Why 99% of Business Leaders Don’t Have the Google Knowledge Panel They Deserve

Have you ever wondered why Google makes some people look more impressive than others in search results?

Why some people look like this:

And others, who are just as influential in their industry, look like this:

And, indeed, others still have no fancy Knowledge Panel at all:

Do people pay Google for a fancy Knowledge Panel? Is Google punishing some people? Or is Google not as smart as we think it is?

None of the above. 

Google your name right now.

Check if you have a Knowledge Panel. Do you have one that knocks the socks off potential clients and reassures them you’re the person they need to do business with? 

If you don’t, you’re not alone: 99% of business leaders don’t have the Google Knowledge Panel they deserve, because they don’t understand.

But you can create this incredibly valuable revenue-generating asset by doing the following things. 

1. Work intentionally to educate Google about your personal brand. 
2. Create an Entity Home (or knowledge hub about you).
3. Focus on the right things in your brand and marketing activities. 

You’ll get a Knowledge Panel like JCron’s if you do all three.

Jonathan Cronsdedt is one of many business leaders who is happy to have entrusted the management of their personal brand to our team at Kalicube.

What is a Knowledge Panel and Why Do You Need One

What is a Knowledge Panel?

A Google Knowledge Panel is the information box on the right and at the top of the search result. They often appear when you search on Google for the name of a person or a company. They are designed to help Google’s users by summarizing the facts about the person in one place so they get everything they need to know at a glance. 

Google only includes the facts it confidently understands about a person in a Knowledge Panel.

How are Knowledge Panels Created?

Google learns everything about a person by crawling around the web and evaluating all the information it finds. It assesses the veracity and extracts what its Knowledge Algorithms deem factually correct. When these algorithms are sufficiently confident in specific facts about an individual, Google stores these facts in its Knowledge Graph (a “machine-readable Wikipedia” containing information about hundreds of millions of people). 

When people earn a place in the Knowledge Graph they are automatically given a unique identifier by Google (called a KGMID), that means they become an Entity, and they therefore get a Knowledge Panel.

The important thing to remember is that when you are an Entity and you have a Knowledge Panel, Google explicitly understands who you are and what you do. You aren’t one of the billions of unidentified people floating around the internet. 

Getting a Knowledge Panel means that Google trusts you – which is incredibly important for your personal brand. 

Why is a Knowledge Panel Important for your Personal Brand?

Everyone who engages with you closely or does business with you will google your name. I’m sure you’ve googled someone you’ve met to check them out, right?

What potential clients see when they google your name can make or break a deal.

Looking at the example above, you’ll see that Google actively makes Jonathan Cronstedt look impressive – authoritative, and important. That is reassuring and convincing for his audience, and JCron gets new leads and more clients because of his Knowledge Panel.

The important thing to remember is that you want a Knowledge Panel that gives you credibility above your peers, so you make more money.

What is the Single Most Important Thing to get an Impressive Knowledge Panel?

Confidence.

When Google displays a Knowledge Panel, it puts its reputation on the line since a Knowledge Panel summarizes Google’s understanding of the facts about the person. Get the facts wrong, and Google looks foolish. Google engineers designed the Knowledge Algorithms that decide whether to show a Knowledge Panel to be very, very cautious. 

The important thing to remember is that the Knowledge Algorithms need a high level of confidence to display a Knowledge Panel for a person and a very high level of confidence to display the additional Knowledge Panel Cards at the top.

Jason Hennessey is one of many business leaders who is happy to have entrusted the management of their Knowledge Panel to our team at Kalicube.

How to get the Knowledge Panel you deserve

1. Work Intentionally to Educate Google

Working intentionally to educate Google about your brand is the key to getting the Knowledge Panel you deserve. Google needs help to figure out the facts about you. You might feel that you shouldn’t need to help Google, that Google should be able to figure out the facts about you: which photo you prefer, your job title, your bio, your company, your achievements, your qualifications, your age, your closest (most impressive) peers, your social media accounts and the like. But it can’t.

Why? The web is a huge, badly organized mess, and the information about you is not easily accessible. It is in fragmented pieces scattered all over the web, and some of it is out of date.

What you Should do

Ensure your information is clear, accurate, and helpful on all profile pages, articles about you, articles you’ve written, podcast guest appearances, industry awards websites, alumni presentations, conference bios, etc.

How long this will take

The time this will take depends on the size of your digital footprint. Updating a digital footprint of a dozen platforms, articles, and mentions takes a day. Updating a hundred different platforms and mentions takes a week or two. Updating thousands of items in a digital footprint takes a long, tedious, and frustrating three months. But it’s worth the effort.

Once Google has seen all the updates you made, it will take about 1 week for changes to appear in the search results for your name and 3 months for changes to appear in your Knowledge Panel (including getting one from scratch).

2. Create an Entity Home

An Entity Home is one single web page that is the place of reference about you, from you. Google is actively looking for you to provide your version of the facts about you. John Mueller from Google calls this the point of reconciliation. At Kalicube, we call it the Entity Home.

The Entity Home allows Google to easily accomplish its three reconciliation goals: 

1. Identifying the facts about you. 
2. Corroborating those facts using multiple trusted sources.
3. Having a stable go-to reference for the facts over time.

Having one primary reference point for information about you that Google’s Knowledge Algorithms can trust simplifies all three reconciliation steps significantly for these algorithms.

What you Should do

Build a personal website. Your Entity Home must be a personal website you control 100%.

Google is able to use second-party websites as the Entity Home (such as a social media profile or your company profile page). There are two reasons you don’t want that.

1. Second-party Entity Homes make it difficult for Google’s Knowledge Algorithms to reconcile the facts (so it takes longer).  
2. You want to own your “source of truth” so you have control over the facts Google understands about you.

A two-page website is enough – a home page and an “about me” page. The homepage is for your human audience, and the “about me” page is for Google. The “about me” page states the facts about you clearly and simply. The “about me” page must link to the most important, relevant profile pages and resources about you on other websites. Link back to your Entity Home from those other web pages to create an “infinite loop of self-corroboration.” Linking back is easy with pages you control such as social media profiles. Articles about you and profile pages on third-party websites require some outreach.

How long this will take

If you already have a personal website, updating the Entity Home should take you about a day. You simply need to set out the facts clearly on this one page. If you don’t already have a personal website, then creating one can take time. Using a DIY platform such as Wix or Squarespace can speed things up sinc you can do this yourself without a geeky web developer.

Once Google has seen the updates you made to your Entity Home, it will take about 3 months for the Knowledge Algorithms to accept this as the primary reference page for you.

3. Focus on the Right Things

Focusing on the wrong things is typically the reason a Knowledge Panel doesn’t blossom with the Knowledge Panel cards at the top like this:

Olga Zarr is one of many business leaders who is happy to have entrusted the management of their name change and then building a fancy Knowledge Panel to our team at Kalicube.

Google understands which platforms and resources are most relevant to every industry and geo-region. Google knows that LinkedIn is important for B2B, that Avvo is relevant for lawyers in the US, and that Crunchbase is a reliable source of information for tech startups, for example.

Focusing on the wrong platforms and sources confuses Google, so you have to get this right. If you are a florist and yet you appear on Crunchbase, you are sending mixed signals. Even if the information is accurate, you will confuse the Knowledge Algorithms because Crunchbase is not a relevant source for florists. 

Google is very, very niche, and you need to be too. 

What you Should do

1. Focus. Ensure you focus on the geo and industry-relevant platforms for social media, press coverage, guest articles, data sources, podcast guest appearances, getting niche industry awards, and make sure you sponsor or speak at the most pertinent conferences relevant to your niche.

2. Be intentional. Don’t just try everything all at once and hope. “Throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some sticks” is not a strategy. You’ll waste a huge amount of time and money and confuse Google so much that your hard work is completely negated. 

Audit your peers and your market and identify the following things. 

• Identify what works and what doesn’t. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, “What you choose not to do is as important as what you choose to do.” 
• Decide what you should prioritize and what can wait. “Your order of priorities defines the effectiveness of what you choose to do.”

Check a selection of your peers to get a picture of what works across your niche.  Your most effective, efficient, and profitable strategy will not be the same as anyone else’s; it will be the perfect hybrid of your peer group.  At Kalicube, we have over 2 billion data points collected from Google since 2015 (and still going), and we are able to analyze your niche and peers and give you a laser-focused strategy, ensuring you focus on the right things – and get the results faster. 

3. Prioritize your audience. A Knowledge Panel is not all about Google. You want a Knowledge Panel that wows your audience and generates business. Prioritize what makes sense to build trust with your audience and expand your reach. Expand your audience by reaching out to them on the platforms where they hang out. Optimize the content for Google where possible because Google is watching everything you do online and evaluating the engagement you are getting with your ideal audience. At Kalicube, we give you platform-specific, standard operating procedures for where and how to engage your audience and optimize the content for Google. 

4. Join the dots for Google. Create a section for each strategy in your personal brand building on your “about me” page (podcasts, media, conference attendances, etc). Create individual pages for the ones that most clearly demonstrate your status in your niche. Add links to corroborate your participation on the relevant websites. Add a link back from those to the page in question where possible.

Creating and maintaining a section for each strategy in your personal brand joins the dots for Google: You organize all the information confirming your status and give Google a simple, reliable reference point for evaluating your career over time. At Kalicube, we identify the best strategies and places you need to be, guide you through the process, check you’re implementing everything correctly, and ensure you don’t miss anything. It’s reassuringly comprehensive, and you aren’t guessing or wasting your time.

How long this will take

A personal brand strategy is an ongoing undertaking. If you are serious about building your personal brand, then the work never stops.

Google is constantly looking over your shoulder and evaluating how successfully your are engaging with your ideal audience. With a well defined, laser focussed strategy, you’ll see results in a month or two.

Getting tangible results will take significantly longer if you invest your time, energy and money in the wrong places. However, if you invest the resources to evaluate what is working for your peer group, then you will be focusing in the right places and that will:

1. vastly reduce wasted effort,
2. save you time and resources,
3. get you results faster.

What if you Don’t Have the Time?

At Kalicube, we know your time is precious. Managing your online presence can be overwhelming and time-consuming, but it’s crucial for your business success. 

Kalicube specializes in managing and optimizing your digital footprint, ensuring you stand out with a powerful Google Knowledge Panel. Let us handle the complexities while you focus on what you do best.

• Save Time: We take care of everything, from strategy to implementation.
• Expertise: Leverage our years of experience and data-driven insights.
• Fast Results: Get a Knowledge Panel without the hassle.
• SOPs: Standard Operating Procedures for every strategy.

Book a call with Jason today, and let Kalicube do the heavy lifting to grow your Knowledge Panel so you can get back to business.

Knowledge Panels are Key to the Future of Search, Answer and Assistive Engines

Your Bonus: this works for ChatGPT, Bing CoPilot, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overview, and Gemini

All the BigTech AI machines function the same way. They collect information from the web, establish the facts about you, and evaluate the corroboration to build confidence in those facts over time.

The important thing to remember is that if you follow the three steps above, you’ll gain control of how these machines understand you and how they represent you to the subset of their users who are your audience: you’ll enjoy self-determination for yourself and priority treatment from all the AI algorithms.

Imagine ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview endorsing you when a person asks them to recommend an expert in your field. That’s powerful stuff. 

Get a Google Knowledge Panel by Being Intentional About Your Personal Branding Strategy 

Anyone can get an information-rich, accurate, and “fancy” Knowledge Panel like our client examples in this article. You simply need to optimize your existing digital footprint, provide Google with an Entity Home so it can reconcile the facts about you and connect the dots for the Knowledge Algorithms over time.

The important thing to remember is that this is your future. At Kalicube, we offer a DIY option with our free Knowledge Panel Checklist, Jason’s step-by-step book.

If you’d prefer to work your niche specific data, have a friendly team lay out the plan and guide you through the process, and give you the SOPs to keep you moving forward, book a call with Jason and start building your Knowledge Panel today.