How Kalicube Hit the Brand SERP Tipping Point

What You Will Learn

What is the Brand SERP Tipping Point and Why Is It Important?

You know when you have reached Brand SERP Tipping Point: adding information to your Knowledge Panel, creating Knowledge Panels for related entities and managing your Brand SERP becomes very, very simple, reasonably fast and very reliable. That tipping point is when Google has really understood the digital brand’s ecosystem, really understood who they are, what they offer and which audience they serve.

Reaching Brand SERP Tipping Point generally means that your entity is approaching (or has already reached) Entity Maturity.

There is a subtle difference between the two:

Entity Maturity is when Google has a confident understanding of the entity in its Knowledge Graph (explicit, stable knowledge about an entity).

Brand SERP Tipping Point is the moment when Google’s presentation of the entity accurately represents the brand message when people google the name (algorithmic representation of information about an entity).

Introduction

Kalicube’s Brand SERP Tipping Point

We have determined that Kalicube has reached the tipping point for its Brand SERP because:

Entity Description is from the Entity Home

Google recognised Kalicube’s Entity Home as kalicube.com, and it used the description we wrote for Kalicube from our own About page. This shows that Google considers Kalicube’s own website to be an authoritative source and, in conjunction with this, is convinced that our own About page contains valuable information about Kalicube.

SERP thumbnails from our own image bank

We have a great image bank at Kalicube. We’ve been working on that for a long time. We publish images in a very sustainable and consistent way. Google displays our brand visuals incredibly well in our Brand SERP, as each page contains appropriate images that attractively represent the content of the page.

Content and Videos made by Kalicube, about Kalicube

Google is prioritising our content about us on all our Brand SERPs. Not only our pages, but also the videos we made to showcase our own products and services.

Google, which aims to understand our universe in order to provide the best experience to the subset of its users who are our audience, is absolutely thrilled with them and is now including them in all of our Brand SERPs.

These videos give us immense control and provide very useful information for our audience when they Google our brand name. The videos provide clear, helpful information and give our audience a choice of how they want to interact with our products and services.

Our audience is happy, we are happy and Google is happy 🙂

Triggering Knowledge Panels With or Without Wikipedia and Wikidata?

The Kalicube Knowledge Panel was triggered and managed entirely without Wikipedia or Wikidata. Since I made the mistake of creating a Kalicube page on Wikidata and that Wikidata page was deleted, the Knowledge Panel was also deleted and it took us a year to rebuild the Knowledge Panel.

The presence of a Wikipedia article or a Wikidata profile is certainly helpful in triggering Knowledge Panels but it is not essential, as in the case of our Kalicube Knowledge Panel.

Solution

How Did Kalicube Actually Hit the Brand SERP Tipping Point?

We have developed a three-step process, which we fondly call the Kalicube Process, that we use to educate Google about our offerings and services.

The Kalicube Three-Step Process For the Brand SERP

A strategic mix of marketing, branding and SEO. The emphasis on each aspect is (in this order):

Marketing: This is done by creating relevant, valuable and helpful content for our audience and placing it on the platforms where they naturally gather (social, third party sites and our own sites).
Branding: This is done by defining a meaningful brand message, a clear brand voice, and a strong visual identity… and being consistent over time across every first, second and third party platform.
SEO: This is done by taking the marketing and branding and “packaging” them for Google using simple, non-geeky SEO techniques anyone can apply.

The Kalicube Three-Step Process For the Knowledge Panel

A simple hub-based approach that educates Google by consistent, repetitive corroboration of the facts.

Entity Home: This is done by optimising the Entity Home and including an NLP-friendly description, photos and a logical HTML structure, as well as creating relevant and useful content on the Entity Home that answers your audience’s questions or solves their problems.
Corroboration: This is done by correcting all the corroboration on first, second and third party sites that confirm the facts, and also by running a PR campaign
Signposting: This is done by creating an infinite self-confirming loop from the Entity Home to these sources and back.

That’s how we work at Kalicube, and we have worked to ensure that our own entity identities are fully recognised by Google and absolutely nail the relationships between those entities, Google’s understanding of who we are, what we offer and which audiences we serve.

Importantly, this is a cross-referencing understanding and representation of our Cornerstone Entities, as we’ll see.

What Were The Real Gains?

Google Understands What Services Kalicube Offers

As we’ve worked on our content to accurately describe the entire Kalicube ecosystem and everything we offer, and even gone so far as to optimise our descriptions with Google’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) to make them easy for Google to digest, it now has a complete understanding and has begun to connect the dots between Kalicube, its associated entities and – even better – the keywords and keyphrases associated with Kalicube.

Google’s Awareness of the Entities Related to Kalicube and their Relationships

Related Entity: Kalicube Tuesdays

Google understands what Kalicube Tuesdays is. It understands which videos refer to Kalicube Tuesdays and shows the latest videos or episodes that we post. This is very positive and shows that Google already understands Kalicube Tuesdays and its relationship with Kalicube.

Related Entity: Kalicube Pro

If we search for Kalicube Pro, we can see that Kalicube Pro’s Brand SERP focuses mainly on the platform itself. This means that it is clear to Google that it is a SaaS platform offered by Kalicube and not the same entity.

Since Kalicube and Kalicube Pro have almost the same name, one might worry about ambiguity and Google confusing the entities. However, since we communicate very clearly with Google, this did not happen.

We may still have the Kalicube Google My Business (Google Business Profile) panel, but most of the results are all about the Kalicube Pro.

Related Entity: Kalicube Academy

Kalicube Academy is very new, this site is only four or five months old. If you search for Kalicube Academy, you can see our own video ranking there, our explanation right at the top, and even Rich Sitelinks on Kalicube Academy’s website.

This is absolutely delightful, because we initially thought it would take longer for Google to build up its knowledge of this new entity but we were happy to be wrong. That speed demonstrates the power of building a consistent Digital Ecosystem around a brand.

Related Entity: Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy)

Jason Barnard (me), is also seen as an associated entity to Kalicube as the company’s founder. Again, we have this understanding in Google’s “brain”, which is incredibly positive.

Next Steps

Tip of the Iceberg

Just because Kalicube has already hit the tipping point does not mean we stop there. The tipping is fragile and needs to be maintained and developed. Google is evolving rapidly, and what we currently see as a tipping point is certainly just the tip of a huge iceberg. With the new updates Google is introducing, including infinite scrolling, Social Post Carousels, Knowledge Panel Cards etc. That means we need to build for the future by continuously consolidating, adapting and improving our strategy..

Conclusion

Google Aims to Understand the Universe

This is the HUGE task Google has set itself. At Kalicube we are pragmatic and limit ourselves to ensuring that Google understands our tiny corner of the world. The Brand SERP Tipping Point demonstrates that we have achieved that goal.

Google’s Complete Understanding of Kalicube and its Related Entities

Now that Google understands how the Kalicube universe works, we see that whenever we introduce something new, Google understands it very, very quickly. As we saw earlier in this article, when we introduced the Kalicube Process, it only took a week for Google to show that article as a featured snippet. But Google’s understanding of our Digital Ecosystem goes way beyond that – just take a look at these Related Searches. How many major brands have branded queries that are as well-focused as this?

This is important: Google understands every single Kalicube entity, it connects them to each other, and makes connections with the content we produce. This is a self-perpetuating flywheel that will prove to be an incredibly powerful business driver in the years to come. Stay tuned!