Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington.
And today I’m going to talk to Jason Barnard about brand SERPs and the knowledge panel. This interview was originally aired on my now canceled discontinued podcast called ranking revolution. And it was a great interview. Actually, Jason’s pretty cool. I want to hang out with him sometime. We had a nice conversation before we started recording and seems like a cool guy overall.
So one cool thing we do talk about the knowledge panel. And at the time that we recorded this, which looks like it was a February of 2024. I didn’t have a knowledge panel. If you Googled my name, Doug Cunnington, some other normal results came up. There were YouTube and some of my websites that are out there, of course, but I didn’t have an actual knowledge panel since Google has been, well, Google’s fucking bananas out there, but basically I have a knowledge panel now.
So if you Google me, you can see there, there is a knowledge panel. There’s other information. Uh, I don’t know. I I’m not sure how accurate it is. It’s just whatever like Google organically came up with, which let’s talk about Google for a second. This is interesting. This is going to be sort of a longer intro here, by the way, but basically with SEO changing a lot, Google algorithm updates, kind of shaking up the niche site and authority site.
Content site world. I have been covering sort of different stuff. And actually I’m, I’m struggling in air quotes just a little bit about like what the audience wants to consume, what the audience wants as far as content at its core, like this audience is really like side hustlers and entrepreneurs, and there, there are many.
Like a surprising number of like very advanced operators who are running companies, agencies, they may have a few different location, independent businesses. So if I had to guess, it’s probably like 10 to 20 percent of like these sort of high level operators that are working full time, self employed for themselves.
And then. This is just a guess. I’ve never done a survey, but roughly, you know, 80 percent are dabbling side hustlers. Maybe they haven’t gotten started, but obviously there’s a lot more people that are not doing this full time that are in the audience. I could be off. The audience skews different directions on YouTube versus the audio side.
But all that to say, when I was thinking about, like, recording this, Intro, I went over to X, I went over to Twitter, which I don’t do too often, but I’m on a few newsletters. And what I see is, um, some of the, some of the chatter, some of the drama that goes on over there on X in the newsletters. And then like Shonda Newman, for example, she like breaks down some of the stuff that’s going, going down over there and some of the discussion.
And it’s just a lot of drama. If you’ve listened to the show for a while, you know, that I’ve stepped away from sort of like pure SEO for actually a long time now, but I’m more in the content production business where I’m producing these shows and SEO doesn’t come into play as much also, I’m not catering to like the YouTube algorithm very much occasionally I’ll do a shorter form video, but largely I’m just publishing.
What I want to publish when I want to publish it and it removes a lot of the Stress it removes a lot of the The components that lead to burnout which happens all the time on YouTube any kind of creator Once things start getting traction you end up in a spot where you’re like, I have to keep doing this I occasionally get on that treadmill and Getting my own head often when I wake up in the middle of the night and end up thinking like, Oh, what do I need to do?
So anyway, I was over on X looking through just the drama between SEOs and. Like agency SEOs and maybe more like corporate SEO types against the niche site owners, which I mean, hey, we’re, we’re valid you know, citizens of the online world make money online and things change really quickly. I’m reading the book revenge Gladwell and.
Great book, by the way, check it out. It’s, it’s sort of like a new take on his original book, The Tipping Point, which is also very good. One of my favorites. I forgot how much I like Malcolm Gladwell. So anyway, I got thinking about how, you know, in the positive direction things, you know, they slowly change usually.
And with The Tipping Point, there’s a section that I ran across today. Where once you reach that tipping point, things change fast. Like you could be approaching the tipping point and in the book, small spoiler alert, but there’s no context here. So you could just go with me on this. Basically, whenever you hit like 25 percent of like a population sort of maybe urging a change, that’s when Nothing happens until you hit that 25 percent mark.
And then it dramatically happens. And it’s not necessarily negative, but it’s just like, if you’re at 2 percent versus 22%, it feels the same. It feels like nothing’s happening. Then all of a sudden, boom, the switch happens at 25%. And then everything changes. And in this case, it made me think about how Google.
Changed so fast or felt so fast where it’s just like the whole industries were like devastated. And when I popped over to exit the date that I’m recording this on November 24th, Sunday morning where I had some nice coffee here, I, I was thinking about, um, The Parasite SEO news stories. And this episode is not going to come out for a few weeks, but it’ll still be fresh on your mind.
Cause I think the drama is going to come out. The thing is, you know, like Forbes, Forbes advisor, um, all these sort of like news websites, these big sites that had a huge amount of authority, they started like really. Rolling out and scaling their affiliate platforms, sometimes fulfilled by a third party that came in and said, Hey, can we partner?
We’re going to do this affiliate stuff. And to my knowledge, like this is what I’ve, I’ve heard. I haven’t researched it a ton, but like Forbes advisor was looking to buy Forbes, like the, the original publication that they were a parasite on. And it’s very interesting to see how it’s playing out. When I checked over at X, um, apparently Google de indexed the subfolder of like the Forbes advisor, but Forbes just like moved the content to a different directory.
So the thing is we’re in, we’re rolling up to the Black Friday, Cyber Monday week, the height of The retail season, millions and millions and millions of dollars to be made as affiliates and products to be sold. And Google is manually like de indexing stuff. All that to say, when I’m looking at like the stuff that I want to cover, I’m not what, while it’s an interesting, like soap opera going on over there, it’s just like, I’ve already, I decided some time ago, I’ve already decided that.
Spending time on SEO is not good. ROI just generally and when you know, I interviewed, um, someone recently, I think the episode came out a couple, a couple of days ago or a couple of weeks ago with Zach, uh, Welchel from my budget coach. And, you know, this is not super secret info, but he, he was saying, Hey, I’m, I’m trying to, you know, get some SEO.
We’re, we’re blogging out there. We’re putting content and I don’t know if it’s working and people are trying to follow like. The best practices, but like I met Zach at FinCon, which I think it originated as the financial bloggers conference. Now it’s all creators, but blogging. It’s pretty much like dead, like overall, like people are not from small creators.
Like they’re not getting a ton of traffic. It’s like the amount of time and effort that you have to put in to write and publish and do all that shit is like, it’s not worth it. And then Google potentially is just going to like, fuck it all up anyway. So it’s very interesting to see where this is going to go.
It seems like either. Google will have to sort of repair some of the damage that they’ve done with the algorithm. I mean, the results are not that great. People are not probably trying to go to Reddit most of the time to get like some people arguing back and forth, keyboard warriors in their basement.
Although I’m sitting in my basement now, but the point is, I mean, Google Search is not great. Normal people talk about it. And when I’m thinking about the content that I want to cover on the show, I’m like, ah, man, like SEO was such a core piece, affiliate marketing was a core piece, but like, now that I’m, you know, looking at some of the stories, I’m like, ah, I don’t really care to research or get into the, all the details of that stuff, perhaps, you know, what I can do is like interview people.
I do like interviewing people and hearing the stories, but it’s, it’s It’s hard for me, or it’s been challenging to figure out like what to cover. Usually, and I’m like this, you know, I listened to a bunch of different podcasts. If the, if the people are interested in the topic, it will be interesting to the listener most of the time.
So I should be able to lean on that. Um, but I’m not sure where. It’s leading exactly. So long intro. We’ll talk to Jason. Jason’s cool. Check out his stuff, go check out the links and everything. I also want to let you know about Mint Mobile. So it’s one of those discount carriers, which I was afraid of for many. Years for some reason, I thought it was really hard to like switch to a new carrier. You have to like switch your phone number and all that stuff and maybe get a new phone. Well, it turns out nowadays, super easy to switch to a new carrier.
You can bring your phone number. You could use your existing phone as well. Most phones nowadays do have eSIM. So it’s super easy to switch. And basically in the last year, I’ve saved 1, 080 for essentially the exact same service. So it used to be on one of the big companies. And basically I switched in about 10 minutes.
I pay about 15 per month and my wife does too. So we pay about 30 per month. But the thing is, if you pay in advance, we pay annually, we. Pay 360 for both of our cell phones for got five gigs per month. We get five gigs per month and it works. Awesome. We’ve traveled all over the country. I have no issues with service or anything like that.
Previously I was paying 1, 440 and now it’s down to three 60. So huge savings for us. So if you want to get this deal, you can go to nichesiteproject. com slash Mint or check the link there in the show notes. I need to let you know about a limited time offer. So this is only active until January 2nd. So from right now until January 2nd, 2025, Mint Mobile is offering new customers.
A free month. So you can buy two months and get one month free on their best selling three month, five gig plan. So basically you pay for two months and you get one free five gigs is sufficient for me personally. So you could check it out and see if that works, but if not, they also have their normal deal, which is like new customers are eligible to get any plan for 15 per month for three months.
So you, you pay 45. They get you to pay in a little block, but if you want the free Deal there for the five gig plan. The coupon code is free month, and we’ll put all the details below so that you’re able to take advantage for whichever deal you need. So if you’re on one of the bigger carriers, you should definitely consider switching over to mint mobile.
Doug: I’m pumped today to do this interview. We’re gonna go over a few topics. We’re gonna talk about how Google is a child. We’re gonna talk about entity optimization for N-E-E-A-T. NEEAT. And we’re going to get into what that is exactly. I feel like there’s some extra letters in there. We’re going to talk about Knowledge Panels, too.
And I have my new buddy on here, Jason Barnard. He’s an entrepreneur, a writer, he’s a musician, which we’ve been talking about for a few minutes. And he has an upright bass sitting behind him in a smaller acoustic bass as well. He’s also the CEO of Kalicube. With over 25 years of experience in Digital Marketing, Jason transitioned from music and TV to a Google whisperer. Jason published his first book, the Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for business in 2022. And he’s been featured almost everywhere. A multitude of industry publications, including Forbes, search engine, land trust, pilot, Wordlift, Semrush, and of course, Kalicube.
So, Jason, welcome
Jason: Thank you so much, Doug. That’s delightful. Of course, Kalicube, who wouldn’t write for their own website.
Doug: And I’m pumped that we connected here pretty recently. I’ve seen your name around and I’ve heard of Kalicube, of course. But it’s kind of the first time that we’re speaking just one on one. And before we get into all the details, I do want to hear a little bit about your history getting into SEO, and we could keep it brief. I know you’ve told the story many times, but talk about the transition getting into Google and kind of the timeframe as well.
Jason: Right, well, I mean, the double bass doesn’t even come into this story, so it’s sitting there just to look pretty. But I was a professional double bass player then I got into the Internet in 1998 because in 1998, my ex wife and I created cartoon characters called Boowa and Kwala. And we couldn’t get a record label or a book publisher or a tv company interested in the characters. So being incredibly determined, I created a website for Boowa and Kwala, the Blue Dog and the Yellow Kwala for kids and started building interactive games for children, songs, activities, animations using Macromedia Flash back in the day when Macromedia Flash was an animation tool before Adobe bought it and before it was killed by Steve Jobs. So I love Flash, and if anybody doesn’t know what Flash is, go look it up online. Macromedia Flash or Adobe Flash generally hated. I love it. I still love it.
It was so much fun. We could make interactive CD roms for kids streamable online streaming. In 1998, I mastered the art of streaming cartoons over a 14k modem. So that was the start of the Internet adventure. Then what we did is to build interest and traffic. We obviously went to schools, we got schools coming in, we got recommendations from babysitting websites, but most of all, we got a lot of traffic from Google. So from 1998, when Google was incorporated and we started our website, I built up alongside Google our amazing SEO, to the point at which we ended up with 5 million visits a month from children aged up to ten. In 2007, we delivered 1 billion page views.
In 2007, a billion page views for a website for kids aged up to six, competing with Disney, PBS and the BBC. That was fun.
Doug: Wow. From your background brand, a couple of things that you mentioned, it sounds like you have more of an artistic background than a technical background. Like a lot of people in the SEO industry. Can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, do you consider yourself an artist first and then you do some SEO on the side?
Jason: I think a lot of what we do, number one, I don’t consider myself to be an SEO. I used to be an SEO. Now I’m a CEO. And in between I was a digital marketer. So I’ve gone from Blue Dog in a cartoon using Google to get traffic, to a full time SEO to make money, to discovering Brand SERP. The search engine results page for your exact match, brand name or personal name, to understanding that the search result for your name is actually a huge insight into your entire digital ecosystem, your digital strategy, what you’re doing right and wrong, when you’re trying to engage with the audience across your entire digital ecosystem, not just the website, but also your social media, your PR, your reviews, the government websites that talk about you, and that you can use your reading of the search engine results page for your brand to fix everything about your digital business. That’s huge. So I’m not an SEO anymore.
I’m a Digital Marketing CEO entrepreneur who happens to use Google because it’s a free insight into exactly what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong for your business. And that’s what we do at Kalicube, that’s what we sell as a service is come to us and we can set your digital business up in a way that makes business sense first. And SEO is, if you like, a bonus. Because all SEO is, is packaging your branding and marketing for Google. Simple as that. Sorry to all the SEOs out there, doesn’t seem to be so very important anymore because you just package for Google.
Doug: Great transition there, Jason. So you often say that Google is a child and it’s kind of funny with your background, right? So you had like a billion, you were delivering content for kids and you’re doing it again. It’s just the child in this case is Google. So can you elaborate on what you mean and how it shapes your approach for, I guess, branding, SEO as a bonus and all that stuff?
Jason: Yeah. I mean, I started off with what you would call reputation management, but proactive reputation management is I was looking at the search engine results page for your brand name as your Google business card, a representation of you to your audience who are bottom of funnel searching your name just before they do business with you. Those are the most important people to your business, whether it’s a client, a prospect, a partner, an investor, all of these people will google your name before they do business with you. So that search engine results page is the single most important search engine results page for your company or your person. That then for me, showed me that Google misrepresents people, it misrepresents companies, which led me to understand or realize, sorry, that Google simply doesn’t understand. Then I realized, especially with entity SEO, Google is a child who wants to understand the entire world and it’s really struggling because the Internet is a total mess. And what I see with our clients is I think they say to me, well, it’s not a mess. Look, I search for this and I get these great results and it’s pretty cool, and they forget that Google’s actually organized the web for them. And if they had to look for it themselves, obviously that’s not gonna happen.
It’s not possible. So Google’s understanding of the world is pretty good, but it’s an understanding traditionally based on keyword counting and link counting. And that now when you say it like that, that’s been SEO for, since 1998. And links were a revolution when Google brought them in. But it sounds so simplistic. All it does is count words, count links. And today it wants to understand the world. And when it can understand the world like a human being does, it can start to judge who does what, how good they are at it, how well they serve their audience, and to what extent the solution they’re offering is actually relevant.
That’s where we are.
Doug: That’s when you mention you know, treat Google as a child. So it might be early to get into some of the nuts and bolts, but can you give a couple of examples? Because it sounds simplistic, but let’s get into some of these details.
Jason: Yeah, the best example, and I like the way you phrase the question because it allows me to bring Boowa back into the show. Boowa the Blue Dog. I was a cartoon Blue Dog. I wrote the scripts, I wrote the songs, I sang, I did the music and I acted. So I was a voice actor. In 2012, I was looking for work as an SEO or digital marketer. And when you search my name, right at the top, it said, Jason Barnard is a cartoon Blue Dog. When I tried to get clients, they would search my name, they would see that and they wouldn’t sign.
So my realization at that point is the weight of evidence online indicates that Jason Barnard is indeed a Blue Dog. But for me, that was in the past. So I set about figuring out how to educate Google to understand that although I was a Blue Dog, I am now a digital marketer. And that involved changing its focus and changing the weight of evidence. So you have two things going on. Number one is changing the focus away from the Blue Dog without removing any information. And the second was creating the counterbalance, the weight of evidence that demonstrates that today I’m a digital marketer. And it was a really interesting process that took me, in the end, about three months to actually get the blue dog removed from the top of the result, replaced with a digital marketer.
The Blue Dog was still quite dominant, and today you will see it on the search engine results page. I keep saying search engine results on the SERP, on my Brand SERP, and it’s because I was doing an interview with some lawyers just before. So I had to keep saying search engine results page, and I’ve got into the habit. So Boowa the Blue Dog still appears on the page, but he doesn’t dominate. Digital Marketing dominates, and now we’re looking at it in terms of cohorts. So a cohort is a group of people, companies, or any entity that acts in a predictable manner or will react in a predictable manner to a particular stimulus. So it’s predictable groups, and that’s how Google functions. GA4 functions on cohort analysis.
The SERP, the whole page algorithm at Google and Bing work on cohort analysis as much as they work on ranking. So people in SEO or Digital Marketing who think, I just need to rank and everything’s good, forget about the whole page algorithm, which does not only click analysis, mouse movement analysis, but also cohort analysis to understand when something that should rank should not be on the page. So although you’ve won the ranking game, you’ve lost the cohort click user behavior game of the whole page algorithm. And just to quickly explain that is Nathan Chalmers, who is the whole page algorithm guy at Bing, explained to me exactly how it works is that you have the different algorithms that will rank content. But at the end of the day, the whole page algorithm is designing the product that Bing is selling, which is the search results, and it has veto right on everything. And it has promotion right on everything. So if it decides that a result is on page two, but it should be on page one, it can simply move it up. So you might have won the ranking game, but you may well lose the whole page game.
Doug: Okay. And just as a side tangent here, in preparation for doing this interview, I googled myself, which honestly, I do it every day. No, I’m just kidding. I hardly ever do this. And I was like, oh, I’m just curious what is out there? And kind of like you said, I was like, there’s some things that make sense. I have a lot of content out there. I’ve been interviewed in places, I’ve guest posted. I have my own content.
It is a mess, just like you said. And it wasn’t in my head to try to focus on any one certain area. So like I said, I don’t have a specific sort of question here. Maybe we look at it later or I look at it later. But I think one key thing for me currently is I’m not trying to sell to clients. I’m not trying to do anything specific. I don’t have a clear goal. Right.
So it’s a little bit harder for me other than my own personal brand, where I just hope most of the stuff that pops up is accurate. Maybe some of the most recent things that I have worked on versus something from eight years ago, which isn’t relevant. It looked that way when I kind of scrolled through. Do you have any insight or other things that I might look at just from my own personal brand and personal perspective based on what I just mentioned?
Jason: Yeah. I mean, I think kind of it’s a bit like seeing the psychiatrist is that you go in thinking, I don’t really know what I’m going to talk about, and then the psychiatrist will bring you to talk about the topics that make sense to you and that are important to you and help you to sort them out little by little. Google is your psychiatrist now. You look up your name on Google and you look at what’s appearing, what isn’t appearing, what you regret not appearing, what you think should appear but isn’t appearing, and ask yourself why. Then you can start to sort out all the problems on your digital presence, because it’s gonna make you look at those, it’s going to make you face up to where you aren’t, where you should be, where you are, where you shouldn’t be, and what you’re not doing right in terms of interacting with your audience, what information don’t you have out there that should be out there? And typically for a personal brand, the first mistake people make is not having their own website. If you have your own website, Google has a reference from you about you. And if you want to control your digital presence, and we’re not talking about just Google here, we’re talking about Google ChatGPT, Bing, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, all these big hitters, they all work the same way. They’re looking to find where you live online, and that’s your website.
If you don’t have a website, you have no hope of control of your digital representation. If you have the website, you can start to control it. But whatever happens, looking at that result on Google, or on Bing for that matter, for your name, gives you a really nasty look in the mirror. That moment you look in the mirror and you realize you haven’t brushed your hair, which I never do. You haven’t washed your beard or brushed your teeth. You look a mess, you don’t want to see it, but you have to. Yeah, I was going to say, what a terrible analogy.
I’ve got no idea where I’m going with it.
Doug: Yeah, neither of us have hair, so we don’t even think about it. We saved so much time and money over the years. Just keeping it clean, keeping it bald. Okay, back on topic, a little bit closer on topic. Very insightful, by the way. So you mentioned that it took you about three months to get your sort of digital footprint in a state that you were happy with back in 2012, 2013. Can you talk a little bit about the process and then what it might look like now? Things have changed in the last decade, right?
Jason: Yeah. It’s both more difficult and easier now, which is obviously one of these terrible statements that don’t really make sense. But because it’s now based on knowledge gathering, building the Knowledge Graph at Google, it’s much easier to figure out what you need to do to correct that knowledge. And correcting that knowledge corrects your entire digital ecosystem. Or the process of correcting that knowledge in Google’s brain corrects your entire digital ecosystem. Twelve years ago, it was these different algorithms fighting with each other, and each one had its different ideas, the different priorities, getting the videos to rank or images would be multiple different strategies, and today they’re all holistically mapped together, so it becomes easier. And yet the whole system is significantly more complex because we’re looking at natural language processing mixed with knowledge that don’t talk to each other, which would be mixed with the algorithms, multiple vertical algorithms for the videos, for the images, for the blue links. And you got to take all of that into account, and it becomes very quickly overwhelming.
Where do I start? What do I do? I’ve got no idea. But if you start by correcting knowledge, you’re building the foundation. And as you build block by block, you realize that it’s incredibly logical, incredibly easy to prioritize, and incredibly powerful. So what Kalicube Pro does, which I built in 2015, I built Kalicube Pro to crawl Google, compile a list of all references to you, and prioritize them for knowledge. Then you just go through the list from top to bottom, you correct everything, making the message clear, consistent corroboration across your entire digital ecosystem. That’s what we call the Kalicube spring clean. And everybody has to do that. When they start working with Kalicube, the first step is a huge spring clean.
If we’ve got a spring clean, we’ve got a foundation. We can build anything, literally anything on that foundation. If you don’t have that foundation, anything you build will fall over.
Doug: Perfect. So it gives you a list, sort of prioritized, I suspect. So you know that you can get most bang for the buck as far as effort as you work through
Jason: The prioritization is Google’s priority in the sense that I’ve built the algorithm, so obviously it’s my interpretation, but my little brain built the algorithm and it hasn’t missed yet. Literally, you can go through half the list and the thing will be corrected. We advise everyone to go through the whole list. It would be like cleaning your front room, but not cleaning your bedroom. What happens if your guests look in the bedroom when they’re looking for the toilet? Oh, clean the bedroom when your friends come round. That’s another really silly analogy that I just made up, and I’ve got no idea where it goes.
Doug: No, that’s the main reason we invite people over, just so we clean the house. I don’t know if that’s a strategy you use, too, but highly effective, right? Yeah, that’s a true story, unfortunately. Okay, moving on. I think it’s a perfect time to move into entity optimization, which you talk about a lot, especially for N-E-E-A-T-T and for people that are unfamiliar. Can you go into the details of N-E-E-A-T-T for us?
Jason: Yeah, it gets confusing with too many letters, obviously. Google talks about, talked about E-A-T expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Then they added experience because they said, well, expertise, authoritative and trustworthiness needs experience. But they stopped there. And we’ve been calling that E-A-T credibility. So we just call it credibility because it’s easier to explain to clients. And then it occurred to me that a lot of what we do at Kalicube is actually PR dressed up with SEO or PR packaged with SEO. Notability is hugely important.
Not notability in the Wikipedia sense. People often say to me, oh, so I need a Wikipedia page? No, you don’t want or need. You don’t want to go near Wikipedia if you can avoid it, because Wikipedia is great for your ego, but it’s really bad for managing your brand narrative. You’re handing over your brand narrative, understanding of the facts about you to third party, faceless wikipedians who don’t actually know what they’re talking about. So don’t go Wikipedia unless you really have to, because you don’t need Wikipedia for managing your entity. Back to NEEAT. Notability is notability within your industry, just like authority is within your industry. It’s all very, very niche.
If you’re an expert in a niche, makes sense. If you’re an expert in everything, it doesn’t make sense. So you’re an expert in a niche, you’re experienced in a niche, you’re authoritative in a niche, you’re trustworthy for that niche. For example, I would be trustworthy as a musician, I’m not trustworthy as a plumber. So even trust is niche, then notability is niche. I’m famous as a musician, but I’m not famous as a plumber. And transparency is the other t at the end. If you’re not transparent, how can we trust you? So it’s notability, expertise, experience, authoritativeness, trustworthiness and transparency.
That’s N-E-E-A-T-T. We call it N-E-E-A-T-T credibility. If you miss any of those aspects, you’re not doing your job. And interestingly enough, what Google has said is that’s what we’re looking for in the algorithms. There’s no measurement or N-E-E-A-T-T score. Fine. There doesn’t have to be. What they’re trying to do is evaluate how people feel about you, how people perceive you.
So don’t think about, does Google have a score for N-E-E-A-T-T? Think about what is Google trying to achieve by measuring it in some way? They’re trying to achieve an understanding of people’s perception of your trustability, your credibility. So if you look at it from that perspective, it becomes much, much simpler. Then what we can look at is, does credibility mean anything? If Google doesn’t understand who you are, the answer is no. I’ve been saying this for four or five years. If Google doesn’t understand who you are, credibility means nothing. You can’t build credibility on something that it hasn’t understood. Now what we’re looking at with the. Sorry.
So you have credibility and you have understanding. With understanding of who you are, then you can start applying credibility. Credibility used to be just links, so it was links to a website equals page. Rank equals credibility. Brilliant. Once again, incredibly simplistic. Incredibly, incredibly simplistic. What Google couldn’t do was apply things like awards, qualifications, reviews, history of the company, the history of my publications as a person, because it was looking at just the website.
Now it’s looking for who is the author of the content and who is the owner of the website. So in Google’s quality rater guidelines, they now no longer talk about website in this context. They talk about website owner, they talk about author. If they can understand who the website owner is, they can apply credibility signals in addition to the links to the website that simply represents the entity. A website is just a representation of the entity. It represents the company behind the website or the person behind the website. So if you look at links, they’re like this much. Then you add all of the other credibility signals.
Awards, history, articles, published, happy clients, reviews, so on and so forth. You can immediately see that with links you’re hitting a glass ceiling very, very quickly. And it’s a very, very solid, I said glass ceiling. It’s not, it’s a concrete ceiling that you can’t break. Links have got this much. If you’re not working on your credibility signals based on entity understanding. Google knows who you are, so it can apply those signals, whatever they may be. You’re stuck with links and you’re gonna lose the war, the game and the battle.
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Doug: For specific entities. Can you give just like one or two examples, maybe the ones that people need to look at super closely.
Jason: The company, the CEO, the founder, the reviewer. If you’re in YMYL, that’s particularly important. Who has reviewed all your articles? Get that person understood and Google will then understand that somebody qualified has reviewed all these articles. The authors, those are the key ones for the global website and content. But then you would also want to go into the products. Products are entities, so you want it to understand your products. Or your services as entities. But generally speaking, at Kalicube, when people come to us, I would love to do all of that in one go.
But number one, it costs too much money. Number two, it’s too much work too fast. So what we generally do is start with the company. And people say, I want to optimize my website for entity understanding and N-E-E-A-T-T credibility. We said, but it’s not the website that Google will apply all these signals to, it’s the company behind the website. Even though the company behind the website is simply a legal entity that allows you to run the website. Google needs to understand the company because once it’s understood the company, it can understand who owns the website and therefore start applying these signals. So the website is important, but it represents the company rather than the other way around.
So we start with that. If the CEO or founder has an online presence and is the face of the company, which is often the case, we need to work on them, because Google is looking for relationships that are close, strong and long, and the CEO is close and strong, but it’s not necessarily long. The founder is close, strong and long permanent. So we want the closest, strongest, longest relationships we can find and build an understanding in Google’s brain of company CEO, founder, website authors, reviewer. And if we come to the authors, which is a really interesting point, is last year in July, there was a huge update to the Knowledge Graph, and Google tripled the number of people in the Knowledge Graph in four days. So imagine they had 500 million people in the Knowledge Graph on the 1st of July, 4 days later they had 1000 500 million people in the Knowledge Graph. It tripled the number of people. It didn’t add any companies, it didn’t add any events, it didn’t add any product, it added people.
Why? Because it wants to understand who the authors are. Because that’s how it can apply E-E-A-T signals, or N-E-E-A-T-T signals as we call them, because a person generally doesn’t have a website and will write for multiple websites, whereas the company owning the website is static and fixed, the author will skip from site to site. So that’s the only way Google could actually move towards a better application of N-E-E-A-T credibility and leave links behind. Almost obviously, links still do count. But if you think about links, imagine what I’m saying with reviews, with history, with all the things I’ve written, all the podcasts I’ve been on, the cumulative value of all of those credibility signals is huge compared to links. Let’s say links is 10%, the rest of it is 90%. If you’re sticking just to links. You’re missing out on 90% of the opportunity for credibility in Google’s eyes and indeed in your audience’s eye. Sorry, I get overexcited.
Doug: That’s great. Though I was going to say, I suspect you’ve been talking about this stuff for about eight or nine years and it’s still the first time some people are hearing about it.
Jason: Yeah. And to be fair to people and the world, I built Kalicube Pro in 2015 because I understood all of this and I was naive because I thought that’s what Google could already do. But it’s actually taken Google eight years to catch up with me. It can do it now. It couldn’t do it eight years ago. So I built a machine for the future. Isn’t that lovely? And eight years ahead of time. I’ve been waiting for the whole thing to catch up with me, which is brilliant.
But it also means that I now have the machine that does the right job at the right time. And I don’t need to wait a year or two years to get developers to build it for me. It already exists and it’s the only one in the world of its kind. Others are gonna copy us. Now my job is to figure out what the next machine is for eight years down the line. And I’ve sent a video to my team and we’ve decided already exactly where we’re going with it and we know where we need to go and very, very, very sure that we’re on the right path.
Doug: That’s cool. At the end of the interview, I’ll get you to tell me what it is. So everybody hang on till the end. All right, couple things I want to highlight, so we’ll come back to Google updates. I want to ask you about helpful content updates and what all the work that someone can do that you just mentioned, making sure Google understands their brand or their personal brand and how that potentially could insulate them from helpful content updates or similar. Before we get to that, I’ve been pushing actually for years. People should be on podcast, they should be on YouTube channels, do collaborations and just get out there more. And not too many people have the maybe it’s confidence, maybe they’re nervous to try something new, to actually try to be on podcast.
You and I, that’s what we’re doing. We’re quite comfortable with it, but it’s hard for people to get into it. So you actually highlighted it, but I want you to go a little bit deeper if possible. If there’s more to add about how important it is to be out there, speak at conferences and really network, whether it is podcasts, YouTube, conferences, et cetera, how important is that.
Jason: Right. Well, that’s a really interesting question from the perspective of is more better. And one thing that’s happening today is entity stacking. And people think if I create lots of different profiles and push them to Google, Google will understand me and it will understand my entity rather. And at Kalicube, we talk about understanding and then confidence in that understanding. Now, the problem with entity stacking is that you’re creating understanding by repetition across multiple platforms. However, those platforms are not relevant to your audience, so you’re actually throwing a huge curveball to Google. The other problem is that they’re very difficult to maintain over time.
We all change over time, we all evolve over time. How are you going to keep maintaining those without creating inconsistency? And over time, inconsistency is going to be your biggest enemy there. So non relevant, inconsistent. You’ve got two problems when you do entity stacking. Less is more here, if I can do less, but it’s more relevant and I can maintain it over time, that understanding will build and build and build in confidence. And that confidence in the understanding is what’s gonna be the huge trick to play in the future. If you’re asking me what is the next step, the next immediate step in the next two or three years is confidence. So if you build a small digital ecosystem and you maintain it very well and it’s relevant, you will have understanding, and you will have confidence in understanding.
And I’ll give you example of two people on our team. Allyssa Reyes and Mary Ann Buarao have both built Knowledge Panels for themselves. They have tiny digital footprints, but because they’re so clean, they’re so consistent, and because they’re listed on Kalicube, Google trusts Kalicube, they get the Knowledge Panel. So more is not better. More is actually a problem. And the other is moving into the NEEATT. Once Google’s understood who you are and it’s confident in who you are, you need to then convince it of your credibility. Obviously, if the different platforms are irrelevant, that’s gonna damage your credibility.
But then credibility is also to do with notability, demonstrating your expertise, demonstrating your authority, demonstrating your experience, then demonstrating how trustworthy you are, and doing it all in a very transparent manner. At that point, getting on the podcasts, getting your name out there, getting your face out there becomes hugely valuable. But once again, do it with care. It’s not scattergun hit and hope. Maybe it’ll work. It’s focusing on your audience, because if we come right back to the conversation from before, Google is constantly looking over your shoulder. Who is this person engaging with? Who are they related to? Who are they on the podcast with? Does this make sense to the cohort that I expect them to belong to? And if you think about cohorts, I’m at the middle of the cohort in Digital Marketing. Let’s say if I suddenly do a podcast about plumbing that doesn’t talk about Digital Marketing at all, Digital Marketing for plumbers will be fine.
But if I’m on a plumbing podcast talking about how I love to fiddle with my pipes in my home, which sounds a bit strange now I say it, it’s like a magnet pulling me away from the center of the cohort I actually belong to. So it’s damaging Google’s understanding, its confidence in its understanding, but also my NEEATT, because NEEATT is niche. Ooh, I like that. NEEATT is niche.
Doug: Alliterations are always good. Okay. It’s interesting because again, I’m thinking about my own digital footprint out there and it is somewhat scattered. I actually have like two podcasts. I’m in this sort of SEO and Digital Marketing area, but I’m also in the financial independence and personal finance area. And the thing is, I have two things going on in separate areas and I’m fine with that. So I can see how it can get a little scattered. And then additionally, one thing that I have going on, and this is just kind of an odd thing, probably a little unusual.
So I have the keyword golden ratio and there are a lot of blogs that thought, oh, I’m going to write an article on that. And they just go regurgitate the information typically. And a lot of times they’ll mention my name, but they don’t link back to my site because they’re trying to rank for the term, right. So they’re just like, this is a cool idea, it’s good for the blog, and they go from there. So not only do I have not very much control, but because I’m out there talking about things, people will also write about it. And then it is so scattered. So I could see how it can get complicated. But I think perhaps I’m kind of a rare example because I am spread in two different areas that are basically unrelated.
So any thoughts on that? I mean, there’s no question there.
Jason: No, well, there is multifacetedness. All human beings are multifaceted. Some are more multifaceted than others. But getting Google to understand that we have multiple facets is part of our job. So if we go back to Boowa, the Blue Dog and the double bass punk folk music, that information still exists online. Google still knows that I was a musician and that I was a blue dog, but it doesn’t focus on it. And that’s the hugely difficult balance to keep. And I think that is actually probably the biggest value added that Kalicube brings, because doing it yourself, it’s gonna be impossible for you to find that balance.
Doing it with data. Data from Google through the Kalicube Pro platform allows us to figure out where that balance is going to be. And I’ll give you a really good example. Sorry, you’re talking about the helpful content update. And Gary Illyes said, lots of classification, we’ve reclassified lots of stuff. We’ve become significantly better at classification. The Knowledge Graph update two months before was people Google deleted the subtitles of. I think it was about half all the people in the Knowledge Graph.
A subtitle is a categorization. They deleted absolutely loads. 50%, let’s say. I can’t remember if that’s the right number. Please don’t quote me on it. Look at the article we wrote about the Killer Whale Update, which is what we called it. The Knowledge Graph update from July is the biggest update I have seen in 25 years, working alongside Google by a long chalk. And there is no understating how huge this was, because it’s the day the Knowledge Graph suddenly got involved with a helpful content update that is huge.
But the one thing that they reclassified the least is writers and authors, which clearly indicates they’re looking for who’s written the article, who’s producing the content, so they can apply N-E-E-A-T signals and start to figure out where the AI content is. Because if it knows who the author is, it knows it’s not AI, unless the author is cheating and using AI, in which case they use author vectors to decide if the author actually did write the article or not. And author vectors is something Bill Slawski talked to me about, is it’s basically your fingerprint. You have a style of writing that the machine can identify at a glance. Is this you, or is it AI? Is it you or is it a ghost writer? It knows who you are and it can therefore understand. Did you write it or not? Then you get your N-E-E-A-T signals, then you’re in a really powerful position. So, ironically, in the age of AI, handwriting stuff is gonna be more valuable if you’re recognized as an entity. I’ve actually forgotten where this question started.
All of a sudden, oh, it was about classification. And so the example I was going to give you is that I used to be a musician. In Google’s brain, it’s a Jason Barnard, musician. I was classified as a musician because the musician side of me is the most easy for Google to understand. Then it classified me as an SEO professional. Then we got it to change me to author. Writer. No.
When we published the book, this book here, the fundamentals of Brand SERPs for business, I got myself reclassified as an author. Google did the Killer Whale Update and reclassified a lot of people as authors and writers because it was saying, for example, Olga Zarr was saying, oh, I want to be an SEO professional. He said, no, you don’t. You want to be a writer who specializes in SEO. It’s better to be recognized by Google as a writer who has a specialist topic than be an SEO in Google’s brain because then your content has more value in terms of credibility. Then of course, Kalicube being Kalicube, Jason Barnard being Jason Barnard. I can’t let that lie. So against the flow of what Google’s trying to do, identify writers, I decided to change my subtitle to entrepreneur and we just managed it.
It took us two months. So Google then switched me from writer to entrepreneur so I can get Google to reclassify people. And that classification is huge because as an entrepreneur, if you think about whatever projects I’m doing as an author, my credibility gets applied to my articles. As an entrepreneur, my credibility gets applied to my company. That’s better for me. If I start another project, my credibility will be applied to that other project. So you really need to think about your categorization, your classification, to understand which is the best one for you in terms of your audience and Google. And obviously for my audience, if I’m going out saying, well, I’m an SEO professional, you know great, wonderful, I’m an entrepreneur, that’s pretty impressive.
Makes me seem more important even though I’m not. So being able to, and I will say the word manipulate Google is huge power.
Doug: That’s great. It makes me really think about what I might need to do. I’m lazy by nature, so I may not do anything and just let it sit where it is, but I’m writing a book right now, so there could be a scenario where it makes sense for me to really manipulate, or you know it’s giving Google the data that we want it to see sort of upfront I think
Jason: It’s shining a light on the stuff that we want Google to focus on, which is what I did with the blue dog, what I’m now doing with entrepreneur. It’s really important to make sure that you decide. Google, John Mueller, Gary Illyes. They don’t make Google guess. It’s a bit trite as a thing to say, but it’s you who makes the decision. You decide which pages are important on your website that should be indexed. You decide who you are. You decide how you should be perceived by your audience.
Don’t let Google make its own mind up. And here’s an analogy I did use in the past and I’ve forgotten about for a while, is letting Google decide who you are and how to represent you to your audience is like letting your mother pick your clothes to go to the high school dance.
Doug: That’s a good one. Yeah.
Okay, so we’re coming up towards the end here. Do you have a hard stop, by the way?
Jason: Yeah, nine minutes.
Doug: Okay, perfect. So quickly, let’s cover two things. One, I’m curious about helpful content update, maybe some of the other recent updates. I know you’re focusing more on Brand SERPs versus just SERPs in general, but what have you seen from maybe the companies you work with that had a good handle of their Brand SERP versus companies that did not and how they might be impacted?
Jason: Which is a lovely question, because our clients see growth in business through the multichannel marketing that we’re doing, the omnichannel marketing that we do. So we will place them to be standing where their audience is looking on the platforms our audience hangs out on. Show that audience that they have the solution, invite them down the funnel, which is usually to their website. That is what the Kalicube Process does. By optimizing your digital ecosystem, Google then sees that you are serving the subset of its users who are your audience on these different platforms. So it understands that on LinkedIn, you’re engaging with your audience and your audience is engaging with you in a positive manner on YouTube, on Forbes, and that audience is then going to your website and converting. Google sees that you’re satisfying these people. Google’s a recommendation engine.
It sees that you’re a great solution wherever you’re solving the person’s problem. And at that point, it’s always gonna recommend you over the competition because it knows that you can serve your audience better. That’s where the packaging of Google for Google comes in. If you can package all of these different platforms, including your own website, in a way that makes it easy for Google to digest and understand that you’re serving the subset of its users who your audience, it will recommend you as long as you have the content that satisfies that need. So the word holistic gets overused, but this is truly holistic. Being able to demonstrate to Google that you’re serving your audience means that you have to actually serve your audience, which is great for business. And then Google is simply a natural extension of that. It wants to recommend the best in market.
You need to demonstrate you’re the best in market. To demonstrate you’re the best in market, you actually need to be the best in market. So we’re looking at business and SEO comes last.
Doug: Okay, now, Knowledge Panel. So I have a lot of content out there, and based on what you said, some of your team, they have Knowledge Panels and they have kind of a small footprint. So it seems like something I should be able to get a handle on. What would it take without knowing anything other than I’ve published a lot of stuff over time. How long do you think it would take for me to have a Knowledge Panel with the things that I want to be shown and displayed there?
Jason: Right. Very practical question. Knowledge is in Google’s brain is in three month iterations, so you can expect improvements every three months. So if you cleaned up your digital ecosystem today or this week, in three months time, you would expect to get a Knowledge Panel sprout, which is just that, the Knowledge Panel exists, but Google doesn’t show it. When somebody searches your name, but it exists in Google’s brain, it just doesn’t display it. And at Kalicube, we’ve got tools that will help, free tools, indeed, that will help you find that. Once you have that, you can give that as a reference to Google on which you can hook all of the other information you’re giving it. So you can then say, this is me in your system, and these are all the corroborative sources that prove that what’s going on here is exactly what the truth is.
Three months later, sorry, you will have a bigger Knowledge Panel. So it might have your name, your photo, your description, and two social media channels at that point. If your name is ambiguous, it won’t trigger when somebody searches your name, but if your name isn’t ambiguous, it probably will. If you’re in a geo region where you’re notable, then it probably will as well. But it wouldn’t trigger in Australia. If you’re living in Canada, three months later, you would probably have your age, a company you founded, and potentially the people also search for, which is the other people that Google associates with you. So your cohort and that’s when you start to see where Google sees you as part of the Internet, the wider world. And after twelve months you would expect to have what we call the Knowledge Panel cards.
If you search for Leonardo DiCaprio, you will see a really lovely representation with Knowledge Panel cards that are colored with a video, with Twitter, with photos, with information. And that process, if you do it right, would take about twelve months in three month iterations. And one point about the Knowledge Panel cards, if you search for somebody, Beyonce, Leonardo DiCaprio, who are famous, you say, yeah, that’s normal. If you search for Jason Barnard, J-A-S-O-N-B-A-R-N-A-R-D you’ll see the same thing. I look really famous, but I’m not. Google is simply very confident and wants to represent me in the best way it can because I’ve educated it over the last twelve years. And those Knowledge Panel cards are actually a precursor to search generative experience. They were the first iteration of search generative experience and they’ve been around for three years, I think now maybe four, and we mastered how to manage them two, three years ago.
So search generative experience for Kalicube is a tiny step from what we were already doing and what we realized when it was launched. Bing Chat, then search engine experience in 2023 is Kalicube had already solved that problem before it even became a problem.
Doug: That’s cool. All right, we got to wrap it up here. I’m going to link up to all the places that you’re available, but can you tell us who the right user and customer is for Kalicube?
Jason: Yeah. Anybody who has a personal brand that’s important for their business or their career. So if you own a company, if you’re the founder of a company, a CEO of a company, your personal brand is part of the representation of your business. You are the face of the company. You’re the perfect client for us. If you’re an aspiring actor, an aspiring writer, but you’re a C list celebrity and you want to appear to be a B list celebrity, we can make that happen for you. We can make you look more important, more famous, more authoritative than you really are. If you’re on the speaking circuit, people are gonna Google your name before they book you to speak.
If they see this incredibly impressive result, they’ll think, oh, they’re a B list celebrity. I’ll book them in because it’s going to bring the audience, but you’re actually a C or a D list celebrity. A friend of mine said to me, Jason, you’re a D list celebrity. I was so disappointed. And then he said publish a book and we can move you up to the c list. But in fact, your Knowledge Panel already makes you look like a B list celebrity. So you don’t need the book because the appearances is what matters. That’s really cool.
Doug: Awesome.
Jason: Jason Scott Thurman, shame on you for saying that to me, but it was a really good insight.
Doug: Yeah, it’s a good, great analogy. And, yeah, this has been a real pleasure, Jason. I wish we could talk for long. Pulling the bass around. The double bass around. Yeah, the cat. Great guest as well. So, yeah, have a great day.
This has been a wonderful interview. And we’ll link up so everyone can find you and Kalicube and Google Jason out there. Check out his Knowledge Panel.
Jason: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Doug.