Google's Knowledge Graph | Jason Barnard

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Jason Barnard, CEO and founder at Kalicube. Jason has 25 years experience in digital marketing, with 10 years managing brand digital ecosystems through brand SERP optimization and Knowledge Panel management. Jason recently published the book, The Fundamentals of brand SERPs for Business, and you may know his name from his regularly published articles in Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land, or his guest posts on WordLift, SEranking, SEM Rush, Search Engine Watch, Searchmetrics, and Trustpilot. Jason, thank you for joining me today. Jason Barnard: Thank you, David. That was the most brilliant non flubbed intro I've ever heard. David McBee: Well, I'm glad you liked it. I'll do my best to continue being awesome throughout the rest of this interview. All right? Jason Barnard: Brilliant. David McBee: All right, so Jason, you are known as the brand SERP guy, and that's not a term everyone is familiar with. So real quickly, can you just define the term brand SERP? Jason Barnard: Right. Great question. I always forget that I coined the term 12 years ago. Nobody knows what it means, and I should always explain it right at the beginning of every single time I do a show or I write an article. Brand SERP SERP is the search engine results page for your brand name or your personal name, and it's the exact match search result. So Jason Barnard, Kalicube. It isn't Kalicube reviews, Jason Barnard videos. It's the name. So it's an entity SERP, if you're a bit of an ICO entity geek. David McBee: Right. All right. Thank you for defining that. Now, here on Simpli.fi TV, we talk a lot about digital media marketing strategies, and some of our listeners may be wondering what their brand SERP has to do with that. So I actually think you're the perfect guest because, in my opinion, a great marketing campaign that leverages targeting, reach, frequency, all those things, it gets prospects to look for a business by their name. So can you speak to the elements of a good brand SERP result and your opinion on how that ties into the way a business advertises their brand? Jason Barnard: Right. Well, you've pretty much nailed it. People make, or businesses make an awful lot of effort to get their name in front of their prospects, their audience. And that name in front of their audience will then incite or encourage their audience to Google the name, and then they don't think about what appears. And that's your Google business card. That's the moment where somebody is navigating to your website you hoped, but they're also researching you. They're seeing what Google thinks about you. And a great brand SERP is positive, accurate, and convincing. It needs to make sure that bottom of funnel person who've worked so hard to get to Google your brand name thinks, wow, Google thinks this company, this person is wonderful. David McBee: All right, so a lot of my advertisers really focus on organic SEO. And some do some paid search. I talk to very few that really bring up the knowledge panel. So why is it important to have all of these things aligned? Or is ranking number one in the organic section enough? Jason Barnard: Right. Yeah. I moved away from ranking for buy red shoes as a career project because everybody's doing it. And in fact, my overall digital strategy that focuses on my brand is marketing, and that's a solid business strategy, whereas ranking number one for buy red shoes is a strategy that can fall apart very quickly, which many companies have seen as Google does its updates. So when somebody googles your name, you see the brand SERP. On the right hand side, you see the knowledge panel. So if you search for IBM, you'll see their knowledge panel, which is Google's representation of the facts that it has understood about an IBM. If you don't have that, Google hasn't understood the facts about you, and that's a big problem. On the left hand side, Google is showing its recommendations. It's showing its recommendations of how your audience would want to engage with you, and the information they might want to know about you so that they can decide if they want to do business with you or if they're a client continue doing business with you. So it's hugely important. And the next answer to the question you half asked is, why is it so important to the overall strategy? And the answer is because Google is reflecting back at you what it thinks the world thinks about you, what the world thinks about your digital marketing strategy. So it's actually a guide and a helper for you in terms of a digital marketing strategy. If something you're focusing on, for example, videos does not appear on the search engine results page for your brand name, then you're doing it wrong with your video strategy. David McBee: So if a person or a brand doesn't have that knowledge panel, how do they get one? Jason Barnard: Google's Knowledge Graph, which is what the Knowledge Panel is a representation of, doesn't have a concept of notability. It just wants to understand. And the knowledge graph contains 1,500 billion facts. So Wikipedia, 50 million, the knowledge graph, 1,500 billion. You can see that Google is just learning as fast as it possibly can, and it's learning. Its understanding of your brand, your company, what you do, and who you serve, and your credibility is represented by the presence or not of a knowledge panel when somebody searches your brand name. David McBee: So I have to confess, the first time I Googled myself and saw that I had a Knowledge Panel for my name... Jason Barnard: Really? David McBee: ... I was elated. I was like, wow, I'm a big deal now, right? But the question that I have is like, what if I was that other David McBee? There's a real estate, David McBee, there's a musician David Mcbee. Jason Barnard: Right. David McBee: What do you do if someone else already has your name or your business name? Jason Barnard: Right. Well, I realize now I didn't answer the previous question, is how do you get one? And the answer is that you provide Google with the correct information about yourself so that it can understand. It's not looking for looking for understanding and confidence in that understanding. Then we can move on to the second question, which is you share a name with somebody else. That's a huge problem, and it's going to become a bigger and bigger problem as Google understands more and more. So somebody who has a book will be easily understood by Google because you're in a knowledge base Google books that it understands and that it has easy access to. For the other David, I will always get stuck with the fact that they're not in a known knowledge base. So David McBee, what was he? A real estate agent? David McBee: Real estate agent, and there's a musician. And there is actually another author, but it's a really niche book that's pretty random. Jason Barnard: Right. They would all have an opportunity to build a knowledge panel, so we'll take the least probable, which is the real estate agent. You simply need to identify what we call an entity home, which is one page that represents your entity. You present the facts about yourself on that entity home, and then you link out to all of the corroborative sources that prove what you're saying on third party sites, and you get them to link back to you. David McBee: It's all the classic SEO, right? Jason Barnard: Yeah. It's not rocket science. It really isn't. And if you can make that whole thing corroborate, then Google will give you a knowledge panel. It will exist somewhere in Google's brain. That's what we built Kalicube Pro, which is a SaaS platform for agencies to do, is that it takes this not rocket science and makes it simple, efficient, and effective. So it's not a question of if we can get knowledge panel. It's a question of how long it takes. And the agency who use Kalicube Pro, same thing, simply a question of going through the process. And then you have the question is, why does Google show the Knowledge Panel? And generally speaking, it's looking for the geo relevancy and the... Well, sorry, it's looking for the probability, which depends on geo relevancy and search volume, and their notability does come into play. So it might have a Knowledge Panel for the David McBee, who is a musician, who is an author, and who is a real estate agent, but it doesn't show them because either it's not confident, or it doesn't have enough information, or it's not geo relevant. And then we come into a whole realm, which is entity dominant, which is the dominant entity, and that's huge, huge barrel of fish, that if we dive into it, will be 10 hours, not 10 minutes. David McBee: And we are getting close to our 10 minutes. So I want to ask you about AI. Well, we talked, before we started recording, about AI's role in all of this. So as quickly as you can, share that opinion with me. Jason Barnard: Right. I was sitting on a bus going to Milan, 14 hours sitting thinking, and I suddenly realized generative AI, what Bing Chat are doing and what Google are doing with their generative AI on search is dynamic knowledge panels. They're creating dynamic knowledge represented in the same way a knowledge panel is and created in the same way a Knowledge Panel is on the fly. So if you can manage your own knowledge panel, you can start to manage generative AI in search. Simple. David McBee: That's awesome. So you're the guy that people need to call when AI starts messing with their SERP results. Okay, perfect. Jason Barnard: Exactly. And I built the platform eight years ago just for Knowledge Panel, and it turns out 2023, 8 years later, it's right at the heart of generative AI in search. I'm so happy, and I'm super overexcited like a child. David McBee: A as my daughter likes to say, if you want flowers tomorrow, you got to plant seeds today. And it sounds like you planted them eight years ago. Jason Barnard: Yep. Your daughter's super wise. David McBee: All right, one final question. Do you have a mentor or a favorite podcast or a book that you feel has helped you become really successful? Jason Barnard: I've actually learned most from my own podcast. So it's not promoting my own podcast, but it's saying that I've had such great people share such great things with me, that that's where I've learned the most. And my podcast goes from SEO to digital marketing to how to run a team. And I can count I've 250 episodes. I'd probably apply something from each and every one of them. David McBee: I feel you, brother. I feel the same way about this show. Jason Barnard: Brilliant. So I've got 250 mentors. David McBee: I love it. I love it. Well, what's the name of your podcast for people who want to check it out? Jason Barnard: Brand SERP and Beyond with Jason Barnard. David McBee: And said with quite a bit of flare. Jason, thank you very much for joining me on Simpli.fi TV today. I appreciate you. Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Thank you so much, David. That was brilliant. David McBee: Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and I'll see you next time.