Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: I'm Jeremy Rivera with SEO Arcade and this is this week's SEO Chat. I've got Callum Scott here with me with some interesting ideas about knowledge graphs and how businesses can leverage them. So what makes you so passionate about this aspect of SEO? Because I know it's, it's typical. Just look at the keyword rankings and look at, you know, traffic from that. So why would business care about this aspect of SEO?
[00:00:34] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely, I think. And thanks for having me on for the, for the podcast and the newsletter stuff this week.
I think it's a very under underutilized aspect, especially when it comes to branded search. So when we're talking about branded search, it's obviously when someone types in your company name and you get the SERP that comes up and when someone is googling your exact brand name, they are probably your best client already or they're about to become a customer. So they're either looking up is this company worthwhile doing business with, or they're just looking for you. If you're a SaaS tool, they're looking for your login page. So what comes up on that SERP can really, you know, shade their business decision or their purchase decision. If there's a bunch of really bad reviews on there, if there's a bunch of, you know, negative information that's going to throw them out of their side. On the flip side, if you go to a SaaS product and they have a knowledge panel sitting there on the right hand side, that's a huge trust signal that tells you so much information about them, how long they've been in business, a blurb about what they do, all this kind of stuff, who owns them, X, Y and Z. And then on top of that, when we're talking about knowledge panels which come from the knowledge graph, if we're talking about things like eat and equities and authority, which kind of gets thrown around quite a lot, we're going to then think, well, actually what kind of information would Google realistically trust and use for something that can be so easily faked on a website? You know, just throwing up an author bio and saying, I'm an expert on this, it's not something I think Google's actually going to trust. But if they have enough faith in their own system to say, here's this SaaS product, we know that they do this, we know this with enough confidence that we're going to throw this up on our serp and usually there's a little bit underneath that says what they do. I think that's as close as we're going to get to a signal from Google that they actually know who you are, what your expertise is and that you're an authority in that niche. Do we know if they use that directly for ranking? I'm not entirely sure. We have got no confirmation on that. But I think it's the biggest, you know, indicator that you might have UVAT and it has that added benefit for branded serp. No one seems to be talking about it though.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I know that if you, in certain subjects, if you say author about, you know, health and healing, it's starting to come back with, you know, specific people that it knows about.
It does make sense to try to optimize that knowledge panel. Is there any like actionable like oh to do X or to, to try to capture that? Like is there any like hands on things of oh to get the knowledge panel you need to do X or Y or Z or have these things filled out or that. Is there anything like that that you're aware of that you can pass on?
[00:03:34] Speaker A: Yeah. So I mean obviously the first thing you're going to do is you're going to hire my company to do it because I'm going to give my little plug there. We do do this for companies. It's one of our main products is building and managing branded SERPs and knowledge panels for clients. Obviously not everyone is going to be in a position to be able to afford to do that. But the really good news is you can build a knowledge panel for literally any entity on the Internet. You just have to follow three basic steps. The first is to build what we'd call an entity home. So that is a page on the web that is the authority on that subject. Ideally we're going to want this to be an about page on your own website.
Google will often use Wikipedia as this source. Everyone wants a Wikipedia page. The problem with Wikipedia is you don't have control of what is on there. It can get deleted. If you annoys the editor or the Wikipedia editor just having a bad day, it can disappear.
So we tend to say it takes a little longer but we're going to try and build the entity home on your about page or add a push, a social page that you have control over. The next step is to optimize that page. Make sure you have every bit of information on there about what you do, who you are and then links to all your off site what we'd call corroboration. So the way Google works, the knowledge path, the knowledge graph is they look at the entity home and then they look for other information that's going to back that up. So you can use tools. Jason Barnard has a great one on his calicube site that will actually show you all the sources that Google uses to corroborate information for entities similar to yours. And then from there you can go and optimize all them. So we're talking about LinkedIn, pages crunch based, your social profiles, all this kind of stuff like article mentions of you, guest post bios, this kind of stuff. And you make sure that all the information matches and that you interlink between the two. And then Google's going to find those links and they're going to start to build trust in that. And then the last step is we mark it all up with appropriate structured data or schema markup just on that about page. So we're going to be linking in everything from same as where we're going to link to all those corroborating sources. The description is going to be the same in there. The information about, you know, I'm an organization or am I a website, am I a corporation? All this kind of stuff you have to be really careful with. But you're teaching Google about the entity. And realistically we found this takes 10 to 12 months regardless of the entity to get the knowledge panel up there if you take the right steps.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: All right, so you can go from zero to knowledge panel no matter what. Like even like a poop scooper company, if you wanted to do it, you could create an entity about your poop scooping. There's not any specific qualifications per se.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: There is no specific qualifications. The places where it might get difficult is if there is what we call like an ambiguous entity. So someone with the same name as you or a similar enough name who is considerably more authoritative or is already in the knowledge graph. So we'll see this when like, like my own company. I, I think the hardest thing with a company is to choose a company name that took us like three, four months to do. There's multiple other blue orchids something SEO agencies out there or marketing companies. So for us to do that we'd have to make sure we were recognized as the unambiguous form of that. It's not something that we're doing for ourselves, but that kind of thing can step in the way. You know, if you're a local entity as well, you operate in small service area business, it can be harder to do, but again it's not impossible.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: That's absolutely fascinating because I, I wish that I had known you like two or three years ago because there were multiple clients that I consulted with where they could not figure out their Knowledge graph. And they were large, you know, national companies and just could not figure out the magic of or process behind it.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: The biggest thing is patience, to be honest. And we find like one of the biggest hurdle, like stumbling blocks is trying to get specific information on an about page for a site. Because you'll stop like there's the SEO team and then you're going to be going through like upper corporate management who are saying, we don't want to have a blurb that kind of sounds like robot speak sitting in the above the fold. Because, you know, that's optimized for the Knowledge Graph but might not be best for users. So we get a little bit of pushback with that sometimes. But realistically, you can kind of work with what people have and the bigger, the bigger they are as a company. Yeah, less stringent. You have to be with those things. Chances are Google already has them in the Knowledge graph somewhere. You can search that. So again, if you go to Calicube Jason Bernard site, he has a free tool where you can plug in your brand name or whatever entity it is and it pulls from the Knowledge Graph API and shows you all the related entities. And if you're in there. So that's usually a great place to start.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for sharing this knowledge.
