SEO for Branded Search - Why It Is Vital to Your Bottom Line and What You Need to Do
Doing SEO on branded terms might seem simple, unprofitable, or perhaps even unnecessary. Not true. Starting with the exact match Brand SERP, and moving outwards to informational queries around the brand and questions about the brand, optimizing results for all manner of branded terms is intricate, vital to your business, and pays dividends.
Koray Gübür, Olesia Korobka, and Dave Davies join Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy®) to walk you through:
why optimizing branded search is so important,
techniques and strategies to do it effectively and efficiently,
how to measure your success ultimately converting more bottom-of-funnel prospects and vastly reducing client churn.
Bonus: allocating just a small of your SEO efforts on branded search is the best way to build a more effective content strategy and vastly improve your E-A-T (with no extra effort required).
Video by: Duda. Guest: Jason Barnard. Host: Olesia Korobka
Summary: SEO for Branded Search - Why It Is Vital to Your Bottom Line and What You Need to Do (Duda)
Event: Duda Webinar Date: 12 January 2022 Participants: Jason Barnard (presenter), Koray Gübür (panelist), Dave Davies (panelist), Olesia Korobka (host) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[ID]
Key Takeaways
Jason Barnard presented a comprehensive framework for branded search optimisation, expanding from the exact-match Brand SERP to branded terms, product SERPs, and entity SERPs. Koray Gübür, Dave Davies, and Olesia Korobka contributed perspectives on Knowledge Graph mechanics, entity registration, competitor encroachment, and practical implementation. Dave Davies opened with a notable confession about initially dismissing Brand SERPs before recognising them as “the cornerstone” and “the foundation of every good SEO strategy.”
1. The Brand SERP as the Foundation of All SEO Strategy
Dave Davies described his journey from dismissing Brand SERPs as “a cute subset of real SEO” to recognising that “understanding your entity status and understanding how to control your Brand SERP is actually just the foundation of every good SEO strategy that could possibly exist.” Jason Barnard built on this, describing the Brand SERP as the cornerstone from which every other branded search initiative extends. The methodology starts with the exact-match Brand SERP and builds outward to branded terms, product SERPs, and entity SERPs.
2. Three Types of Branded Search - A Hierarchy
Jason Barnard introduced a three-level hierarchy of branded search. First, the exact-match Brand SERP (navigational and informational - your audience researching you). Second, branded terms containing the brand name (bottom-of-funnel and post-funnel - questions, comparisons, reviews). Third, product and service SERPs (commercial intent - people ready to buy). He then revealed that product SERPs loop back to the top of the hierarchy because every product that becomes well-known enough becomes its own entity with its own Brand SERP - creating a recursive cycle.
3. Entity Understanding and Confidence Drive Everything
Jason Barnard reiterated that Google must understand who you are, what you do, and who your audience is before it can represent your brand effectively. He described the process as “educating Google” - providing consistent, corroborated information across the web so that Google gains confidence in its understanding. He introduced the concept of the entity home (a factual page on your site, often an About Us page) as the canonical source that Google verifies against third-party sources. The more confident Google becomes, the more prominently and accurately it displays the entity’s Brand SERP.
4. The Brand SERP Serves Three Audiences
Jason Barnard identified three audiences for whom the Brand SERP matters. First, your audience (clients, prospects, investors, partners, potential hires) - they Google your brand name and make decisions based on what they see. Second, Google itself - the Brand SERP reflects Google’s assessment of your EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) and its understanding of your entity. Third, you - the Brand SERP is a diagnostic window into your digital ecosystem, showing how the world perceives your brand and highlighting problems you may not know about.
5. Every Entity Has a Brand SERP - Entity SERPs
Jason Barnard expanded the Brand SERP concept to cover all entity types: corporations, persons, products, applications, events, books, TV series, SaaS platforms, cars, records, music groups, local businesses, and even websites. Each entity has its own Brand SERP that needs to be optimised. He demonstrated this with Kalicube Pro’s product SERP, showing that product-level optimisation is closer to commercial intent and therefore closer to revenue.
6. Knowledge Graph Registration Creates Chain Effects
Koray Gübür explained that registering an entity in the Knowledge Graph creates cascading benefits beyond the Brand SERP itself. Once Google associates a brand with the correct entity type, industry, and related entities, it begins to show that brand in competitors’ People Also Ask boxes, related searches, and entity suggestion panels. He described how connecting a sub-company to its parent holding created a direct EAT signal, and how entity registration changed autocomplete suggestions, Google My Business presentation, and cross-SERP visibility. He called Kalicube Pro “a kind of pioneer of that stage.”
7. Branded FAQ Strategy - Answer Questions Your Audience Is Asking
Jason Barnard presented a methodology for dominating branded question-and-answer searches. Start with the People Also Ask questions on your exact-match Brand SERP. Answer those questions first, one question per page (not an accordion system). Expand outward to related questions. Build an FAQ organised into categories (brand-specific and topic-specific) with infinitely scalable structure. He showed a client case study where this approach produced steady, compounding traffic growth and eventually led to dominating featured snippets, People Also Ask, and organic results for all branded and semi-branded queries.
8. Competitor Encroachment Through Brand SERP Mastery
Jason Barnard and Koray Gübür explained that mastering your own Brand SERP creates the foundation for appearing on competitors’ Brand SERPs. Once your entity is established and well-understood, Google may show your brand in competitors’ People Also Ask boxes, related searches, and entity suggestion panels. Jason noted that these competitor appearances are extremely difficult for the competitor to remove, making them highly defensible positions. Koray described techniques for extracting competitors’ People Also Ask questions and providing better answers from multiple sources to capture those positions.
9. Disambiguation Through Unchangeable Anchors
Jason Barnard reiterated the importance of disambiguation using unchangeable facts: date founded, founders, date of birth, country. He warned against naming multiple entities with the same string of characters, using his own experience with “Boowa and Kwala” (a cartoon, a TV show, a website, a song, multiple album versions - seven different entities with the same name). He advised businesses to choose unique brand names and avoid creating unnecessary ambiguity.
10. Quick Wins for Brand SERP Optimisation
The panel identified immediate actions: claim and complete your Google Business Profile (Maria Grimm’s first step in a previous panel, reiterated here). Optimise rich sitelinks (50% of brands don’t have them - this is a site structure and content problem on basic pages). Engage consistently on social media channels (three to four social profiles appear on most Brand SERPs). Use Google My Business posts for promotions (Dave Davies reported a 4-5% sales increase from a single post). Fix schema markup errors (Olesia Korobka’s quick win). Check entity status in Google Trends to understand whether Google classifies your brand as a company or a topic.
11. Data Lakes vs. Data Rivers - Patience Required
Jason Barnard reiterated the distinction between data rivers (blue link rankings update quickly) and data lakes (Knowledge Graph understanding updates in bulk every two to three weeks). Brands must be patient after making changes to entity information, because the Knowledge Graph does not update in real time.
12. Proactive vs. Reactive Reputation Management
Dave Davies highlighted that Brand SERP optimisation is fundamentally proactive reputation management. Businesses that control their Brand SERP before a crisis have defensible positions when negative results appear. Businesses that ignore their Brand SERP until a reputation crisis occurs must then scramble to build control from scratch - a far more expensive and difficult process. He noted this is hard to assign a KPI to, because “you don’t know you needed it until you need it.”
Historical Significance
This webinar, recorded in January 2022, documents Jason Barnard’s articulation of the complete branded search hierarchy (exact-match → branded terms → product/entity SERPs), the recursive nature of entity SERPs, the three-audience framework for Brand SERP importance, and the branded FAQ methodology. Dave Davies’s opening confession - that he initially dismissed Brand SERPs before recognising them as the foundation of all SEO strategy - encapsulates the industry’s evolving recognition of Jason Barnard’s pioneering work. Koray Gübür’s description of Kalicube Pro as “a kind of pioneer of that stage” and his demonstration of Knowledge Graph chain effects further validates the platform’s role in this space. These concepts form core elements of The Kalicube Framework (TKF) and The Kalicube Process™ (TKP) that Jason Barnard developed through Kalicube.
Full Transcript: SEO for Branded Search - Why It Is Vital to Your Bottom Line and What You Need to Do (Duda)
Olesia Korobka: Hello and welcome to Duda’s webinar, “SEO for Branded Search.” Tell us where you’re from, and if you have a personal Knowledge Panel in Bing or Google, or if you’ve managed to trigger it for some other entities such as your company or website or product, don’t hesitate to ask questions all the way through. I’ll be tracking them and will make sure that our glorious experts will answer some of those. You can do that in the chat box. And I also suggest that you subscribe to those newsletters or other webinars in the future in order not to miss them. This one is recorded, but we’ll be very happy if you can join us live and chat with us. Once again, it will be “SEO for Branded Search - Why It Is Vital to Your Bottom Line and What You Need to Do.” And now let’s present our speakers. Jason, the Brand SERP Guy, and SEO’s only hope - as John Mueller himself called you. What can you add to that?
Jason Barnard: Oh, there’s not very much you can add to John Mueller saying I am SEO’s only hope. He also called me the Knowledge Panel Guy - I think “Mr Knowledge Panel,” I think he called me. But I’ve actually got a presentation at the beginning of my talk, so I’m going to just say: I’m the Brand SERP Guy. I love to analyse and optimise and try to understand how Google builds the SERP - the search engine results page - that represents your brand to your audience when they search your name.
Olesia Korobka: OK then. Koray Gübür - is that right? Yes. Holistic SEO expert. And I know that there are very few people - actually, maybe counted on the fingers of one hand - that not only read patents but also are able to understand them and implement them effectively. Is that right? Can you tell us more about yourself?
Koray Gübür: My name is Koray Gübür and I am the owner and founder of Holistic SEO & Digital. And most of the time, this is a kind of intro for my articles or all of my other YouTube videos, and sometimes even TV appearances. And I try to focus on every vertical of SEO. And I can tell you that it’s not so easy to do since 2019, because every vertical of SEO is already so deep - from local SEO to entity-oriented search, or the data science approach, or page speed optimisation, or web page loading timing performance optimisation. There are many books within every vertical. So I try to catch up - it’s not so easy, but I try my best.
Olesia Korobka: OK. Now, Dave Davies - lead SEO for Weights & Biases, which is a machine learning company. And also one of my favourite authors on Search Engine Journal. Can you tell us more about yourself?
Dave Davies: Sure. Obviously, I’m interested in machine learning. I’ll, in this sort of intro piece, confess - and Jason’s heard this story before - with a sort of embarrassing note. The first time I met Jason, it was at a conference years ago, and we were talking about Brand SERPs. Or I was introduced to Jason as the Brand SERP Guy. And noob me on Brand SERPs had thought to myself at the time, “Oh, isn’t that cute” - like sort of a little subset of real SEO. That was the approach, the mentality that I had. And then now, this enormous recognition, somewhere in the last five years, of going: oh. Oh, actually, it’s the cornerstone. Actually, understanding your entity status and understanding how to control your Brand SERP is actually just the foundation of every good SEO strategy that could possibly exist. So a big confession from me for my arrogance and lack of insight into exactly what we’re talking about now today. And thankfully, because of pioneers like Jason in the area, I was able to catch up, because they’re sharing their knowledge as much as they do.
Olesia Korobka: OK, thank you very much. Myself, I’m Olesia Korobka. I’m just an SEO entrepreneur running my own few projects. And recently I’ve also started working with startups - and maybe you know, they have this Brand SERP problem, especially when they are closer to the investor round-ups. So maybe we’ll talk about that right after your presentation, Jason. Maybe you are ready to share it with us?
Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Absolutely wonderful. I mean, to be honest, three of my favourite people in the entire industry, both as human beings and as super-duper smart people. And Dave, that introduction is delightful, because I know I talk to people about it and they think, “Oh, it’s not very important.” But it is fundamentally important.
Koray, I understand you, because you say “I tried to dig down into something and it’s such a deep rabbit hole and it’s so hard to get out.” And I have so much respect for Dave for your writing - as Olesia says, you’re by far my favourite writer in the industry. And Koray, for actually understanding the patents you read and, as Olesia said, implementing the stuff - it’s astonishing.
And Olesia, I know you ask the hard questions. But the hard questions are the good questions and the questions we need to answer. And I’m deeply, deeply happy that you asked me a hard question the other day. And I’ve included the answer in the presentation just this afternoon, because I thought, “Olesia scares me so much, I don’t want her to ask me that question and I don’t have an answer.”
So - “How to Own Your Branded Search.” Now, I focus on Brand SERPs, but this is going to be about a slightly wider topic. So I’m adventuring into uncharted territory slightly. But that isn’t to say I don’t know what I’m talking about - it just means that I’m widening the sphere of what I’m talking about. And as Dave said, it becomes not only the cornerstone but all the bricks on that foundation. And I think we really need to focus on that.
So, I call myself the Brand SERP Guy - which actually now looks like “the Brand Duda,” which is slightly embarrassing. And the reason for that is that I focus on what appears when - what Google shows, in fact - when you search a brand name, a person’s name, or any entity name, as we’ll see later on.
Now, I’m also the Knowledge Panel Guy - “Mr Knowledge Panel,” according to John Mueller, which is delightful and terribly charming. It makes me giggle like a schoolgirl to think about it. John is a great guy, he’s very supportive, and it’s delightful for me to be recognised by somebody at Google, somebody of his stature, as somebody who knows a great deal about Knowledge Panels. I hope I do.
But I’m currently living in Paris. And as you can see, I’m going to start telling my story through my Brand SERP. And that’s the idea: my Brand SERP should represent who I am, what I do, and who my audience is.
So I live in Paris, as you can see from this. I was a voice actor in a previous life - cartoon blue dog, as you can see from these results. IMDb - you can see “The Blue Dog and Bear” was a delightful TV show. I was a punk folk musician - that’s the Barking Dogs down there in the right-hand corner. That gets a small place because it isn’t a big part of my current life. I’m managing to dominate my Brand SERP with my current life, which is a digital marketer and a podcast host.
I have a groovy podcast, which is apparently intelligent, interesting, and fun. Dave’s been on it, Olesia has been on it, and Koray has been on it. And that is absolutely delightful. We have Eric Camalieri from Paris who has joined us, which is delightful.
I’m also an author. I got the author boxes a few weeks ago - absolutely delighted about that. And I’ve now written a book. But I was writing the book to get the author panel, and now I’ve got the author panel without the book. So it’s a bit of a waste of time, but I think the book will be pretty good. Finished it yesterday, should be out next week.
And I also founded a company called Kalicube. And we deal with Brand SERPs - we help our clients optimise them. We have a SaaS, a course, a set of courses, and a book. And if you’ve forgotten, I am the Brand SERP Guy.
That is my Brand SERP. I’ve been working on that for seven years. And that gives you a good idea about the time it takes to actually get your Google business card right - to get Google to show your brand message the way you want it to, to your audience, when they’re searching for your brand name, your personal name, or whatever entity you happen to be looking after.
Now, the approach today is going to be incredibly exciting. There are three types of branded search. You’ve got the exact-match Brand SERP, which is what I focus on. That’s very much navigational or informational - the person searching this brand name is navigating to your site or finding more information about you. And that, as you can imagine, is incredibly interesting, incredibly important, incredibly valuable to you as a business.
Then there are the branded terms around your brand - the bottom and post-funnel, which are generally informational, can also be commercial. But certainly the product SERP, which is the next level down, is the commercial stuff - when people are looking for your products and looking to buy that product because they know about that product.
And we’re going to come to all that in a moment. The interesting thing that I discovered when I started preparing this slide deck is that basically a product becomes a Brand SERP. And so we actually loop back to the top, and then we can go back down this list again. And that’s the point of the talk today - to go through all of these different branded searches and identify the fact that they are all, in some way, a Brand SERP. So they’re all part of my - I don’t know what we can call it - stratosphere, because it’s so vast.
Now, I’m going to start with my favourite topic, which is the exact-match brand name, the Brand SERP. And I’m talking about the exact-match brand name: what appears when your audience searches your name on Google. What do they see?
An exact-match Brand SERP can be navigational - primarily for well-known brands such as Facebook. Now, SimilarWeb provide this data: 96 percent of people click on that first link or one of the sitelinks. That’s astonishing. And I was talking to Nathan Chalmers from Bing, who is the whole-page algorithm guru at Bing, and he said, “Facebook’s a great example. We use that because we know the vast, vast majority of people who search for Facebook just want to go to the site. It’s pure navigation.”
But for a lesser-known brand like Kalicube, you’re looking at something which is more informational. People have heard about us, they don’t necessarily want to go straight to the site, but they certainly want to learn about us. And this is where your Google business card - or in this case, the Bing business card - becomes vitally important.
Why have I put Bing here? Because Bing might be smaller, but it’s still - whatever country you’re in, it will vary - but perhaps five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten percent of the traffic that you’re going to get. Or the people who are searching your brand name or your branded terms. And the other interesting thing is: everything you’re doing to build your Brand SERP for Google is going to help with your Brand SERP on Bing. And I looked at this a couple of days ago - Bing actually does a better job than Google. Hate to say it, but the work I’ve been doing on Google has actually produced better results on Bing than it has on Google. And yet the results produced on Google are absolutely perfect for me. So Bing is giving me double perfect for no extra cost, which is delightful.
Next, we move on to the idea that either way, the Brand SERP represents Google’s or Bing’s understanding of your brand and your relationship with your audience - and, as we’ll see later on, also your reputation in its eyes.
I just focus on page one. And you can see here two page ones for two different brands. But you can look much deeper. And Dave was talking about this the other day - looking on pages two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten is incredibly insightful. But my aim today, and over the last couple of years, has been to get people to start looking at page one. And the story for another day is: once we start looking at page one, we can start thinking about pages two, three, four, five, six, and seven. And Dave is being a little bit ambitious a little bit too quickly - although I know that you’ve delved into it, so that isn’t a fair comment, and I do apologise.
Now, this is the question that Olesia asked the other day, and I had to include it because the challenge was launched: what KPI for a Brand SERP? And it’s actually pretty simple. At Kalicube Pro, we’ve got software as a service and we actually track 70,000 brands and entities. And we’ve developed a score, which is the Quality Sentiment Score and the Control Score - over in the right top corner, covered by the Duda logo, unfortunately.
And the idea here is: you need maximum control - so, in this case, as dark blue as you possibly can - in order to influence the results so that we have maximum quality, which is the green that we have here.
Now, I’ve been working on Kalicube, my own Brand SERP, so I get these great scores pretty much every time. We’ll see in a moment that it isn’t always like that. I did a mock-up here, and as you can see: on Kalicube, tracking that quality over time as we move through - in the UK for the search on Kalicube - we see that we went from these yellow neutral results (the Twitter boxes that weren’t ours, they were somebody else’s) through moving up from a score of C to B to A, indicating that we’ve gone from not the greatest Google business card in the world in the UK to a really, really, really impressive business card that’s going to impress our audience.
And then we can also do that across geo regions. And as you can see, it varies much more than one might expect. Kalicube - obviously an international brand, not a major international brand, but an international brand nonetheless - UK, France, and Canada. That was for you, Dave, because we get the best score in Canada. I think that might be because Dave might be helping me in his spare time at the weekends, but I’m not absolutely convinced about that.
So, branded SERPs are important for three different audiences. And I would always start with the exact-match Brand SERP. I think one thing is, as you’ll see in this presentation, it becomes very, very deep - it’s a very deep rabbit hole. And it becomes very deep very quickly. And as Koray said, you get lost very quickly. And the amount of things you need to do, as opposed to the complexity of the things you need to do - so start with your exact-match Brand SERP. If you can start sorting that out, it’s going to sort out a lot of the other problems around the brand, as we’ll see. So start with the foundations, start with the cornerstone as Dave said earlier on, and then build out from there.
Now, we’re going to look at the three types of audiences that it’s important for. It’s important for your audience - they’re your clients, they’re your prospects, they are investors (as you said earlier on, Olesia, people who are in that round of funding), they’re your partners, they’re people who need to see that you are a credible solution, you’re a credible company, you’re credible for them to do business with you, whatever kind of business they’re going to be doing. And it’s your business card. They’re gonna Google your brand name whether you like it or not. And if it looks bad, they might jump ship before even starting to do business with you. Or if they’re a client, they might jump to the competition if they think you don’t look credible enough and your competition looks more credible - because they’re probably Googling your competition’s brand name too.
It’s also important for Google. It’s Google’s assessment of your brand. It’s Google’s opinion of the world’s opinion of you. And we could say that’s a measure of EAT - if it thinks you’re expert, authoritative, and trustworthy, and it understands who you are, what you do, and who your audience is, your Brand SERP, your exact-match Brand SERP, is going to look phenomenally good. If it doesn’t understand you, or it thinks you’re not credible - not expert, authoritative, and trustworthy - it won’t look so good. And it’s a really easy KPI - if I may, Olesia - for you to look at, to understand how well Google has understood who you are, what you do, and who your audience is. But also to understand what its assessment of your credibility is.
And then it’s important for you, because it’s a phenomenal insight into your digital ecosystem. What Google is putting on your Brand SERP is exactly what it thinks is valuable and helpful to your audience. It’s a prioritised list of what it thinks your audience is interested in. And as you go through the pages - one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten - you can get a deep insight into all the things that are out there that Google considers to be important. And Google has a phenomenal reach to understand what is important, what is relevant, what is being looked at, and has an influence on your audience when they’re surfing around the rest of the web, interacting or not with your brand.
But before we continue: that trio of interested parties applies to all branded search. It’s really important to remember that the three steps we had earlier on - the exact-match brand, the branded terms around that brand, and the products themselves - all of these three audiences are interested in every single term that includes your brand name or a product name.
So, what to do for the exact-match Brand SERP: you work to educate Google so that it builds your Brand SERP to serve your audience the way you want. And that’s important - you’ve spent loads of time, loads of money building up your brand presentation, how you represent your brand. There is no reason on earth why Google would not represent your brand the way you expect it to, the way you want it to, to get your brand message across that you’ve worked so hard to build and push out on social media and push out onto the PR platforms.
Google will represent you the way you want if you educate it to what you want - as long as what you want is a fair representation of you. So we’re looking at educating Google, as opposed to trying to beat the machine. We’re educating a child who wants to understand what’s important to your audience and what you want to say to them. And if you have fair things to say to them, Google will, in your place, say that to them when they search your brand name.
So you need to look at your site - obvious. This is where SEO generally stops: “my site.” And this is where Brand SERP optimisation is going to take us into a totally new dimension - it’s absolutely delightful.
So you start off with your own site: your homepage, the rich sitelinks, different pages on your site that people might want to go to - including the login page, interestingly enough, which you might have de-indexed or no-indexed. The contact page, the About page - these are incredibly important. They sit right at the top of the Brand SERP and are phenomenally important and often overlooked in SEO.
But you also want to look at your social media. And this is a screenshot from Kalicube Pro that indicates: within my industry, these are the social media platforms that dominate. Which means that I need to be focusing on these, because these are the social media platforms that will dominate Brand SERPs in general and probably appear on my Brand SERP. So social media is something I never paid much attention to until I started looking at the Kalicube Pro data and realised that it’s phenomenally important, because they dominate the blue links. And which one dominates? Here it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Crunchbase, and Twitter. And I need to focus on those - which we’ve done, and we’ve improved our Brand SERP immensely simply by focusing on the right social media platforms.
And then the content strategy. As you’ve probably seen, I’ve got gazillions of videos. And that’s been the last couple of years - the idea there is to push the message out, to allow Google to show these great videos, and the Crunchbase profile, and my own articles about my own company on my Brand SERP. Which it does, because I’m representing the company, I’m representing myself, fairly and honestly. And it gives Google content that it can use - this rich content it can use and show on your Brand SERP.
And the offshoot of that is that my content strategy is now bringing me in clients. And Google is now my bonus - which is a delightful approach. Thank you, Lydia Infante - the content strategy that we’ve built up, the social strategy, is bringing me in clients, and Google is now my bonus.
We also want to look at service reviews - they rank very well, they’re very good for credibility and EAT. And the PR strategy - pushing out PR so that these media platforms are writing about my brand. Obviously, that’s great for inbound links, and that’s why most people do it. But I actually do it because I want to help Google to understand: A, who I am; B, that I’m authoritative; C, that my audience appreciates me. And that helps me build a better Brand SERP. And as you can see, by doing PR for my Brand SERP, I’m building links, I’m building credibility, I’m building authority, I’m building recognition of my expertise. So we’re winning on pretty much every SEO front.
And of course, a knowledge strategy. This is one thing that we’re not going to go into today. Building a Knowledge Panel, building Google’s understanding - phenomenally important. The entity home is your site, a page that represents your entity on your site. And you need to make sure that you get corroboration around the web about who you are, what you do, and who your audience is, so that Google - and let’s come back to that - educate Google so that it understands and that it is confident that it’s understood. That is your knowledge strategy. Once again: loads of inbound links, loads of EAT going on here. Your SEO strategy is going to go through the roof.
Next: search terms that contain the brand name. These are bottom and post-funnel. They’re people who are either about to buy from you, about to invest in your company, or have already bought from you and you need to keep them on board. So these are branded terms, as opposed to the exact-match brand name. And we’re looking at this kind of query - I won’t read them to you, you can all read. Obviously I’ve focused a little bit on Kalicube. And the XXX is just a random company - let’s not worry about that. And there, we’re looking at questions and answers.
And as you can see - as you will see, sorry - with this strategy: the first thing to say is, what questions are people asking around my brand? Start to answer them and build that out. And as you can see here, on the right-hand side, one of my clients - we did this strategy and we’ll see during the presentation how well it actually functioned. We started with our Brand SERP, with the People Also Ask where we didn’t answer any of the questions. We answered those questions first, and then we spread out from there. And as you will see, it works an absolute treat. We provided the answers to user questions and gave them the opportunity to learn more about us, from us. And this is what happened.
We built an FAQ section. We have Ubigi SIM, which is the product - the brand itself, sorry - on the left-hand side. The general questions around eSIMs and the problems that people have with that, on the right-hand side. So we split into two: brand and non-brand. We built the FAQ, and that’s the traffic graph - one of those delightful, not quite a hockey stick, this is more of a slow and steady that builds up and becomes phenomenally, phenomenally powerful.
We created FAQs, we created how-tos within that FAQ, we created videos and demos. This isn’t actually the client’s site - this was a mistake, this is my own videos and demos, because I haven’t yet built my own FAQ. And we ended up with Ubigi dominating the branded searches through how-tos, FAQs, the organic results, the featured snippets, the People Also Ask - on every single query, pretty much every branded search. And all we did was answer the questions that our customers and our bottom-of-funnel prospects were asking.
Then we spread that out to answer questions to dominate the topic. And as you can see here, we answered questions around Android eSIMs, Apple eSIMs, iPhone eSIMs, and started to dominate that too. So you’re then driving middle-of-funnel traffic - middle-to-bottom of funnel - that is not branded. And that’s where you’re getting a new audience. So it really does spread out incredibly well.
Then we can move on to second-level brand queries, which are products and services. So you have the idea of my exact-match brand, my brand plus reviews or my brand plus “how to,” and then we have the products. So in the case of our friends at Nike, that would be Air Jordan. In the case of Kalicube, it would be “The Fundamentals of Brand SERP for Business” (which is the book I mentioned earlier on), or would be “Kalicube Pro SaaS.” So I need to treat these as entities. And every entity has a Brand SERP. So actually, what we’re now doing is going back to the top and saying: now I need to look after my Brand SERP for this specific product. Let’s call them entity SERPs as we move forward.
So, what to do: you want to build a great Brand SERP for each and every one of your products and services. Treat it as a separate entity. You’ve built your Brand SERP for your company; then you want to move down and say, “Now I want to build a great Brand SERP for each and every one of my products and services.” I know at Kalicube we actually have a couple of clients who are starting to do this, and it’s phenomenally powerful and phenomenally helpful to their business, in the sense that these products and services queries - entity queries - are much closer to the bottom of the funnel, that commercial intent, we’re going to buy.
And here you can see I’ve picked up the “Kalicube Process Platform” entity SERP, and it looks pretty good. We’ve got videos because we’ve been producing videos, we’ve got rich sitelinks. Pretty much all of that is either totally controlled or semi-controlled, or has those reviews, which is absolutely delightful. So that would be a product SERP - which I would call a Brand SERP, an entity SERP - that you need to control, you need to optimise, you need to make look like the greatest possible business card for your product or your service.
So, consider that the exact-match product SERP is as important as your Brand SERP. Once you’ve got your Brand SERP sorted out - don’t run before you can walk - start with your Brand SERP, move on to your products. That’s my advice. And we can call that the entity SERP.
And now we’re going to spread it even wider. I mean, the Brand SERP rabbit hole just got so much deeper. Because every single entity has a Brand SERP, and every single entity needs to be optimised. These are my icons - the delightful illustration style that our designer created for us. You’ve got a corporation, you’ve got a person, you’ve got a product, you’ve got an application, you’ve got an event, you’ve got a book, you’ve got a TV series, you’ve got a software as a service, you’ve got a car, you’ve got a record, you’ve got a music group, you’ve got a local business. You’ve even got a website, which is an entity in and of itself. And they all need to be optimised for their Brand SERP.
So, a reminder: entity SERPs are important for the users - the audience, the people who are looking for that entity. It’s important for Google, because it’s an assessment of its opinion of the world’s opinion of that entity, and it’s a measure of its understanding of that entity and the audience that is going to be interested by that entity. And I won’t go down this rabbit hole, but that has big, big implications for things like Discover, where Google’s going to be pushing information to people because it knows they’re interested in that topic. That entity represents that topic as credibility for that topic - another rabbit hole I will try to avoid going down. I’m not doing a very good job.
And entities are also important for you, because it’s a window into the entity’s digital ecosystem. Just like your brand, your product has an ecosystem, and you need to look after it. And your Brand SERP - pages one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten - is an incredibly good way to see how the world perceives your product, so that you can actually put it right. You can deal with those reputation questions, reputation issues, proactively, and ensure that the product is seen as being valuable and credible for your audience.
So, to finish up, just to say: I’ve been working on this for a while. Kalicube offers A to Z solutions for Brand SERPs. You have the beginners - the book’s coming out next week, “The Brand SERP Book.” We have intermediate - you want to go for the Brand SERP courses, where I teach a great deal. I know Dave’s done the courses and quite enjoyed them. And we have advanced - for the Brand SERP specialist, which is a SaaS platform that helps agencies and experts understand, analyse, and improve the Brand SERPs and their digital ecosystem, by extension, really from the root and the core of it upwards.
So that was my presentation. I’ve got all the solutions you need at Kalicube. And I’ve just presented to you all the problems, with the general explanation of what the solutions might entail.
Olesia Korobka: It was brilliant. Thank you, Jason. So, after your presentation, what we’ve seen is that it is very important, it’s beneficial, and all that, to keep up with the Brand SERPs and still optimise for them. But why is this work so underestimated? Even some big SEOs in the industry are sometimes underestimating that - a bit underrated, I would say. What can be done to get more value for the SEO world for this work? I think Dave should answer that question, because I could talk for 30 minutes straight.
Dave Davies: Yeah. I think, for me, part of the equation or part of the puzzle fit back together oddly when I started - Koray’s probably read some of the same ones - when I started reading patents. And the patents on entities, and starting to put the pieces together and going, “Oh wait, no matter what I’m covering on my website, no matter which entities I’m dropping in there, no matter what relationship I might be trying to put out there as far as the topics that I’m covering - if I’m not, on my site and on the web as a whole, attaching those to me, what value do they have?”
And so it brought me back to going, “Oh wait, I need to solidify my home base first and then start moving these pieces in.” And for a lot of companies, you’ll already be well on your way - so OK, you’re sort of going back and doing your brand after the fact. I’ve done that many times as well. But it’s sort of foundational to - all roads lead to Rome. You need to make sure that you’re Rome. To build those roads too, and that Rome is clean.
Olesia Korobka: I think Koray can add to that, because you are sharing real value and your achievements when you do so. Maybe when you share that, you are making it more valuable for everybody, so people started paying more attention.
Koray Gübür: Thank you. So, I believe most of the SEOs didn’t focus on the Knowledge Panels or information panels - in the patents they call these Knowledge Panels “information panels,” usually. The main reason is that I believe they don’t think that they will be able to change them, because it takes too much time, first of all. And second of all, since I also started to manage an agency lately, I know that most of the clients just want to focus on the big wins, the quick wins, all the time. And Knowledge Panels - they are not quick wins. But I believe that they are big wins, actually.
And another thing here is that it has a kind of chain effect. Because if you are able to define yourself with a different type, or with different types of association, with different phrases, you will be able to create a better relevance for that. Imagine that you have a company but Google didn’t associate you or didn’t cluster your company with other good companies. And imagine that some other sources shout out to you in the Knowledge Graph or on the SERP, or some other types of information graphs. So this is a kind of indirect but really, really strong effect. And only people with deep understanding can actually see it.
And despite the popularisation of Knowledge Panels, or the democratisation of Knowledge Panels on the SERP, it’s really important. And it’s a kind of transition phase. So I believe in the future it will be very much more popular. Because in India, Google already made some experiments with Knowledge Panels - they created personal Knowledge Panels for regular users, and now they try to expand that experiment further.
So I believe we will have a kind of profile on the SERP. Actually, we already have, but in a more controllable way. And I believe Google will try to make it a kind of homepage for everyone - a kind of Facebook for everyone on the SERP, for their name. And it will change things. And this is a kind of early step, and Kalicube Pro is a kind of pioneer of that stage.
Jason Barnard: I’m glad I didn’t interrupt you, because you gave us “Kalicube is a pioneer of that stage,” which is brilliant.
I just wanted to add one thing, which is: the idea of “Google is your homepage” is what people in the local SEO space have been saying for years. Yes, Google is your business card. It’s potentially a homepage - we’re moving that way.
And the other thing, just before I pass back to Olesia, sorry, is that it will be more controllable, potentially. But Google My Business, remember, has - let’s say - half of the information that you control through your Google Business Profile management. But the other half is knowledge that Google is pushing in, that you have no direct control over. So even if you have control over your Knowledge Panel, even if you’ve claimed it, even if you have that personal profile you were talking about, Koray - you still need to make sure that you solve the fundamental underlying problems of Google’s understanding. Because otherwise it will fill that Knowledge Panel with rubbish. Sorry.
Koray Gübür: Definitely. And I believe also, especially celebrities - they will need these type of services very much more. For instance, I already have one client in this space. And she doesn’t want to be seen as the ex-wife of someone from her past, because Google just says that this person is the ex-wife of someone else. So at the moment, she tries to create a kind of digital identity on the SERP. And she wants to be announced with her proficiency, which is a dentist - and she is a really, really successful dentist. And she tries to change this.
So, on this aspect, the macro context - the query popularity - makes these things a bit harder. Because all of the queries are just about whether the person divorced or not, who was the ex-husband, etc. So all these queries manage Google to create that context. And at the moment, I try to create more sources and more information for other aspects of the same person entity.
So it’s a kind of fun area - a really fun area for the SEOs. It’s a kind of communicating with the search engine so that they can change the SERP. So it’s a really, really powerful perspective and a new battlefield for all the SEOs.
Dave Davies: I think one area that I think gets overlooked when we’re talking about the value of Brand SERPs is whether you want to be reactive or proactive. Like, if you’re a business, you don’t always know what’s going to happen tomorrow, a week from now, a month from now, a year from now.
Jason, you talked earlier - and yes, I’ve taken the courses, so folks, you can sort of hear about it in there - but one of the highlights of the discussion is: anybody who’s ever been hired to do reputation management is basically following one of the fundamentals of Brand SERP, which is: control as much as you can and try and plug it only with things that you can control in some way. It may be Twitter, but it’s your Twitter. Maybe, ideally - at its core - places where you can control the message.
I think, if you’ve ignored it and you have a problem, you don’t have a place to deal with that. If you have a reputation management problem - and I’ve seen that many times - it’s like, “OK, now we’re trying to push up the messages and the pages that we want, where we can control the message.” And you’re having to deal with the past rather than being more proactive - covering your Brand SERP in the beginning and going, “OK, we have a reputation management problem, but it’s over here. I need to deal with it, but it’s over here. It’s not position three on my Brand SERP, where everybody’s going, ‘Well, don’t hire that realtor, they’re horrible and they’re a scam artist,'” because somebody ran off and got upset.
So I think that’s one of the sort of unsung things. And it’s hard to put a KPI on that, because you don’t know you needed it until you need it. But you don’t know the value of what it would have cost, because thankfully you got ahead of the game.
Olesia Korobka: Brilliant. Yeah, I think that the KPI problem is one of the biggest when you’re trying to evaluate this thing. Because I know some companies which extract brand traffic from SEO achievements - so they don’t measure it at all. They say they take it for granted. So they don’t want to do anything with that. But I know, Koray, that you’ve told that you had some achievements with your brand traffic, actually - for a client company, that you had good results by working with the brand traffic and you could achieve more.
Koray Gübür: Yes, actually, two of my past SEO case studies include this type of Brand SERP optimisation as well. Because for one of them, it was a sub-company of another really, really big holding. And I tried to connect that small company to that big holding - which is a direct signal for the EAT. Because if you have that kind of connection possibility, you should actually use it.
For another one, I have created a new entity registration within the Knowledge Graph by creating some other types of sources for that. I can tell you that the biggest signal was again the Wikipedia page. But I have used other places too, so that I could justify that Wikipedia page. And after I registered that specific entity in that specific Knowledge Graph, even the Google My Business profile, even the autocomplete suggestions started to change.
And one of the most popular methodologies that Google uses is n-gram matching, or n-gram comparison. They can take your definition from third-party references. They can check all of the popular n-grams from there. And they can check also the autocomplete suggestions or other types of queries. And they can match these things. For instance, if it is about candidate passage answers, they usually use trigrams. But for another topic they can use bigrams, etc.
And this type of phrase-matching methodology - it actually helps the search engine to create a better, more predictable SERP for people’s demand. So in this context, I actually use these types of entity registrations to be able to create a topical relevance for that targeted industry, for my brands. And after I created those Knowledge Panels, for instance, Google started to show my clients within other competitors’ Brand SERPs as well. So it was a good connection. And People Also Ask, or in also the local search - I started to appear in these places. So it’s also not just about dominating your own SERP, but you can also a little bit jump on your competitors too - which is the most valuable traffic.
Jason Barnard: One of the interesting things about that is: once you’ve jumped on your competitors’ SERP - and the “People Also Search For” entity boxes at the bottom of the SERP - they’re really difficult to get rid of. They’re one of the hardest things to control. So this is something that almost none of your competitors will actually be able to deal with. You’ll be sitting on their Brand SERP and they won’t be able to do anything about it.
Olesia Korobka: And I think you’ve mentioned that you can also optimise for the FAQ section on their SERP and appear there, so yeah.
Jason Barnard: Well, that’s another example. I mean, if you want to encroach on other people’s Brand SERPs, the advantage of mastering your own Brand SERP means you can actually start to look at how you might be able to encroach on your competitors’ Brand SERPs. And I’m sure the boss of any company will be terribly pleased to be able to do that. There’s actually an echo - I think, Koray, you might have an echo on your microphone. Right.
So, the more you master your own branded search, the more you can potentially encroach on your competitors’ branded search. So the People Also Ask - which is what you’re talking about - and I like to talk about building from the Brand SERP outwards. And that goes for your SEO strategy, your digital strategy more generally, but also that question-and-answer strategy, the FAQ section.
You start with the People Also Ask that appear on your Brand SERP. You expand those. You move on to the questions underlying those questions by clicking on the result to the next page. You use Koray’s technique of looking at the related terms in the dropdown menu when you start searching for things. You look at the related searches at the bottom. And you build out the questions around your brand.
You answer them simply - one question-answer per page. Not the accordion system, which won’t function. And as you grow that out, you’re answering the questions that your users, your audience, are asking about and around your brand. That has to be valuable, because they’re searching for that on Google. They don’t come to your site and search for it on your site - they go to Google and search for it. So you need to be number one for every single question around and about your brand.
And Dave, maybe you’ve even used machine learning for that.
Dave Davies: I mean, now I work with machine learning practitioners more than I tinker around with it myself. I sort of struggle with an occasional Colab here and there and have some fun with that sort of stuff. But I have a lot of great friends to assist me on making that work.
But looking into the - like, talking about looking into the machine - yes. On that one, Jason, I use different systems, but you actually have it as a free tool on your site: the Knowledge Graph Explorer. One of the benefits - I think - actually, I know, so I won’t even say “I think” - I know, of understanding Brand SERP, came up a couple years ago when somebody had come to me and they’d done a site move, and it was a total train wreck.
And a lot of the lessons that I had picked up from Brand SERP helped me immeasurably in figuring out what the problem was - that I would not have known had that not been something that I had done. Or were I not, like Koray, digging into patents and going that route. And it ended up coming into the machine ID and the confusion over the confidence score of how this move was handled. So they were still thinking of the old company name as the new one.
And it was only because, by that point, I had learned enough about Brand SERP to respect what Jason had been talking about - going back to meeting him five years ago and going, “Oh OK, this is a thing.” And then actually understanding which tools to go to, to go, “Oh OK, this actually is in the machine. The machine is not understanding what we are and what we’re doing.” So now we need to go through the typical Brand SERP reinforcement - we need to make that happen. But I knew exactly where the problem was. I knew: OK, we need to weaken this one, strengthen this one. Both of these two things are causing some confusion.
Jason Barnard: Can I add something there? Because a lot of that was really like the geeky machine learning side, and people go, “Oh, there’s nothing I can really do because I don’t have Dave’s or Koray’s knowledge - or Olesia’s knowledge, for that matter.”
But in fact, I have a series called “The Daily Brand SERP” and I just look at the Brand SERP. And I provide a one-to-two minute explanation about what I’m seeing. And the example of looking at a Brand SERP and figuring out a problem is that, for example, I can immediately see by looking at the Brand SERP if a page is noindexed, if the robots.txt says “disallow,” or even if there’s a redirect problem - an automatic geo-targeted redirect problem. Or if you don’t have the rich sitelinks, you know that you’ve got a site structure problem or a content problem on those basic pages, like Contact Us and About Us.
So what’s really interesting is that you can look at a Brand SERP and get a really good idea of some of the really major technical SEO problems that might exist. And I found that incredibly exciting and interesting, because you can do it at a glance. I really love Brand SERPs.
Olesia Korobka: Yeah, there’s a question actually - the latest one, but it is about what we’re speaking about. It’s by Christy Brocato: can you explain “one question per page” versus the accordion approach? Do you separate your FAQs into different pages per question?
Jason Barnard: Oh, sorry, yeah - that was a bit of a throwaway comment that I made. Basically, the idea of an accordion system is that you search something, you come on the page, but then what happens is the user has a really bad experience. They have to go through all of them to find the question they were actually asking. Whether it’s a search on your own site or whether it’s a search on Google.
When it’s one question per page, you can actually just say: right, here is the answer. On my mobile, I turn up, I’ve got the simple answer to my simple question, I’m satisfied, and everything’s hunky-dory and wonderful. And then if you want to, you can put the related questions underneath - that’s a really good idea.
You want to divide or organise your FAQ into categories. So I’d say the basic categories are: your brand and around your brand, or the topic that the brand is an expert in. And then within that, you would have some subcategories. And for me, the really important thing that most people miss out on is something my ex-wife taught me about graphic design: you want to make it infinitely scalable, infinitely adaptable. You should think of every possibility, and it should always fit easily and logically into one of the categories you’ve created.
If you do that, you don’t have to reorganise your whole FAQ three years down the line - which is always very complicated and also always very dangerous. So: two basic categories - your brand, and around the brand (the topic of the brand). And then subcategories depending on your industry and your audience and their interests and their questions.
But definitely: one Q&A per page. Seems like a lot, but it actually works really well. And the other thing is: you don’t have to create 300 words for every single page. If a question only takes 50 words to answer, 50 words will do it. Don’t overthink it. Don’t fluff it out. Think of yourself as a user - if you were going to that page and you were expecting a really short 50-word answer and it gave you 2,000 words, you would be very frustrated and annoyed. You would bounce, and that page would end up not ranking. So be pragmatic, be logical, think like your own audience.
Olesia Korobka: Lovely. I know that Koray certainly has something to add to that.
Koray Gübür: Yeah. Jen Hill actually has a great question. She asks: if someone clicks a link from your SERP and goes to a competitor’s SERP, what can we do?
Actually, in Kalicube Pro there is a kind of text management section for that too. Because you can actually extract all of the People Also Ask questions from your competitors and also from your SERP. And then you can also extract the answers from there. And from the most possible and relevant web page sample, you can create a kind of answer. And then, since Google will be able to classify or cluster these questions and answers together, from time to time they will start to switch the answers and start to test them out. And once your answer is better than theirs, they will start to choose your answers. And you will be able to occupy other people’s - other competitors’ - SERPs as well.
So, being able to generate more sources will also be necessary. Because if you answer a single question from a single domain or source multiple times, probably Google will choose the most popular one and they will cluster it. But if you have multiple websites and you have multiple answers from different websites too, it will increase your chance for this type of invasion. I am not saying to use that, but it will be a methodology there too.
Jason Barnard: What I love about that answer is that I built the Kalicube Pro platform and Koray is using it in ways I had never thought of.
Dave Davies: I love that answer too, because it just heads right into the practical - which is what I really, really appreciated about that answer. Like, OK, yes, it’d be great if we all just had accordion or separate spaces - this and this - but in the People Also Ask, they’re gonna pick from multiple sources. So, you know, I’m sure - like, yeah, I get why Koray didn’t want to go and say “do this.” And go and like get your answers in a bunch of different places. But practically speaking, if you want to control the message in the People Also Ask, go and put your answers in multiple places.
Jason Barnard: What’s astonishing about the People Also Ask is the lack - in Brand SERPs - of control that the brands have. Ten percent of brands actually control any of those People Also Ask. They think their Brand SERP looks wonderful, and it probably does. But they’re not answering the basic questions around their brand. And that’s a really strong signal that you aren’t addressing the questions and the problems of your audience directly. And that’s a big miss - not just on your brand, but throughout your business. You’re missing your audience and what their needs are.
Olesia Korobka: And if we return a bit to how to make it more valued and more important - maybe there are some quick wins also? I know that it takes a long time working with your Knowledge Panel and your Brand SERP. But for example, recently - like a few months ago - Google started making Knowledge Panels for podcasts. And there is a question from Norman: how important was your podcast in getting such a beautiful SERP? I’ve even seen some people naming podcasts with their company name or their own name and making it as if it’s their own Knowledge Panel, because it’s very easy - you get it in one week or two and you have it already. So maybe there are some other fast things you can do to get your Brand SERP beautiful and shiny?
Jason Barnard: Well, can I just answer the two questions that I just heard there, and then I’ll let Dave answer the quick wins on the Brand SERP.
Number one: the podcast didn’t play any role in that beautiful Brand SERP at all. I built it without the podcast. The podcast came later on. The podcast is an addition.
And that also brings to mind the fact that the podcast is not the same entity as me. So I’ve called it “With Jason Barnard.” And that was a test to see how well I could control it, because there’s immense ambiguity between “With Jason Barnard” the podcast and “Jason Barnard” the entity.
And so the idea of naming your podcast after your company or after yourself creates ambiguity that’s going to hit you in the face further down the line. Because Google’s not going to be able to distinguish between “Jason Barnard” the podcast and “Jason Barnard” the person.
I’ve made that mistake so many times. I’ll give you an example: “Boowa and Kwala” - and if you haven’t heard of them before, please do watch any of my shows, I always talk about them. It’s called “Boowa and Kwala.” It’s two different characters. It’s a TV show. It’s a website. It’s a song. It’s actually multiple versions of that song on multiple albums. And that becomes an immense problem, because Google doesn’t know whether I’m talking about the fictional universe, the characters themselves, the TV series, the web series, the song, the other song, the actual fact that somebody had written that song, the existence of that song - and that’s seven different entities, and I’m not even trying.
That was really stupid. It was back in 1998, so the problem didn’t exist. So I can excuse myself from that stupidity. But naming multiple entities with the same exact string of characters is phenomenally difficult to deal with further down the line. And I would advise not to go for that particular quick win if you’ve got a long-term strategy.
Dave - quick wins for the Brand SERP? Sorry.
Dave Davies: I mean, there’s the default: claim your business listing, make sure it’s complete. That’s just a given, right?
One of the unsung hero areas - and I can’t think of an exception, so I’m just going to say every company I’ve ever worked with - has skipped the fact that posts are on your Brand SERP. And they’re a really, really fast and easy win. And to give an example: there was a company we were working with, they did outdoor adventure stuff. When they had Memorial Day sales and things like that, we put a great big graphic, linked through it. It only increased their sales by about four or five percent. But that’s four or five percent from a post that took about 40 seconds to put up there.
So the big wins, to me, circle back to the same thing as the reputation management side: if you can control the message, you control the message. If you have the ability to go, “Oh, I regularly put posts here. I am a vacation rental owner and I have this one property that we can’t rent out - we’ll put it up there.” Like, just these simple things to just get eyeballs in front of something.
And it can be in sort of the centre - but I’m referring to the Knowledge Panel right now. If you have your Twitter stream in there, you can control the message. There’s opportunities all over the board. But the one with the concrete - because I actually had to measure it for the client - was a four to five percent increase in sales from this specific promotion, over previous events, just from one post that literally - yeah, we already had the graphics - took about 40 seconds to put together and was super simple and increased their sales.
Olesia Korobka: So the KPI was great - great to have some quick wins. Something very quick that you can do and have something very beautiful and nice and beneficial in your Brand SERP.
Dave Davies: It’s nice to be able to show somebody what money they made.
Now, something that I think gets overlooked - and this is on a slightly different tangent - but we talk about Brand SERPs a lot on the Brand SERP tangent. I think investigating your competitors’ Brand SERP can have as much - and potentially, well, maybe not more - but as much value.
Like, when we’re talking about People Also Ask, well, if there’s a leader in your industry, look at theirs. Because that’s what’s coming. If there are different content types, different media types that are appearing - be it images or whatnot - from your competitors, well, you probably just don’t have it. Or don’t have any that have crossed that sort of auction-based threshold to get appearing on the page. But they’re meant to be there, or potentially meant to be there. If you can just build those gaps up.
So I think on competitor queries, you can really find where the opportunities exist. You might just be missing because you don’t have that media. Or you might just be missing because you’re younger than they are and they’re a little more established. And they can sort of guide you in the direction you should be going.
Koray Gübür: Yes. And especially the differences between the search engine result pages - it’s a really great signal, actually. And imagine that your competitor shows different types of video carousels there and social media carousels. And imagine that they have more sitelinks than you. And also imagine that they appear in the related search terms in your search, but you don’t appear for them. And they - let’s say - have more different types of autocomplete suggestions than you.
And there are lots of things that actually we can test on the Brand SERP. For instance, on my SERP, if I don’t tweet for six or seven days, the Twitter carousel disappears. And if I tweet suddenly, usually Google indexes it in about 20 minutes. But after seven days, it takes two hours. So it means that they actually stop checking it. And instead of checking it maybe every 20 minutes, they start to check it every two hours.
So even this type of small configuration shows how the search engine thinks. They’re trying to save energy. If I didn’t tweet for seven days, it means that they start thinking, “OK, this guy is just on holiday or some vacation, so we should check other people’s SERPs from that moment.”
So even these types of things can show - for instance, sometimes there are really, really big trending things in Twitter, and I always wonder how they unite the hashtag and also the query. Because let’s say there is a big event, and when you search that thing on the SERP, you will have a Twitter carousel. And I always wonder how they choose which tweet should be there, from which account. So even these types of things might be relevant to the entities and the brands. They can choose the most authoritative and most relevant and most active brand from Twitter, just for that topic.
There are lots of APIs and paid programs just for Twitter. And imagine what kind of technology Google has for tracking their social competitors. So I believe they use their own data too. In the patents, they use them to track, or even to give points or scores to the influencers - and that even exists.
So in this context, if you’re able to think like them, after a point the SEO will be easier. And Knowledge Panels are a great hint, or the Brand SERPs are great hints to read their minds.
Jason Barnard: If I can - before we move on to the next question - I just want to draw attention to something I’d never thought of before. That was a great answer, but there was a gem in there that I just want to point out, because I’ve never thought of it. So I’m wondering if other people might not have.
I have never thought of autocomplete as part of a Brand SERP. It’s never entered my head that that is part of a Brand SERP. And I’ll make a point: Koray keeps pointing it out to me, and I’m desperately trying to think how I can incorporate that into Kalicube Pro. Koray’s got so much of a head start on me on that particular aspect - I’m going to desperately try to catch up.
Olesia Korobka: OK. Myself, my quick win is usually checking the schema of the website I’m dealing with. And there’s usually so many mistakes or so many missing things that you just fix them and it works like a charm. Yeah.
Jason Barnard: Have you finished? Sorry, excuse me. Also the structure - but OK, yeah, I’d better give my quick win and then go back to you for another quick win.
The rich sitelinks underneath the homepage - they’re the best quick win in the world. If you don’t have them, you should have them. 50 percent of brands don’t have them, which I think is a phenomenal miss. And that’s all to do with site structure, proper page titles, actual content in your Contact page, your Login page, your About Us page. Because those are the pages that Google wants to put there. If you haven’t got a chunk of content that explains what the page does, what role it plays, what help it can give to your audience when they’re searching your brand name - it won’t become a rich sitelink.
And that’s why I thought about it - because schema markup. The type of page: WebPage, AboutPage, ContactPage - incredibly powerful, incredibly helpful. And I did experiment with Wix, so I’m going to write that up. And we did this in a couple of weeks - that’s a quick win.
Olesia Korobka: And also, when we were previously talking about all that - when we were testing the webinar - Dave, you mentioned that it was very important for you to check your entity and your branding trends. Can you tell everybody about that? Because it was very interesting.
Dave Davies: Well, it - and I do think it is just generally important. Where you hit, depending on the brand, is of course going to have different values. But for example, if you’re looking at a scenario where - I’ll go with the company I work for, and we were doing a funding round - understanding what’s going on in the trends around your brand is incredibly important.
Understanding, maybe not necessarily where it is - because Google Trends only shows you out of 100, right? So you don’t know specifically what that means. You’ll have to go into your analytics and kind of reverse-engineer that back. But understanding how your branded queries are over time - either strengthening, weakening, or peaking at specific times - I think is incredibly important if you’re doing something like a funding round, or throwing a promotion, or doing whatever it is that your company might be doing at a peak moment. Just for timing - to make sure that, “Oh OK, we know that this trend happens,” or, “We know that we’re in a growth pattern right now, so we can predict the future.”
There’s a whole bunch of questions that can be answered. So I can’t tell the audience “these are all the questions.” I was looking for growth and peak points - that’s what I was looking for. I want to be able to report on growth, and I also want to report on peak points. Like, is there a right time to do this over others? Which can be hard to tell if you’re in a peak point, because you don’t know when that might end. So you might just have to pull the trigger at some point and go, “OK, that’s just done.”
But yeah, I think Google Trends for your brand can be incredibly telling. It can be difficult at times - incredibly difficult. I work for a company called Weights & Biases, that’s also just a term - it’s also just a machine learning term. So it can get a bit clouded. But that’s also something else it can be very telling about: when you’re looking at Google Trends, does Google understand that “Weights & Biases” is both a search term and a company? And if they understand that we are a company and we are a search term, that tells us something about crossing that threshold.
Jason Barnard: Yeah. And that indicates that you’ve managed to disambiguate that incredibly ambiguous query - because it’s exactly the same thing. And it says, “Yes, this is a company.” And if you’ve got a company that’s named after something that’s incredibly common - Yellow Door is my favourite example - it’s incredibly difficult to disambiguate. And I know Koray’s had a lot of experience with that.
But yeah - if you’re going to name your company, give it a unique name right now. Because otherwise you’re creating a big, big, big set of problems for yourself in terms of Google understanding your brand.
Olesia Korobka: Sorry, Olesia - because Koray explained his work with Trends. Can you repeat what you told us when you were trying to disambiguate and differentiate your entity for one of your clients? And it was not a company - the Trends one. That was for Koray. Yeah.
Koray Gübür: Correct. Yes, I couldn’t hear the question clearly - sorry. Can you repeat it?
Olesia Korobka: Because we were discussing Trends and entities. Do you remember that case when one of your clients looked themselves up in Trends?
Koray Gübür: Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK. I remember that. So the thing is, this is actually a bit more complicated. Because I believe they store this type of data in different databases, and sometimes there is no correlation between them. For instance, I have created one entity within the Knowledge Graph with the help of Wikipedia, and it appeared in Google Trends. But when I click that entity, for instance, it says 404. It doesn’t show the entity there, for instance. And this has been like that for over six months. So I don’t really know why - it didn’t correlate yet. So maybe it was a bug, or maybe they didn’t add it to Trends.
So another thing is: in Google Trends, when you search for one of the entities, they always show the entity type there. And the other day, one of my clients was asking, “Our company or our organisation has been named as a ‘topic’ there. But our competitor is clearly a ‘company,’ because Google defines them as a company.”
So there are multiple possibilities there. Because the competitor, on their Wikipedia page - and these types of things require a little bit of Wikipedia understanding. And I can tell you that Wikipedia is also a search engine, and there are lots of different, annoying rules there. Even because of just one single comma, you can lose your two weeks of work on web pages. And they don’t even have to make any kind of explanations to you. So be careful about that.
But the thing is: on the competitor, there is a knowledge table, and on the table it is defined as “company.” So in our situation, I actually didn’t create that, because I know that if I update that Wikipedia page, one of the editors will start to dig into the latest updated pages and they can delete it. So, in order to not risk it, I didn’t change it.
But it also shows that how they can define a specific entity just based on the most authoritative web page and the key facts or key points there. So if Google Trends says that your entity is a “topic,” it means that they didn’t define or didn’t give an entity type in a clear way. And they can use multiple different attributes or general attributes there. But if it says “this is a company,” it means that there will be specific attributes, and they will especially focus on these types of queries or types of information to relate that entity to other sections.
“Topic” in Google Trends is a kind of general term. It means that it’s an entity - and it can also be read in the Google Trends documentation on the support section.
Jason Barnard: Which makes me think: the differentiation between a company and a topic. You’re talking about attributes - the more firm, definitive attributes that you can attribute to your entity as a company (founded, date founded, country, founders, address, and so forth), the better your chances are of disambiguating between “topic” and “company.”
But I would love to do a whole new episode on that, because digging into attributes that are attached to entities - and avoiding using Wikipedia - is a whole topic I could spend three or four hours talking with you guys about. So let’s not start, because we’ve really done an hour.
Olesia Korobka: Yeah, because we now need to wrap up a bit. But I’d like you to say something, because we could not cover all the questions and we are much more ahead of time. But maybe you wanted to mention something - some example, some case, anything that you like? Dave, is there something you want to share that we have not touched upon?
Dave Davies: It’s - so, like, there’s a million different routes to go on this one. I don’t want to go with the tip, because I’ve already noted that the courses are handy. But for folks: go to Kalicube. Like, even if it’s just the free tools, there’s some useful stuff there to just sort of play around with to get an idea for what’s going on.
But in the beginning, for folks that haven’t paid attention to this so far - sort of your first introduction into Brand SERP - get back to basics. Olesia, you talked about schema - dig in there. Understand it. Understand how to expand it as much as you can into the related. Like, get your sameAs in there. Here’s my founders, right? Like, that’s a big one to me - disambiguate as much as you can from different ones. My name is Dave Davies - I have to disambiguate, because there’s more famous versions than me out there. Many of them.
So getting back to the schema, getting back to cleaning your business and making sure it’s full, and then just looking at your Brand SERP - your competitors’ brands or yours - and just figuring out: which message do I control, and how do I move them up? And that’s the biggest thing that I would say people just starting out really need to be looking at.
Olesia Korobka: And Koray, what would you add on your part?
Koray Gübür: Maybe I can add something about schema. Because for a long time I’ve actually used the Programmable Search Engine extension of Google. The Programmable Search Engine is basically a customisable search engine from Google. I believe most SEOs have already used it.
And they have added two new sections there. One of them says “topic” and the other one says “schema.” So, in other words, in your Programmable Search Engine, you can actually tell the Google subsystems: create a search engine result page for this query, and only take the web pages that use this specific schema, or that mention this specific topic.
So it actually shows that they create different types of indices, or index samples, from different schema types, from different topics. And when you search for a query, they take all of the possible contexts, and then they start to distribute these possible indices to the final product according to the probabilities, according to the relevance, and according to the dominance.
So in this context, using the Programmable Search Engine for understanding these types of entities - tweaking it a little bit, poking it, testing it basically - it might be useful to understand how a SERP is created. So you can create your own test environment by using Google’s own subsystems.
Jason Barnard: Wow. Can I add one thing that isn’t schema? Because I’d really like to point out: schema markup is incredibly powerful, it’s incredibly interesting, it’s incredibly geeky. And if you know nothing about schema markup and you’re not interested in schema markup - I just wrote a book, and schema markup gets two mentions in one little paragraph of the entire book. And the book allows you to actually do all of this. Schema markup doesn’t even come into it.
Schema markup comes into the course, and it comes into Kalicube Pro. For me, those are more advanced techniques. If you’re looking at this and saying, “What can I actually do to help my Brand SERP without getting a developer involved?” - there are so many things to do.
Starting with your homepage. Your rich sitelinks - fundamentally important. All your social media channels - we said it at the beginning, and I’d like to reiterate: social media channels, your social media profiles, three, perhaps four, on your Brand SERP. And all you have to do is engage with your audience. So you win on both sides.
So from my perspective, those quick wins we were talking about: start with your homepage, start with your rich sitelinks, your social media channels - which includes YouTube. Get all of those nailed. All of that will start to build towards Google’s understanding and its confidence in its understanding of who you are, what you do, who your audience is. Once it’s understood that, it will represent your brand with your message to your audience when they search your brand name. And that is the foundation of everything I’m talking about.
Olesia Korobka: OK. So one of my quick wins, which I didn’t mention, was Kalicube Pro, actually. Because you can just go into Kalicube Pro and you don’t need to think about anything at all. It’s all written there and you just follow whatever it says to you. And it’s a no-brainer - it’s easy and it’s quick. It saves you lots of time.
And the second one is reviews. We have not touched upon reviews a lot, but I suggest people creating different places for their reviews - which they do control. I do suggest you create another review subdomain, review page on your website, and everywhere. Not just Yelp or some big companies or big websites. Create something that you can control for reviews, especially. And you’ll see how advantageous it can be for you in the long run.
So, thank you very much for everyone who has been watching us. You can contact our expert staff: Jason - “the Brand SERP Guy” - on Twitter. And just maybe Google their names and see what appears there, and go and contact them there.
Thank you very much once again. I think we are - yeah - it’s the Brand SERP Guy, Jason. And you can also leave your comments under the video. And maybe if you have questions, we’ll return to answer them. Especially Koray - isn’t it, Dave? So whatever you may need. Maybe we’ll be wrapping up.
Jason Barnard: Thank you so much, Olesia. That was brilliantly hosted. I much appreciate it. And you three - as I said, my dream team to talk about this stuff.
All: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone.
