Can SEOs Control the Contents of Knowledge Panels?

Digital Marketer – Podcaster – Jason Barnard | Ep. 360 Send It Rising Internet Marketing

In this clip, Jason Barnard explains what Knowledge Panels are and that business owners, brand managers, and SEOs have the power to heavily influence what Google displays in these factual information boxes. The approach is to treat Google like a child who we are educating. It wants to learn, and present the world in a factual way, all we need to do is teach it.

00:00 All about Knowledge Panels
00:42 Influencing what Google shows in Knowledge Panels
01:22 Educating Google like a child
02:00 Knowledge Panel is different from Google My Business

Transcript from: Can SEOs Control the Contents of Knowledge Panels?

We can hear it just fine. All right I’m good again. Yeah, we’re cool. So Jason talk to me a little bit about this specialty of yours because you were recently told by John Mueller was it? It was search engine, something, something, something. That you are the leading outside of Google. You’re like “The Man.” So what is this stuff? And why should we care?

Right? He said I was the man for a specific part of what Google does, which is the Knowledge Panel. And what he actually said was that for them, it’s algorithmic. It’s an algorithm that builds these Knowledge Panels. And what I’ve done is started to look at how can we as business owners, brand managers, SEOs, influence what Google shows in these factual Knowledge Panels (which is the thing you see on the right when you search for a brand like Facebook or Google). How can we influence what it shows. And basically it comes down to saying what Google shows on the right hand side on desktop, (which is the box) which says, basically, this is Facebook, this is the description, this is the founder. This is the date they were founded. It’s what Google represents as facts.

And it has a Knowledge Graph which is its understanding of the world. Much like a human would understand it and as soon as you say human, you think, “Right. So how do we get it to say what we want it to say?” We educate it. It’s a child. It wants to learn. It wants to represent the world in a factual manner. We need to educate it about our little corner of the universe. And that is I think where I am changing a little bit the game. And from Google’s perspective, they’re saying Jason Barnard has a practical knowledge of how this algorithm learns.

Absolutely fantastic. I feel like we’ve entered into the point in human history where even the algorithm engineers don’t have control to the level that we used to have. And Knowledge Panel is not to be confused with Google My Business which also appears on the right hand side like when you search for a business, there’s a Google My Business Profile.