikipedia. Daddy Koala is not in Wikipedia. The description for Daddy Koala comes from my own website. So Google understands that the best place to find information about Daddy Koala, the fictional character created by Jason and Véronique Barnard, is on Jason Barnard’s site. Which sounds logical, but it took a lot of work for me to convince Google that this is the place to look for the information about Daddy Koala, and that I am the authoritative source for Daddy Koala. You need to be the authoritative source about yourself.
So, in conclusion, what I just described is simply, for me, a rounded, balanced content strategy. And it’s reflected in the control and the quality of your Brand SERP. If your Brand SERP looks qualitatively wonderful and you control it, more than probable you have a balanced, rounded, effective content and marketing strategy.
So a reminder: when you improve your Brand SERP - your Google business card, let’s call it - you’re more convincing to your audience, you boost Google’s opinion of you (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), you improve your digital ecosystem. And I think, within this talk, I’ve probably covered pretty much every step of your acquisition funnel to the moment when somebody comes to your site to actually start buying from you.
Tracking, measuring, and improving your Brand SERP is a strategic necessity, for me. Something that most brands - 99.999 percent of brands - completely overlook. Tracking, measuring, improving your Brand SERP: strategically incredibly important, incredibly overlooked.
And obviously, I’ve now built the platform Kalicube Pro, with data partners WordLift, Authoritas, and SE Ranking, to optimise your brand, to manage your Knowledge Panel through a SaaS platform. And I haven’t quite finished it yet. But I’ve been stunned at how much I’ve learned by building this platform to help other people to be able to do what I can do with Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels - which is optimise Brand SERPs, make them look really, really positive, accurate, convincing, and manage the Knowledge Panels once we’ve triggered them, and make sure the information on the right-hand side that Google is showing as fact is true, is accurate, and represents my brand message and my brand voice.
Thank you very much.
Victor Aldea: Wow, that was amazing, Jason. I’ve learned so much. Sometimes we take for granted that Google is going to understand who we are and what we do, our company, and sometimes we need to give some cues so that we get results. And we have a couple of questions related to that.
Jason Barnard: Can I just jump in quickly? You didn’t ask a question, but I’m going to take it as a question.
Victor Aldea: Yes, of course.
Jason Barnard: And this is really quick: Google does tend to understand pretty much what’s being said in a page. The work we need to do is to give it supporting information and help it to be confident. And there’s the key: it’s confidence in that understanding.
Victor Aldea: Absolutely. We have a couple of questions related to that. For example, Susmit is asking: how can companies or brands focus on the trust factor which can help the overall SERP for the brand? That’s related to that - how can we focus on transmitting to Google that Google should trust us as a source for information?
Jason Barnard: Yeah. Now, one really important thing to remember about Google’s algorithms today is that they’re all now machine-learning driven. So ranking factors and understanding exactly how the machine perceives the world is now impossible. What we do know is how Google and Bing are measuring and how they’re judging the machine.
And Fabrice Canel from Bing said it very well: if we can understand what metrics they’re using to measure the success or failure of the machine, we can start to understand how we can improve our performances with that machine. Because basically what they do is they take results and they feed them back into the machine saying, “This is good, this is bad, this was a mistake, this was great.” So you’ve got this corrective data that they’re feeding back into the machine, and the supporting data which is saying, “Yes, you were right” - the thumbs-up data, as it were.
So for the trust aspect, we can’t know exactly what it’s looking at. But it’s very clear that the metrics that are being used are going to be around human perception of that trustworthiness. And if you look at trustworthiness, how do we perceive it? It’s star reviews, obviously, number one. But then it’s also user engagement, peer approval. Are other people in your industry referring to you as being an expert, or being somebody to be looked to for answers to your questions?
For example, in my industry, the SEO industry: is Bill Slawski tweeting me questions? If he is, then I’m obviously an expert. So it’s peer approval. And it’s also engagement by your audience.
Now, I think what we fail to realise is - once again - you don’t want to engage an audience who aren’t yours, because Google can see that. Or even if it can’t see it, you’re confusing it. It’s thinking, “Oh, this is their audience,” but it’s the wrong audience. So it’s going to send you the wrong people. That’s pointless. But if it can see that you’re engaging your audience on a regular basis, then it knows that you’re serving that audience incredibly well. And it’s more likely to trust you, because it knows that your audience trusts you.
Victor Aldea: Yeah. We have another question from Miriam. She’s asking: how long do you think improving my Brand SERP can take? How long do you think you should work in order to see a difference? If you have 10 blue links, how long do you think you have to work on improving your Brand SERP?
Jason Barnard: Well, I’ve got lots of examples. For Kalicube, from the moment I decided to rethink my entire image strategy to the moment I got the image boxes was a couple of months. So it can be quite quick. If you want to trigger the rich sitelinks underneath your homepage, I had a client who did that in a week. And that same client also had a couple of problematic results on that first page, and it took me two weeks to get rid of one of them.
And so - you wouldn’t expect to trigger video boxes if you didn’t have a video strategy beforehand. It would take you, let’s say, six months to build that video strategy up. But that being said, I was very surprised the other day with one of my clients when we suddenly got video boxes. We were very surprised because she didn’t have any videos on YouTube at all. She created one video, put it on YouTube, reposted it to Facebook, and Google gave her the video boxes. Because it had seen that she already did lots of small chunks of video on Facebook and Twitter. And she got the video boxes with Facebook, Twitter, and one YouTube.
So it can be very quick if you’ve already got something that exists that Google can use, and it sees it as being valuable, and it’s just that it doesn’t have enough content to fill it up. If you’re starting the entire strategy for your Twitter or for your video boxes, for your images, it’s going to take several months.
Victor Aldea: Oh. And one question from Christy that we were talking about before: is it worth working on Knowledge Panels for individual products?
Jason Barnard: The answer is: in the short term, you’re not going to get much traction from it unless you’re in the US. In the US, product Knowledge Panels are popping up all over the place, and this is going to be phenomenally important. But yes, definitely, definitely something you want to be looking at, and you want to start building now.
But I would argue that you should start with your brand. If Google can understand your brand and you’ve got a brand Knowledge Panel, you can start to filter down to all the smaller elements underneath: the subsidiary companies, the products, and so on and so forth.
Doing it the other way - starting with the products and then trying to get the overarching entity and Knowledge Panel - is going to be more difficult. Because Google understands entities and things and brands and products and people by their relationships to things, people, brands, products it’s already understood. So if you have a brand at the top and it’s understood the brand, it’s easy to hook products onto it. If you’ve got multiple products, it’s actually quite difficult, because the products don’t have a relationship between them except through the brand. So it needs the brand, I would argue, to be able to effectively understand products. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it - it’s just more difficult.
And the thing about product Knowledge Panels - basically, Brand SERPs work for any entity. It can work for a person, a website, a podcast, a job board, a product, obviously. Any entity, anything, is basically going to be a Brand SERP, in the sense that Google’s showing what it knows about that thing - both on the left-hand side as recommendations, on the right-hand side as knowledge.
And WordLift, a guy called Andrea Volpini - I mentioned them earlier on - have had incredible success in the e-commerce space with product Knowledge Panels. And they’re the big experts in that. I mean, for me, if I start looking at product Knowledge Panels, I’m never going to get my head out of the rabbit hole. Just brands and people is pretty big. And I do do products - I can help with products. But the other thing about products is: you’ve only got one brand, but you’ve got like a thousand products. You’re not going to work on them individually one by one, in the way that one would for the overarching brand.
And WordLift - what they do is take your database, your product listing, and they leverage it into the schema markup automatically, which is a much, much more effective and efficient way to approach this. Obviously not quite so detailed - and doing it product by product is doing it for all the products in one go, which I would argue is actually a more intelligent approach. It’s to say: I have a thousand products, let’s put the schema markup, let’s give Google - as I was saying earlier on - all this information that is already in the page, that is already probably understood, but in its own native language, which is schema markup. So that it’s increasingly confident that it’s correctly understood.
And not just for those little rich snippets with the prices and the stars that we all do schema markup for - it goes well beyond that. It’s the fundamental understanding of who you are, what you do, who you serve, and in this case, what products you sell. That Google is confident it’s understood that this brand sells this product, this product, this product, this product. If it’s confident, it’s going to be much more likely to present you as a solution to its users.
Victor Aldea: Amazing. Yeah. This is such a complex topic.
Jason Barnard: It doesn’t look like it when you look at my face, does it?
Victor Aldea: No, no, no. I mean, it is absolutely complex because, as I said, sometimes we give Google too much credit and think that it knows everything about our brand. And sometimes we have to work in order to give it the cues for it to recognise, yeah, that we are indeed expert.
Jason Barnard: Yes, exactly. And when we look at a result from Google, we think, “Oh, isn’t Google stupid?” It’s absolutely not. We’ve explained it badly. You’re educating Google here. If Google’s getting it wrong, you’ve explained it badly. It’s your fault. Google isn’t stupid. It’s just the information isn’t presented in a way that Google can understand it.
You’re educating, let’s say, a child. A child will not understand it if you explain things badly. If you explain things in a fragmented manner, a child will not understand. When you explain things in a very structured manner, it will understand. And it will be confident if multiple people explain it in a structured manner. So that’s the key: explain in a structured manner, and get lots of people, lots of other sources, to confirm what it is you’re saying. Sources that it trusts. Much like a child trusts the head teacher, the postman, the baker down the road, the grandma, the mother, the father, the sister, the brother - whoever it might be. So that it gets to the point that says, “I have understood. And I am so confident I’ve understood, I will go to the playground, I will shout it out to all my friends.”
A Knowledge Panel is Google shouting out in the playground: “I’ve understood! Look at me, aren’t I clever?” That’s what Google’s doing.
Victor Aldea: I think that sums it up quite nicely. Thank you so much, Jason, for being here today. And thank you, everyone, for sticking with us for this webinar. We’ll see you in the next one. Thank you so much, Jason, again.
Jason Barnard: Yes, thank you, Victor. That was a lot of fun. And I’m giggling internally, vastly. And it was amazing - it’s a lovely platform to be on. And I thought the questions were great. And I loved the thumbs up and the little comments. I was watching the chat as we went along. Thank you to the people who were saying how lovely it was. And the questions - and Genevieve and Christy and Ciara and everybody else. I’m in love with the world today.
Victor Aldea: We will be uploading this video to our YouTube channel. Make sure to follow us. Make sure to follow Jason. He’s doing an awesome job with his content. Again, see you very soon.
Jason Barnard: Bye-bye. Thank you very much. Have fun, everybody. Bye-bye.
