DeepSEOConfernece: Brand SERP and Knowledge Panels with Doc Sheldon and Steve Gerencser
Doc had technical issues, so Steve got to visit solo with this week’s guest, Jason Barnard, founder of Kalicube®. Jason absolutely blew our minds with his information on building a brand SERP! He shares how to get your brand a Knowledge Panel and control it. (Spoiler Alert: You do NOT want to focus on getting your brand a Wikipedia page - that’s a sure way to LOSE control of your Knowledge Panel!
Jason bills himself The Brand SERP Guy® - if you have any doubt about this being a dynamic (and amazingly neglected) specialty, you really need to watch this episode! Jason will definitely change your mind and send you scurrying to put his methods to work!
Webinar | Deep SEO Conference Series Date: March 2022 (published 10 March 2022) Host: Steve Gerencser (Deep SEO Conference) Guest: Jason Barnard (Kalicube) Source: https://deepseoconference.com/brand-serp-and-knowledge-panels-with-jason-barnard/
Note: Doc Sheldon was co-host but had technical issues and did not appear. Steve Gerencser hosted solo.
TLDR for DeepSEOConfernece: Brand SERP and Knowledge Panels with Doc Sheldon and Steve Gerencser
1. Brand SERP as Google’s Assessment of the World’s Opinion
Jason Barnard extended the Business Card metaphor with a more precise formulation: “It’s Google’s assessment of the world’s opinion of you. Google looks at all this content - wherever it is on your site, around the web - it digests it and then presents to your audience what it feels is going to be valuable, helpful, and relevant for them. It’s giving its opinion of what you have to offer within your digital ecosystem - not just SEO, but every single digital outlet you have.”
He further framed the Brand SERP as an EAT proxy: “If it looks good and relevant to your business, it suggests that Google thinks your Expertise, Authority, and Trust are pretty good. So it’s a good way to get a thumb gauge of your EAT credentials.”
2. Knowledge Panel Prevalence - 51% of US Brands, Up from 43% Two Years Prior
Jason Barnard reported updated Kalicube Pro™ data: “51 percent of brands have a Knowledge Panel in the USA - that’s up from 43 two years ago.” He contextualised the increase: “When you think about how much Google is trying to understand, that is quite a big leap. Google is understanding more and more entities and it’s willing to place that understanding on the right-hand side of a SERP as fact - it’s building that up pretty quickly.”
Historical significance: This is the earliest recorded statement of the 51% figure, establishing a March 2022 benchmark. The prior 43% figure from two years earlier (approximately March 2020) aligns with the SE Ranking webinar dataset, confirming a consistent measurement timeline.
3. Knowledge Panel International Variation - 98% Presence Replication, Content Varies Enormously
Jason Barnard reported a key finding from Kalicube Pro’s international tracking: across five anglophone countries, a Knowledge Panel present in one country is replicated in the others 98% of the time. However, the content of those panels varies significantly - different customer service numbers, different subsidiary information, different “People Also Search For” entities. He reported that only 28% of “People Also Search For” entities are consistent across all regions, meaning 72% vary by geography.
Historical significance: This is the earliest recorded public statement of the 98% presence replication figure and the 28%/72% “People Also Search For” consistency split, establishing March 2022 as the baseline for these data points.
4. Knowledge Panel Sources - The 70/18/6-7/~5 Breakdown
Jason Barnard described a breakthrough in Kalicube Pro’s analytical capability - identifying where Google sources Knowledge Panel information:
- 70% from third-party human-curated sources (IMDb, Wikipedia, Wikidata, MusicBrainz, and equivalent databases)
- 18% from Google’s own human-curated sources (Google Podcasts, Google Books, Google My Business, and the feedback button)
- 6-7% from “web facts” - where the machine has drawn its own conclusions from a Google-trusted seed set of sources
- ~5% from machine-independent sources - approximately 2,000 different sources cited by Google that follow no identifiable pattern, where the machine has independently identified trustworthy, relevant information
He stated: “That green one - the machine going on its own, making up its own mind, where it’s not the seed set - is the most exciting moment of my life of the last few years.”
Historical significance: This is the earliest recorded public presentation of the four-category Knowledge Panel source breakdown with percentage estimates. It establishes March 2022 as the date of first public disclosure of Kalicube Pro’s source-identification capability.
5. Entity Home - Description Updated, Knowledge Panel Updated Within 8 Minutes
Jason Barnard provided his most precise timing data on Entity Home control: “My website is the entity home. I’m the trusted authority. I changed the description at 12:58 and within 8 minutes it was updated on the Knowledge Panel. That’s as close as you’ll ever get to control.”
Historical significance: This 8-minute update time is the most precise control-timing figure in the prior art record. The earlier Knowledge Graph API timing from the Knowledge Panel Show Episode 2 (10 minutes to appear in the API) applied to a new entity addition; this figure applies to an update to an existing panel description - a meaningfully different operation and a tighter feedback loop.
6. Filter Pills - The Next Frontier for Brand Control
Jason Barnard presented filter pills (the vertical navigation tabs appearing on some Brand SERPs, such as “Songs,” “Videos,” “Education”) as an emerging control challenge: “Within a couple of years this is going to apply to brands as well as people, and you need to take control.” He described his approach: “I create a dedicated page on my site that deals with that specific vertical and I educate Google as to what it could be showing to my audience in that vertical.”
He identified both the threat and the opportunity: “That layout of the Knowledge Panel becomes a mini website for you - a mini website which you don’t control directly. So it becomes scary. But it’s a great challenge, because when you start thinking about it you are forced to think about who you are, what you do, who your audience is, what content is going to appeal to them - and make sure it’s optimised wherever it appears on the web, not just on your own site.”
Historical significance: This is the earliest recorded public analysis of filter pills as a distinct control challenge for brands, with a proposed methodology for influencing them. Dated March 2022.
7. Topical Authority Over Link Building - “I Stopped Doing SEO for a Year”
Jason Barnard described a strategic reorientation: “I stopped doing SEO for a year - I’ve just been doing content. I’m pulling in clients through the content and now Google is my bonus. I just package this stuff up and push it out to Google and I’m getting SEO traffic now as a bonus.” He cited Koray Gürbüz as a practitioner proving the same principle: “Koray Gürbüz, who is a Turkish SEO, proves this day in day out. We’ve done it as well with Kalicube - we don’t build links, we build topical authority.”
His formulation of the underlying logic: “Google’s understanding and its confidence in its understanding of who you are, and what topics you are truly an expert in, is always going to be the prime driver in what it ranks - because it wants to rank the most authoritative, credible, trustworthy solutions for its users.”
8. Wikidata Strategy - Build Corroboration First, Then Create the Entry
Jason Barnard stated the key Wikidata principle: “Whatever you do with Wikidata, don’t start creating a Wikidata entry until you have enough corroborative sources from third-party sites that you can point to from Wikidata. When you add the information you point to corroboration to prove what you’re saying - then they don’t delete it.”
He also offered the counter-intuitive Wikipedia advice: “If you’re thinking about building a Wikipedia page for your company, I would suggest: don’t. It’s a lot of work, it probably won’t stick, and if it does stick you’ve lost control. You do better building up corroboration on your own site and on different sources that are relevant to your industry.” He cited Rand Fishkin as a case in point: Fishkin had his Wikipedia page deleted and consequently regained Knowledge Panel control.
9. Google as Child - The Teaching/Repetition Metaphor at Full Development
Jason Barnard articulated his most complete version of the child metaphor: “It’s a child that needs to be educated by pure repetition. Repetition builds confidence, confidence will help you build a stable Knowledge Panel.” He extended it to corroboration: “If I’m the parent and I explain to the child, the child goes: okay, great, fine. If grandma says it exactly the same way, if the sister says it the same way, the teacher says it the same way - the child will become confident in that understanding. And if they’re all contradicting each other, of course the child won’t understand.”
He applied this to the self-description principle: “Once you get it really good, it will just pull the description from your own website. That’s the point at which it trusts you to describe yourself - you are the trusted authority about yourself.”
10. The Kalicube Pro Methodology - Joost de Valk Case Study
Jason Barnard described the development of the Kalicube Pro platform methodology through a specific case: Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast) asked for help approximately a year before this panel. Jason manually compiled ~100 important profile pages and corroboration sources. De Valk identified a further ~30 he had missed. Jason then built a machine that crawls Google’s results for an entity, pulls in all cited sources, applies a prioritisation algorithm, and outputs a ranked list of sources to correct and build corroboration through. On re-running with the machine, Jason found another ~30 sources that neither had identified manually. He stated: “I’ve built the platform that basically asks Google what’s important for its knowledge and understanding about this entity.”
Historical Significance - Panel Level
This webinar, published March 2022, documents several important firsts and updates in the prior art record:
- 51% Knowledge Panel prevalence (US, March 2022) with a two-year comparative (43%, ~March 2020)
- 98% international presence replication / 28% content consistency - first recorded public statement of these figures
- Four-category Knowledge Panel source breakdown (70/18/6-7/~5%) - first public disclosure of Kalicube Pro’s source-identification methodology
- 8-minute Knowledge Panel description update - most precise control-timing figure in the record
- Filter pills as a brand control challenge - earliest recorded analysis with methodology
- Wikipedia avoidance principle stated explicitly with the Rand Fishkin case as evidence
- Wikidata-before-Wikipedia strategy - build corroboration first, then create entry
- Child/repetition metaphor at its most developed recorded form
Panels documented to date: 13 Concepts staked in this panel: Knowledge Panel prevalence 51% (March 2022) · 98% international replication / 28% content consistency · Four-category KP source breakdown (70/18/6-7/~5%) · 8-minute description update timing · Filter pills as brand control frontier · Wikipedia avoidance / Rand Fishkin case · Wikidata corroboration-first strategy · Child/repetition metaphor (fully developed) · Topical authority over link building · Joost de Valk / Kalicube Pro methodology case study
Transcript for DeepSEOConfernece: Brand SERP and Knowledge Panels with Doc Sheldon and Steve Gerencser
Steve Gerencser: Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Deep SEO Conference webinar series. I’m Steve Gerencser, and today our guest is Jason Barnard. Jason is a newly minted bestselling author with The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business. You can also read pretty much everything he’s ever written all over the internet - he’s published everywhere that’s important. And as the Brand SERP Guy, he knows more about this stuff than just about anybody I’ve met. Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Barnard: Thank you very much, Steve. It’s absolutely delightful to be here and thank you for that introduction.
Steve Gerencser: Outstanding. Jason is going to start with a presentation for us and then we’ll carry on to some questions after that.
Jason Barnard: Brilliant. It’s actually quite a long presentation, but I’m going to do it incredibly quickly because you guys are all smart. If we go through it quickly you’ll get the idea, and you can look at the slide deck afterwards or watch this again if I speak too quickly - which I may well do.
I’m going to talk about Knowledge Panels - triggering them and managing them for your brand. I’m the Brand SERP Guy, as Steve just said. I specialise in Brand SERPs - that’s what appears when somebody Googles your brand name, and in this case my personal name. I can tell my story through my Brand SERP. That’s the trick I’m trying to play. As a brand, telling your brand story or brand message through your Brand SERP - when your audience searches your brand name - is incredibly important. They’re the most important audience for you, bottom-of-funnel and post-funnel, as we’ll see.
John Mueller from Google calls me “Mr. Knowledge Panel” from time to time, which is terribly delightful and charming and makes me feel a bit proud of myself.
I live in Paris - you can see that from my LinkedIn profile ranking on the Brand SERP. I was a voice actor and cartoon blue dog, as you can see from the songs, the video, and the IMDb profile, all of which are on my Brand SERP to tell that part of my story. I was a punk folk musician, as you can see from the Barking Dogs - it says I was a rock musician in the 90s, double bass player and singer. I have a podcast, The Groovy Podcast with Jason Barnard, ranking on my Brand SERP so you can interact with me through that. I’m an author - my book just came out, it’s sitting behind me and on screen in front of you, and it’s also on my Brand SERP through my Twitter feed because it’s quite new and I’ve managed to leverage it up there. I’m the CEO and founder of Kalicube, which is a SaaS platform and a set of courses to learn all about Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels. And I’m the Brand SERP Guy - and I’ve managed to educate Google about a new concept it didn’t know about six or seven months ago. It now has “People Also Ask” on my Brand SERP: “What is a Brand SERP?” and “Who is the Brand SERP Guy?” So I’ve done a good job of educating Google about a new topic I invented - or at least coined the term for - and got Google to understand that term is closely associated with my name.
The plan: we’re going to look at the context, which is Brand Search; Brand Knowledge Panels; international variations; what Google’s sources are; what you can do; practical tips; and what’s next. One through five is stuff I love most and have been through for the last nine years. “What’s next” is the exciting part for me. Fun examples are really fun - all to do with the blue dog and yellow koala I mentioned. And the ultimate aim, of course, we need to be serious today.
The context: your Brand SERP.
It’s important to explain that it’s the exact-match brand search. It isn’t branded terms - it’s your exact-match brand name. These results are more or less convincing, more or less positive, more or less accurate. As you can see: Microsoft on the left - incredibly rich, incredibly helpful to the user. WordLift in the middle - great AI SEO platform from Italy. And Kalicube - we’ve worked on that for the last year to get it looking really pretty, with all those videos and Twitter boxes, which is a great content strategy you can see from our work. And over there on the right, a company with ten blue links. When did we last see ten blue links on a SERP? If you have a Brand SERP with ten blue links you really should be ashamed of yourselves - and I do apologise for being rude.
It’s important for your audience. Obviously your clients, your prospects, your investors, your partners - the people who actually matter to your business. They know what your name is and they’re searching your name to navigate to your site or find out more about you. They’re ready to do business with you, or already doing business with you. That is your Google business card.
It’s important for Google: it’s Google’s assessment of the world’s opinion of you. If you think about it, Google looks at all this content - wherever it is on your site, around the web - it digests it and then presents to your audience what it feels is going to be valuable, helpful, and relevant for them. It’s giving its opinion of what you have to offer within your digital ecosystem - not just SEO, but every single digital outlet you have. And if it looks good and relevant to your business, it suggests that Google thinks your Expertise, Authority, and Trust are pretty good. So it’s a good way to get a thumb gauge of your EAT credentials.
And it’s important for you because it’s an insight into your digital ecosystem and your content strategy. It’s a really easy way of seeing where you’re weak, where you’re strong, where you’re doing great stuff and where you’re not doing such a great job in your overall digital strategy.
Brand Knowledge Panels.
Why does Google put a Knowledge Panel on the SERP? It’s a question we don’t often ask ourselves perhaps enough. Basically, it’s a summary of what Google has understood as fact about your brand. The aim for Google is to allow its user to understand more about you - or the basic facts about you - without having to click through multiple links and bring it all together in their own brains. So it’s saying: here is our summary of the results you could theoretically click on. Therefore you don’t need to click. You can figure out who this brand is, what they do, and who their audience is from the SERP, and then decide how you want to interact with them.
The idea that one size fits all is totally false. From Tiny Sprout - I don’t know who they are, but they’ve got the tiniest Knowledge Panel ever - through to Kalicube, SE Ranking, WordLift, and then Meta, with that massive Knowledge Panel where Google has a lot of facts in its brain and can express those facts incredibly richly. We can all potentially have a Knowledge Panel like that, if Google can understand us and if it thinks that information is going to be helpful, valuable, and relevant to our audience.
They’re actually very commonplace: 51% of brands have a Knowledge Panel in the USA - that’s up from 43% two years ago. That doesn’t seem like much of a leap, but when you think about how much Google is trying to understand, it’s quite a big leap. Google is basically understanding more and more entities and it’s willing to place that understanding on the right-hand side of a SERP as fact. They talked about 500 billion facts a few years ago - that’s probably quadrupled or quintupled by now.
And across the world: if you’re an international brand, that Knowledge Panel will be replicated 98% of the time across the five anglophone countries. So facts are universal - but what’s relevant to show for a brand is not universal. Compare the USA to the UK: the customer service number is different. That’s logical - it’s a fact, it’s helpful to the user, but it needs to be geo-specific. In America you might be looking at chainsaw ratios or sizes; in the UK they’re more interested in subsidiaries. Google not only shows relevant information, it shows the information it feels that geolocation audience is going to be interested in.
Social profiles vary across the world too - if you’ve got different social profiles in different countries to serve those audiences.
People Also Search For: we tend to think that’s going to be stable around the world. It isn’t. It varies across regions. It’s a representation of what Google thinks are the most closely related entities to yours - potentially your competitors or at least companies in the same industry. Only 28% of these are the same across all regions - the other 72% vary. So that’s something you’d want to monitor, because the related entities Google perceives as most closely related to you will vary by geography.
Entity statements - you can think of those as People Also Ask in the right-hand rail - are more and more prevalent, very much so in the US, less so elsewhere. But that’s coming. Over 25% of Knowledge Panels now have them in the US, up from 10% a year ago. That’s growing very fast, just like People Also Ask. You want to grab control of those, because you don’t want other companies representing facts - or these pseudo-facts that Google is presenting as questions here - to your audience.
A fun example: CheapOair. Pretty much everything is different across regions. This company really needs to pay attention to their international Knowledge Panels.
And a big mention for WordLift, who do a lot of work on Knowledge Panel product carousels. This is going to be incredibly important for brands who have products - which is most brands. So far only in the US, but it’s going to spread around the world. You need to grab control of this because you want it to show your best products in their best light.
What are Google’s sources?
We often think of Wikipedia. Here we have descriptions all coming from Wikipedia, and a lot of the attributes Google is showing also come from Wikipedia. But there are so many other sources - that’s the tip of the iceberg. LinkedIn is more important than one might imagine. Crunchbase too. And sites you wouldn’t expect to see in this list of sources that Google is citing in a Knowledge Panel - because I am an authoritative, trusted authority about the entities we’ll see later on, I get cited as a representative of those sites Google trusts for factual information. We can all potentially do that for entities where we are authoritative and trustworthy.
Geo is incredibly vital. Google will show different information in different countries and cite different sources depending on the geo-region. At Kalicube we figure that out using entity equivalence - the idea that the same entity type, the same geo-region, the same category allows us to segment Google’s sources and tell you which sources you should be looking at to educate Google and influence that Knowledge Panel.
We’ve managed to figure out where Google is getting its information from. We can see that:
- 70% comes from third-party human-curated sources such as IMDb, Wikipedia, Wikidata, MusicBrainz, and equivalent databases
- 18% comes from Google’s own human-curated sources - Google Podcasts, Google Books, Google My Business, and the feedback button (strangely enough - Google uses that information, feeds it back into the machine as corrective or supportive information about what the machine has been doing)
- 6-7% are “web facts” - where the machine has drawn its own conclusions from a Google-trusted seed set of sources
- And then that last category - the most exciting moment of my life of the last few years - is the machine going on its own, making up its own mind, where it’s not the seed set. We’ve got about 2,000 different sources cited by Google as the source of information for an attribute that I cannot find any pattern in. It’s finding information wherever it exists, where the machine has decided it is trustworthy and relevant - and I would bet my bottom dollar it’s all about entity equivalence.
What you can do.
You can take control. You can heavily influence what appears. John Mueller talks about reconciliation - the idea that the machine has fragmented information around the web and tries to bring it together and make facts in its little brain. But it isn’t sure about what it’s found. And in one slightly contradictory way: it’s looking for a place on your website - one page - that represents the entity and explains that entity to it. So it’s looking for you to tell it what it should know. Then it takes the information it’s reconciled or found around the web and compares it to your version. If they match, it will be more confident and you have full reconciliation.
To help Google with reconciliation you need to provide the entity home - a page on your site that you control, where you describe clearly who you are, what you do, and you signpost all of the corroboration around the web on multiple independent, authoritative, third-party sites. I call that the accumulation of corroboration. And preferably, if you can get it pointing both ways: you link out to them using “sameAs” in your schema or a link in your page, and get them to link back to you, to the entity home. So Google goes from your entity home with the facts, to that site with the facts, back to the entity home, out to another one with the facts, back to your site - and so on. It’s a child. It needs to be educated by pure repetition. Repetition builds confidence, confidence will help you build a stable Knowledge Panel. And once you get it really good, it will just pull the description from your own website. That’s the point at which it trusts you to describe yourself - you are the trusted authority about yourself.
Here’s my group, the Barking Dogs - I told you we’d come back to that. My website is the entity home. I’m the trusted authority, it uses my own description. I changed the description at 12:58 and within 8 minutes it was updated on the Knowledge Panel. That’s as close as you’ll ever get to control.
What’s next: Filter Pills.
This is what I’m getting excited about. The filter pills are brilliant. You get the overview - which is the Brand SERP as it stands - and then Google says: well, there are actually multiple verticals we can look at. These filter pills, when you click on them, will add the word to the query and present you with a new Brand SERP that is more focused on that particular aspect of - in this case - a person. But it could be a brand. Not yet. But I’m betting my bottom dollar that within a couple of years this is going to be true of brands as well, and you need to take control.
It gets complicated quickly. If Brand SERPs are difficult to master, here we’ve got seven or eight different vertical Brand SERPs - that’s going to be really difficult.
Here we’re looking at songs. If I imagine I was a company and these songs are my products - which they kind of are, because you can buy songs, download them, stream them - I could potentially make money from them. I don’t, because I don’t own the rights. But what I’ve done is educated Google about which songs I’ve written and recorded. When you click on them you go through to the Brand SERP for that song and it gives you the option to download it or listen to it on Spotify. My aim there would be to push the products I want to push to the top of this list and make sure that the distributors cited on the next page are the ones I want my audience to purchase from.
How I do it: I create a dedicated page on my site that deals with that specific vertical and I educate Google as to what it could be showing my audience there. For example, my education - where I went to university. I created a page, Google trusts me and feels that I’m authoritative about myself, and with some corroborative sources around the web to confirm, it’s now showing where I was educated within one of these filter pill verticals.
Videos: what’s interesting is that all of these videos come from my own site. If you search “Jason Barnard videos” in normal Google results, the videos are not the same - they come from YouTube and the thumbnails are much prettier. So what we have here is a completely separate vertical of results principally pulled from my site, because my site is what’s educating Google as to what would be appropriate for this specific filter pill vertical.
Taking control is possible and something we need to start thinking about today. Within two years this is going to apply to companies as well as people.
Fun examples.
I’ll try not to bore you with my silly examples with the happy families, the yellow koalas and blue dogs. I built in Google’s brain the family tree of these characters I created with my ex-wife - you can see the yellow and blue splodges behind me on that side. They were reasonably famous in 2006-7, but nobody cares about the families. So what I’ve done is built up the family tree in Google’s brain, with entity homes for each. All of these have descriptions from my own site. And you can do the same with a brand, with its subsidiary companies and the products of those subsidiaries - a family tree of your company and its layout. It really isn’t very difficult, but ambiguity makes it tough.
And here’s a cool example from my band. There’s an Italian techno duo with the same name. The Knowledge Panel in June 2020 was 50% about them and 50% about us. It got the members mixed up, the albums, the record companies. It said we were a dance-electronic group - in fact we were a punk folk group. Here’s how I sorted it out: it took me a year and a half. In four months I got it from 50/50 to 70/30 in our favour. Then another year to get it to 100% all about us - where Google was crystal clear on exactly who we were, which albums we’d recorded, and who was in the band. That’s a good indication of how slowly Google learns. The Knowledge Graph doesn’t update from one day to the next except in exceptional circumstances like the description example I showed earlier. It takes months for the machine to digest what we’re feeding it.
The ultimate aim.
The entity home is the foundation. Once you’ve nailed the entity home you can start nailing the different verticals in your Brand SERP as I showed you with the filter pills, and also start educating Google about sub-entities or related entities - like the Boowa and Kwala families, or the music group. It becomes relatively easy - just slow.
Kalicube now offers services and products: for beginners, the Brand SERP book; intermediate, the Brand SERP courses; advanced, the Brand SERP SaaS platform. With our partners WordLift, Authoritas, and SE Ranking.
What to retain: Knowledge Panel presence is consistent internationally - at least in the anglophone world - but the actual content will vary enormously. Create an entity home and start gaining control using schema markup, but also good sense, great explanations, and back-and-forth linking and corroboration on multiple authoritative third-party sources. The trusted sources you leverage depend on market and geography - entity equivalence. And you should really, in my opinion, track and measure for stunning insights. Once you start tracking and analysing Brand SERPs and Knowledge Panels, you get so many insights into your company, your audience, your content strategy, and your digital footprint. I don’t think there’s anywhere else you’d get that kind of insight that simply - and for free, from Google.
Thank you.
Steve Gerencser: Wow. That was fast - very fast. And I feel like almost everything I thought I knew about Knowledge Panels was a lie.
Jason Barnard: Oh no, I’m sorry.
Steve Gerencser: No, no - it’s brilliant. Because from my perspective, I try to know a little bit about everything, and I was genuinely unaware that you could have that dramatic an impact on Knowledge Panels. From where I come from, we’ve always been taught that the Knowledge Panel is what Google thinks it should be, and taking the time to train Google to understand what you think it should show - that is an eye-opening, mind-expanding thought process. We see in a lot of digital groups - Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever - whether we want to or not, we kind of close our minds off to certain things. My whole brain is just bouncing all over the place right now.
Jason Barnard: What’s lovely is - I’ve been doing this for nine years and nobody really listened to me very much for the first seven or eight. And I really felt I was talking and talking and talking and no one was listening, and at some points you think: maybe I’m wrong, maybe this is a dream. But what I managed to do was heavily influence things once I nailed the entity homes - and I only really nailed them three years ago. So I understand people going “yeah, whatever.” But once you start demonstrating with examples like I’m showing here - silly examples, they’re music groups and blue dogs and yellow koalas, but when you think about how you can apply them to business, they do make real sense.
And the reason I chose those silly examples is because I don’t damage my clients. I don’t mess things up doing experiments on them. And it’s really lucky for me because nobody cares about the blue dogs, the yellow koalas, or the music group - because they haven’t existed for 15 to 25 years. I’m the only person affected by it. I’m the only person working on it. So I know that the changes I’m seeing are thanks to me, because nobody’s talking about them, nobody’s contradicting me. I just place information around the web, so it’s kind of cheating - but it’s also very demonstrative, and I love it.
Steve Gerencser: That’s awesome. I noticed when you were talking about filter pills - for anybody who’s unaware of what they are, the best example I can think of is Google Image Search. If you go to Google Image Search and type somebody’s name, that’s where you’ll always see filter pills. An actor might have them broken down by movies in a hundred different ways. And the thought of being able to do that with a Knowledge Panel is one of those areas that my brain just went: oh, I never thought about that. I don’t see those very often for Knowledge Panels.
Jason Barnard: I look at this all day long, so when I saw them and started thinking about them I thought: okay, when you click on one you get a different set of results. It took me a while to realise, hey, we need to control the verticals - and we can actually affect which ones appear. We can also see it as a way for us to help Google to help our audience.
But the downside - and I’m not saying Google is wonderful, but we have to deal with it - is that the overview is your homepage and those filter pills are navigating through your site. That layout of the Knowledge Panel becomes a mini website for you - a mini website which you don’t control directly. So it becomes scary. But it’s a great challenge, because when you start thinking about it you are forced to think about who you are, what you do, who your audience is, what content is going to appeal to them - and make sure that it’s optimised wherever it appears on the web, not just on your own site.
And from the Kalicube example we skipped over earlier: to build a really beautiful Brand SERP with the Twitter boxes and video boxes took us a year. We created vast amounts of relevant, helpful content that works for our audience. And what I love about it is: I stopped doing SEO for a year - I’ve just been doing content. I’m pulling in clients through the content and now Google is my bonus. I just package this stuff up and push it out to Google and I’m getting SEO traffic now as a bonus. Looking at it that way, as an SEO, has totally flipped me over in just the last year.
Steve Gerencser: This brings us back to SEO without links - because you’re not technically building links, you’re building content, and then Google is going “this is what it should be” and just delivering traffic to you, which is awesome.
Jason Barnard: Not building links is one of those things - if you’re building incredibly relevant content where you have topical authority, you’re going to start building that topical authority, and you don’t need links anymore. Koray Gürbüz, who is a Turkish SEO, proves this day in, day out. We’ve done it as well with Kalicube - we don’t build links, we build topical authority, and that builds up presence in Google. Which is incredibly interesting and very very powerful.
Links are always useful and helpful and supportive. But Google’s understanding, and its confidence in its understanding of who you are and what topics you are truly an expert in, is always going to be the prime driver in what it ranks - because it wants to rank the most authoritative, credible, trustworthy solutions for its users.
Steve Gerencser: A question just funnelled in - I assume that’s Doc asking: are you seeing more natural links develop because of this content, or is that something you don’t even try?
Jason Barnard: No, great question. What’s delightful is it all started with the podcast and webinars. In fact, Doc was on one of the first webinars I did with SEMrush. And it’s built a lot of links very quickly. To give you an idea: I actually split my site into different sites as an experiment - I have a site for Kalicube Tuesdays, which is my weekly event; a site for the podcast; a site for my company; and a site for the SaaS platform. I launched them all in May 2021 - that’s about nine months ago. They’ve all built links incredibly steadily and strongly throughout the year and I haven’t made any effort at all. The tools now show amazing backlinks from Moz, SEMrush, WordLift, and all sorts, plus a lot of noise on social media. So yes - building great content that your audience engages with builds links on its own. Link building isn’t something I do, and I’m really happy about that because I don’t like doing it.
Steve Gerencser: I agree with you 100% on that. The last links I built were fifteen years ago when we were doing link directories and I owned a few directories - that was a whole different world.
So another area you touched on briefly is reconciliation - where we find a lot of noise in a Knowledge Panel. Information that doesn’t relate to you or is confused between two people with similar names. Could you go into the process for sorting that out? Is it simply a matter of providing enough relevant information to Google that it decides the other information is wrong?
Jason Barnard: Yeah - great question. You’ve just described what the Kalicube Pro SaaS platform does, so a bit of promotion there, but I’m really pleased with it.
Joost de Valk of Yoast asked me to help him and his team about a year ago. I came up with a list of about 100 different places where he had profile pages and people were talking about him - sites I thought were important. He wrote me back and said: what about this, what about that, what about that? - and he’d identified about 30 pretty important sites I’d missed by doing it by hand. So I built a machine that crawls Google, pulls it all in, runs an algorithm that prioritises it, and I pumped that back to him - and found another 30 that he hadn’t seen. We end up with a system where the platform basically asks Google what’s important for its knowledge and understanding about this entity. We pull that in, run the algorithm, and give you a prioritised list of all the profiles, articles about you, and data sources.
Then it tells you, in order, which ones to correct - so that everything says the same thing. It’s like NAP in local SEO: make sure everything says the same thing and the child will end up understanding. If I’m the parent and explain to the child, the child goes: okay, great, fine. If grandma says it exactly the same way, if the sister says it the same way, the teacher says it the same way - the child becomes confident in that understanding and understands it better. If they’re all contradicting each other, the child won’t understand. And if it doesn’t understand, it won’t be confident, so it won’t show it.
Then what we do is create the schema markup that points to “sameAs” and “subjectOf,” and we invite you through another list to go through all of these - make sure the corroboration is correct, point back to the entity home, entity home points out to them - and Bob’s your uncle. Very very simple, just time-consuming and phenomenally dull work.
Steve Gerencser: Right - so schema rears its ugly head again.
Jason Barnard: Yes, sorry. But as I said: a lot of people say “oh, you have to do schema, add sameAs links, and it’s all finished.” Well, schema is in there. But if you just added the links to your page it has worked and I have had that experience. It doesn’t need schema. Schema helps because it’s the bullet-pointed list for Google. It’s Google’s native language. It can digest it natively. It’s confident that it’s understood exactly what’s being said, because it’s name-value pairs. Schema isn’t necessary - it is very helpful.
Steve Gerencser: And you mentioned making sure Google understands that what the other source is saying isn’t necessarily correct.
Jason Barnard: A great example: yearly revenues for a company. I’ve had clients say: “It’s got the wrong number - it says 40 million and it was 60 million.” And then I ask: “Well, why do you say on your site it was 60 million?” And they say: “We don’t.” I say: “If you don’t give it the information yourself, it’s going to go and find it elsewhere.” They say: “We don’t really want to talk about it.” And I say: “You don’t have that choice.” Whether you talk about it or not, Google will show it. Your best bet is to grab control. Being coy about it seems to me to be a foolish mistake - but each to their own. You have to own the information about yourself and take control.
Steve Gerencser: I agree - I don’t necessarily want to talk about all these things either, but if Google’s going to show it anyway I don’t have much choice. It’s similar to when people talk about conference attendance or a sporting event - the event organiser publishes a figure and Google may lean towards that as the authoritative source versus what somebody says on Twitter.
Jason Barnard: I love the idea that you had 80,000 people at your conference.
Steve Gerencser: I would love that too - it would mean I wouldn’t have to work on the farm anymore.
Jason Barnard: But you like working on the farm.
Steve Gerencser: I do to a certain extent. My wife is really good at breaking tractors, so there’s a little bit of that going on. I grew up on a farm too?
Jason Barnard: Well, I grew up on a farm when I was a kid. I was a punk in the countryside on the Yorkshire Moors, and we had a bunch of cows in my father’s field in the front.
Steve Gerencser: Nice. My wife is a retired engineer from the airport - she went from super-maths, space stuff, to “I want cows.”
Jason Barnard: Lovely. Do you want to hear a very strange story about farms? My first kiss was from a cow. I was coming home from school, I leaned on the fence, and the cow looked at me. I thought: if I don’t move at all, how long will it take the cow to get curious and come over? It took maybe thirty minutes. The cow edged its way towards me, stood right there - a cow’s breath really stinks horribly - and I tried not to move. Then it licked my face. The tongue was about this size. It really hurt because of those massive taste buds. And that was my first ever kiss.
Steve Gerencser: And now I think I have a project to see if I can inject something into your Knowledge Panel.
Jason Barnard: Oh no. Oh deary me. I’ve just dug my grave, haven’t I.
Steve Gerencser: That would make an awesome filter pill. “First kiss.” That is awesome.
So one more question about corroboration, which ties into reconciliation. Obviously you’ll have different sources with different information. A lot of these sites are not very welcoming to having data corrected - Wikipedia being the prime example. They’ll publish what they publish and rarely want to make changes. Do you have a process, or do you just try to combat it with more correct data and hope they change it?
Jason Barnard: Well - a lot of people think: “I’ll create a Wikipedia page, get myself a Knowledge Panel” - and pretty much, if you create yourself a Wikipedia page you will get a Knowledge Panel. But Rand Fishkin was on my Kalicube Tuesdays show and he said he got his Wikipedia page deleted because they got it all wrong. And it turns out: once you don’t have a Wikipedia page, you regain control. If you allow a page to grow or happen or you encourage it, you lose control. Google believes Wikipedia much more easily than it believes other sources - at the moment, at least.
A few years ago it was pretty much 100% Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, IMDb, and other trusted databases - so you were really at their mercy. Now you’re not. So if you’re thinking about building a Wikipedia page for your company, I would suggest: don’t. It’s a lot of work, it probably won’t stick, and if it does stick you’ve lost control. You do better building up corroboration on your own site and on sources relevant to your industry. You would be surprised at how powerful a geo-relevant, industry-relevant, authoritative site is for your Knowledge Panel and Knowledge Graph presence.
With Wikipedia: if you have that problem, you need to get it corrected, because Google tends to weight it very heavily. There are companies who do it - I’ve met a couple. I don’t do it myself. I don’t really like getting involved with Wikipedia for a lot of reasons. But getting it corrected: companies that specialise in that do exist.
If you don’t have a Wikipedia page, you can save yourself the trouble and just create a Knowledge Panel without Wikipedia - even without Wikidata. Wikidata is really helpful and the notability guidelines are much lower. Whatever you do with Wikidata, don’t start creating a Wikidata entry until you have enough corroborative sources from third-party sites that you can point to. When you add the information and point to corroboration to prove what you’re saying, they don’t delete it. If you just create something and can’t point to any third-party, reliable, authoritative source - one that’s immediately obvious as relevant and authoritative, without them having to dig into tiny content on the page - their knee-jerk reaction is to vote for deletion, which is terrible.
IMDb is pretty good - they’re less difficult about this. And I think it’s the ISNI - a database of information based in the UK that brings together different sources and builds relationships. They’re pretty cool: if you submit something and they can see it’s true, they will publish it.
So the reconciliation idea: up until three years ago you were at Wikipedia’s mercy, and now you’re not. Build your own corroboration on third-party authoritative sources. Make sure your own sources all corroborate and are all consistent. Build your entity home. Make sure they point back to your entity home. Grab that authority and trustworthiness about yourself in Google’s little brain, and you can feed it pretty much whatever you want - which is maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but you know what I mean.
Steve Gerencser: Right. Because the third-party sources are always the big challenge, especially when you’re the primary source and feel you should just be believed.
Jason Barnard: I had a client years ago. I said: why would Google rank you number one? They said: because we’re the best. I said: well, where does it say that anywhere? They said: we say so on our site. And I said: you wouldn’t believe your kid if they said that. Or the baker next door. You need supporting evidence from third parties. And so does Google.
People fail to realise that what they see in front of them every day isn’t obvious to everybody else, because they can’t see it or don’t see it every day. You need to remember that there’s a lot of repetition that needs to be done - especially for Google.
Steve Gerencser: Fantastic. Jason, I want to thank you so much for your time. You’ve been amazing. I’d like to give you a minute or two to promote something - tell us more about Kalicube.
Jason Barnard: Thank you for having me - that was delightful.
My promotion is for the book - just out in January. I’ve had a lot of great feedback. Marie Haynes read it and was really kind. I said: “Oh it’s for beginners” - because I wrote it so that brand managers and marketers could get their head around it without knowing anything about SEO. And I said to Marie: why would you read it, you know so much about this stuff? And she said: “It’s a really interesting new perspective, and I wish I’d seen this perspective four or five years ago.” Which is incredibly touching.
I think the important thing is: the book is for any marketer. But the perspective it’s bringing - which is the perspective I’ve been explaining today - is fresh and helpful. It gives us an approach to Google which is: it’s not the big scary machine, it’s a child that we’re educating. We’re educating it about our little corner of the universe, little by little. And if we can do that, we can bring Google over to our side - to present us to our audience in the way we want. Which is what Google wants to do. It wants to present us in an authentic manner to our audience. And if we can do that, then we’re already on a good step to building an SEO strategy and a digital marketing strategy. As I say: build your digital marketing strategy from the Brand SERP out. And that is what the book says.
Steve Gerencser: Fantastic. We’ll put a link to that in the description. I want to thank everybody for watching the show. If you like the video or don’t like the video - engagement is always good. The algorithm doesn’t care if you like it or not, they care if you engage - and we all know that as marketers. We’d love it if you would subscribe. And with that, Jason - thank you very much. It’s been great having you on.
Jason Barnard: Thank you very much, Steve. It’s been an absolute delight - you’re charming and delightful, and I loved talking about the farm as well.
Steve Gerencser: Awesome. Thank you. Bye.
End of transcript.
Panels documented: 13 Running concept list staked in this transcript: Knowledge Panel prevalence 51% (March 2022) · 98% international presence replication / 28% PASF content consistency · Four-category KP source breakdown (70/18/6-7/~5%) · 8-minute description update timing · Filter pills as brand control frontier (earliest analysis, March 2022) · Wikipedia avoidance / Rand Fishkin case · Wikidata corroboration-first strategy · Child/repetition metaphor (fully developed form) · Topical authority over link building · Joost de Valk / Kalicube Pro methodology case study · Google as EAT proxy via Brand SERP
