Google is Your Homepage - Learn How to Optimize It | 5 Hours of Local SEO (SemRush)
Mike Blumenthal has been saying this for years: Google is your homepage, learn to optimise It. But this observation is even more true today than it was four years ago. And as we all know, it goes WAY beyond simply optimising your Google My Business listing. In this webinar, Jason Barnard presents the most effective (and deceptively simple) process to create a solid, prioritised list of tasks to manage your Brand SERP (what your audience sees when they google your brand name). If you have reputation issues, this methodology will pull you out of the mire. If you don’t have any specific issues, the methodology will make that Google homepage look positive, accurate, and convincing to your audience and also push your
Published by: SEMRush. Guests: Jason Barnard, Ric Rodriguez, Maria Grimm. Host: Paige Hobart. March 25, 2021
Summary of Google is Your Homepage - Learn How to Optimize It | 5 Hours of Local SEO (SemRush)
Event: SEMrush “5 Hours of Local SEO” Live Date: 24 March 2021 Participants: Jason Barnard (presenter), Ric Rodriguez (panelist), Maria Grimm (panelist), Paige Hobart (host/moderator, ROAST) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[ID]
Key Takeaways
Jason Barnard presented a complete methodology for optimising a brand’s Google search result page, treating it as the brand’s homepage and connecting it to entity understanding, EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), and proactive online reputation management. Ric Rodriguez and Maria Grimm contributed perspectives on reviews as corroborative data, Knowledge Graph mechanics, and client strategy.
1. The Brand SERP as Your Homepage and Diagnostic Tool
Jason Barnard argued that Google is the true homepage for most businesses because a large proportion of their audience - clients, prospects, investors, partners, potential hires - never reach the brand’s website. They make decisions based on what Google shows them. The Brand SERP (the exact-match search result for a brand name) is therefore the most important piece of real estate a brand controls. It must be accurate, positive, and convincing, and it must communicate who you are, what you do, and where to find you.
2. The Brand SERP Reflects Google’s Assessment of EAT
Jason Barnard stated that the Brand SERP directly reflects Google’s opinion of a brand’s Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The rich elements Google chooses to display - Knowledge Panels, review stars, social profiles, video boxes, People Also Ask - are not decorative features. They are Google’s editorial decisions about what is most relevant, valuable, and helpful for the people researching that brand. A rich, controlled Brand SERP indicates strong EAT. A poorly controlled Brand SERP with negative third-party results indicates weak EAT.
3. Entity Understanding Precedes EAT Evaluation
Jason Barnard reiterated a point he first made in a 2020 SEMrush panel: Google needs to understand who you are and what you do before it can properly evaluate your EAT. He described a process of “educating” Google - establishing entity recognition through consistent, corroborated information - followed by “coaching” Google to present that information in the most positive, accurate, and convincing way. Maria Grimm contributed the education-then-coaching distinction, noting that you cannot coach Google until it has first been educated about the entity.
4. The Entity Home as the Canonical Source of Truth
Jason Barnard introduced the concept of the “entity home” - the canonical page on the web where Google goes to get information about an entity “from the horse’s mouth.” He specified that this is not necessarily the homepage of a website, but more often an About Us page, because the entity home needs to be factual and descriptive (who you are, what you do, who your audience is) rather than promotional. The entity home is then supported by schema markup that repeats the factual claims, and the claims are corroborated by consistent information across trusted third-party sources.
5. Disambiguation Through Unchangeable Anchors
Jason Barnard explained that disambiguation - helping Google distinguish one entity from another with the same name - relies on unchangeable anchors: date founded, founders, date of birth, family relationships. These are facts that never change and serve as permanent reference points for the Knowledge Graph. He compared these anchors to crutches: if Google loses them, it loses confidence and drops the entity from prominent display. The more anchors Google can confirm across multiple sources, the more confidently it presents the entity.
6. Corroboration as the Mechanism for Confidence
Ric Rodriguez expanded on Jason Barnard’s concept of corroboration, explaining that reviews function as a form of third-party data corroboration. Reviews capture information about a brand from external sources - information the brand may not have published itself - and this data allows the Knowledge Graph to build a more complete and confident understanding of the entity. Rodriguez described how search engines use “subjectivity - lots and lots of patterns and data - to understand truth,” and that corroborated information is the mechanism by which that truth is established. He cited Jason Barnard’s use of the word “corroborate” as a key concept.
7. Data Lakes vs. Data Rivers - The Patience Principle
Jason Barnard distinguished between two types of Google updates relevant to Brand SERP optimisation. Blue link rankings operate as “data rivers” - updates flow through quickly, often within days or hours. But the Knowledge Graph and Google’s entity understanding operate as “data lakes” - Google gathers information over time, then processes it in bulk every two to three weeks, with occasional gaps of up to three months. This means that brands must be patient after making changes to their entity information, because the Knowledge Graph does not update in real time.
8. Control Spectrum: Direct, Semi-Controlled, and Uncontrolled Results
Jason Barnard categorised Brand SERP results into three levels of control. Directly controlled results (the brand’s own website, rich sitelinks) are the safest and most valuable - they can be updated immediately and always reflect the brand’s current messaging. Semi-controlled results (social profiles, business directories, LinkedIn, Facebook) are editable but hosted on third-party platforms that can change their rules at any time. Uncontrolled results (third-party review sites, media mentions) are the most dangerous because they can “flip” - a positive review site can accumulate negative reviews at any time. The methodology prioritises optimising directly controlled content first, then semi-controlled, then leapfrogging negative uncontrolled results with stronger positive content from lower-ranking pages.
9. Leapfrogging, Not Drowning
Jason Barnard emphasised that the correct approach to negative Brand SERP results is leapfrogging, not drowning. Creating large volumes of new content to push negative results down does not work unless the content is hosted on a high-authority site. Instead, brands should identify existing positive or neutral results on pages two through five of their Brand SERP that can be strengthened through traditional SEO tactics - link building, content optimisation, outreach - to leapfrog above the negative results. The goal is to prove to Google that the positive content is more relevant, helpful, and representative of the brand than the negative content.
Historical Significance
This panel, recorded in March 2021, documents Jason Barnard’s articulation of several concepts that are now foundational to The Kalicube Framework (TKF): the Brand SERP as a diagnostic and proactive ORM tool, entity understanding as a precondition for EAT evaluation, the entity home as canonical source of truth, disambiguation through unchangeable anchors, corroboration as the mechanism for Knowledge Graph confidence, and the education-then-coaching methodology for managing how Google understands and presents a brand. These concepts underpin the Understandability-Credibility-Deliverability (UCD) model that Jason Barnard developed and patented through Kalicube.
Full Transcript
Paige Hobart: Hi everybody.
Panelists: Hey Paige, hello. Hey Maria, hey Rick, lovely to see you all. Hey guys, how you doing? Lovely to see you, really good.
Paige Hobart: So I’ll just do a little bit of an intro. So definitely one of my favourite people in SEO, the lovely Jason Barnard - not just because you sent me a lead earlier. You’re going to join us for a talk on “Google Is Your Homepage - Learn How to Optimize It.” I think we’ve already got some people interested in elements that weren’t Google My Business, where you’re going to be able to help out here. So I’m super excited for that. But if any of these talks are going to run over, it’s definitely going to be Jason, so I’m going to be ruling with an iron fist. Get your Q&As in early as we’re going through - you know I like to scroll right to the top and go from the start. But for anyone joining us right now, we’re about to start talk number two. There are five amazing talks coming up, so please do stick around, ask any questions in the chat, and tweet using the hashtag #5HoursOfLocalSEO. Now Maria, if you could introduce yourself, followed by Rick, and then followed by Jason - he’ll just jump straight into his deck.
Maria Grimm: Oh goodness, I have to start first. I always hate that. So, my name is Maria Grimm, I’m a Digital Marketing Strategist with Grimm Collective, which is a consulting firm, and then also one of the co-founders of Relly, which is a marketing subscription service for small businesses, startups, and nonprofits. So over to you, Rick.
Ric Rodriguez: Great, thanks. Hey, I’m Ric Rodriguez, I’m Search Director at Vashi, a fine jewellery company. And I absolutely love this whole idea that Google is your new homepage. I think it’s such an interesting topic. So can’t wait to see what Jason’s going to talk about, which leads me nicely over to you, Jason.
Jason Barnard: Oh, thank you very much Rick. I think you actually probably know most of what I’m going to say because we’ve talked so often about it. Because I go on and on and on and on about it, to the point of boredom for everybody else. And I’m surprisingly surprised that I’m not bored of it after seven years.
And that’s the interesting thing - the idea of what appears when somebody searches your brand name. It’s your audience who’s searching a brand name, by definition. And I think people forget that: anybody searching a brand name is by definition your audience, and is by definition bottom-of-funnel or post-funnel. So at that point you think, OK, incredibly important. Interesting for about five minutes. I’ve been doing this for seven years and I still haven’t lost interest in it. So if that gives you hope or it gives you fear, that’s up to you. It gives me hope and it makes me feel terribly, terribly, terribly happy.
Now today I’m going to talk about “Google Is Your Homepage - Learn How to Optimize It.” Mike Blumenthal’s been talking about Google as your homepage for years. I tend to say Google is your business card, in a very kind of generic sense, as a person or as an international business or a national business. As a local business, it really is your homepage. Mike is right.
And to start with, I’m going to do this delightful trick and present myself through my own Brand SERP. What is a Brand SERP? It’s what your audience sees when they Google your brand name. I’m The Brand SERP Guy®, and this is my Brand SERP. And I have Shaun the Sheep in my Twitter boxes - that’s by design. Basically, because I can tweak whatever I want and it would appear within 15 seconds in that little box, and I like Shaun the Sheep.
I’m also the Knowledge Panel Guy. Not necessarily applicable to local search, but as we just saw with Joy, it is actually part of local search now. Mike Blumenthal is talking about how Google is bringing together Google My Business and the Knowledge Panel - the Knowledge Graph - and making one single entity. And I think we all need to start paying attention to it because it’s going to be big news tomorrow.
I’ve got two decades in digital. I used to be a blue dog - I’m there on the left. If you’re colour-blind and you don’t recognise dogs, the yellow koala on the right-hand side is my ex-wife. And we created this cartoon and we built it up to be one of the ten thousand biggest sites in the world in terms of visits. And it was wonderful and it was fun, and that’s what got me into SEO.
I now have a groovy podcast. I did an episode earlier on with Bill Slawski, which was absolutely delightful - intelligent, interesting, and fun. I’m a speaker and a host. As you can see, I am speaking, but Paige is hosting, so that doesn’t quite work in this context. And I’m an author on Search Engine Journal, SEMrush - just written a new article about Knowledge Panels if anyone wants to read that. It’s actually really interesting. I spent all my Sunday writing it and I think it’s quite good. But you can slam me on Twitter if it isn’t. And I’m a tutor and coach, and I tutor and coach Brand SERPs because I’m the Brand SERP Guy. Genius, right?
The plan for today - and it’s going to be half an hour. Your Brand SERP is your business card - excuse me, it’s not your business card because we’re in local search - your Brand SERP is your homepage. You need to take control of your Brand SERP because it is your homepage. A lot of people will not come to your site. You rely on Google to project the information about you and your brand and your offers - how good you are and how much they want to buy or do business with you.
It’s proactive ORM. And I think people miss this an incredible amount. They think, “Oh, I’ve got a problem, I need to sort it out.” But actually, if you start now, before you have a reputation problem - ORM is Online Reputation Management - before you have a problem, it’s a really good deal. Because it helps you to deal with any problems that might appear, and it also improves your EAT.
People like Lily Ray, Marie Haynes will absolutely love this, because the whole idea of a Brand SERP is: Google will show what is most relevant, valuable, and pertinent to your audience. And that means that it considers you to be expert, authoritative, and trustworthy within your industry if it’s showing great stuff. And if it’s showing bad stuff, obviously it thinks you’re not so trustworthy, not so authoritative, not so expert.
Three steps to improve your Brand SERP. And your Brand SERP reflects your EAT - and I love that idea and I think it’s incredibly important, and we’re going to talk about it more and more as the years go by. And then we’re going to tell you how to create your prioritised little task list.
But before we start: what do I mean by Brand SERP? It’s the exact-match Brand SERP. And I would be terribly, terribly happy if people didn’t say to me, “Oh, that’s branded search.” It’s not. It’s not brand plus review. It’s not brand plus product. It’s not brand plus name of person. It’s your exact-match Brand SERP, because that is what Google thinks the world thinks about you. That is what Google is representing your brand to your audience. And that is incredibly important. So we don’t want any fluff, we don’t want any noise. We want your exact-match Brand SERP.
So there are all sorts of anatomies. Now I did some research with this, and I love it: the Oxford Cheese Company. I’ve got no idea why they keep popping up in all the studies I do, but you know, that’s OK, that’s fine. And then you’ve got something like this, which is citizenM. They’ve got multiple hotels - I think Rick and I did a review, an interview, in citizenM in London. They have multiple places, so they get that map pack instead of the Google Maps on the right-hand side.
And this is Kalicube. And as you can see, Kalicube is slightly richer than the other ones because I’ve actually paid attention to my Google My Business panel. But I’ve also got lots of videos. So local Brand SERPs can be very rich - with those Knowledge Panels, with People Also Ask, with Twitter boxes, and all this kind of thing. It’s not because you’re local that you don’t deserve, in inverted commas, those rich elements like video boxes, like image boxes, like Twitter boxes, and like People Also Ask.
Because Google is only looking to show your audience what is valuable, relevant, and interesting to them. And because I make a lot of videos, videos are interesting to my audience - be I a local business or not.
And it’s your homepage. A lot of people don’t even get to your website. I’m not saying don’t have a website, because you do need a website. That website is your entity home. It’s where Google recognises that your company lives on the internet. But because a lot of people never get there, you really want to take care of what Google is showing your audience, which is a subset of its users.
And I think we tend to forget that: Google’s users are billions of people. Your audience is simply a subset of that. And Google is showing to your audience - who is a subset of their users - what it thinks the world thinks about you. And it needs to be accurate, positive, convincing. I’m sorry, I’m punching the keyboard with great enthusiasm, I’m sure you can hear it in the microphone. So I will now calm down.
And it needs to explain who you are, what you do, and where to find you. And as you can see on this Brand SERP, which is Kalicube - local business, we could argue it’s an international SaaS company, which would be really cool, but this is a local result - and it does reflect accurately, positively, and it is convincing. Those video boxes make all the difference in the world. And those products that I posted myself make all the difference in the world. And that red shirt just keeps coming up.
And it shows who Kalicube is, what Kalicube does, and where you can find Kalicube. And it sounds so simple, but you would be incredibly surprised at how many local Brand SERPs and Brand SERPs in general aren’t accurate, aren’t positive, aren’t convincing, don’t show who you are, don’t show what you do, and don’t show where to find you.
Now, I mentioned earlier proactive ORM. And it does improve your EAT. Obviously, we can’t measure Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, but it’s pretty obvious when you look at a Brand SERP - when you search an exact-match brand name - it’s pretty obvious if that brand is expert, authoritative, and trustworthy in Google’s eyes, which is the important point, within the context of Google Search.
This is a great Brand SERP. And of course it’s my Brand SERP, because I’ve been working on it for years and years and years. The green stuff is direct control. The blue stuff is indirect control. That’s fine - some things you cannot control but you really want to control. Because if you can control, you can make it positive, accurate, and convincing. You can control that quality. You can make sure that it’s positive. You can make sure that your audience is convinced by what Google shows them when they search your brand name.
So a bit of blue on your Brand SERP? Absolutely fine. That’s third-party corroboration, which actually might be very healthy. If you talk to Jono Alderson, he would suggest that a bit of third-party corroboration - independent corroboration - is always a good thing. But I actually have indirect control over those pages.
Now we look at this one, which is my favourite: the Oxford Cheese Company. I live in France, so cheese is obviously very important. And we have the yellow chunks, which are no control, but they remain positive. Now, that lack of control is not necessarily a problem, but it is a danger, as we’ll see later on.
And here we have - what was it? - Bentley’s Oyster Bar and Grill. Now, I can only imagine that they serve oysters that they haven’t actually checked beforehand and lots of people have been terribly ill after eating the oysters. But that’s only a guess. And those red chunks are no control and negative. Those are review sites, and those are terribly, terribly dangerous and terribly, terribly damaging.
But what’s interesting - if we skip back - in that Google My Business panel, the control of even the Oxford Cheese Company is much stronger than the control of Bentley’s Oyster Bar and Grill. So even within Google My Business, you do not necessarily control the entire thing or even semi-control the entire thing. Google My Business can still pull in those third-party results. So it’s important to make sure that Google doesn’t need to do that, doesn’t want to do that, doesn’t feel that what you’re presenting to it through your Google My Business interface represents your business and that they need to go and find some third-party information to balance things up.
Here I would be betting Google thinks the world’s opinion of this company is pretty negative, and it wants to show it both in the left rail and the right rail - as we’ll see in a moment.
Now, take a look at your local Brand SERP. You want this - that’s me. And lots of companies obviously have brilliant local Brand SERPs, not just me. But that’s the example I’m using because obviously I want to promote myself. And you don’t want things like this. And this one, although very good, lacks control. You’ve got the blue and the yellow, and it indicates that at least 50 percent of that real estate is not directly controlled. And that represents, as it says in the top right corner, potential danger.
Any of these sites can flip. Somebody can change their review. They can change what they’re saying about you, because you do not control the site. The semi-controlled things - less likely to flip, but still quite dangerous, just in the sense that, for example, Facebook can change the rules from one day to the next. And although you control the account, you do not control the site. So you want to be a little bit careful about that.
Very interesting, very positive. And this is obviously absolutely appalling, and they’ve got a big problem. And you’re not going to go and eat there - I definitely wouldn’t go and eat there.
So, how do you improve them? This is the practical part. Quick explanation: right and left rail. The left rail is traditionally what we’ve always seen with these blue links. We all know the ten blue links. It’s now become much more rich - it’s got these videos, it’s got People Also Ask, it’s got Twitter boxes, it’s got images. But it remains Google’s recommendation of what information it has found on the web you might be interested in, given what you’ve just typed in.
So in this case it’s a brand. So it’s saying: this is what I would suggest is most appropriate, most relevant, most helpful, most useful for you as the audience of this brand. And on the right-hand side, it’s saying: this is what I consider to be fact. It’s not 100 percent true, but you could say left-hand side opinion, right-hand side fact. And that’s incredibly important.
So obviously the priority number one is the right rail. We are, as users - as clients of Google. And I do insist on the word “clients.” Google has clients like we all have clients. Google wants to serve its clients as best it possibly can. Those clients pay Google through their clicks on the advertising, but they remain clients. So it’s trying to satisfy - just like you - its clients as effectively and efficiently as possible.
So you need to optimise absolutely everything. Obviously you start with the right-hand rail. Going through - we want to go through these three steps. Looking at the right-hand side, that’s the fact, that’s the Google My Business. Obviously you get a great deal of control - make the most of it. On the left-hand side, you obviously need to control it indirectly. And this is what this second part of this talk is all about.
So there are three steps to fill the left rail with love, in order of priority. You want to update those you control. Now, it sounds incredibly obvious when I say it. But in my opinion, the ones that seem most obvious are probably the most appropriate and the best advice you get.
So don’t just think about your own website. You can think about all the relevant pages within that website for the rich sitelinks that we see there on the left-hand side: About, Podcast, Kalicube Pro™, Client, Contact. I’ve actually spent a lot of time optimising them. And in the traditional SEO world, they would not be SEO pages. But in the Brand SERP homepage world, they are incredibly important. You want to optimise them. You want to make sure that Google wants to show them because it understands that they are useful destinations for your audience.
And those rich sitelinks - in this case on mobile - give you a lot of control of a lot of real estate. But also related sites. I mean, I’ve shown this example because the second site in that list is jasonbarnard.com. Now, as you might have guessed, that’s my site. So above the fold on mobile, I’ve controlled - actually, you look there, the third one is me as well. I hadn’t noticed that. I control everything above the fold directly. So I can update that at any time. So my Google homepage is always under my control. Google updates - Google will show more or less what I wanted to show.
Then you want to look at improving the ones you semi-control. Now, these are social accounts, company profile databases. They’re things that you can edit, you can change, but you do not control the site at the end of the day.
And if we talk about flipping - something like LinkedIn or Twitter or Owler can change their rules from one day to the next. And although you control the account, you do not control the site. So you want to be a little bit careful about that. Very interesting, very positive.
Just below those that you actually control, second-best: Wikidata. You can go and you can edit it, but somebody could delete it. They could change it. They could put lies in it. So it’s something you can semi-control that you want to optimise - that makes for great results for that Google homepage, but not as good obviously as the ones you do control.
And then you want to push up the better results from below. And this is where we get into the ORM - Online Reputation Management - sphere. If anything on that first page - if we think back to our friends at the oyster bar, whose name I can’t actually remember now - Bentley’s Oyster Bar - there are bad results. What can you do? You can push up the content on pages two through five that you want your audience to see.
Because Google, remember, just wants to show your audience - which is a subset of its users - results that reflect your brand overall online. And so it’s up to you simply to convince Google that the content it’s currently showing is not content that reflects and is relevant and is helpful to your audience.
So, how do you create your prioritised list for pushing this information up? Sorry, I’ll go back a step, because that frog on the side - by the way, I actually forgot to mention - it’s called leapfrogging. Don’t drown. Please, please, please, please, please don’t try and drown content. It’s creating spam. You create lots of content, you think, “Oh, this is gonna rank” - nothing will rank unless it’s on The Guardian or the New York Times or some big, big, big media site with a lot of power. You can’t drown this content. You need to leapfrog it with content that you can prove to Google is more relevant, more helpful, and more authoritative to its users who are your audience.
So, how do you create the prioritised list of results on pages two through five to push them up? You can basically say, “I would like to push this content up, and all I need to do for that is prove to Google that it is relevant and helpful and representative of my brand.”
So you can scrape your Brand SERP - stick “num=50 results” in your browser. Very boring, takes a lot of time. Click on links, collect them all, put them in a Google spreadsheet - or a spreadsheet in general. Or you can use SEMrush - add it to your tracked keywords. Now, what I advise all my clients to do is add their brand term to their keyword list, which most brands don’t do. Because it allows you to keep an eye on what’s happening, what’s shown on your Brand SERP, what’s bubbling under the surface. And that’s especially interesting for ORM.
Or you can use Kalicube Pro, which is my platform that I’m currently building. It’s in beta - if you want to apply, you’ll see how to apply later on. And we do the next steps for you automatically. I built the whole system. I build it at weekends and it’s absolutely brilliant. I’m sorry, I’m getting a bit over-excited about my own system. But what was interesting is I’ve been working on my own Brand SERP for the last seven years. And when I built the system that automated what I’d been doing by hand, it threw up - which sounds slightly horrible but isn’t - it threw up ten percent of results that I just had not expected. And yet I’ve been looking at this for seven years. So it is worth doing it automatically, simply because it’s quicker, it’s better, and it’s more organised and it’s prioritised.
So if you want to do it by hand: scrape your Brand SERP. Remove any that are not about you. Google obviously gets it right most of the time, but sometimes it can get it wrong. And sometimes, if your brand name is ambiguous, there’ll be results in there that are not about you. You want to remove them.
I mean, I’ve used Yellow Door because it’s so incredibly ambiguous. Please don’t call your company Yellow Door - or anything quite that ambiguous - because you end up with these very confused SERPs. Whereas if I was selling yellow doors 20 years ago, I would have called my company Yellow Door Company and I would have been bingo, away, it would have been brilliant. But today you want a unique brand name so that there isn’t any ambiguity, so that you can start to control that Brand SERP, so that those people - your audience - who are bottom-of-funnel or post-funnel see your Google homepage positive, accurate, and convincing.
So back to the process. Remove any that are not about you, because obviously you can’t do anything about them - or, I mean, maybe you can if you really, really, really want to. But what you can actually do is push other content up.
You want to remove or move any negative results to another list - to be left alone. Don’t touch them. Don’t try to improve those reviews if you don’t have to. Because there are probably review sites on page two, page three, page four that you can potentially push up and above this one.
Because if you have a review site with 500 reviews and you have a one-star overall score, it’s going to be pretty much impossible to drown that one-star overall score, because you would need something like five or six thousand reviews to push that up to four or five stars. Whereas if you’ve got something with four or five stars on page two that only has five reviews - logically, easier to push that up. Show that it’s relevant, make it active. Because if you make that bad review site active, Google will think it’s relevant because it’s recent. So obviously, take that with a slight pinch of salt - every case is different. But as a general rule, I would leave it alone and try to leapfrog it with a better result.
Next up, we want to tag the partially controlled pages on pages two to five - priority two. We have priority one, which is the great stuff. Priority two is the semi-controlled stuff on pages two to five. The great results on pages two to five are priority three. And you’ll see why that works in a moment. And then if you have tagged something in steps four and five, you prioritise it as one, because anything you partially control or you fully control that is a great result is obviously your priority number one. Makes total sense.
Then you get this incredibly delightful list in your spreadsheet that you can prioritise. And you can choose the ones that you work on. And you use traditional SEO tactics to leapfrog the lesser results with your finest. And that can include building links for another site. It can involve contacting that site and asking them to change the meta title, meta description, all the content. It can involve any of the traditional SEO tactics you would use on your own website, but for somebody else, for your own benefit.
And the bonus tip - I love this one - is the rich elements. And it could be a whole talk on its own, as you can see from my text. They are absolutely awesome. If you get those rich elements: A, your brand looks much more credible. But B, it takes up a couple of spaces and potentially kills a blue link, which means that instead of having ten blue links to deal with, you only have nine. And if you get the rich sitelinks, which are very much underestimated - I’m shocked at how underestimated they are - that’s another two places. So in fact, instead of having ten blue links, you only have seven or eight. So I only need to deal with seven or eight blue links. The potential for a bad link, a bad review site to rank there is much, much less. It gives me less work, gives me more control, makes my life more peaceful, and I sleep much, much more soundly.
So it’s up to you to make it accurate, positive, and convincing, and ensure it communicates who you are, what you do, and where to find you. Don’t leave it to Google. Don’t think Google understands all of this stuff off the bat. It’s up to you to improve that Brand SERP. Make that left rail really positive, really accurate, really convincing. Make sure the entire thing explains who you are, what you do, and where to find you.
As a reminder: your Brand SERP is your homepage. It’s up to you to make it accurate, positive, and convincing, and ensure it communicates who you are, what you do, and where to find you.
And if you want to track your Brand SERP, you come along to Kalicube Pro. We work with WordLift and Authoritas, who both provide API support to Kalicube, to track, measure, and improve your Brand SERP. The improvement part is all my own advice from these seven years of studying and the 70,000 brands we’re tracking - 10 million Brand SERPs, 15 million lines from the Knowledge Graph. We’ve got immense amounts of data, immense amounts of experience. So the tracking and the measuring is Kalicube, WordLift, and Authoritas. And the improving part is all down to me - my experience and my silly experiments that everybody has probably already heard of.
Thank you very much. Google is your homepage - learn to optimise it. Jason Barnard, the Brand SERP Guy. Back to you, Paige.
Paige Hobart: Oh, that was a mic drop if ever I heard one. Thank you, Jason. It’s always such a pleasure listening to you. You’re so passionate about it.
I’m gonna start with two questions for the panelists so you can take a breather and have a relax. So my first question is for Maria. Your expertise is much broader than us SEOs - how would you sell Brand SERP optimisation to your clients?
Maria Grimm: So yeah, this is interesting. I’m gonna kind of take it two places. I’m gonna go back to the previous webinar where Joy was talking about engagement rings - you know, keep it similar so people can understand the strategic part of it.
So one of the things that a lot of people often don’t think about is their Google My Business listing, which is really important. When you’re talking about optimising - Google customers trust reviews. About 80 percent trust reviews as much as they do personal recommendations. So I think really focusing on those reviews on your Google My Business, as well as including images. So when Joy was talking about making sure you have product images in there, if you have special offerings, including that in your Google My Business posts, adding some of those things - these are things that you need to collectively do together, not just focus on one or the other.
Unfortunately, with engagement rings you’re competing probably with a lot of national brands who all want to add dollars. So there’s that. But anything you can do from a controllable environment on Google, I would really focus on that.
And then we talk about the service-based companies who don’t necessarily have products they can post in Google My Business or optimise for necessarily. I really think that, again, talking about reviews - I know we’ll talk about this a little bit more and how important they are, but I just can’t emphasise that enough. When somebody is going and searching for your company, and they’re wanting to buy from a trusted source - if they’re seeing that one company has 150 reviews and then this other company that they’re looking at has zero, they’re gonna probably lean more towards that company that has reviews. Because they’re establishing a relationship.
People are buying outcomes. They’re not buying products. They’re not buying tangible things. They want a relevant experience. They want to buy what they’re - whether it’s they want to have a beautiful ring on their finger, or whether it’s they want to have a payroll service that they don’t have to worry about - they’re thinking about the end result. They’re not thinking about what we’re thinking about, which is getting that product in front.
So I think just really focusing on how you can articulate and sell in that result page in a way that shows your customers how you’re different, what makes you stand out from that crowded page, and can give them the experience that they’re looking for. I think that’s just really the most important thing you can focus on, rather than just feeding them with ads. It’s giving them a relevant experience and giving them that outcome they’re looking for.
Paige Hobart: Yeah, definitely. And Rick, how does local and Brand SERP and reviews - how does that play a role in what you’re doing right now?
Ric Rodriguez: So, reviews - I love the topic of reviews. Jason and I - I’m gonna plug this - Jason and I did a whole podcast on reviews a couple of years ago. I think reviews are awesome.
So, why are reviews awesome? Well, first things first. At the heart of Google, it’s a brain. It’s the Knowledge Graph. It’s the database of information that exists about everything that the search engine knows about the world. And I mean it knows it in real form - like it knows it in the way that we humans do. It connects dots together. Its understanding might be subjective. Therefore, it takes lots and lots of data and tries to make heads or tails of it, rather than objective. We - that’s the difference between humans and search engines. We can objectively do understanding through intuition.
And that data point is really important. And think about it this way: reviews are a way of capturing lots and lots of data that exist about you, not from you. And as a brand, you may not have every single potential angle that exists around your business covered.
And there’s a great patent that was put out - now, clearly, take patents with a pinch of salt, they may or may not be part of the systems that go into what makes a search engine - there’s a patent that discussed using review data to expand the information that search engines have on a particular thing. So a great example of this might be that your customers talk about the amazing Wi-Fi that you have in your café. You don’t mention anywhere. But if you want to show up for “café with great Wi-Fi” type terms, that’s a really great way of people - of Google - understanding the things that you don’t tell them.
So I think reviews, as a way of adding more information, or a way of search engines picking up on things that you don’t explicitly say, can be a great way of doing that.
Final point: Jason uses the word “corroborate,” and I remember you picked up on that in the podcast. I remember that quite vividly. Corroboration of data signals is a great thing as well. Search engines use subjectivity - lots and lots of patterns and data - to understand truth. If your reviews are certifying - i.e. corroborating - your story, that’s a great thing to happen as well. That gives the requisite data signals to discern truth.
Paige Hobart: Great answer and great plug as well. I’m going to jump into some of our questions in the Q&A. So we’ve got a lovely question from Alessia Korobka - apologies if I just butchered that - but: have any of you ever encountered difficulties when you’re optimising for national rankings but getting a strong local Knowledge Panel? Have you ever found that local versus national is a difficulty?
Jason Barnard: It’s a phenomenal problem. I mean, the problem is obviously kind of national brands that have this national presence will tend to have a Knowledge Panel. Then Google needs to decide, depending on where this person is in the country and perhaps what they’ve been looking for in previous searches: shall I show them the national organisation because they’re looking to understand better what the parent company is doing, or shall I show them the local result because they’re actually trying to get to the offices?
And that’s ambiguous, and it will always be ambiguous, and it will always be a problem. Now, what we saw during the coronavirus period is that local listings actually didn’t disappear, but they were relegated to second place. And what Google would show is, on that right-hand side, a Knowledge Panel and a local listing, or a local listing then a Knowledge Panel, or a local listing and then a “see results about.”
And during the coronavirus, because that local intent had partially disappeared for much of the time - or some of the time during lockdown - the Knowledge Panels tended to dominate. So you have to look at what Dawn Anderson calls the probabilistic side of things. You can’t freak out about it, because it isn’t you who decides what the intent of the user is - it’s Google. What you can do is influence the information it has so that it can show the best results for its users.
And don’t ever forget that they’re Google’s users - your audience. They’re not your users. They’re still on Google. They’re Google’s users. So Google shows them what they want.
And one thing - really just to finish this terrible, terrible long, long monologue - excuse me, a discussion would be that Rick or Maria or Paige would have interrupted me at some point and said something intelligent - but the more confident it is - and that’s what Rick was talking about - in the information it has about you, the more it will show that information. So your Knowledge Panel will tend to dominate with more confidence, as long as the person is not incredibly local and obviously looking to find your office or your shop.
So that confidence Rick talked about - corroboration - I do love that word because I can’t say it, and I sound like somebody with a problem with the R’s - but the corroboration brings confidence, and that confidence brings stability. Don’t freak out.
Paige Hobart: “Don’t freak out” - I feel like that was the best thing. I think we should all tweet that out: “Don’t freak out, Google will serve the best thing.”
The next question - I think you kind of covered this already, Jason - from Diana Richardson: what are some of the ways to tackle branded SERP if you or your company have a common name? So you mentioned Yellow Door. I work for ROAST. Personally, we lean into “ROAST Agency” to try and differentiate. But I don’t know if any of you guys have advice on top of that?
Ric Rodriguez: So I think this is an interesting topic. I guess what we’re talking about is a concept called disambiguation, which is the idea of helping systems or things understand that two things can be the same by name but very, very different things. A horse can be three or four different things, from a carpentry horse to an animal to - was it something that gymnasts use?
Paige Hobart: Yeah, exactly. That was the one. Cool - every day is a school day.
Ric Rodriguez: But the point here is, again, it comes down to data signals and connecting certain scenarios, certain points where certain results are successful. I mean, things like click-through rate aren’t used in ranking, but they are used to understand whether the result set that is returned is useful to people on a macro level. And there are patterns and documents that describe this.
So what we’re not saying is, if you get tons of bots firing at your site you’re going to be number one tomorrow. But on a kind of macro level, across all things, there is this understanding - like Google can start to disambiguate things based on the footprint that exists around it. So firstly, if your website says “this is what I do and how I do it,” that’s great. If it’s then picked up by all of the things that go on around you - from your online presence in local through to your wider presence in media, it could be that you’ve got positive customer reviews, it could be you’ve got people talking about you on social. No, social doesn’t equal you get to number one. But it does create this positive footprint. And the more data you can get to tell your story, the better. And that can help with disambiguation as well.
Paige Hobart: Yeah, really good, really good. And one piece of advice that they can probably take away is: we looked in our Search Console to see what people were actually calling us to get to us. So that’s a really nice step if you’re trying to lean into something that’s a bit different, like Yellow Door or ROAST.
Our next question is from GJ Brahma: how long does it take to have control of your Brand SERP?
Jason Barnard: Oh, I’m sorry - excuse me. Sorry Maria, you had something to say?
Maria Grimm: No, I was just gonna say: time. I’ll let you go - this is the whole coaching of Google that we talked about. So I’ll let you take it on there.
Jason Barnard: Well, credit where credit’s due. We were talking - I was talking about educating Google, and then Maria rightly pointed out that once you’ve educated it, you can then start coaching it. And that’s key to this question: if you haven’t educated Google about who you are, what you do, who your audience is, you can’t even begin to think about coaching it.
So as you say, it’s time. And that time depends incredibly on ambiguity. The more ambiguous, the more time. It also depends on how much mess you’ve left behind over the last few years. If you’ve had loads of interns who have posted things all over the place that contradict each other, you don’t get that corroboration and the consistency that Rick was talking about. You’ve got a problem, you need to clean it up. You need to clean up your mess.
So if you’ve got a big mess, it’s a lot of time. If you’re ambiguous, it’s a lot of time. If it’s unambiguous, local, simple, clear, and you haven’t created a big mess - couple of months. You’ve got the education done and you can start coaching. At which point I’d pass over to Maria.
Maria Grimm: Yeah, I was going to say - you know, talking about that, it’s funny because we actually just launched a brand new company for a client, and one of the typical questions is: when are we gonna start showing up in search engines?
And that’s just kind of one of the most common questions. Some of the things that you can do: submitting your sitemaps as you’re cleaning up, using Google Search Console to help with that. So there’s those little tactical things. But again, like Jason said, the messier, the longer. And the better that you are educating it, it will take less time. But that coaching - continually doing those things - you know, Google is a machine. And I like to say, kind of like Jerry Maguire: help Google help you. They’re wanting to provide relevant experiences to their customers and keep their customers on their platform. So the more that you can provide that relevant experience, to allow Google to give that relevant experience to their customer, the more that you will be rewarded and the more you’ll start seeing your brand showing up on the results page.
Jason Barnard: Can I just add something really quickly to that? And it’s all about data lakes and data rivers, which sounds really boring but it actually is quite interesting.
We’ve become used to data rivers now. If we remember back 10 years ago, you had the concept where you would update your site and you would wait for the Google Dance. And the Google Dance would be a month later, two months later, and then you would see the results of what you’ve done. If people weren’t in SEO before that, they will never have seen this. So this is kind of a new idea for them, but you need to understand it because it’s really important.
Because those blue links use data rivers. So they will update pretty much immediately. You can expect, if you update a page, it will update within a couple of days. If you submit it through Search Console, it can potentially update within a few minutes.
But the Knowledge Panel - Google’s understanding of the world and that corroborative information we were talking about earlier on, and its confidence in that understanding - is still in the data lake stage. Where Google puts all the data in a big lake and then a big machine comes along and it goes through and it goes, “Ooh, eureka! I’ve understood!”
And that happens - and I’ve got on Kalicube a Knowledge Graph Sensor where we actually track when it updates, to the day. And it tends to be every two or three weeks, with sometimes gaps of up to three months, which we recently had. So you have to be patient. You’re placing this information, you’re informing Google, you’re educating Google, but you need to be patient. And you don’t expect it to understand from one day to the next. It will tend to understand in chunks, every two to three weeks. It will improve that understanding. So be patient. You need to do the work, you need to clean it up, and you need to be patient - because we’re working with data lakes, not data rivers, in this specific instance.
Paige Hobart: Nice. I think that’s a really nice metaphor for how you’re dealing with those different SEO things. I think that leads quite nicely on to the next question. When you’re talking about Kalicube, Usama Nacia asks: what are the best local SEO tools that you would recommend?
Jason Barnard: I have no idea. Can I like leave that to Maria or Rick? Because I don’t use local SEO tools.
Paige Hobart: You should plug your own, Jason.
Jason Barnard: Yeah - oh right, no, no. Sorry. Excuse me. Oh, that was wrong. Oh, you were handing it to me on a plate! Kalicube is brilliant!
In fact, actually, now you’ve mentioned it - last weekend I changed it. It used to be this international tool where we would track across Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, UK, and US, basically thinking that covers the world. And then I suddenly realised that nobody except Microsoft and Disney and Google themselves - IBM actually - care about all these different countries. I was working with Yoast on their Brand SERP and their Knowledge Graph presence, and they care because they’re an international company. But 99 percent of companies care about a country or a town.
And so we, actually with Authoritas, just built the system to nail it down into towns. So we can now track any town, any country - well, that’s obviously an exaggeration - and I rely on Authoritas for the data. But we’ve nailed it down. And you can actually track very locally using Kalicube. And I’m incredibly excited because the results have completely, completely changed. And it’s so, so much more useful than it was two weeks ago. And that was my Sunday afternoon coding last week.
Paige Hobart: Lovely. Maria, did you have some tools?
Maria Grimm: I did. Well, it’s a free tool and a lot of people know about it: Google Trends. One of the things that is really interesting with Google Trends is that you can narrow down the search to the city that you’re in.
And another interesting thing is, as you’re trying - yes, you want to optimise for your brand - but what else does your brand sell? So say if you sell “home security” versus “home alarm,” but people are searching for “home alarms” in your city, then you want to optimise for “home alarms,” not “home security.” So Google Trends is a really great free tool just to see how people search and what you want to optimise for in that local community.
And if you’re a bigger national brand and maybe people are searching something very differently on the East Coast than they are on the West Coast, you could optimise your different Google My Business listings to help with some of those trends that we’re seeing. But it’s a free tool, one that I recommend absolutely if you’re wanting to understand the end user in your community. And it sounds like Rick agrees, so yeah.
Jason Barnard: Yeah. I’ve also - I don’t know if Anton Shulke’s on the line, but Anton is also telling me that I need to get a better camera. So shout out to Anton as well. My phone is lighting up like every second. But I will answer, and I promise, next time. And also SEMrush - let’s, yeah.
Paige Hobart: Oh yeah, that’s my suggestion. Yeah, SEMrush. Thanks, Anton. Fantastic.
Next question is from Covington Travel. This may be elementary, but: how do you get your Google Business profile to show up on the right-hand rail? How did you get it there?
Jason Barnard: Oh, well, I can answer to a certain extent. Once again, we come back to intent. Google decides what the intent is. I’m actually terribly intrigued by the idea that - do we really need to worry about intent? If we serve that intent, it’s Google’s problem to decide what the intent is, not ours. Obviously, we can work towards convincing Google that we serve the intent, but at the end of the day, intent is more Google’s problem than it is ours.
If Google’s user’s intent is local, you will appear - or you will tend to appear - as long as you’ve got a healthy Google My Business panel.
And - oh, that’s really important actually for the entire thing - I like to think of Google as a child that we’re educating. We come back to that again. And Google will not stick something in the right rail, which is in inverted commas “fact” - it won’t shout about something if it isn’t sure. Just like a child will not go into the playground and shout out all these things that they heard until they’re absolutely sure, because they don’t want to make a fool of themselves. Google is the same. Google as a child - we need to educate it, we need to convince it, we need to help it be confident. Think of Google as your child.
Paige Hobart: And I guess as well, when you’re talking about that right-hand rail, it’s a lot easier to get a Google My Business panel than it is to get a Knowledge Panel.
Jason Barnard: Yes, 100 percent. Because Google My Business is basically a business listing where you give Google the information and it will show it on trust, as long as it’s healthy.
But one really interesting point, because we were talking about it earlier on and I think this is really important - obviously not to think about right now, but it’s something that’s happening - and Mike Blumenthal has been talking about this, and I’m getting really, really enthusiastic: Google is merging the two together. Google Maps - Bill Slawski told me earlier on - was a proof of concept. And as I said to him, wow, that’s some proof of concept! It’s a Knowledge Graph. And they’re going to merge it into the bigger Knowledge Graph. And it’s already started to happen.
So if you have a Google My Business, you also want a Knowledge Graph presence, and you want to merge the two together. And preferably, because the Knowledge Graph is independent of your own control - or at least partially - you need to make sure that you start nailing it today. With what Rick was saying: consistent information that is corroborated across multiple third-party trusted sources.
And you need to identify to Google today where the entity home is - as Mike Blumenthal says, the canonical for your business. Where Google goes to get the information from the horse’s mouth, that it then goes out and double-checks with all those third-party trusted authoritative sources. And that should be your website. Even if nobody visits it, it doesn’t matter. It’s still your entity home. It’s the way that you can educate Google, so that after that you can then coach it, as Maria rightly said.
Paige Hobart: Yeah, absolutely. And Rick and Maria, have you ever created a right-hand Knowledge Panel for a client?
Ric Rodriguez: Yeah, I mean, a number of times. I worked for a business that - our company who are in the business of helping businesses get information out there. I used to work for Yext prior to my current role.
And I actually just want to pick up on the point that Jason made, which is around this idea of Google surfacing the right information for intent rather than you trying to guess what the intent of the user is. I think that’s a really interesting point. Because I very much agree - Google has access to not only data about the thing itself, but it also has access to data about you in that moment of space and time, and what people like you do at that moment of space and time. It knows this stuff.
So even this whole concept of understanding whether you are ranking number one or where you are - it’s still a very, very subjective thing. You might be ranking number one for that moment of space and time, but you might not. And that’s Google putting the right information that it has with the right user in that instance.
But yeah, I mean, to me, I think the thing to remember is this whole idea of the Knowledge Graph. We talk about it as this amazing brain. And I’m going to go on a monologue here, so please keep me to time and I’ll try not to.
But we talk a lot about this kind of crazy concept of a Knowledge Graph. It’s a really simple thing. A graph database. And a Knowledge Graph is just information - a database that is used to store non-uniform data in a way that makes the most sense. So relational databases - they have lots of tables, they take tons and tons of time and computation effort to get to answers.
What a Knowledge Graph is: a thing, or lots and lots of things, that connect to other things that may or may not be the same type of thing. A pizza might have cheese. But pizza and cheese are not the same thing. And the bit - the sort of the magic secret sauce - is the bit in the middle. And we call this the subject-object-predicate triple, so to speak. It’s also called a semantic triple.
The great thing about Knowledge Graphs and this whole way of structuring data is: within each of the parts, you can go another level down - which you can’t really do in a relational database. You can go: right, this thing is known by all of these attributes that we can align to it.
So to Jason’s point - making sure that your information is out there, making sure that you give a complete set of information in so much as you’re able to, making sure it’s corroborated, it’s found across the web - that’s the way to get onto the right-hand side. Because you’re filling in the gaps. You’re maximising the data that the system has access to. And you’re proving to the system, in a way that it’s expecting, that you are the truth - or the trusted source.
Sorry, I may have gone on a bit on that one. But I hope that’s helpful.
Paige Hobart: No, I think it is helpful. And I’ve just seen something come through about, “OK, so what’s the first step?” And I think you guys are kind of touching on it. Maybe something like schema, to just outline who you are and what you are to that five-year-old Google, would be your first step.
Maria Grimm: Well, the first step is actually - oh, sorry, excuse me.
Ric Rodriguez: Go ahead.
Maria Grimm: Also say: the first step would be your Google My Business listing. Just go to Google My Business. So that’s first. That’s step one.
Paige Hobart: Oh brilliant. Now Jason, what’s your first step?
Jason Barnard: I love that, because I hadn’t even thought of it and it’s so obvious. It’s one of those pieces of advice that is so obvious you go, “Oh yeah, of course. Oh yeah, that one’s the easiest - do that.”
So after you’ve identified and filled in your Google My Business and made it accurate - it’s not the schema markup. It’s identifying the entity home. It’s that canonical. It’s the go-to place to get the information. As Rick said - or he didn’t quite say but was implying - get the information from the horse’s mouth. You want to be the source of information about yourself. And then Google verifies it, corroborates it, checks that it’s correct.
And that entity home is not necessarily your homepage. It can be an About Us page. Which is actually a really helpful tip, because if it’s your homepage, you’re trying to be factual when you’re trying to explain to this child - you need to be factual, you need to be simple, you need to have that schema markup that repeats what you’ve already said on the page. And your homepage is actually there to attract people and sell to them and direct them to the correct place on your site.
An About Us page is a factual page that describes who you are, what you do, and who your audience would be - which is exactly what you want Google to understand. If it’s to start offering you up as a solution to its users’ problems and an answer to their questions - excuse me - then once you’ve done that, you write out very simply who you are, what you do, who your audience is. Then you put that in schema markup. You run it through your entity home.
Then you go out and you corroborate. And you make sure that your NAPs - now we’re back to NAPs, which is a very local search term, but it’s not Name, Address, Phone Number in this case. It’s date founded. I saw that whip through as a question earlier on. Date founded - incredibly important. It’s an unchangeable piece of information about you.
Where your offices can change. The date it was founded is the same thing as, for us, date of birth. So if you say “Jason Barnard” - you can say there are 250 of us in the world - there’s only one who was born on the 5th of June 1966. You now know my age. In Leeds, in the north of the UK. And that’s disambiguation.
And for a company, it’s date founded, founders. Full stop. It’s the same thing. And you want Google to have those anchors. And you want Google to be convinced of those anchors, both on your site and on other sites. Because those anchors never change. Your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, the founders of your company, where it was founded - you want to find those anchors so that Google never loses the crutch. I call it a crutch. If it loses the crutch, it loses confidence. It drops you like an olive stone or something.
Whereas something like where you’re living today, or where your office is today - Google knows that that can change. It’s a temporary relationship. Who you’re married to, unfortunately, is a temporary relationship for most of us. Or some of us. I’ll shut up. And on that point -
Paige Hobart: OK. Let’s look at something in the chat that I think is going to come up quite a lot: how do you remove those bad results about your brand? How do you kind of rescue your Brand SERP?
Jason Barnard: Oh, I’ll bet Rick’s got something to say about that.
Ric Rodriguez: By creating more positive information about you. Which can be - first thing, I think, is acknowledgment, right? Everybody gets bad reviews. Actually, most people have this complex where they see a bad review and think that’s the worst thing that’s happened. And my old company, Yext, did a study and it turns out something like 70 percent of all reviews that happen are four or five stars and above. So generally, reviews are really positive. People like leaving positive reviews.
The first thing you can do - I can’t remember the guy that wrote the book - there’s a book called “Hug Your Haters.” Read that book if you’re interested in online reputation management. Great book.
But if you get bad reviews, if you get negative results - try and engage. If you can engage with that person, you can give your point of view. They may review and remove that review, or they may give your point of view. And already you’re starting to add positive data signals.
And then the final point is: create some positive buzz. If you are selling a product that’s really great and people are loving it, get your customers to talk about you. If you’ve got a great new initiative that you’re doing around CSR, make sure people can find out about that and that they can share it. Just really start to create a buzz around what you’re doing.
You can turn - the reason the negatives are there is because people are finding it, quote unquote, “helpful.” But if you can help people find utility in the stuff that you create, then you’ll be able to - to use Jason’s term - leapfrog that stuff as well.
Paige Hobart: Nice. Really good, really good. And I guess as well, your customers and your visitors are semi-educated. If they see one listing that’s one review from two people versus another thing that’s saying five stars from thousands of people, they’re going to trust that one, right? So don’t freak out. That’s the phrase I’m going to say - exactly that: don’t freak out.
Now, I’ve got a really good question here. I think it might be one of the last ones we have to do. But I really enjoy this because I’ve picked Jason up on this myself. Julie Reinhardt says: we’ve looked at Brand SERP so far exclusively on desktop. How does this differ on mobile? We know that the majority of our customers get to us on a mobile device.
Jason Barnard: Right. Well, the whole thing is just broken into chunks on mobile. So the reason I use desktop as an example is because you can say right rail, left rail - it makes it really obvious and we can distinguish between them. So it’s much easier for us as marketers to work with.
The thing about mobile is that the Google My Business panel or the Knowledge Panel can be broken into chunks. So somebody needs to scroll. There’s blue links in between. There’s maybe a video here or there. So it makes it much more complicated to analyse, to understand, and to act upon.
So I tend to use desktop as the example, even though it isn’t the dominant source of traffic, simply because it makes our jobs more structured, easier to explain to the boss. I mean, if you say to the boss, “Oh look, it’s chunked in and this is actually part of the Google Maps panel” - you’re going to lose yourself. You say, “Left rail advice, right rail fact” - everybody gets it.
Paige Hobart: Perfect, lovely. And we are at time. Would you guys please give everybody your Twitter handle so they can go and chase you afterwards for all the questions we’ve not answered? Rick, go first.
Ric Rodriguez: Yep - @RicRodriguez_UK. Super creative, that one.
Paige Hobart: Perfect. Maria?
Maria Grimm: @Grimm_Collective.
Paige Hobart: Lovely. Jason?
Jason Barnard: @JasonMBarnard - it’s on the screen. Apologies - excuse me - to you, Maria, because I don’t think you’ve got enough speaking time.
Maria Grimm: Hey, that’s OK. Next time I’ll get in there. You guys have great tactical advice, which I think is what people are here looking for. I am overall strategy and support, so.
Paige Hobart: And it’s been a pleasure having all three of you. Thank you so much. It’s been really, really helpful. So everyone, you have their Twitter handles - you can go and chase them for the Q&As we didn’t get around to. Especially chase Maria. But just a reminder that all of these webinars are recorded so you can go back and watch them at any time. We are on talk number three now, so I’m very excited to introduce our next round.
