Video - Robert Craven and Jason Barnard talk Brand SERPs
VIDEO: 52:45 mins
AUTHOR: Robert Craven and Jason Barnard
In this GYDA Talks, Robert talks to Jason Barnard. Jason is an author, speaker and consultant on all things digital marketing. His specialist subject is Brand SERPs (what appears when someone googles your name). He teaches Brand SERP optimisation to students at Kalicube.pro. He also hosts a marketing podcast, where the smartest people in marketing talk to Jason about subjects they know inside out. The conversations are always interesting, always intelligent and always fun!
Over 2 decades of experience in digital marketing: he started promoting his first website in the year Google was incorporated and built it up to become one of the top 10,000 most visited sites in the world (60 million visits in 2007).
The Brand SERP Guy
Why “The Brand SERP Guy”? Because Jason has been studying, tracking and analysing Brand SERPs (what appears when someone Googles your name) since 2013...
Conclusion: Brand SERPs are your new business card, a reflection of your brand’s digital ecosystem and an honest critique of your online marketing strategy. That could well be enough to pique the interest of any marketer and any brand... in any industry :)
Jason challenges some basic assumptions about the best use of our time and why we should focus on Brand SERPs - ignore them at your peril. Here's why...
What are you known for?
What are you doing right now?
Aren't Brand SERPs a bit niche?
Why do you think agencies often overlook the Knowledge Graph?
What are agencies missing by not tracking Brand SERPs?
Isn't managing your Brand SERP just really simple SEO?
What's next for you?
Your recommendations/pearls of wisdom, golden nuggets.
Connect with Jason:
Click here to read more about Brand SERPs and knowledge panels
Transcription:
Robert Craven 00:48
Hello, and welcome to GYDA Talks grow your digital agency initiative talks and today I'm absolutely delighted to have with me Jason Barnard. And without further ado, hello, Jason.
Jason Barnard 00:59
Hello, how you doing? Rob?
Robert Craven 01:01
Absolutely. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. So you are known as the kind of branch guard. So your further ado, my first question is always going to be you know, what are you known for? So tell me what are you known?
Jason Barnard 01:15
Well, I'm known for the brand SERPs. In fact, I its name I gave myself because I really want to nail that position. I'm nailing my flag to the masses, it we're saying exact match brand searches. And the results that come up are something that we aren't looking into enough. And I'm looking into it, I've got a collection of 75,000 entities 45,000 brands across nine different content, different countries. And I'm tracking what appears when people search exact match brand names such as Microsoft or Apple, or Jason Barnard, or Kelly, Q, my company. And what comes up is phenomenally interesting. And people in the industry are starting to to get on board. But it's a struggle, because everyone says it's easy. And it's obvious, which it isn't. And it isn't.
Robert Craven 02:10
Well, we talked we talked before, before we came on board, we kind of talked about, you know, evidence based approaches and research based approaches to do things. So you you've given us some numbers as what's the what is the kind of the connection between listening to what you say and and running about a business.
Jason Barnard 02:38
Right, I like the question. The thing about it is, if you're looking at Google Search Console, first thing to do looking Google's search console and filter your brand searches, the exact match ones, the ones that are your brand Cali cube in my case, and it can vary from 5% and 95%. Now, if you're in the 95%, that's a lot of brand awareness relative to your SEO performance in general. But people are searching your brand name and seeing that brand SERP phenomenal amount of time, a phenomenal number of times, a lot of those people are likely to be your existing clients and you have that thing as well as if your competitors are on there. Or bad review or bad press. Obviously, your existing clients are going to be attracted by your competitor and put off by the bad review. If it's a new client, they might be stolen by the competitor or put off by the bad review. And a lot of the time people say well, I don't have a bad review. And I don't have a copy. So I'm okay you saying well, why don't you think about how good it could get this. This is your business card. This is what people are looking at. It's like you couldn't have a business card. I used to go into my clients and this is my story. And it's not big database, but we can come to that later on.
Robert Craven 03:51
So can we just go back and so you I saw on your thing brand SERPs are your new business cough, quote unquote brand SERPs, your new business plan, which I love, because that's kind of a really interesting way of looking at a reflection of your brand's digital ecosystem. And an honest critique of your online marketing strategy.
Jason Barnard 04:13
Genius. Rob, where do you come up from?
Robert Craven 04:15
I did a quick search to find that stuff. Could you just unpick, unpick that brand SERPs and your new business card?
Jason Barnard 04:22
Okay. Well, that's what I use for marketers, I say to a marketer that your brand search is a new business card. And marketers got I get that because they're the kind of people marketers and salespeople that people would go in front of people and convince them to consider purchasing or doing business. And they realise that when somebody searches the brand name, they're looking at the the equivalent of the modern business card. And I the example I was going to give you is I used to go see my clients, I would pitch and pitch and I would go Yeah, I'm great. This is gonna be wonderful. And I would walk out and I think that's sold, but I would still only convert about 60%. Then I improved my brand search and what came up what comes up. Now if you search Jason Barnard is a lovely knowledge panel on the left or right hand side, sorry, my site at the top Search Engine Journal, some videos, who took the boxes, maybe some images, SEMrush, word lift. All of these things that credible eyes me if that's the proper word in digital marketing. So now my clients convert at about 80%, and nobody handles about the price. Now that isn't big data, it's one example.
Robert Craven 05:30
And so your answer your your argument, I'm just trying to understand it. So your argument is that if you've got your house in order, then when people are looking for you, you've come across as more professional you come across as an authority, you come across 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on on the page, so to speak. And therefore you're ahead of the competition, as opposed to a situation where they might search for you. And they might see the ads of five or six of the people who are trying to elbow you out of the way.
Jason Barnard 06:05
But yeah, I did another another additional problem that we can put them aside. But if you come back a step, and you say what I what I do with my brand stuff is control it, I control my message, I control the message, as you say authority, I control it to the point in which I'm more or less deciding what will rank and what text is showing in both a blue links in the descriptions. And that means controlling my brand message means I can push out a really positive, accurate and authoritative convincing message to anybody who's actually looking for me. You look thoughtful.
Robert Craven 06:40
I'm on so I'm wondering how how is this is this is what you're saying? A unique perspective.
Jason Barnard 06:53
I don't know anybody else who looks at it this way. If you talk to the local search, guys, they'll all say it's not your business card. It's your homepage, which is taking it another step further. In terms of marketers, this is how I presented to marketers, it's not how I present it to an SEO professional, for example, or digital marketer or somebody who's kind of fairly advanced and it basically it's your business card is just an easy way to explain to somebody so they can visualise what it is I'm talking about and who their audience or who the audience of this brand SERP is.
Robert Craven 07:23
But what you've done is you've kind of taken but you're, you're smoking your own dope, so to speak, you've taken your own, you're taking your own. You're eating your own dog food, whatever phrase you want to use, I've got no idea what you mean. But keep going, you know, you know that there's kind of an American phrase, but it's it's about it's about, it's a niche, but you've you're actually dominating in your presentation. Because of your because of your knowledge within the niche?
Jason Barnard 07:52
Well, I think that I mean, I think the point is, it's a niche in the sense that nobody else is talking about it. It's not a niche in the sense that everybody needs it. And then entity by search, whether it's people, brands, products, events, music groups, it doesn't matter, any entity is going to have an entity search site, you can actually push it further than just brands. But if if I started talking about entity SERPs, I would only ever get five or six clients and the people are actually talking about entity based search. And the idea for me is to get marketers involved. And then we can move on to the next step, which is it's a really easy entry into SEO and digital marketing, because it's an easy way to visualise your digital ecosystem, which is the second point in that list. And any idiot can look at it and say, Okay, this is good, this is bad, this is accurate, this is positive. And this is convincing, yes or no, anybody can do that. And you look at it, and you can say, Okay, now what can I do to improve it. Now, if you're an SEO expert, you'll go up all the old tricks or work and it's really easy. And it's a controlled environment, which means that you can take any person who doesn't know very much or anything about SEO, and they can practice on something that's controlled and easy to deal with. And generally easy to affect the rankings and, and what's being shown and so on and so forth. So there are two things that are one of which is any marketer can look at it and read it and understand what's right and wrong with their digital ecosystem is their social media good is there are people saying nice things about the bad things about them, because it's a reflection of what Google thinks the world thinks about you. What's valuable to your audience was helpful and relevant to your audience. And that means and from my point of view, I wouldn't bother going to a digital, sorry, a marketing agency that was selling me an incredible insight into all these different channels that they're pulling in all over the place. You just I just looking at brands that takes you 20 minutes, and you'll already have very big pointers to where you're going wrong and where you're going, right. And that idea of saying and I like this as well. And I've found I've got these brands cert courses, and I've got a few agencies on board and they buying brand cert courses. In order to give it to new people in their company so that they can get their teeth into SEO, with very little risk, and lots of success and lots of kinds of things that changed things that you managed to affect directly. So kind of you immediately feel really good about yourself, because you change your meta title on your homepage, and it shows up bingo, right off the bat.
Robert Craven 10:19
So isn't managing your brand, sir. Just really simple SEO.
Jason Barnard 10:25
But it teaches you every trick in the book in SEO, because you've got videos, you've got Twitter boxes, you've got your homepage, you've got all those rich site links that you want to trigger 50% of brands do not have rich site links. That's rubbish. That's great site structure. It's using schema markup. It's writing proper meta titles, meta descriptions, it's removing no index from the pages, such as contractors that could potentially pay for that or about us. It's managing your knowledge panel, which is surprisingly easy to do. And surprisingly effective. I've managed to get it down to I can trigger a knowledge panel in two minutes for certain types of things. And I can change the description and in a knowledge panel I control in eight minutes flat.
Robert Craven 11:07
So here's here's the thing. So I currently work with a rather well known pure PPC agency, they pride themselves on being pure PPC. And they they just introduced a sort of an SEO, they call it content management, but an SEO because we're modern, younger in 2020. But it's it's it's kind of SEO department really. And they've got real, they've got real problems. They got real problems integrating SEO mindset into PPC mindset, because, you know, PPC, as we know, is very pointy headed. And, and it's kind of very, very transactional, and kind of very black and white. It's so so it sounds to me, like you're saying that you could use and the problem they have is the sales team don't understand. They understand how to do PPC, they don't understand how to sell video, because video is just way too complicated. But they understand how to sell PPC. They really are first class and the results they get within PPC. But they I guess one of the things that's coming through to me is that easy on training, easy understanding for their people. Rather than saying here's the whole here's the SEO playbook, go to go to Brighton and spend a week digesting stuff so you can figure out what the hell's going on. Right? That actually brands syrup is easy, more palatable entree.
Jason Barnard 12:49
That's a really nice, a really nice way of putting it. I mean, well, I think what you're saying is it's focused, and it's isolated. And it's a controlled environment. And it and that's the other thing is kind of getting what you're leading on to is SEO. The SEO community is still having trouble letting go of the blue links and the descriptions. And ranking number one in the blue links in the descriptions and I mean, I did an article on Search Engine Journal about Darwinism in search, which is about how those rich elements the video boxes or boxes, the knowledge panels or get their place on the SERP and the brand SERP is phenomenally rich. And once again, control and so you can really see how that whole sort of the that's the Darwinistic system comes into play. And then I interviewed Nathan charmers from Bing, who's the whole page algorithm guy at Bing. And you realise how much they have a reorganisation on top of all these different algorithms. They have an algorithm for the blue links, and they have another one for the videos. They have another one for the Featured Snippets, all built on the same kind of block set of basic algorithms and both feeding into also all feeding into the different algorithms for example, but and in Bings case, it's during the descriptions under the blue links use that the Featured Snippets use that explicitly, that's Ali Alvey from being here explained it to me, the knowledge panel uses it. And so they're all feeding into different algorithms and bringing their results together and saying, Here's what we, here's the videos we think you should be doing. Here's the images we think you should be sharing. And they put in a bed a bit of value to the user. And then the whole page algorithm just comes in and says, All right, we'll have that we won't have that we won't have that we'll have that. And we'll take that we'll move this one up or down. And what I found very, very interesting about that is John Mueller and guerriers will say to us all day long click through rate doesn't play into the algorithm, because the question they're being asked is does it play into the blue link algorithm? The answer is of course, it bloody doesn't. But it does play in to the whole PageRank algorithm and it's the fundamental element of the whole PageRank and Nathan Chairman's from Bing is saying this explicitly says we look at user behaviour and that's how we organise is the homepage. Now I'll give you a trick. And I'll be I'll be surprised if anybody of the audience have heard of this before. Start page.com And this is good for your ads people as well. It's unfiltered Blue Link results from Google. Try looking something up on START page.com And look at the same thing on Google. And in brand SERPs, you will see how phenomenally different they are. The blue link algorithm was produced this list of results. And I did it for my name first, because I was curious. And I experiments on myself, like every good scientist or mad scientist, depending how you want to look at it, these drugs. Really exactly. And I mean, I've messed up a few times, I've got some horror stories about what I've done with my own brand setup over the years and had to repair myself, but I've got good at repairing this stuff. So it's alright. But what you see is the blue links that come up, and not the same blue links that are showing in the final results. So the whole page algorithm not only messes with the rich elements, and it decides we can put the videos in because those are relevant, valuable for Jason Bernards audience, and Kenny cubes audience, but the Twitter boxes him because he's got an audience there, we'll put the knowledge panel in, because he's got a knowledge panel because we know who he is. And it's probable that they're looking for that person, and another person called Jason Barnard. But we will also move the blue links around to avoid repetition. If you look at Microsoft results, it's phenomenal. Microsoft is 10, blue links is 10 results from microsoft.com. And on the final result that Google actually shows to people, one result remains just one and it's the homepage. All the rest is messed with by the whole page algorithm in one way or another. The other thing and that's why I said answer interesting, and this is this is the one that completely blew my mind on my name in startpage.com. There are two ads systematically really badly targeted for one of them's for Greek gods or something. And and the other one is for is it genealogy go your family tree, remember what it's called. And they get filtered out systematically. And that explains if anybody from the ad industry as well, who does Google ads, that would explain why some brand campaigns that seem to have no competition and you're looking Google ads, and there was no competition, you're still paying 15-20 cents a click instead of the four or five you should be paying. It's because that competition is hidden. It's never shown. But it's still I reckon, applies to the final beer. In fact, the bidding goes up and it shows the ad, but it shows it after it's made this competition with ads, it will never show. That's so smart, if you want to make loads of money. So you're good to go.
Robert Craven 17:41
So you're competing with hidden competition?
Jason Barnard 17:43
Yes. I think I think if we did a research wider than that, and looked at other keywords, you would find something similar going on. Because the whole that sorry, that the ads that Google are showing, can be filtered out possibly at two stages. One would be by the Google Ads algorithm itself, but the other is by the whole page algorithm who say, actually, no, these ads aren't going to help anybody. So we're not going to show them. And that's post bidding, that's post the moment you've actually bid for that place. So if it's the whole page algorithm, I can I'm guessing I'm right.
Robert Craven 18:18
So just going back a bit
Jason Barnard 18:19
why I told you I get a bit over enthusiastic,
Robert Craven 18:24
like enthusiastic, it's better than dull and boring. I hate the ones that.
Jason Barnard 18:27
Yeah, I can't do that.
Robert Craven 18:30
Why, what just going back couple of places. Why do you think agents is often overlooked knowledge graph?
Jason Barnard 18:39
Oh, crumbs! I can't imagine. I'm now now that I've looked into it. And now that I've understood, and now we're talking about entity based search. I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to be looking into knowledge panels. It's phenomenally important. I mean, it. I mean, I talked about how I approach SEO to, to present it to my clients. What I say is, and we were talking about content earlier on is don't create content for Google. Create an that's completely what's the words, pathetic thing that Gary Ellison, John Mueller say all the time, but I'm going to put it differently. create it for a specific platform and a specific audience, the specific audience that engages on that platform, so the content exists and pays for itself. Standalone. It can be YouTube videos, can be Twitter, it can be LinkedIn, it can be medium articles, that can be any platform where you can create decent content that speaks to your audience and works with the audience. And then you repurpose it the other way around. And we usually do put it on your site in a repurpose form. So if you've done something for Facebook, your initial thing is small and quick. And then you repurpose something your site for something bigger and bigger blog article or video, it doesn't really matter. Then you package that for Google. And the SEO aspect is taking content that's already packed for itself, hopefully on the other channels or had the intention of paying for itself on the standalone on the other channels and repackaging it, sorry, repurposing it and then presenting it, packaging it in a way that you can present it to Google. And there's three things you need to deal with with Google. And it's only three. Understanding Google has to understand what your offer is, what that piece of content offers its users. It's not your users, it's your audience. It's their users. Number two, credibility. If it has to choose between two different pieces of content that offer more or less the same thing. Are you the more credible that's your E-A-T? I call it credibility, because I think credibility speaks better to people. But you know, are you expert or your authority? Are you trustworthy and is the content authoritative? Is it trustworthy? Is your brand authoritative? Is it trustworthy. And knowledge panel, obviously, if you want Google to understand that your expert, authoritative and trustworthy, as long as done who you are, began to understand who you are, it can't apply those signals to your brand. Third thing is deliverability, it needs to be able to deliver the content either on the SERP. And that's a whole debate about unsurpassed SEO, in a Featured Snippet, for example, or be confident that you can deliver the content in a format that's appropriate to its user in their context. So might need to be a video or it might need to be text, it might need to be delivered on mobile. And if you can't deliver on mobile, obviously, it's not going to push them through to you, it's recommending your content as the best solution to its users problem. So it needs to understand what you're offering. So it can match it to what the person is asking for it needs to understand you're the most credible solution. And it needs to be confident that you are it can deliver that content to its user to actually make it practical. And that's it. That's all we need to do. And it's simple.
Robert Craven 21:50
Your argument is the knowledge panel is kind of the wrong phrase to say canary in the coal mine, but it's but it's the knowledge panel is what overtly overtly tells you how you're doing it's kind of a it's a it's a measure of how you how you're doing.
Jason Barnard 22:14
It's a measure that Google has understood who you are and what you do. And that's another triplet that I've got Google is to understand who you are, what you do, and who your audiences who potentially you can help, which which group of their users can you potentially help. And the knowledge panel says: Name of company, type of company, telecom company, whatever it might be, so it's understood who you are and what you do right off the bat. And then it's already obviously understood who your audience potential audience is going to be. Now, the knowledge panel on your brand setup is an interesting case, because a lot of brands have knowledge panels are present in the Knowledge Graph, but we will not see them on their brand SERP. So that again, slowly, a lot of brands have got knowledge panels, but don't know it yet. Or in the Knowledge Graph, and don't know it. And so it's so it's important to understand when Google has triggered that understanding, either in the Knowledge Graph, or by creating what I call sprouts, now we got into gardening, you need to create your sprout or plant it. And that's a little tiny little knowledge panel that just says Name of company. And that's it, that's the smallest knowledge panel, you will find just the name of the company. Then add to that what type of company you can potentially add who the founders were, or the logo is typically the next thing to come up, then the official site. And that's basically the sprout growing, so you nurturing your sprout into this kind of nice little plant that's pushing its little head out, that's when it will appear on your brand SAP. So in order to do that, you need to first of all, figure out that it's there, then you need to nourish it with information, corroborative information or corroboration of the information that it already has. And then provide it with more information with more corroboration of that new information to grow it into a big knowledge panel, such as Microsoft or myself, Jason Barnard. If you search for that, you'll see the best knowledge panel in the world.
Robert Craven 24:21
And have a look, I've got to go have a look now.
Jason Barnard 24:24
And what's interesting is finding those sprouts is not as easy as you would think. I have a tool called Callie cube dot Pro and you can track your brand search and it also tracks your presence in the Knowledge Graph, which will then show you when you have a spout appear. So you can actually find these sprouts that way. There are multiple ways of finding them. But once you found that you know what you're feeding, you know what you're aiming. And then you come into the technical aspect, which is putting the schema markup on your site. And that's that's the single most important thing for entity based search and entities and knowledge panel. Every entity needs are recognised home that Google trusts that Google feels is authoritative and that home is your site. It's not somebody else's site. It's not Wikipedia. It's not wiki data. It's your site, you find one page, where you describe it. It's about us for a company. One page, you describe who we are, what we do and who we serve. And we come back to that triplet I mentioned earlier on. Anyway, schema markup two point where basically, A - you explicitly say exactly what you said in the page. And B - you point to all the corroborating evidence. And that can be Wikipedia, wiki data, CrunchBase, LinkedIn, Facebook, all of these sources, to corroborate what it is you're saying. But if you don't make that home, that entities home your page on your website, you lose control, that's the only hope you have control of your entity and Google's Knowledge Graph. And in the future of search. That's a big statement.
Robert Craven 25:54
I can't let you get away with that.
Jason Barnard 25:57
That's why I did it, I thought you might want to.
Robert Craven 26:00
You can't it's like a red rag to a bull. So so this is the year that video is gonna be big, this is the year that SEO is gonna die. SEO is dead long live SEO. For the for the average, to medium sized business and other big ones for the average medium sized business, it's got a small marketing department they struggled to know what they should be doing. From extreme performance based marketing all the way through to colouring in and everything everything in the middle. Because they don't they can never decide whether it's about awareness or sales or about positioning or what, how do you see SEO panning out? In the years to come?
Jason Barnard 27:10
Well, I mean, when I talk about this stuff all the time and and creating the home for your entity and building up your entities presence and Google's Knowledge Graph. And John Mueller keeps saying, You don't need to do that the knowledge graph does it on its own. You don't need to do anything, which is fairly typical of Google. And what I've proved is you can actually improve, inform, expand, increase Google's confidence in its understanding of who you are, what you're doing, who your audience is, very easily. And it's it isn't very complicated. But once you get that what I've seen with my clients is that what Google's got to grips with, and it's probably the most important aspect of that is who your audiences and it's the third one in my list. So it's who you are, what you're doing what you're who your audiences, and I got, I've got clients, and I'm starting to put schema markup on their sites for audience that works phenomenally well, as long as it's understood who you are and what you do. And it's understood what your content is. And putting audience in schema markup is a really neat trick to say, actually, Google, this content is for homebuilders, architect, whatever. And because the knowledge graph functions that way, it's topics, sorry, it's entities, topics, which are entities, sub topics, which are children, entities of entities, I've been told not to say that by people like Jonah Alderson, because in the Knowledge Graph, they don't have children, parent relationships, and I understand that, but it's, it's a good way for us to think about it's still a relationship and under tyreq are using it. Because topic subtopic is important. And then you come into the topic layer. And you look at Google discover, and people like Jeff Schultz, were talking a lot about that. phenomenally interesting. You're saying: Google will start to push my content out to its users in discover, because they know that their users are interested in a specific topic. And my brand deals with that topic that they are my audience, it knows them i origins, that's when you get push. That's when you get pushed by Google into people's faces all the time. And if it's understood you before it's understood your competition, you get pushed first. That sounds like something dangerous in front of a train, but it's not getting pushed is actually a good thing.
Robert Craven 29:23
So this is so this is about about being better than the competition, as opposed to helping out whilst you are helping out Google by doing that, but it's actually it's actually it's a competition aren't making the effort. But you are, yeah, you get rewarded. You get recognised for that.
Jason Barnard 29:41
You're helping Google to understand when you are a good solution for its users problems. And if you look at it that way, it doesn't feel quite so debasing, but you're saying, here's a solution, and it's great, and I'm convinced it's great. Now, all I've got to do is help Google understand that it's the correct solution, understand that I'm the most credible provider of that solution, and that my solution is in an appropriate format to be delivered to my user. That's my trip live. I, that was pretty good, wasn't it? I managed to get that into the but your initial question was medium sized businesses, where do you put your budget, I would say, first thing you should do, as soon as you get up in the morning, tomorrow is look at your about us page, rewrite it, add some screen markup, make sure that you've got that home for your entity setup. Then I would say start looking at the content you're creating. If you're writing blog posts, stop writing blog posts for a couple of days, and look what content you could create for your audience where they already have hanging out. And then how you could repurpose it, repackage it for Google as a bonus excuse, just repeat that point. The About us page vulner.
Robert Craven 29:42
The second one, which about stop blogging.
Jason Barnard 30:33
Just stopped writing one blog a week, you think I have to write one blog a week. And if you look in Google Search Console, look at the figures, you probably got zero clicks for most of them. So it's a complete waste of time. Rather, look at the next topic you were thinking about creating. Think about where your audiences hanging out YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, medium forums, it doesn't, it doesn't matter where they're hanging out what content you can provide to them on that platform that will be helpful to their current problems. Create that content for that platform, be it short form, long form doesn't matter, video, text, audio, then create a longer form of content or different form of content repurposed on your website that links out to wherever you've placed this initial piece of content, that initial piece of content also links back to you, which gives you a link, which is lovely. And then once you've repurpose the content on your site, repackage that or package that for Google, so that it understands what your content is who it's for, that it's credible, and you're away. So it's kind of turning the content model. on its head. It's saying stop thinking about your site. First, your site is where is the bonus? Go and find your audience where they already are.
Robert Craven 32:16
So I mean, I I find, I find that extraordinary in a way because.
Jason Barnard 32:22
Extraordinary good or extraordinarily bad.
Robert Craven 32:25
Oh, good. Good. Don't worry. Thank you. Good. Good. So So yeah, as the person who wrote a book called Customer is King, it kind of seems blindingly obvious, the place you always start with is, who is your customer? What's her knee jerk Scratch one? How can we help them go out and figure out, show them how you can help them and I'm not saying everything else, everything else will fall into place. But if you've got a hammer, or problems and nails, and, and, and just selling stuff, I've not thought of trite phrases today. Setting stuff like patted of wild grass, saying you need this you need these needs, is the wrong way about going about it the right way about going about it is demonstrating you understand their hurt problem, you didn't scratch one demonstrating how you have solved it for other people demonstrating that you recognise the pain that they're suffering. And then, and then letting them come towards you as opposed to bang on their door and demanding thereby.
Jason Barnard 33:36
I think kind of the mistake a lot of people make including myself in the past and much less so now is saying I'm going to create this piece of content, find the right keywords and optimise it so that people searching it from Google will come to me, which a gives me an enormous reliance on Google that I could probably live without, especially these days with on surface. Yeah. But also fails to see actually, the content needs to serve my audience, who are my audience? Where are they? And if I'm in any way empathetic, I'll go and find them on their platform and present to them content that's helpful to them in their environment. And one exception to that, and I found it very interesting is FAQ sections, answering specific simple questions. If you've got a simple to do question that people we all ask Google the simple questions. Providing the art, I started off with the idea of saying you get people also ask on your brand set. And the idiocy there is that a lot of the time brands have questions about their own brand answered by other brands. Or another thing you see is that Google will show two or three questions about that brand specifically, who is we rank for example, what does we rank do? Third question will be what is good SEO? And then you've got moles ranking. They're a competitor. So you take their ranking on your brand search through the people also ask so you need to create a piece of content that answers that question that beats Moz Because that's your brand SERP it's not theirs. But then that then leads you on to it. If you keep clicking on the questions, you obviously get this big long accordion coming out, you've got the first questions you need to be answering about your brand, in terms of Google, at least, because those are the questions that Google understand through your entity through an understanding of your entity. They understand to be related and relevant to your audience. So that I can see, then I'll add one thing to that, then is that with the FAQ idea, you answer a simple question on your website, you then attract you, you dominate your brand. So you get lots of features and epics, you expand out into the wider web of Google. And then you take that content. And that's the content that you then repurpose in a longer format on another platform. So it works the other way around. So you've basically got just two pillars of content, one of which that's elsewhere and comes back, and the other which starts on yours, which is the simple questions and goes out. Sorry, go ahead.
Robert Craven 35:59
No, no, I'm not gonna say this. This. So this does a book call. They asked you answered by Marcus Sheridan, they asked you answer. Okay. And what he says, is, there are about six questions, everyone always asks about your product. And everyone always says: Well, I'm not going to answer that until we do a one to one because it's a bit difficult. Talking about price was a bit difficult talking about what makes us special, because after all, we're commoditized. Or it's a bit difficult talking about competition. So it says the six questions all potential customers want to ask, which are, how much does it cost? Which are who your competition, which are what do customers think about you? Which are, what's gonna go wrong, if I buy from you those kinds of questions. And he says, for every product that you have, you have these, they asked you answer videos. That's his, that's his approach. But you, you, you smother your website with answering all the questions that customers want. So actually, that therefore works at a kind of a content level, as well as, as well as an SEO level in terms of giving giving Google the juice.
Jason Barnard 37:14
Yeah, like Marcus thing? We've I've never heard of him, but I love him. We agree. But the thing about it is, is I basically identify if it's a question with a short answer simple, evident, obvious question with a short answer. Put it in your FAQ, because you want to rank on Google because you want to dominate those questions that people are searching for on Google. So Google's your primary target, any spin off repurposing, that's great. Look for that when you can, it's brilliant. And don't exclude videos. I mean, I have a client, they just actually literally, they just took my youtube channel found all the videos that answered the questions that they were now answering their FAQ, because I got them to build one, add it into the pages, redid the thumbnails redid the title. So it was a little bit less product centric. Bingo. They're getting like dozens and dozens of visits from content that already exists on YouTube. But dozens a day, literally within a week from content already existed on YouTube. Well, all they did was stick it on their site and optimise it a little bit and bingo. And that's exactly kind of where this idea of saying create it on the platform where the people are, then pull it back in. It's there wasn't exactly that case. But it really did push forward this idea that especially sorry, when you look at the SERPs, and brand SERPs come back to that. You see the videos appearing in the brand search, you see how often they appear in the brand search? You need a video strategy. Full stop. I mean, there's not you need one. If you have the means you need one full stop. And that video strategy. I think it's 60% of the videos in the video boxes on brand SERPs come from YouTube, which is surprisingly low. They're quite a lot come from Twitter and Facebook. But video, yeah, I mean, it is it has been the year of the video for the last seven or eight years. But yeah.
Robert Craven 39:03
Well, it was a year of mobile for about 10 as well. So. Okay, a couple of questions. What are agencies missing by not tracking brand SERPs?
Jason Barnard 39:19
I think they're missing probably the simplest insight. And hey, we come on to the third point of that tree out the beginning. It's your business card. It's a reflection of your digital ecosystem by Google who reflects what the world thinks about you probably better than anybody else can do. And I'm a great great believer. I'm the the brand cert reader and the brand cert whisperer. I read these things off the top of my head. I've seen so many of them and so many cases that I can look at them and see, okay, this isn't balanced. This is wrong. This is right. And that's where you come into the content strategy. And you say right, if you're putting money into your video strategy, we don't have video boxes. You're putting your money in the wrong place. If you're paying somebody full time to work On Twitter, you don't have Twitter boxes, they're doing a bad job. And they need to be pulled into some kind of productive use of Twitter because what they're doing is unproductive, it's unconvincing. And that's the point. I mean, something like Twitter boxes, you will get Twitter boxes. If Google sees that your audience or what it perceives to be your audience is engaging with you on Twitter. So just getting all those likes all those reshares. If it's not your audience, Google won't trigger those Twitter boxes. So it's a great insight into the content strategy. So agencies are missing out on the easiest possible way to analyse a content strategy, at a glance, easiest possible way to figure out where there's a reputation problem where the audience isn't on board, where clients have got a problem, ie the digital ecosystem that exists around them, what's ranking if LinkedIn is ranking, but Facebook isn't, you know, and Facebook is where your audience are hanging out, you have a problem, you need to sort that out. That's a priority. And then the third one is obviously I mean, for me, I can't believe that people don't think this is important. If I've got 50,000 visits a month, and 30,000 of those visits come from brand searches. I'm an idiot. If I haven't made that brand SERP look as good as possible, accurate, positive and convincing. It's your new clients, its investors, its partners, its potential hires. It's, I think I said prospects already. And it's your existing clients who are navigating to your site potentially multiple times a day, and they see that it sticks, little by little, whatever message that brand SERPs sends to them is going to stick in their brain. And if it's bad, you're gonna lose the client. Love it.
Robert Craven 41:43
So I'm, I have a very small brains, it takes me a while to do all that stuff.
Jason Barnard 41:53
When I Sorry, I have a very small brain. But it's been working for seven years on this.
Robert Craven 41:59
So what next for you, Jason? What's what's in the pipeline?
Jason Barnard 42:02
Well, I've got my brand took crosses. My idea for that is to say, I've learned so much from working on clients from working on myself. And I've been doing experiments, which I'll tell you in a minute moment about, that I've packaged it and put it into courses so that people can actually learn what I've learned. Now, if you're an SEO, you'll say, Well, I know all this stuff, how to trigger site links, and how to get video boxes now change your meta title and how to change the title of my social channel. But what you'll find is that there's lots of details that you will have missed, and I've made the mistakes. And this is a way to breeze through them. avoid those mistakes, because I've made them all and I'll give you a few of them. I mean, I do experiments on myself. I used to be in a punk folk band. So we call that poke music. I was a double bass player. We sold 20,000 albums, double bass. We've done 20,000 albums, we've probably seen about 100,000 people over six years, we toured professionally for six years. Then I made a cartoon, Blue dog, a yellow koala for kids. We had 5 million visits a month to the site, the TV series on ITV international 25 countries, big success, three Wikipedia articles, one for me, one for the group, one for the cartoon characters, somebody decided that he would experiment on the Wikipedia pages to see how Google reacted every time I change anything. And after a while the Wikipedia editors got bored and annoyed. And within the space of a week, they deleted my article than the group's article and then the characters article. All three are notable. They were allowed to delete it because I had messed with them too much. So I kind of sacrifice myself on the altar of Wikipedia to understand how knowledge panels work, how Google relies on them on Wikipedia, how much it relies on it, how do you how much do you need it? And the answer is actually not much. And I was talking to Rand Fishkin about it and he said, he actually got his Wikipedia article deleted, because he was saying, I don't want these people controlling what's being said about me what Google understands about what the world understands about me, because they don't know. They got it wrong. And he actually said, and I like this, if I want to know what happened in the seventh episode of the eighth season of Star Trek, Wikipedia, great place to go for I want to know who founded Moz. With whom and how much investment has gone into it. Definitely don't want to know it from Wikipedia because it's wrong. And what happened for me is, in fact, my my page got deleted. And I lost the description in the knowledge panel. I panicked. I moved my schema markup that was on my site to another page. My wiki, my knowledge panel completely disappeared. I went right out of the Knowledge Graph, and then I had to build In the presence backup, I had to build an understanding backup not from nothing, because the there is a vast magazine, you have memory or whatever you'd call it. So I made that mistake. Don't ever do that. Advice number one with the backing dogs, the group from the 90s. I kept everything as it was, and the description switch within two weeks from Wikipedia to my own site. And that's where I could change the description in a knowledge panel, the information in a knowledge panel within eight minutes, because I changed it on my site. And as I said earlier on, but cheering whichever BB algorithm that goes into these pages and summarises them and chooses a summary, which is a snippet algorithm, which actually serves the Featured Snippet, which is logical, but also serves the knowledge panel means you can update the knowledge panel in minutes, which is an astonishing insight. So that was really interesting. The other thing is the confidence score went up and up and up and up. Because what had happened is that the Wikipedia article had got confused and on my site, it wasn't confused with a blue dog and the other koala? Absolutely not. Well, I got the the description in the knowledge panel once again, I gained control of my entity. Sorry, go ahead.
Robert Craven 46:12
I'm gonna have to have words with my people, people, all the people who look after all our digital assets here because I'm kind of feeling more and more uncomfortable as the interview goes on, as I think through what's what's, what we're doing and what we've done and how it looks.
Jason Barnard 46:12
I mean, what's lovely about all of this absolutely all of it, the solutions are really simple.
Robert Craven 46:34
Yeah, I get that. Which, which brings me on to the final question. I mean, because our time is up, which is we go out for a meal. You remember the days in Paris, I have my favourite restaurant in Paris and a beautiful little square down Partha Boulevard, you guys my favourite restaurant we eat phenomenally wonderful. French food, delicious French wine, two bottles between the two of us because you like to do and I like wine brandy at the end of the meal, we come out of the restaurant. I look at you and say have you heard me? Yeah, well, what would you do? So So all I'm looking for is what are your kind of your golden nuggets? Do your you're the kind of pearls of wisdom, your your one liners that everyone should get their pens out and be scribbling away frantically on?
Jason Barnard 47:30
Well, I mean, my pearls of wisdom are all the triplets I've I've gone on about I mean, I actually have a friend called Dave Clayton, who's a teacher at a level students in jewels break in the north of England. And he said to say everything in triples, everything needs to be in threes. If you say it in four, they'll forget the fourth if probably forget the other three as well. If you say it in two, it doesn't seem important enough. So even if you don't have a third thing, make it up. And he's right 100%. So you're, you need to look at your SEO, I'm sorry, you need to package your content for Google. And think about just three things. Be it this is three things empathetically, ie you're thinking about it from Google's point of view, it needs to understand you need to help it understand you need to help it understand that you're credible, you need to can't convince it of your credibility. And you need to ensure that it that your content is deliverable. And it understands that it's deliverable. From your point of view, that just means explaining using schema markup, great text, semantic triples in your tax context, class, all these things that we talk about in SEO, but probably never do very much. Ensure that you're you are actually credible, ie your audience and your peers appreciate you. And one good way to figure out if your audience in your peers appreciate your excuse me, is to look at your brand, and go through the first five pages and see what rubbish comes up. And if it's rubbish, don't just say, oh, Google's got it wrong, because it probably hasn't take a step back and think why does it think that is valuable to my valuable and relevant to my audience. So that idea of understanding credibility and deliverability is for me phenomenally important. The second one would be to take a step back on your content and start looking at it from this, which content should be put out on the platforms my users are on and brought back to the site for repurposing and which should be answered on the site short questions, and then repurposed elsewhere. Another one is take your brand SERP seriously, because it does show you it's your business card. So it does hit your bottom line. If you've got, as we said earlier on 30,000 of your 50,000 visits from Google a month on your brand serve. It's the most important, sir, in your business. It has to look good. It's a reflection of your ecosystem, which comes back to looking at your reputation. And it's a reflection of your content strategy where it's strong, where it's weak, where it's going right where it's going wrong. And Google is probably the best reflection we have for that. And then the last point is, look on that right hand side if you don't have a knowledge panel Oh, and by the way, when I say knowledge panel, I don't mean Google My Business Listings. I hate it when people say that's a knowledge panel. It isn't. Alright, 99.9% of the time, it isn't there are some exceptions. But having a Google My Business, it's a business listing where you provide information Google does not check it. Google just shows it under your good faith. And knowledge panel is something that Google has understood through informing itself finding corroborating evidence to prove that this is right. It's a fact it's something that Google knows to be true or thinks it knows to be true. Sometimes it gets it wrong, obviously. And the difference is enormous. Because Google My Business, I can just go and fill it in today. And in an hour, it's done and I can go home, do whatever I do at home, building up a knowledge panel is creating that home, informing Google adding the right content, adding that schema markup and then pointing to the collaborative evidence. Now Google can, as John Mueller rightly says, do that on its own, it doesn't need your help. But it goes much faster. And it's much more solid when you do it yourself. And most importantly, you get control of that entity.
Robert Craven 51:22
Brilliant. I'm just writing that down.
Jason Barnard 51:26
Okay. You could actually watch this back. Apparently, you can watch it in replay.
Robert Craven 51:34
I think lots of people are going to watch it back. Because I think it's been absolutely great. My brain feels slightly fried. But that's just me. So much content, so much richness that's absolutely fantastic. People can find out about you at the end in the links.
Jason Barnard 51:51
Look for the red shirt.
Robert Craven 51:53
Look for the red shirt. And of course, the knowledge panel, the best knowledge panel in the world.
Jason Barnard 51:58
I might possibly have been exaggerating a little bit.
Robert Craven 52:03
Many people believe that. Thank you so much for being really great cast. Thank you so much for your passion and your enthusiasm for the subject. And thanks for really kind of informing us and kind of giving a lot of people a bit of bit of a bang to their head in terms of what they're doing and what they're doing. Right.
Jason Barnard 52:20
Thank you for asking all the best questions and thank you for listening and laughing when I say something even remotely funny. I like people who laugh.
Robert Craven 52:29
Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you so much for being a great guest. Thank you very much.