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The Ranking Revolution Podcast is the source for strategies and ideas for SEO, growth, and business.
Join me as we embark on a journey to go deep into the weeds of SEO, content creation, and organic growth.
Each episode is a deep dive into the tactics and strategies employed by the masters in the industry.
And some episodes will feature my own strategies about operations, project management, or mindset. Those episodes should be short, bite sized, and easy to consume.
I’m your host, Doug Cunnington. Founder of Niche Site Project and creator of the Keyword Golden Ratio.
Welcome to the ranking revolution
podcast, your go-to source for
strategies and ideas for SEO, organic
growth, content creation and business.
I'm Doug.
Cuttington your host.
And today.
In this episode, we're going to talk to
Jason Barnard and we're going to go deep
into the weeds of the knowledge panel.
We're going to talk about.
N E E a T T I there's some
extra letters in there.
And this is a super fun interview.
I had a blast talking to Jason,
and I think he's one of those
guys where I can talk to him.
About a bunch of other stuff,
unrelated to marketing SEO.
And in fact, we did that.
We ran out of time.
Like many of the other episodes
I'm dividing this interview
into two different parts.
So they're a little bit shorter and
bite-sized, and hopefully I'll get some
data out of this to understand if just
having more episodes and more downloads
is a positive thing, algorithmically.
And if you're listening to this show,
We like testing things with algorithms.
So.
Without further ado.
Let's talk to Jason and hear a
little bit more about Kalicube.
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.
Douglas Cunnington
:
So, Jason,
Jason: welcome.
Jason Barnard
:
Thank you so much, Doug.
That's delightful.
Of course, Kalicube, who wouldn't
write for their own website.
Douglas
Doug: Cunnington
:
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: Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Douglas Cunnington
:
Wow.
Doug: 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: Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Douglas
Doug: Cunnington
:
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,
Jason: like
Doug: 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: Jason Barnard
:
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.
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 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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
That's where we are.
Douglas Cunnington
:
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: Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Douglas Cunnington
:
Okay.
Doug: 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.
Douglas Cunnington
:
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.
Douglas Cunnington
:
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
Jason: Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
I've got no idea where I'm going with it.
Douglas Cunnington
:
Yeah,
Doug: 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 Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Douglas Cunnington
:
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: think.
Jason Barnard
:
Sorry.
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.
Douglas Cunnington
:
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
and for people that are unfamiliar.
Can you go into the details
of N-E-E-A-T for us?
Jason: Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
That's N-E-E-A-T.
We call it N-E-E-A-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 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.
Jason Barnard
:
So don't think about, does Google
have a score for N-E-E-A-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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Jason Barnard
:
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.
Douglas Cunnington
:
That's it for part one, be sure to
check out part two with Jason, we get
into more of the nitty gritty details.
If you dig, the show helped me out.
I'm sponsoring the show right now.
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So thanks a lot.
We'll catch you on the next episode,
which is part two with Jason.