SE Ranking Webinar: “Why Tracking Your Brand Name Is Crucial for Your Success”
During this webinar our special guest Jason Barnard shared his knowledge and best practices for tracking, improving and maintaining the quality of your Brand SERP.
Jason and Andrew had a very interesting chat about Brand SERPs and using different tools like SE Ranking and https://kalicube.pro/track to manage it. Make sure to check it out!
Webinar published by SE Ranking March 27, 2020. Host: Andrew Zarudnyi. Guest: Jason Barnard, founder and CEO at Kalicube®.
Note: The second half of this session is primarily a live product demonstration by Andrew Zarudnyi of SE Ranking’s rank tracking interface. The transcript covers Jason Barnard’s full presentation and Q&A. The SE Ranking demo section is summarised where Jason is not speaking, and transcribed in full where Jason re-enters.
TLDR: SE Ranking Webinar: “Why Tracking Your Brand Name Is Crucial for Your Success”
1. Brand SERP as Business Card - The Central Metaphor, Dated March 2020
Jason Barnard opened with the formulation that would become his most repeated framing: “It’s your business card. When I talk to somebody, the first thing they do is search my name or my brand name - to understand what Google thinks about me. What they see is what Google thinks about me.” He stated the aim of Brand SERP optimisation in three words that would become the canonical Kalicube formula: make it “positive, accurate, and convincing.”
Historical significance: This is the earliest webinar-format recording of the Business Card metaphor in its full, developed form, linked explicitly to bottom-line impact, dated March 2020.
2. Five Strategies Framework - Control / Semi-Control / No Control / Leapfrogging / Rich Elements
Jason Barnard presented what would become the canonical five-strategy framework for Brand SERP management:
- Content you control - homepage, meta title/description, sitelinks, Google Ads
- Content you semi-control - social accounts, Wikipedia, review sites, Crunchbase, guest-blog profile pages
- Content you don’t control - forums, bloggers, media sites (managed through relationship-building)
- Leapfrogging - promote content below suboptimal results to push them down, rather than creating new content to “drown” bad results
- Rich elements - triggering search features (Twitter boxes, video boxes, images, People Also Ask, Knowledge Panel) to kill blue links and improve the visual impact of the SERP
Historical significance: This is the earliest complete recorded presentation of all five strategies as a unified framework. Prior panels documented individual elements; this webinar assembles them into a single coherent methodology with a sequenced logic.
3. Killing Blue Links - The Rich Elements Strategy
Jason Barnard introduced the “killing blue links” concept: rich elements (Twitter boxes, video boxes, images) each occupy the space of one or more blue links, reducing the total number of standard results visible on the SERP and making the remaining results easier to manage. He stated: “The average number of blue links on a Brand SERP today is seven and a half. If you have more than seven and a half blue links on your Brand SERP, get working on these rich elements.”
He provided data from Kalicube Pro™ (then tracking 14,000 brand names and 10,000 people, with ten million Brand SERPs in the database):
- Sitelinks: 45% of brands
- People Also Ask: 33% (up from 29% eight months prior)
- Twitter boxes: 11%
- Videos: 25%
- Images: 24% (down from 36% eight months prior - because video uptake displaces images)
- Related searches: 12% (rising fast)
- Featured snippets: 2%
- Knowledge Panels: 15%
Historical significance: This is the earliest recorded dataset of Brand SERP rich element prevalence from Kalicube Pro, with comparative figures showing change over an eight-month period. It documents both the measurement methodology and the “killing blue links” strategic framing at scale.
4. The Mena / Bing Insight - Images and Video Share One Algorithm
Jason Barnard cited a source from Bing: “Mena from Bing, who’s the team leader in multimedia ranking at Bing, explained to me that images and video are part of the same algorithm - they tend to swap each other out.” This explained the observed inverse relationship between image prevalence and video prevalence on Brand SERPs.
5. Leapfrogging vs. Drowning - The Strategic Distinction
Jason Barnard explicitly rejected “drowning” (creating high volumes of new content to push down bad results) in favour of “leapfrogging” (promoting existing content below the suboptimal result to displace it): “If you create loads of content to rank on your Brand SERP, you’re liable to press the Panda button - Google’s algorithm from 2011 that punishes spammy articles.”
The leapfrogging principle: “Choose content that’s below the content that you don’t like, and promote that - push it up your Brand SERP, leapfrogging over the bad content.” He divided the content available for leapfrogging into the same three tiers: content you control, semi-control, and don’t control.
He also drew the proactive implication: “If you don’t have any bad results on your SERP today - great. But you might tomorrow. And if you control your Brand SERP today, the probability that a new bad result will rank is much lower. And if it does, you’ve already done the groundwork to start leapfrogging quickly.”
6. Brand SERP Varies Enormously Across Countries
Jason Barnard described tracking six English-speaking countries in Kalicube Pro (USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia) and cited two sources who confirmed this: “John Mueller from Google and Frédéric Dubut from Bing - both very high up in the algorithm teams - both told me the same two things: Brand SERPs are the richest SERPs - they have the most search features of any kind of SERP - and they’re the ones that vary the most between countries.” He attributed this to different audiences having different informational needs about the same brand, and to the brand’s presence varying by country.
7. Brand Volume Searches as a Trust Signal
Jason Barnard articulated the compounding effect of brand search volume: “The more people search your brand, the more important you seem to Google. And in fact the more important you are - the more popular you are, the more people are interested in you. If people search ‘Jason Barnard’ that’s great; if they search ‘Jason Barnard marketing’ or ‘Jason Barnard podcast’ that sends a very powerful signal to Google that people are interested in me.”
Historical significance: This is an early recorded articulation of brand search volume as a credibility signal - a concept that becomes increasingly central to TKF in later years, particularly in the context of Deliverability (TOFU) and the Untrained Salesforce framing.
8. Google Ads on Brand SERPs - The 30% Budget Saving Finding
Jason Barnard reported a specific finding from client work: “Brands can save up to 30% on whatever budget they’re putting into Google Ads today on Brand SERPs.” He described this as a lesson in his newly released Brand SERP course, based on multiple client implementations. The principle: because the brand controls the context so completely, ad quality scores are higher and costs per click lower.
9. Standardising Social Handles - Consistency as Discovery Infrastructure
Jason Barnard noted that his own Brand SERP work had forced him to standardise his social handles: “Because I’ve been doing my Brand SERP so much, I realised I had to standardise those - and standardising them has helped me enormously in my Brand SERP but also in my wider social strategy. It’s so easy to find me now.” His handle across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram: @JasonMBarnard.
Historical Significance - Panel Level
This webinar, published 27 March 2020, is the earliest complete recorded presentation of the full Brand SERP management methodology as a unified system. Key firsts documented here:
- Five-strategy framework - all five strategies presented together for the first time as a sequenced methodology
- “Positive, accurate, and convincing” - the canonical three-word Brand SERP quality formula, dated March 2020
- Killing blue links - the strategic framing of rich elements as blue-link displacers, with a live dataset
- Kalicube Pro scale - 14,000 brands, 10,000 people, ten million Brand SERPs documented as of March 2020
- Mena / Bing multimedia algorithm citation - images and video share one algorithm, explaining their inverse relationship
- Brand SERP country variation - confirmed by both John Mueller (Google) and Frédéric Dubut (Bing) as the richest and most variable SERP type
- 30% Google Ads budget saving on brand campaigns - client-tested finding
- Brand search volume as trust signal - articulated explicitly
Panels documented to date: 12 Concepts staked in this webinar: Brand SERP as Business Card (full formulation, March 2020) · Positive/Accurate/Convincing formula · Five-strategy framework (first complete presentation) · Killing blue links · Rich element prevalence dataset (March 2020 baseline) · Mena/Bing multimedia algorithm citation · Leapfrogging vs. Drowning · Brand SERP country variation (Mueller + Dubut confirmed) · Brand search volume as trust signal · 30% Google Ads saving finding
Transcript - SE Ranking Webinar: “Why Tracking Your Brand Name Is Crucial for Your Success”
26 March 2020
(The SE Ranking product demonstration by Andrew Zarudnyi runs for approximately the middle third of this session. That section is summarised in italics; Jason Barnard’s segments are transcribed in full.)
Andrew Zarudnyi: Welcome, guys - we are live. My name is Andrew and I’m part of the marketing team over at SE Ranking. Today I am joined by The Brand SERP Guy®, Jason Barnard. We’re going to talk about why tracking your Brand SERP is crucial for your success.
Just before we kick things off, I want to say a couple of words about Jason. He has over two decades of experience in digital marketing under his belt. He has many titles, wears many hats - he is a keynote speaker, event host, musician, and he did some cartoon voiceover work, which is amazing if you ask me. Maybe Jason can say a couple of words about himself before we move on to the main part of the presentation. Jason?
Jason Barnard: Thank you very much, Andrew. Yeah - in fact I started off very boring. I did a degree in economics with a specialisation in statistical analysis at Liverpool University. I actually went to the same university as John Lennon, but not at the same time, so I kind of have a famous connection there. Then I came to Paris, where I am today, and joined a band playing folk punk music, playing the double bass. Then became a blue dog in a cartoon for twelve years, on the island of Mauritius, which is down in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar. Been around.
And then I came back, and now I’m the Brand SERP Guy. Because doing the cartoon was online, I learnt SEO from 1998 - I started doing SEO in the year Google was incorporated. So I’ve been doing SEO for twenty-two years, initially as a blue dog and now as the Brand SERP Guy. And that’s why I’m here today, because I’m now obsessed by Brand SERPs and what they can bring to both our digital strategy and to our business and our bottom line.
Andrew Zarudnyi: Wow - you had a really amazing journey, and the way it all planned out for your career without you knowing is amazing. And yeah, we are inspired by your story. So let’s move on to the main part of our presentation. Jason is going to have a big presentation about why tracking your Brand SERP is crucial for your business and your success. Then later on I’m going to say a couple of words as well. So without further ado, Jason - let’s kick it off.
Jason Barnard: Thank you very much, Andrew. Right - today I’m talking about why tracking your brand name is crucial for your success.
I call myself the Brand SERP Guy. I’ve been tracking SERPs - Brand SERPs more particularly - since 2013. I initially started because I was wondering if I could control what comes up when somebody searches my personal brand name, my name: Jason Barnard. I started that in 2013 and it’s now become an entire career, because it’s actually very important - not only for people but also for businesses. And we’ll see at the end how much I can actually control my Brand SERP and how well I’ve done over the last seven years to get this under control, positive, accurate, and convincing - which is the aim - and therefore how much you can do to control your Brand SERP and make it, once again, positive, accurate, and convincing.
So let’s get going. The three reasons you have to keep listening: firstly, Brand SERPs are vital to your bottom line - we’ll see why later on. Secondly, Brand SERPs give you amazing insights into your digital marketing strategy. And thirdly, Brand SERPs are interesting - I think they’re interesting, and I’m sure after this talk you’ll think they’re interesting too. Oh, and there’s a fourth reason at the end, with some tracking tips for your Brand SERP using SE Ranking - I’ll give you some, and then Andrew will give you some. So it’s worth sticking around for all four reasons.
So here we go. We’re going to look at this through five questions and five strategies. Not only will I be encouraging you to ask the right questions about your brand, I’ll be giving you the five strategies to actually improve - to optimise - your Brand SERP.
Question number one: Who’s searching your exact-match brand name? Two points. I’m not talking about searches that contain your brand name, such as “brand name plus reviews” or “brand name plus product.” I’m talking about your exact-match brand name. Who’s searching for it?
First: existing clients. Existing clients search for your brand name because they want to navigate to your site. An existing client potentially searches your brand name multiple times a day, and certainly every week, every month - depending on how often they come to your site. So these people are seeing your Brand SERP on a very regular basis, because they’re navigating to your site by searching your brand name.
Number two is prospects. This is bottom-of-funnel - and that speaks to the bottom line. People who are about to do business with you, about to sign on the dotted line and become, let’s say, a partner - because if we start looking at clients as partners, that might actually improve our approach to them. These prospects are about to sign on the dotted line. They search your brand name to research you, to find out more about you, to check that they’re making the right choice of business to partner with. But also: potential hires - people who want to work for your business. Journalists. Potential partners. All of these people - except number one - are researching your brand.
So we have two reasons: one is navigating (existing clients), and the other is researching (all of these other people). All of these people are crucial to your business - they’re either already doing business with you or thinking of doing business with you. They’re the people who really matter to your bottom line. What they see is incredibly important to your entire business strategy.
Question two: Why are they searching? I’ve actually covered this very quickly: navigating to you, or researching you.
Question three: What do they see when they search your brand name? There are three possibilities. It’s perfect - everything they see represents your brand and makes you look great. In that case, the job is done. But before you leave: I don’t think anybody has got the perfect Brand SERP. I’ve been working on it for seven years and I still don’t have the perfect Brand SERP. It might be good - a lot of Brand SERPs are good - but you still have work to do. You can optimise it, you can make it better. For everybody else: sit down, make yourself really comfortable, because there is a lot of hard work to be done to make that Brand SERP representative of your brand so that your bottom line will improve.
Question four: How does Google decide what it’s going to show them? On the left you can see a very boring Brand SERP with some bad reviews. On the right, a very interesting Brand SERP with lots of rich elements - I like the idea of Google as a multimedia page. Search results are more and more multimedia. How does Google decide what to show? Value to the user. Google’s clients are its users, and Google wants to satisfy them. When they’re searching for your brand name, Google wants to show them an honest representation of your brand.
Going back to the example on the left: if that is your Brand SERP with the bad reviews and boring results, that is an honest representation of your brand that Google is showing its users, because it feels that result is relevant and valuable to them. If you’re on the right, you’re in a much better position - that’s a representation of a healthy, quality brand that will impress people. So it’s showing those results because it perceives them as giving value to the user. You need to make sure that Google understands which are the results to show on your Brand SERP to bring that value to its users when they’re researching or navigating to your site.
Question five: Crucially - what can you do to make your Brand SERP sexy? Now, I use the term “sexy” - I don’t know if that’s very appropriate - but what I mean is: it looks great, it feels great, and it looks something like this, with those rich elements, those search features that make it look for me sexy, multimedia, exciting, convincing.
“Sexy” actually goes further than that. It needs to be accurate - it needs to accurately represent your brand to Google’s users, your audience. It needs to be positive - you want them to see something really positive, to be impressed by the wonderfulness of your brand. And thirdly, and this is the crucial one: convincing. If they’re thinking of doing business with you, you want them to be convinced by the SERP that Google is presenting. You want them to think: “Great, this is a business I want to work with.” The one on the right with all the rich elements looks convincing. The one on the left with the blue links and the one-star reviews does not.
So - audience participation. Take a quick look at your Brand SERP. Which is yours - the one on the left, the one on the right, or, more probably, something in between? If you have the one on the left or something in between, you need five strategies to improve and optimise your Brand SERP.
We’re going to go through those strategies one by one.
Strategy one: Content you control.
On the left we’ve got the homepage. You obviously control your homepage. But if you’re now looking at your Brand SERP - is the meta title and meta description that Google is showing to your audience as convincing as it could be in the context of a search on your brand name? If not, you control it, so you can change it.
Below that, you can see those rich sitelinks. Why does Google show sitelinks? Google shows them because it perceives them to be valuable and helpful to users who want to navigate directly to a specific part of your site. Now look at the sitelinks showing for your site. Are the links relevant and helpful to people searching your brand name? If you don’t have sitelinks, that’s a big red flag - it means Google hasn’t understood your site properly. In that case you need to start looking at your site structure and how you’re presenting the different areas of your site.
On the right we have Google Ads. That’s a great way to control your Brand SERP - front, centre, right at the top. The nice thing about Google Ads is that because you’re paying Google, you get to choose the title, the description, and in fact the sitelinks. In the case of a brand search you will often get sitelinks with Google Ads as well, and that’s a lovely way to control your message a hundred percent.
Also with Google Ads you can segment your audience - you can show a different message to navigating clients versus prospects who are about to buy. The debate: should I or should I not put Google Ads on my own Brand SERP? I would say - having initially thought no - I would now say yes. Because it allows you to control the top of the page completely. When you get the Google Ads with sitelinks and then your homepage with sitelinks below, you’re controlling everything above the fold when somebody searches your brand name on desktop or mobile.
Strategy two: Content you semi-control.
Your social accounts should logically rank on your Brand SERP. Whichever social accounts you’re working on most should be there. If they’re not, you should work on them to get them there and to improve how they appear. Obviously you don’t control 100% what your meta title and description are - you can control them to a certain extent.
If you have a Wikipedia page, you can control that - you can edit Wikipedia. But be careful: don’t over-edit it, or you will end up with a warning on your Wikipedia page or perhaps even have it deleted. If you don’t have a Wikipedia page, don’t create one unless you’re notable. Wikipedia has rules about who is allowed a Wikipedia page, and the rule is notability - your brand is worth enough for people to talk about it with no bias and no financial interest in your brand. If journalists from, say, The New York Times or The Guardian have been writing about you, you probably do deserve a Wikipedia page. If they haven’t, you probably don’t.
Review sites will often rank on Brand SERPs. They’re very interesting because you only semi-control them. If they’re bad or not as good as you’d like, you can direct your existing clients towards those platforms to improve those reviews.
Crunchbase is a bit like Wikipedia or Wikidata - a list of businesses and brands that you can actually edit. Here you don’t have to worry about whether you’re notable: every company has the right to have a Crunchbase page.
I’ve put Search Engine Journal at the bottom because I write for them - this represents guest blogging. If you’re guest blogging, or somebody in your company is guest blogging for another platform, that platform’s profile page for you may well rank on your Brand SERP, and there you have semi-control.
Strategy three: Content you don’t control.
On the left we have forums. In the middle, bloggers writing about your company. On the right, media sites writing about your company. Obviously you have no control at all about what they present to Google. But you might be able to improve things. For bloggers or article writers, reach out and suggest they could change what they’ve written - though that means building a relationship with them first. If you just reach out and say “please change it,” they probably won’t. But if you can build a relationship, you can convince them to change their article, their meta title, or their meta description. For forums, engage with your audience there - that will not only improve your Brand SERP but also your relationship with your clients and your wider digital ecosystem.
Strategy four: Leapfrogging.
I don’t really like the term “drowning.” I prefer “leapfrogging.” The idea of drowning is to say: I’ll create lots of content that will rank on my Brand SERP and push all the content I think is suboptimal or negative off it. It sounds tempting, but in fact it’s not a great idea, simply because if you create loads of content to rank on your Brand SERP you’re pressing the Panda button - Google’s algorithm from 2011, created to punish and demote spammy articles. Those articles will tend not to rank because today Google’s Panda algorithm will sort that out.
It’s much better to leapfrog. Leapfrogging means: choose content that’s below the content you don’t like, and promote that. Push it up your Brand SERP, leapfrogging over the bad content and pushing the suboptimal content down. So the content you want ranking - content you feel represents your brand positively, accurately, and convincingly - ends up above the content that does that job less well.
To leapfrog, you need to choose the content below the suboptimal content and promote it. You can divide that into three categories - yes, the same three: content you control, content you semi-control, and content you don’t control. I can work on my own site. I can work on my social accounts and profile pages. I can work on content I don’t control by engaging with the people writing great articles about me and helping them improve their pages. And lastly, traditional new content - but be wary: don’t create lots of content that won’t rank. If you can get it on The Guardian, The New York Times, a major newspaper or media site, it will rank and that’s a great thing. If it’s just new content on some rubbish platform that will never rank, stay away - you’ll ruin your reputation.
And that’s a very important point: Google is showing on your Brand SERP what it feels is most valuable to its users. Your Brand SERP is a representation of your brand. If you start messing around with it using cheap, spammy tactics - writing bad articles on rubbish sites - Google sees that as being representative of your brand, and your reputation in Google’s eyes will go down. That will start to harm your EAT: Expertise, Authority, and Trust. If you don’t know what EAT means in the context of Google, look up Lily Ray or Marie Haynes - they explain EAT and its importance within the Google algorithm exceptionally well.
Strategy five: Rich elements.
This is my favourite part. As I said - they’re very sexy. A Brand SERP with Twitter boxes, video boxes, and image boxes looks incredibly good, incredibly convincing, and it kills blue links. What do I mean by killing a blue link? When you get a rich element such as Twitter boxes or video boxes, it takes up more than one place. Instead of having ten blue links - the traditional ten we had up until around 2014 - you get your Twitter boxes, and now there are only nine. You get your Twitter boxes and your video, and now there are only eight. These rich elements kill blue links. The more you can kill blue links on your Brand SERP, the fewer results there are to worry about - the easier it is to manage and to make your Brand SERP accurate, positive, and convincing.
The average number of blue links on a Brand SERP today is seven and a half. So if you have more than seven and a half blue links on your Brand SERP, get working on these rich elements.
Here are some numbers from Kalicube Pro. I’m tracking 14,000 brand names and 10,000 people, with ten million Brand SERPs in a database. I’ve studied it to try and understand what is happening on these Brand SERPs.
Sitelinks: Only 45% of brands have them. That’s a big red flag for the 55% who don’t. You need to get them - they kill a blue link, give you control over the top of your SERP, and they’re helpful to people navigating to different areas of your site.
People Also Ask: 33% of brands have PAA on their Brand SERP, up from 29% eight months ago. Why the increase? Because Google wants to answer questions before we’ve even thought to ask them. On a Brand SERP this is particularly interesting - Google is suggesting questions around the brand that its user might want to ask. If you have these on your Brand SERP, ask yourself: do I have a page that answers this question? Because you need to control what people will see when they click through.
Twitter boxes: 11% of brands have Twitter boxes. They kill a blue link and they look professional. They indicate that your Twitter strategy is incredibly active. Everything you tweet is injected directly into Google. The fastest I’ve been able to get a tweet onto my Brand SERP is 17 seconds - I can tweet and talk in real time to people who are searching my brand name. For a client navigating to your site multiple times a day, they’ll see a different Twitter message every time - that’s very powerful because it makes you seem much more credible and active.
Videos: 25% of brands have video boxes. That’s interesting because they can watch videos of the brand directly from the SERP. If you have them, it means you’ve got a healthy video strategy. If you don’t, you should be working on it.
Images: 24% of brands have images, down from 36% eight months ago. The reason for that: videos are becoming more popular, and videos and images rarely appear on a Brand SERP together. Mena from Bing - the team leader in multimedia ranking at Bing - explained to me that images and video are part of the same algorithm. That means they tend to swap each other out.
Related searches: 12% of brands have related searches - and this is rising very fast. When you have related searches, it means Google has understood who you are and what you do. It’s important for two reasons: it confirms that Google understands where you might be a good solution for its users, but it also means your competitors are going to appear increasingly on your Brand SERP. For the moment it’s only 12%, but it’s rising very quickly.
Featured snippets: Only 2% of Brand SERPs have a featured snippet. Why? Because it’s not an answer to a question - People Also Ask is much more relevant and valuable for users searching a brand name. Featured snippets are unlikely to increase on Brand SERPs.
Knowledge Panels: 15% of brands have a Knowledge Panel. When we search for a brand, we now expect to see one. A Knowledge Panel is what Google has understood about the brand - what it does. These look very professional, very convincing, and as long as they’re accurate and positive they tick all three boxes: positive, accurate, and convincing.
Here are some SERPs I picked out to demonstrate how few blue links remain once you start generating rich elements. On the left: only six blue links. In the middle: only five - with sitelinks, a Knowledge Panel, Twitter boxes, and video boxes, all contributing to a total of five blue links. On the right: seven, because there’s a featured snippet at the top. So if your Brand SERP has more than seven blue links, start working today on triggering those rich elements.
What do I mean by “triggering”? I mean pushing out content in a manner that Google understands as relevant and valuable to its users searching your brand name.
Which will yours be - the one on the left, which looks pretty rubbish, or the one on the right, which looks incredibly convincing? It’s your business card. When I talk to somebody, the first thing they do is search my name or my brand name - to understand what Google thinks about me. What they see is what Google thinks about me. And I must, as a business owner or an individual, make that business card as good as I possibly can.
So the conclusion: you really should be tracking your Brand SERPs. It seems counterintuitive to track your own brand name when you’re always going to rank number one - but if you track it, you get the full picture. You need to track them to understand what’s appearing and what people see when they search your brand name. What does your Google business card look like?
Next, you need to measure them. Are they good? Are they bad? I have a system on Kalicube Pro that tracks and measures across multiple countries what your Brand SERP looks like, measures how good it is, and tells you how to improve it. I actually have a course online - released three days ago - that explains exactly how to optimise your Brand SERP to make that score push from, say, 80% to 90%.
You can track your Brand SERP for free on Kalicube Pro. We allow you to track your Brand SERP for free, get that measurement, and see how you can improve what people see when they Google your brand name.
Now a quick example of tracking with SE Ranking. I started tracking my own name in the United Kingdom using SE Ranking - an incredibly simple project tracking “Jason Barnard” in the United Kingdom. I can see on the right-hand side I’m ranking number one across 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th of March - ranking number one, normal, wonderful. But what’s interesting is I can see the search features I’ve triggered: a Knowledge Panel, video boxes, Twitter, and reviews. That immediately tells me at a glance that my Brand SERP looks very sexy.
SE Ranking has a really nice feature where I can analyse over time what my Brand SERP looks like - you simply dig down into the competitors path and spread out from, say, 1 February to 1 March to 20 March, and compare over time.
What I can see: the top four is incredibly stable - it hasn’t changed for about eight months. Why? Because it’s been seven years that I’ve been working on this Brand SERP. The longer you work on it, the more stable the top of your Brand SERP becomes.
Specific observations:
Facebook at position five: it was actually a query for all the Jason Barnards on Facebook, and it’s been dropping down as I work on other elements to leapfrog it.
Kalicube Pro: the site was talking about me, then it dropped to just the podcast, and I went back to having both the “About Me” page and the podcast - meaning I’m controlling two results from Kalicube, plus my homepage, giving me three results where I have direct control.
LinkedIn: moving up slowly. Because I’ve been using LinkedIn a lot and posting a lot, Google perceives that result as valuable and relevant to users searching my brand name - pushing it up little by little.
Another Jason Barnard: there are 250 Jason Barnards in the world. One is a footballer in South Africa who’s quite successful. Because I’m working so hard on my Brand SERP, I’m the only Jason Barnard Google presents. Every now and then somebody else pops up and then disappears again because I’m controlling my own Brand SERP.
Stitcher: my podcast is coming into this Brand SERP more and more, because I keep releasing episodes every week - one podcast episode per week, interviewing someone from the marketing industry. That steady stream of content makes Google realise that content is valuable to people searching my brand name. My podcast is becoming increasingly important in terms of the real estate it takes up on my Brand SERP.
So: if you track, measure, and then improve your Brand SERP, you will end up controlling it.
And lastly - the easyJet example. The little black home icons represent results they control: Twitter, Wikipedia (semi-control), People Also Ask (controllable if they create the content that’s relevant to those questions), the news (depends on their PR). There’s only one result - Skyscanner at the bottom - where easyJet has no control.
If you track, then measure, then improve - you can control what people see when they Google your brand name. Your Google business card will look incredibly good, incredibly positive, incredibly accurate, and incredibly convincing to everybody searching your brand name.
(Andrew Zarudnyi SE Ranking product demonstration - approximately 20 minutes - covering project setup, keyword tracking, search feature columns, cached SERP view, live results comparison, and the Top 100 historical SERP view. Jason Barnard does not speak during this section.)
Andrew Zarudnyi: I want to invite Jason back so we can cover a couple of additional questions. Jason, if it’s okay, let’s take a couple of questions.
Jason Barnard: Really quickly, just two things before we carry on. Number one: on social media - whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram - it’s @JasonMBarnard. What’s interesting there is not just that it’s me, but the fact that because I’ve been doing my Brand SERP so much, I realised I had to standardise those handles. Standardising them has helped me enormously in my Brand SERP but also in my wider social strategy. It’s so easy to find me now.
And the other thing: your example with all the branded terms - Apple Watch, Apple iPhone, and so on - is really interesting. It’s a lovely extension of what I’m dealing with. I’m saying exact-match Brand SERPs are your business card - people are researching you. But tracking all those terms that contain your brand name, using something like SE Ranking, is a wonderful opportunity to hit bottom-of-funnel and make the maximum of all these people who are bottom-of-funnel, researching you and your products. Sorry - getting overexcited.
Andrew Zarudnyi: No, great. And the name, address, and phone number consistency - how it really matters to finding you online. And even as an example: if you guys Google Jason’s Brand SERP right now, it will not only give you an example but will actually help him out - show Google that he is of interest. This is something you can do as well for your own strategies.
Jason Barnard: Yes - boosting the pure volume of brand searches is incredibly important. The more people search your brand, the more important you seem to Google. And in fact the more important you are - the more popular you are, the more people are interested in you. If people search “Jason Barnard,” that’s great. If they search “Jason Barnard marketing” or “Jason Barnard digital marketing” or “Jason Barnard podcast,” that sends a very powerful signal to Google that people are interested in me. And that is incredibly important.
Andrew Zarudnyi: And I know for sure this is something I’m going to be promoting - our team and everybody should use it, it really helps out a lot.
Jason Barnard: And please do - tell everybody. I’ve been doing this for seven years and I’m still learning every time I do a presentation or look at a new Brand SERP.
Andrew Zarudnyi: There’s no point in delaying - everybody should just hop on board and start managing their Brand SERP. We have a couple of questions. The first one: you say that the Brand SERP changes a lot from different countries and even different regions. How much exactly does it change? Are there any pointers for people working in different English-speaking countries?
Jason Barnard: With Kalicube Pro I track six English-speaking countries: USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. I did that because I wanted to see how different they were, and the answer is: incredibly different.
I talked to John Mueller from Google and Frédéric Dubut from Bing - both very high up in the algorithm teams - and they both told me two things about Brand SERPs: one, that they are the richest SERPs, meaning they have the most search features of any kind of SERP; and two, that they are the ones that vary the most between countries.
Why is that? Because people in different countries have different needs in terms of what they need to know about you, and your presence in those different countries is going to be different. For example, an Apple Brand SERP in Australia is different from one in America. In Australia they might have six blue links to deal with because they’ve got four rich elements; in America they might have four blue links because they’ve got more rich elements. So it’s incredibly important, if you’re an international business, to track your brand in multiple countries, because those results vary enormously.
Also, a localised result - for example, an article about Apple in Australia - will be more relevant to an Australian user than an article from The New York Times. So the Australian article ranks in the Australian SERP and the New York Times article ranks in the American SERP. That also allows you as a business to focus on different things in different countries for different audiences.
Andrew Zarudnyi: Take that into account, everybody. Another question: I have a negative article on my Brand SERP - what do I do? Can you cover leapfrogging a bit more?
Jason Barnard: That’s a great question. When I tell people that I track, measure, and optimise Brand SERPs, they say: “Oh - online reputation management.” And I say no. It’s not online reputation management. I don’t deal with bad results specifically - I deal with brands proactively, saying: let’s optimise this, let’s make it as good as we possibly can. If you have a bad result we need to deal with it, and we deal with it through leapfrogging rather than creating boatloads of new content in the hope of drowning it - which is what a lot of people try to do, and it’s rubbish.
To leapfrog, you simply need to prove to Google that the content you think is valuable, useful, and helpful truly is, and Google will push it up. The bad content will disappear. That’s point number one.
Point number two: if you don’t have any bad results on your SERP today - great. But you might tomorrow. And if you control your Brand SERP today, like I do, the probability that a new bad result will rank is much lower. And if it does, you’ve already done the groundwork to start leapfrogging quickly, efficiently, and effectively.
Andrew Zarudnyi: Our time is sort of coming to an end. Final question - inspirational for anybody dealing with the problem of brand management for the first time today. Where would I start? What is the first thing I do?
Jason Barnard: We were talking about control, semi-control, and no control - the place to start is what you control. Fastest results, most efficient, and also: your Brand SERP has your homepage at the top, and it’s the most visible thing. Start with your homepage. Start with the sitelinks. Start with Google Ads - it’s a cheap way to get that message you want front, centre, right at the top.
In fact, in the course I’ve just released, there is a lesson about how to best optimise your Google Ads campaigns on Brand SERPs. What I found is that brands can save up to 30% on whatever budget they’re putting into Google Ads today on Brand SERPs. They can save 30% of what they’re paying. I have several clients for whom I’ve done exactly that. I explain in the lesson exactly what to go through to make that brand SERP campaign much cheaper - it saves lots of money and gets the message across in a much more effective manner. And I’ll say it again, because I love the phrase: front, centre, right at the top.
Andrew Zarudnyi: Thanks a lot for today’s webinar, thanks for sharing your experience and insights, and I hope everyone enjoyed this and got a lot of value from it. If you have any questions, reach out to SE Ranking and Jason - we’ll be happy to have Jason back in the future for more talks about what’s happening in the world of SEO and Brand SERP management.
Jason Barnard: Brilliant - well, thank you very much for having me. That was an awful lot of fun. I really enjoyed the entire experience.
Andrew Zarudnyi: Thanks a lot. Same here on my end. Stay safe, guys, and take care. Thanks again for joining us. Bye bye.
Jason Barnard: Have fun.
End of transcript.
Panels documented: 12 Running concept list staked in this transcript: Brand SERP as Business Card (full formulation, March 2020) · Positive/Accurate/Convincing formula (first recorded complete statement) · Five-strategy framework (first complete presentation) · Killing blue links · Rich element prevalence dataset (March 2020 baseline from Kalicube Pro, 14,000 brands) · Mena/Bing multimedia algorithm citation · Leapfrogging vs. Drowning · Brand SERP country variation (Mueller + Dubut confirmed) · Brand search volume as trust signal · 30% Google Ads budget saving finding
