Growing a Personal Brand Online Successfully in 2024
With Special Guest Jason Barnard From Kalicube.
2024 Strategies: Learn how to grow your brand online effectively. Build credibility and attract a loyal audience today.
Are you ready to revolutionize your brand online in 2024? Dive into our comprehensive video packed with actionable advice and cutting-edge strategies for growth. Uncover how to build credibility, expand your reach, and solidify your digital footprint effectively. Take charge of your online presence now – click play on our video and embark on a transformative journey towards success.
#1 – Jason, what are some of the critical factors that people need to understand to build a personal brand online in 2024?
#2 – What do you think people need to know about the Knowledge Panel on Google, and why do you feel this is one of the crucial events in search and SEO?
#3 – What is the three-step process to become a leading authority and influential person in your industry?
#4 – Tell us a couple of crucial things that you want people to get from your book “The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business?”
#5 – How will AI change SEO and branding in the next 18 months?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript And Links
[00:00:15.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic Show this week in WordPress and SaaS. We’ve got a great show. We’re going to be discussing all things SEO, and the brand SERPs as well. We’ve got a real expert with us. He’s written the book on the subject, which I’ve got a copy of, and it’s a good read. It’s called The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business. We’ve got Jason Barnard with us. It should be a really interesting discussion. Jason, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?
[00:01:05.070] – Jason Barnard
Yeah, lovely to be here. I’m talking about brand SERPs, personal branding, and the power of brand in marketing and SEO, which is what we’re all about, what I’m all about. And one really interesting point is that I never realized to what extent it’s important that people say my name correctly. And Jonathan, you just said Jason Bernard.
[00:01:27.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Bernard?
[00:01:28.710] – Jason Barnard
And it’s Bernard. Sorry. Because the problem is that Google will read the transcript of this video, and it will confuse me with the American actor, Jason Barnard. It already does. And I have to insist, Jason Barnard because otherwise, Google starts to get confused between me and the American actor. And I always used to say, I don’t care. I don’t mind if you say my name differently. It doesn’t matter to me, but it matters to Google, and it matters to my audience.
[00:01:56.510] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m sure, Kirk, and the tribe, if they give you feedback, you’ve been lucky that I just butchered it to the extent that I did. I am notorious for destroying, I mean, Jason, destroying the surnames of my guests, aren’t I, Kurt?
[00:02:15.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yes, indeed. He’s only gotten my name right in the last couple of months.
[00:02:18.950] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s right. He’s only been my co-host for almost a year and a half. There we go.
[00:02:25.090] – Jason Barnard
That also brings me to a point, which is I’m going to now ask you for a favor, which is can you go into the YouTube transcript after this episode and correct the references to me as Jason Barnard?
[00:02:38.180] – Jonathan Denwood
For you, Jason, I would do anything, Jason. Thank you. Right, so cool.
[00:02:44.210] – Jason Barnard
It’s that tiny attention to detail that makes all the difference in the long run. It doesn’t seem important, but it all accumulates. That was the point I was trying to make. It’s not to get you to do extra work. It’s that every detail counts because every detail builds up into the bigger picture.
[00:03:00.220] – Jonathan Denwood
I understand, Jason. So, Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners of yours?
[00:03:09.210] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, my name’s Kurt von Annen. I have an agency where we do largely learning and membership-style websites with business consulting, and I work directly with the folks at WP-Tonic and the great folks at Lifter LMS, and I’m most noted for not paying attention to some of those details.
[00:03:24.500] – Jonathan Denwood
There we go. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I have a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I’d like to point out we’ve got some great special deals from the sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services for the WordPress professional and bootstrap startup individual. To get all these goodies, all you have to do is go over to WP-Tonic. Com wp-tonic. Com/deals, Wp-tonic. Com/deals, and you find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot from that page, but that’s all you’re going to get, tribe. That’s all you’re going to get, Drive. That’s all you’re going to get from that page, tribe. They love that, Jason. I’ve had emails, they love that little spin. Let’s go straight into it, Jason. We’re in about the beginning of the second quarter, 204. Where has it gone? And what do you see as some of the key factors that people need to understand when it comes to building an online personal brand? Because you wrote the book. So maybe you’d like to start the conversation with a couple of key things that you think people need to understand.
[00:04:58.100] – Jason Barnard
Well, the first thing you need to understand is your most important audience, the people who want to do business with you, are going to Google your name. Google is your online business card. If you’re on a Zoom meeting with somebody, the likelihood they Google you is quite high. If you’ve met somebody at a conference, the likelihood they will Google you before moving forward is very high. If somebody is looking to work for your company, the probability they will Google you to see who they will be working with is quite high. That search result, the search result for your name, is hugely important to your business and to your personal brand. And that brings me to the next point, is names are very ambiguous, except for Kurt von Aachenen, which is relatively unique.
[00:05:39.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m the only group on them on LinkedIn.
[00:05:41.740] – Jason Barnard
You’re the only one. Yes. You’re a lucky guy. Most of us share our name with multiple other people. There are at least 300 Jason Barnards in the world. There are probably several thousand Jonathan Denwoods in the world.
[00:05:56.480] – Jonathan Denwood
Actually, there isn’t actually. It’s only a couple of us, actually.
[00:06:00.180] – Jason Barnard
In that case, I’m talking the wrong people. Can you change your name to John Smith today?
[00:06:05.490] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m tempted. I should do it. Anybody that looks at my name, Oh my God, you just made me hot and bothered. No, I’m a saint, actually. No, I’m a boring saint, actually.
[00:06:18.550] – Jason Barnard
In the context of Brandsterps, the search engine results page for a brand name or a personal name, your competitors are people who share your name. It’s a weird idea that I’m competing with Jason Barnard, the circus clown in South Africa, Jason Barnard, the podcast host in the UK, Jason Barnard, the ice hockey player in the US, and Jason Barnard, the CEO of Lithium in Canada. But I am. If I want somebody in Canada to see my search results, I want them to see me dominating so they can research me on Google, I need to become the most important Jason Barnard in Canada, in South Africa, in the UK, in the US, and in Europe. I need to dominate if I want people to easily find information about me, and I need to make sure the information Google is showing them is the information I want, and we can look at that as self-determination. These machines, Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, are representing us to their audience, to their users. I want self-determination that they represent me first and most positively and accurately when When people are looking for me. That’s a huge task. Interestingly enough, these machines are simply replicating what they see online.
[00:07:39.600] – Jason Barnard
Basically, the solution to this problem is walk the walk online across your entire digital ecosystem, and these machines will replicate that and represent you fairly and accurately.
[00:07:52.100] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you mean by walk the walk, though?
[00:07:55.740] – Jason Barnard
It means standing in the right place. Stand where your audience is looking, Present them with proof of your credibility, proof that you’re a trustworthy solution for them, and with the materials that demonstrate you can solve their problem. In my case, it would be, Can I help you with your personal brand? I need to be standing online in the places where people are looking for that solution, and I need to demonstrate to them when they see me that I am a credible solution and offer them the content that allows them to understand what I can do for them and then invite them down the funnel. If I do that, let’s say on Forbes, Search Engine Land, YouTube, my own website, entrepreneur. Com, I’m standing in the places where this person will be researching that particular topic, how to build my personal brand. Google will see me presenting my credibility to the right people at the right time with the right content in the right format, and it will replicate that when people are searching around that topic online. And when they search my name to make that final decision at the bottom of the funnel, Google will represent me as an expert in branding, marketing, SEO, and represent the facts about me in a way that makes me look credible and authoritative and trustworthy.
[00:09:18.510] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:09:20.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. What you say is pretty interesting about the googling, and I don’t think a lot of people understand that what they put in the Google search bar also affects the search, right? Because isn’t it like, if you want to search Kurt von Ahnen, for me, you would be like, Kurt von Annen, unquote, right? Because then it’s only Kurt von Annen. But if you put in Kurt von Annen, Google starts kicking up like, Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Miller, Kurt Hall. And then you’re competing with every combination of your name on top of just your name, right? How important is it that someone ties their… And this is like a follow up to the first question, but how important is it that someone ties their physical official name to their brand? Because we’re talking about brand and personal brand. So how important is it to make sure that those are tied and connected in a way that Google finds that? If someone is going to start one on, then they should automatically find Manana No Mas.
[00:10:16.490] – Jason Barnard
Absolutely. So that’s a really great question. The corporation, the brand, the company, and the person need to be very, very closely associated in Google’s brain. There are multiple reasons for that. Obviously, number one is it drives business for you. If Google understands who the owner of the company is and who the company is, it can make that association present both at the same time. So somebody’s searching for you, can choose to look at your personal life, your personal social media, Facebook, let’s say, or engage with you through your company if they’re looking for a professional relationship with you. That understanding is fundamental to your business. Google’s understanding of you as an expert is helpful to your business because Google associates the two together. And if it sees you as an expert, it makes your business slightly more credible, trusted, authoritative as a solution, and vice versa.
[00:11:07.360] – Kurt von Ahnen
Got you. Thanks. The question that I have for you was thinking about how people look at Google and I see the Google Knowledge Panel. As you answer this, if you could explain to people that aren’t familiar what that actually is, but what do you think people need to know about that Knowledge Panel on Google? Do you feel that it’s one of those crucial things in search and SEO?
[00:11:33.040] – Jason Barnard
Yeah. Well, let’s start with the personal branding and my personal life and my audience is if you search my name, Jason Barnard, J-A-S-O-N-B-A-R-N-A-R-D, you’ll see a huge knowledge panel, which is the stuff on the right-hand side when you’re searching on desktop and at the top sometimes that explains who I am or what I do. In my case, it says, Published a book. It says, Mother is Kate Westbrook, partner is Roni Barnard, born in 1966, and it will have a description about me that it’s taken, in my case, from Google Books, but could take from Wikipedia, it could take from my own website, it could take from my company website. It’s presenting the facts about me. When you search my name, Jason Barnard, I look like a superstar. I’ve convinced Google to show a lot of factual information about me to summarize me. If you search for somebody else’s name, you are unlikely to see something that impressive unless they are Matt Damon, Madonna. That person will have this huge knowledge panel, which makes them look really impressive. They are impressive, I’m not, but I look significantly more impressive to people searching my name because Google represents me as being this impressive superstar.
[00:12:53.840] – Jason Barnard
And that knowledge panel is Google’s understanding of the facts. And what it’s trying to do is present the basic facts that somebody searching my name would be interested to know, which reduces the need for that person to jump from website to website to gather the facts themselves. So Google’s putting its reputation on the line. It’s saying, Here are the facts. Believe me, trust me. If it gets it wrong, people are going to start to think, I don’t trust Google anymore. And people using Google use Google because they trust it. So Google is very careful about those facts. Your task is to make sure that Google is confident it’s understood the facts about you so that it will represent them in this superstar format. And how does Google understand the facts? It looks at the information about you around the web, and it tries to evaluate what is fact and what is not. And what we don’t realize is that we are not very consistent as human beings. So Google will see contradictory or incomplete information all around the web. And All you need to do is make it clear and consistent across every corroborative source on your website and off your website, who you are, what you do, which audience you serve.
[00:14:12.290] – Kurt von Ahnen
What you said at the end spurred a follow-up for me on this, and forgive me, Jonathan, but I want to make sure I ask this. When you’re talking in these terms, Google’s making this collage of facts from all these sources, right? How important is it that these are other third-party websites and not just your own site? Because Google also knows that your site is owned by you. If you’re the registrar and you registered that URL and you put Kurt is wonderful, Google is going to say, Kurt might not be wonderful because he wrote that himself, right? So it doesn’t have to be a collection of multiple sources.
[00:14:47.390] – Jason Barnard
Yes. Now, there’s an interesting point there is Google doesn’t believe you on your own good word, but it still needs your own good word to understand what you want it to understand. So you do need to say Kurt is wonderful. But you need to make sure that other people also say that, or Google will understand that Kurt is lying. So you need first, second, and third-party websites to corroborate everything you say on your own website. We call it the Entity Home. It’s your website where you explain who I am, what I do, who I serve, why I’m credible. Then you go on to all your second-party websites, which are the ones you semi-controlled: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, CrunchBase, all things that you can change information about yourself on and make sure it’s clear and consistent. Google understands that you can edit all of these sources, but it appreciates the repetition and the clarity. Then you need to go on to the third-party sources that you do not control. People who have interviewed you. This podcast, I need you to describe me the way I describe myself on my own website, because Google will look at this and say, Well, Jason says that.
[00:15:56.330] – Jason Barnard
But then Kurt and Jonathan agree with him. And Kurt and Jonathan are individuals who-I would agree with anything that you say, Jason. Don’t say that. Google’s listening. Google’s listening. If they confirm it, then I can believe what Jason’s saying. It won’t just believe you and me. If I can get that repeated 15, 20 times, Google will believe. And if you think about Google like a child, it’s trying to understand who you are. It’s desperate to understand who you are. It’s trying to understand what you do and who you serve. And it wants to believe you’re credible. So you need to say it yourself and then get the child to go around all the other corroborative sources and have them repeat it. The more they repeat it, the more the child will believe it and be confident in the belief that it has that you’re an incredibly great human being and that you serve this particular audience with a great product and that you’re credible. Excellent.
[00:16:49.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan, over to you, sir.
[00:16:51.190] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s watching some of your latest interviews and reading your book, but especially in your latest interviews, this child’s mind. It’s like, you say a child mind, but a global mind. A strange concoction, normously powerful, but I think you’ve emphasized quite a bit that it’s a child’s mind understanding. So you got to really spell out things very clearly and very consistently. Would that be one of the main things that you would want people to get from this interview?
[00:17:29.650] – Jason Barnard
Yeah, Yeah, exactly. That is the main thing that I think we get from this interview is you’re talking to or you’re communicating with the child through web pages and also video content, audio content, images as well that it analyzes. And it’s not a stupid child, which is what people tend to think. It’s a simplistic child. It needs simple, clear definitions. It needs simple, clear explanations, and it needs repetition. Like any child, it learns over time by repetition of clear consistent facts.
[00:18:03.360] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. It rolls into the next question. What do you think are some of the key factors? Because I’ve been doing this podcast for eight years now, eight, nine years, and we’re on over 900 episodes. I would say that it’s one of the leading podcasts in the WordPress bootstrap space, startup bootstrap space. We’re being busy. I do more than one podcast, and I go on other podcasts, and I do a load of videos. Does that help? I made the decision that it’s one of the leading things that can help me, but I also found out that you got to write a lot, and you got to do a lot of content on your website and a lot more than you think. So maybe you could comment on what I’ve just laid out and add on what you think are some of the leading things to become a leading authority and influence, being an influential person.
[00:19:22.390] – Jason Barnard
Well, there’s some good news and some bad news. The good news is, yes, the 900 episodes are hugely powerful. The good news is, no, you don’t need to write huge amounts of content. Google can analyze video, it can understand images, it can extrapolate information from what it sees, especially at the scale of 900 episodes. But you need to be aware that it will misunderstand transcripts. Transcripts are going to be full of mistakes, especially people’s names. In personal branding, that’s the biggest problem. We demonstrated earlier on, Jason Bernard, Jason Barnard is a problem. I shouldn’t have said that because I’ve just confused Google again.
[00:20:01.700] – Jonathan Denwood
But-so you actually think it’s listening, it’s analyzing to that-YouTube does the automatic…
[00:20:09.320] – Jason Barnard
Sorry. Youtube does the automatic transcripts and Google reads them. So yes, it’s listening. It also analyzes the images behind.
[00:20:18.950] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re making me feel very guilty about all my other guests. I’ve not helped them at all, have I, Jason? I wanted to make it clear to the I’m not a tribe. I didn’t do it by way. It was all innocent, my tribe.
[00:20:36.310] – Jason Barnard
A couple of things you can do that are really, really helpful. Number one is extract information that’s important from this interview and repurpose it. Rather than writing a whole article about this particular interview, extract little chunks and write question-answers, or do timestamps so that Google can easily find the questions and answers. It’s looking for questions and answers in this video right at this We need to help it because it can identify them very accurately. But if we can help it, it reassures the child. And so if we go back to the child analogy, it’s understood, but is it confident in its understanding? And if we provide it with explicit confirmation of what it has understood in terms of questions, answers, information, people’s names, it will be more confident. And the confidence of the child is phenomeninally important.
[00:21:31.470] – Jonathan Denwood
So think about-We’re drawing a really attractive picture here, aren’t we, Jason? A global child that’s always listening.
[00:21:44.170] – Jason Barnard
And is confused, but wants to be less confused. It wants you to help it clarify and build up its confidence, its own understanding. So if you look at it like a child, like your own child, if you’ve got children, how do you educate them? How do you get them to move forward and become more confident in the world? You pat them on the back and burp them as well. Those are the piece of news I’ll give you. And the last one is with 900 episodes. I would suggest that you do something we are now doing at Calicube. The next six months at Calicube is spring cleaning, going through all of the content we’ve got, making it all consistent with our current message, making it consistent across each piece of content so that the child sees that consistency within our own content. Look at the content that’s generated in other platforms and make that consistent. And that is a hugely important spring clean that you need to do, not every year. We’re doing it after three years, and it’s a six-month project for Calicube today.
[00:22:51.380] – Jonathan Denwood
I would have thought so. Got any advice about… Because my career, its focus has changed. When I started WP Tonic, the podcast, I didn’t even have the WP Tonic brand. I just called the podcast. I was just a freelance and I worked for a regional marketing agency. Now I’ve got two online businesses, and WP Tonic specializes in building educational membership websites utilizing the power of WordPress. I’ve I’ve got another podcast called The Membership Machine Show, which I might ask you to come on that as well. That’s more focused on what my target audience, but I’ve got these two worlds. I’ve got this world of WordPress professionals, and I’ve also got my real business target, which are people… But they do overlap, and the overlap section is WordPress. Right. But a lot of my original, the first three or four years or this podcast, I was worried about continuing this podcast because in some ways it might confuse Google, but it is all about WordPress the press. So I came to the conclusion, Am I on the right track? Or have I confused Google? Or am I confusing you, Jason? Which I do manage to confuse most of my guests on this show.
[00:24:28.410] – Jason Barnard
Right. Well, I wouldn’t suggest to somebody that you only ever do one thing that you have to niche down 100 %. What I would do is say you need to make sure Google is focusing on the right things, but also your audience is focusing on the right things. If you want to do business, you want them to focus on the business side of your activities, but that doesn’t stop you doing the fun stuff. And what we do at Calicube, what we advise our clients on, is how to build your personal website to identify to Google which are the important aspects, which the important piece of content that Google should be focusing on. And I’ll give you an example. When you searched my name on Google 10 years ago, at the top, it said Jason Barnard is a cartoon Blue Dog, because I was the voiceover artist for a blue dog in a cartoon for children. I can’t delete that information. I can’t remove it. And it’s a very powerful piece of information for Google. It understands it incredibly well because of IMDb, because of Wikipedia, because of all the websites that talk about entertainment. What I can do is build into my website a set of content that focuses on digital marketing.
[00:25:42.890] – Jason Barnard
So number one, I had to walk the walk of a digital marketer and make sure that I was producing content of quality associated with people already recognized within that industry so that Google would associate me more and more with digital marketing and build into my website a natural bias away from the blue dog and towards digital marketing, and Google will follow. Google focuses on what I tell it to focus on. That’s control. That’s what we all want. Then you can do as many things as you want. I was a punk-folk musician in the 1990s in a relatively successful band. We sold 40,000 albums. We played in front of hundreds of thousands of people over the years. But Google just mentions it as a footnote because I have made sure it’s focusing on digital marketing today. After all, my audience today is interested in digital marketing, and somebody who wants to know about the music group or the Blue Dog will research it and dig down. Google shows it as a footnote, so you can easily. That’s the trick to play. All human beings are multifaceted. Control of your brand is about making sure that both your audience and Google focus on the facet that’s the most important to them and to you.
[00:26:57.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Can you give a couple of examples examples where you’ve helped people get that result you’ve just outlined? Yes.
[00:27:08.330] – Jason Barnard
I can give you a really good example. Do you know Kajabi?
[00:27:11.810] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yep.
[00:27:12.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Only one of our slides. I take the glorious fight of WordPress to slay the dragon of Kajabi.
[00:27:24.070] – Jason Barnard
Right. In that case, I apologize in advance.
[00:27:26.540] – Jonathan Denwood
No, I would get very upset, but you’re very pleasant I’m not an individual, Jason.
[00:27:32.850] – Jason Barnard
Jonathan Cronsted was the President of Kajabi and the guy who built Kajabi up to be a multi-billion dollar company. He left Kajabi a few years ago, and he was eternally associated with Kajabi in the minds of his audience, Google kept representing him as the President of Kajabi despite the fact he no longer worked there. He came to us and said, I want to be recognized as an investor and business advisor. In a year, we moved his brand from President of Kajabi to investor and business advisor. And what he says to us now is, What’s brilliant is on Google, I look fancy, and it’s his word fancy, because Google says, Jonathan Crosn said, investor. It’s got that huge knowledge panel that makes him look like a superstar and a superstar investor because Google is saying he’s an investor. It mentions Kajabi but doesn’t focus on it. But better than that, The conversations he’s having with his audience are about investment, and people don’t lead with Kajabi. They lead with investment and business advice. He said a year ago, even though he had left Kajabi for well over a year, people and Google were still focusing on Kajabi.
[00:28:50.730] – Jason Barnard
In a year with us, we’ve moved the focus both for his audience and for Google to investors and business advisors. His life has transformed.
[00:28:59.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, Can you give us some insights on how you achieved that then?
[00:29:04.580] – Jason Barnard
Well, we’ve got a proprietary software called CaliQ Pro, which audits his digital footprint. We then go through and we correct all of the information about him to be focused on investors. So we write a description of him which focuses on investors.
[00:29:21.300] – Jonathan Denwood
So that’s linked to this child element that we’ve been talking about, isn’t it?
[00:29:27.650] – Jason Barnard
Exactly. It’s repetition of a clear, consistent message across all the cooperative sources that Kurt mentioned earlier on. And we have a propriety software that allows us to do that, audit the system, the digital footprint, and prioritize in terms of what Google is looking at. And here’s the kicker. What Google is looking at is what people are looking at. So we can correct what the audience is looking at and what Google is looking at because Google tells us where focus is online. Then what we did is take 50 investor business advisors, what we call entity equivalents. Other people who are the people he wants to emulate become an investor or business advisor. Let’s take 50 business advisor investors, put them into the CaliQ Pro platform, and that allows us to see for that particular niche, for that particular cohort, that particular peer group, where is Google looking? Where Google is looking is where the audience is looking. So we started to Tell him, This is where you need to produce content. This is where you need to stand so that you are standing where that particular audience is looking, where people are looking for investors and business advisors.
[00:30:41.640] – Jason Barnard
It’s there, there, there, there, and there, and we’re going to get you to stand there. And we’ll build you your website, which allows us to focus Google’s attention and indeed, his audience’s attention on those particular places and reduce the focus on Kajabi.
[00:30:57.760] – Jonathan Denwood
So also, just to finish off before we for our mid-break. So also, I’m presuming being a speaker in the particular… Aimed at your particular target audience that you want to build influence. Being available to speak at online events, physical events, publishing articles, doing videos, going on people’s podcasts. This is all very important to confirm to Google that you are what you say you are.
[00:31:36.350] – Jason Barnard
Exactly. You’ve given a long list of things you can do, but the question is, which should you do in which prioritized order? That’s what we can tell you because we analyze your peer group. We tell you exactly what the priority should be, which you should focus on first. Should it be a book? Should it be podcast appearances? Should it be conference appearances?
[00:31:54.870] – Jonathan Denwood
I just do it all, See, Jason. I didn’t have the benefit of your services and insights. You need to buy the book, folks.
[00:32:02.410] – Jason Barnard
One last thing is that we can tell you which platforms are going to have the most effect. If you’re going to be guest posting, and we’ve told you guest post because that’s what we know this peer group is what’s going to make you most visible and most authoritative in this peer group, which platforms should you be writing for? And we’ll give you a list of the top 20 prioritized, and then you just aim at them one by one. And you know which ones you should be writing for. You know which ones you should be begging or paying to let you write on them.
[00:32:35.330] – Jonathan Denwood
Fascinating. Thanks, Jason. I think it’s been a good conversation. I know they’re butted in, but I think some of my buttons have been quite a moose, and you have green- Your buttons are great. Yeah, but it’s a bit difficult over Zoom or StreamYard because there’s a little bit of a time delay, isn’t it? But it’s been a great conversation. I think it’s been a real balance of global points with some specifics, and they’re all is the best interviews to get in this mixture, right? We’re going to go for our mid-break, folks. We will be back with some other great insights. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. I want to point out that we got a great newsletter, the WP Tonic Newsletter, where I assemble the latest WordPress and tech stories of the week and put what I think are the best ones in a curated list, plus some other insights from my very mixed mind, my dyslexic mind, which you’re used to my beloved tribe. You can get this goodie by going over to Wp-tonic. Com/newsletter, Wp-tonic/newsletter, and you get it free. In your inbox on Monday or Tuesday morning.
[00:34:02.590] – Jonathan Denwood
What could you ask for? There we go. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:34:11.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I was a curious co-host, Jason, And during your conversation, I opened up Google in other tabs, and I did a search for me. I did a search for you, and I did a search for- We could hear, Kurt.
[00:34:26.200] – Jonathan Denwood
We could hear the keyboard.
[00:34:30.090] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s that new keyboard. I got to turn that thing off. It’s clickety, clickety. But I also did a search for Mark Siemansky, who’s one of our active listeners right now. And each of those search windows is structured differently. And so you talk about that knowledge panel. Your knowledge panel is right at the top. Boom, everything’s right there. Mine comes up like halfway scrolled down the page. I can go through three or four different things, and then there’s some pictures of Kurt. And then Mark Siemansky has pictures is at the top, but any information on Mark really seems to be like, if you want to search for Mark, look over here on the right. How do you tell Google what you want, or do you just have to be so awesome that finally they award it to you?
[00:35:13.830] – Jason Barnard
And that’s an interesting point. You don’t need to be awesome. You just need to educate the child. If the child understands, it will represent you properly. What we have for you and for Mark is lack of understanding. So one interesting point is your names, I would imagine Mark is quite unique as well. All you need to do is be clear and consistent and educate the child about who you are, and it will magically represent you the way you need. You don’t need us. You’ve got a really simple task. Just be clear and consistent across all of the digital footprint and make sure that your own website is very clear. So create a website if you don’t have one, your personal website, not your business website, that presents you as a person. Google’s actively looking for that website where you represent yourself. Then just be clear and consistent and link from your website to the clear and consistent corroborations that you feel are important, and that makes it focused. And link back from them to your website, and so that Google understands it’s you.
[00:36:15.380] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s fantastic, Jason. But I’m speaking for Kirek, but Kirek’s got two lives. He’s got his motorcycle, motor industry, Kirek world, and he’s got his WordPress world. I’m just bringing this, I’m just using Kirk as a Pacific, but there must be a lot of people that have multiple hats, have maybe one or two. How do you deal with that? Can you give us some insights? Because I’m sure this is a situation that you face quite regularly when you’re advising people, James.
[00:36:55.160] – Jason Barnard
Yeah, there are multiple possibilities. Number one is you can have it all on your own website and simply You have less content about the motor cycles than you do about the WordPress. You can also do something that I’ve done, which was move my band, my rock group from the ’90s, onto its own website. So it’s my representation of my own band, at which point my website doesn’t actually contain very much information about the band, I simply say, for information about the Barking Dogs, which was the name of the band, go to this website. I separate it and move it away so that if you research me, you will find it, and Google understands the relationship and can represent that relationship and can represent my participation in that band, but I’m clearly telling Google not to focus on it. Two simple solutions. It’s up to you which one you do.
[00:37:38.590] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, all of your answers have clearly told me to focus on looking up your old band.
[00:37:46.160] – Jason Barnard
With my old band, Nice Story, we played on the same bill as Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan was right at the top headlining, we were right at the bottom. But it was still on the same bill, on the same poster.
[00:38:00.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
Wow. A poster to never throw away.
[00:38:03.050] – Jason Barnard
I didn’t get a copy. I was really foolish.
[00:38:07.330] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, to switch gears and get back to the list, having written the book and put the energy in to write a book and finishing a book, which I know how painful that can be firsthand. What are just a couple of gold nuggets or fundamentals that you want people to come away from reading your book with?
[00:38:26.210] – Jason Barnard
When you please Google, When you educate Google, when you get Google to understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve, what your speciality topic is, why you’re credible, you are necessarily also doing the same thing for your audience. You’re walking the walk, as we said earlier on. The only way to accurately and reliably educate Google the child is to walk the walk over time. What I love about what we’re doing is we’re talking about Google. We’re saying, How does How does Google represent you? How does Google understand you? Will Google introduce you into a conversation that it’s having? If you’ve started looking at Google Gemini, for example, Google Gemini, ChatGPT, perplexity, it’s a conversation between a machine and a human. Is it talking about you in the way that you want in that conversation the machine is having with the human being? The answer to those questions is it will if you walk the walk and you educate it by joining the dots using your entity home. It really is a as simple as that. You can do it yourself, especially if you’ve got a unique name, or you can come to Calicube because we know which buttons to press, how to actually build this thing because we’ve got the data and we’ve got the machine that tells us exactly what we need to do.
[00:39:44.980] – Jason Barnard
So the only difference between you doing it yourself by reading the book and reading the free resources on calicube. Com and doing it with us is that you’ll be guessing. We know. Yeah, yeah.
[00:39:59.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m going to pass it back to you, Jonathan.
[00:40:01.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Based on knowing, are there any particular types of signals, content, signals? Because I do not make my living from SEO or consultancy around this, but trying to build two online businesses, I have had to educate myself to a much higher standard than I I wanted to because it was a necessity. But so I, based on my own research and that, these signals do oscillate and do change. So in the end of 2003, and like I say, we’re in the second quarter of 2004, what are some content and some signals that you think that Google really it looks at?
[00:41:02.480] – Jason Barnard
Yeah, it’s a great question because it all comes back to the entity home, your own website. All comes from there. People think I need to publish a lot of text, a lot of blog articles. That was true up until a couple of years ago. Now, Google is what we call multimodal. It will look at videos, it can analyze videos, it sees the text on this video, it will see Mark’s question, it will see WTp-tonic. Com. It’s listening to us and it’s watching each and every image. It’s listening to podcasts. Apple have now categorized podcasts by analyzing the podcast themselves. And in the source code of Apple podcast, you can actually now see the categorization. All of these machines are doing the same thing, and they all function exactly the same way. Analyzing video, analyzing audio, analyzing text, trying to understand, trying to understand the world like a child or a human being would in order to be able to match what what their audience is looking for and what you can provide as a solution. And to do that match, they need to understand what the audience is looking for, of course, but they need to understand what it is you’re offering to whom.
[00:42:13.320] – Jason Barnard
And in order to present you and not somebody else, they need to understand that you’re the most credible, the most trustworthy, the most authoritative. And that’s what it’s all about.
[00:42:22.820] – Jonathan Denwood
How do they judge… Don’t want me butting in. How do they make that judgment?
[00:42:29.110] – Jason Barnard
Well, it used to be links, and everybody’s obsessed by links. So inbound links is how Google function for years. And links to a page help it to understand whether the content on that page is popular. That’s all it does. Now what Google is doing is saying, Well, I can understand who Jason Barnard is, and that knowledge panel is a representation of Google’s factual understanding of who I am. Once it’s understood who I am, it can start to look at what people say about me. It can start to understand what education I’ve got, how many years I’ve been in business, how many articles I’ve written on these different platforms. I’ve written for Search Engine Journal, I’ve written for Forbes, I’ve written for Search Engine Land, I’ve written for WordLift, I’ve written for Semrush. That gives me credibility Credibility. Google calls it EEAT, expertise, experience, authoritiveness, and trustworthiness. At Caliq, we’ve added notability and transparency to that, but it’s basically credibility. So once it’s understood who I am, factually, every time it sees the mention of the name Jason Barnard, it can figure out, especially if I help it, that that’s me who wrote on Semrush, that’s me who wrote on Forbes, that’s me who wrote on Search Engine land, and it can evaluate my credibility that way.
[00:43:43.710] – Jason Barnard
And this podcast adds a little bit of credibility to me because you, as a third party, are validating me as an expert in my field.
[00:43:54.030] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it makes total sense, but not a but. But obviously, we’re going to go into the next question a little bit, which is around AI. Obviously, you had quite a large update from Google in March. Obviously, I follow people like you, and I follow quite a few of the inner posse of SEO experts. I can’t remember what actual I first came across you, and then I did a bit of a dive because I liked your style.
[00:44:37.170] – Jason Barnard
Thank you. What a charmer.
[00:44:40.440] – Jonathan Denwood
I can be, but I’m not even surprising. I’m a strange mixture, James. I’ve been told I’m extremely blunt when I want to be, but I also got the better side, which is a little bit of charm.
[00:44:52.490] – Jason Barnard
Google’s now going to be very confused because you were calling me Jason at the start, now you’re calling me James. Google’s going to think he’s got a new guest on board.
[00:45:01.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, you just want to be happy. It’s just swapping the names around a bit. Some of the interviews have got a bit spicy, but Well, a few months ago, I did interview the great lead of WordPress, Matt Moweg. And that was a reasonable discussion, wasn’t it, Kirk? It got a bit I see in parts, isn’t it?
[00:45:31.550] – Kurt von Ahnen
No, it was good. It was good. A lot of people liked it, too.
[00:45:34.490] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[00:45:36.010] – Jason Barnard
Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m obsessed by the name, and I keep calling you out on it, and it’s shaking me.
[00:45:41.170] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t mind. I’m used to it.
[00:45:42.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
Just be happy you started with a name that started with the letter J.
[00:45:45.480] – Jonathan Denwood
Brilliant. Brilliant. Okay, I’ll be happy about it. You need to lower your expectations because you’ve got off lightly, I’m just telling you. Let’s go into this. We had this update, and I’ve really I’ve just been knocking out. I’ve been very aggressive over the past year, producing more and more and more content. It has paid dividends. We’re getting more and more traffic to the website, which then means I have to concentrate on the conversion, but there’s no point in looking at the conversion unless you get more and more traffic. But I backed off at the beginning of March because I do use AI content, but we do edit it and we add video and podcasting. I thought, I haven’t done, and my domain authority oscillates between 68 and 70 through AREF for independent website. I think that’s a pretty good domain authority. But I was a bit concerned because some people got hammered. But they were people… Because there’s been a whole niche of SEO influencers around niche websites saying, You can just knock up a niche website and you can just publish 600 pages of SEO content and bob your uncle. They seem to have got really hammered, especially some of these influencers, because they are just a red flag to Google, isn’t it?
[00:47:32.610] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s like putting a red flag in front of a ball, isn’t it, Jason? But I think the things we’ve discussed, I think it protects you to some degree if you got these branding signals that you’ve talked about this interview. Am I on the right track? And was you surprised by what the react? Because I wasn’t surprised that Google started really marketing these people?
[00:48:02.390] – Jason Barnard
I’m not surprised about what happened. I’m not surprised that Google has finally managed to do what it’s been saying it could do for years. I am surprised the SEO community are taken by surprise by it, because for me, it’s been something that I’ve been looking at very closely for years and years and years. And it occurred to me the other day that traditional SEO is what you’re saying. Google’s focusing on the page. So SEO is a tradition. You looked at keyword counting, what words are on the page, inbound links, site speed, website, domain authority, and that’s all based on the web page. And if you look at Google’s quality rate guidelines. They changed three years ago. They stopped talking about web pages so much. They talk about website owners and content creators. So what you then get is With Google’s understanding of who is the website owner, the company behind the website, the publisher of the content, and who is the content creator, the person who actually wrote the content, it can now say, Well, I can still look at the SEO signals that I’ve always looked at, the page, the content, but I can add to that understanding of the content creator, and are they credible?
[00:49:21.770] – Jason Barnard
Are they a good solution? Are they somebody who I want to recommend to my audience? And the website owner, the publisher, the corporation behind the website, is that a legitimate, reliable, trustworthy corporation? So SEO has gone from just the page, just the content, to the person who creates the content and the corporation that publishes the content.
[00:49:44.270] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, can I I’m going to be a little bit of a devil’s advocate here a little bit, because I do believe in a lot what you say, but first of all, I don’t believe everything Google says because they’re a notorious, and this is just my opinion, I know they’re listening, but I don’t care, actually, Kirt. They’re not at all your spul shitters. The other thing, and the reason why I say that, in the WordPress space, Jason, there’s what I call the Chocolate Factory. It’s a company that owns a number of plugins, and they’ve built an internal network of low-quality websites. If you If they do a search on almost any long tail or short tail phrase that generates any level of traffic, they’re there, and the articles they produce are awful. They just plug their own plugins, and it’s just junk. They’re not being touched by Google, what I’ve seen. I mean, I’m much more niche area, but they do… So I can probably… I’ve lost for the word, but I could be more effective than I should be because I’m in a more niche area. So I get the sense that it’s all jumbled up to some extent a bit.
[00:51:23.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Am I on the right track? Because you’re much more of expert than I. I’m just being honest with you, Jason.
[00:51:30.080] – Jason Barnard
Well, honestly- Number one, there will always be exceptions. So one example is not going to change the entire situation. But the important thing to remember is that the first huge update where Google actually got to the point where it could apply signals to the website owner and the content creator was last July. So this is new. Google’s just pivoted, and there was a huge hit in September. So they updated the knowledge graph in July, which is what we track. Its understanding of the website owner and the content creators was significantly improved. That hit the search algorithms in September. There was another update to the knowledge graph in March, and the huge update in March is when anybody who didn’t have a brand went down. So what we have is a completely new situation. Google has pivoted 180 degrees. It’s added two huge layers to what it’s trying to analyze. And of course, it’s going to be a bit of a mess.
[00:52:29.110] – Jonathan Denwood
Of course, the The thing is, what’s this obsession that Google seems to have with junky forums? And about the quality of insight from these forums, to say it’s piss poor, is the understatement of this. Because some of these, I’m not going to name, well, I could, but I’m not going to do, but some of these forums, the people that spend a lot of time on them are some of the biggest crackheads going. I wouldn’t believe anything they told me. So what’s this obsession Google’s got recently with putting forum content on top of search?
[00:53:10.510] – Jason Barnard
Right. Well, partially at least, it’s because it’s really easy to extract questions and answers. Google It’s not just looking for questions and answers. It’s looking for information gain. In this particular video, I mentioned, if you can give it timestamps that identify where the questions are and then the answers, Google will be really happy because you’ve made its job of finding the questions and the answers simpler. So forums and the websites you’ve been talking about are naturally question-answer format, which makes it really easy for Google to understand, and it’s thirsty for them. But what is going to happen is as Google accumulates that information, as it accumulates that knowledge, it’s going to drop it little by little because once it’s got the knowledge, it doesn’t need the knowledge anymore. So it’ll just go on to the next one. So one of the problems we’re all going to have as content creators is once we fed Google with the knowledge of what we know, of what have, it will no longer need that particular article because it has the knowledge.
[00:54:06.690] – Jonathan Denwood
It depends on what the person is looking for, really, isn’t it? But also I think everybody, this whole sector has to be a bit careful because if they discourage, if there’s no point in spending time making podcasts, making videos, and writing marketing content for websites, people will stop doing it, won’t they? That would be a slight problem for Google, weren’t it?
[00:54:38.440] – Jason Barnard
Right. But if I cut in now and say, why would anybody create content for Google? You should be creating it for your audience. Seo is branding and marketing package for Google. You should be creating this for your audience first. It serves your audience. It brings in business from your audience. And Google is simply replicating what it’s seeing you do with your audience. And I’ll give you a really quick example. Calicube gets 80% of its business not from Google. The 80/20 split for Calicube is 20% Google, 80% not Google. I realized the other day, I built up a website called Up to 10, Buwa and Kuaala, the Blue Dog. And in 2007, we had a billion page views, a billion page views for a website for children in one year. I thought I was ace at Google because 200 million of those came from visits from Google. And it only occurred to me the other day, 800 million came not from Google.
[00:55:37.740] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to ask you the obvious question, where do you think the majority of the traffic came from, Lee?
[00:55:45.380] – Jason Barnard
For that particular website or for CaliQ?
[00:55:47.630] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, whatever example you want to take.
[00:55:51.610] – Jason Barnard
Well, for that particular website, it was in the children’s space. It came from schools. It came from play schools. It came from Grandma. It came It came from playgroups. It came from bookmarks. It came from human recommendations in the playground between parents who were saying, I’ve got this great resource, it’s Buwa and Kuala. So 800 million came from not Google, and 200 million came from Google. And at Calicube, it comes from podcast interviews like this. It comes from my podcast. It comes from YouTube. It comes from LinkedIn. It comes from the article I wrote for Search Engine Land this week and the article I wrote on Forbes. And once again, 80/20 split, not Yeah, I think my position on that, I do see where you’re coming from.
[00:56:36.440] – Jonathan Denwood
I would say it’s like 40, or 60 in my gut feeling.
[00:56:43.640] – Jason Barnard
Which is pretty healthy already compared to many people.
[00:56:47.160] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think there’s very… And you also… It’s a well-known term in marketing that you get to touch potential clients there on what is classically based on Campbell’s ideas, the hero’s journey. I call it the seller and buyer journey. So people are at different stages, and you just have to consistently be there at the right moment. But that’s a whole other… I’m going to throw it over to Kurt for the final question. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:57:21.810] – Jason Barnard
The final question, that sounds- The final song.
[00:57:25.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
You’re going to make me feel bad because I might not be here for the whole answer. I have a hard stop at the top of the hour. But if you had your own time machine, your own TARDIS, per se, or H. G. Wells, and you could go back in time to the beginning of your career when things started, Jason, what advice would you give yourself?
[00:57:42.140] – Jason Barnard
The advice I would give myself would be, don’t be so obsessed with Google. Most of your career is going to be Google. And if I’d realized that right at the start, I would have used Google in the way that I’m using it today. As simply package my marketing and my branding for a bonus of 20 % and not the focal point of where I’m trying to go. That’s pretty insightful.
[00:58:12.950] – Kurt von Ahnen
Thank you.
[00:58:13.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, Jason, It’s been a fabulous discussion. What’s the best way for people to find out? And I wanted to say, folks, that I would highly recommend Jason’s book The Fundamentals of Brand, SERPs, for your business. It’s a good read. It’s more than just a 101. It goes into some real meat, but it’s got the right balance for somebody who’s not making their living from SEO. It’s aimed at the business owner. Good read. I would highly recommend it. So what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and your insights, Jason?
[00:58:57.530] – Jason Barnard
Right. Well, before I say that, I’d like to point out the book, I’m proud of it because I got somebody to help me write it, because I was too geeky. I was doing that balance towards the geekiness which people wouldn’t understand. And the person who helped me write it knew nothing about Google and knew little about marketing. By the end of it, her boss, without ever having heard anything I said, read the book in a weekend and said, I get it, makes sense. And so that combination, of Emily and Zoe, made sure that this book is accessible to everybody If I’d done it on my own, it wouldn’t have been. So thank you for that. It would have ended up as a geek fest, would it, Jason? Yes. And that’s a company called Brightray Publishing, and they helped me write the book, and it’s so, so powerful because of them and thanks to them. But if you want to reach out to me, you search my name, Jason Barnard, J-A-S-O-N-B-A-R-N-A-R-D on Google, or you ask ChatGPT for perplexity, who is Jason Barnard? It will tell you everything you need to know about me and where you can connect with me.
[01:00:03.780] – Jason Barnard
And that’s the beauty of searching my name because you can decide how you want to interact with me on Twitter, on LinkedIn, through my company website, through my personal website, or if you want to learn more about me as a cartoon Blue Dog, it’s up to you. And it’s not up to me to decide how you engage with me. It’s up to you.
[01:00:22.310] – Jonathan Denwood
Thanks, Jason. It’s been a fab discussion. I’ve enjoyed it. You’ve laughed at my crappy jokes. You’re a champion. We will be back soon. If you want to support the podcast and the tribe, just share this and the content on your social media platforms. That would be the best way you can show your support, folks. We will be back next week with another fabulous guest. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
[01:00:51.230] – Jason Barnard
Thank you. Bye-bye.
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