Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Speaker 2: 1:15

the SEO knowledge hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello and welcome back to SEO is not that spot. It's me here at Dawson, as usual, and today I'm going to be talking about the Google Knowledge Graph, what it is, where it's applicable. Plus, I'm also going to give you a free tool which will help you explore it. It's not my tool, it's nothing to do with me, but it's a good, great, free tool to use, to explore it, and I'll let you know about that later on in the episode.

Speaker 2: 1:40

To start off with, what exactly is Google Knowledge Graphs so well, it's Google's system for understanding and connecting information, and they launched it in 2012. And the Knowledge Graphs? It goes beyond traditional sort of keyword matching to actually interpret and understand the relationships between different entities like people, places and things. So, for example, I mean, I'm just back from holiday we, me and the family spent just over a week in italy, and one of the cities we visited was venice, and we went to venice. One of the first things we wanted to do was go to uh, find the uh library, which is actually set in a church, to put the library in from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where they um, you know, go in, find where X marks the spot and go down to the catacombs. If you know that film, you'll know exactly where I mean. There's a big library and every time he's bashing the floor, the librarians bashing, stamping a book, and it's very funny. But it's a beautiful location and we went there and actually it's an old church. It's not actually a library and at the moment it's got a leonardo da vinci exhibition in it, um, which we went to, which is fantastic. But after that I was looking up, wanted to, you know, sort of get more information on leonardo da vinci and sort of learn more about some of the things we've seen in the museum. And you know, when I went to Google to search for it, leonardo da Vinci was one of the searches that triggers the Google knowledge graph. So because when you search for Leonardo da Vinci, you don't just get a list of links, you'll actually get a knowledge panel over the, depending on which device you're using to view it, you'll get the knowledge panel being different places, but you get knowledge panel with summaries of famous works, connections to all the historical figures, summary of who he was, all these kind of things, and this is all powered by the knowledge graph.

Speaker 2: 3:30

So the knowledge graph works by turning complex information into structured data, essentially so. It connects millions of facts about entities across various subjects, aiming to understand the context and the meaning between them, and it's designed to help google answer questions directly and provide quick sort of relevant information, rather than just having to list pages where the keywords appear. So that's what it is. So why was it created? Well, the primary reason was to improve their search relevance and user experience. Essentially, it goes back to that kind of like zero click search, essentially. But um, knowledge graph enables google to understand queries in a more kind of human way, I suppose. Sort of in front of seeing words as isolated terms, google began and begins to understand them as concepts connected to like within a larger web, and this was a huge leap forward at the time and because it allowed google to make associations and understand relationships. So if you search for apple, for example, google can discern from the context of your search whether you mean the fruit, the technology company or even the record late, the famous record label that the beatles um put all their published, all their stuff from was apple records. So how does it work?

Speaker 2: 4:42

How does the knowledge graph work? Well now, at its core it's a database of entities. So these are specific people, places and things and each with its own attributes and relationships with other entities. So, for example, like a person's entity might include things like their date of birth, their profession, notable works they've done relationships with other entities, like family members or people that they've worked with or collaborated with, or actors that have collaborated on films with other actors or directors, things like that. Google gathers this information from lots of sources that it deems reliable, like Wikipedia and Wikidata and all the verified databases like Internet Movie Database, I believe as well, and as well as just gathering that it cross-references it. So the more times it finds the same information that matches to each other, it kind of strengthens that sort of validation of that information and it deems it as being more accurate. So it tries to sort of filter out inaccurate information by having that cross-referencing.

Speaker 2: 5:45

And obviously when you enter a search query, google's artificial intelligence sort of scans the relationships to present information that best matches the context of your search. So, for example, if you're searching, say will smith, who's an actor and a musician, if you include will smith and say the name of a film or the name of another actor, then it's going to present your information about Will Smith that's more focused on his acting career, whereas if you sort of search for Will Smith around any kind of music terms, it's going to give you more knowledge panel information based around his music career, for example. So let's look at like a real world example. So let's look at, say you know there's such a famous everybody knows, like albert einstein. So the the knowledge panel graph. It shows a panel with his birth and death date, multiple contributions and relevant images. So when we're searching for a location, for example, such as, say, the eiffel tower, you're going to get, like, you know its location, its height, images of it, links to related landmarks that are nearby, helping you navigate to other points of interest that might be around there. So if you're planning a visit to the Eiffel Tower, it might also suggest other places around there that you can go to.

Speaker 2: 6:56

Say we search for a film, say Inception, you're going to get details about the director, the cast, a synopsis and even other related films to it. So you'll have used this, you'll have found it useful. It might be frustrating if you're a site owner but as a user you'll have used this before, you'll have searched for things and you'll have got the information straight away from the knowledge panel. How does this information that we've got about the knowledge panel and the knowledge graph, how does that impact your SEO and content strategy? So it's important to realize that Google values structured data and entities that have a high degree of accuracy and relevancy. So this means that you should really be focused on creating authoritative, well-linked content around key entities that are relevant to your site, your business, and if you do this and establish your content as an authoritative topic, you improve your chances of being featured in that knowledge panel and the answer boxes. So, for example, if you're a business focused on eco-friendly products, if you create structured, in-depth content about sustainability topics, then you can start to position yourself and your brand as an authority in that topic area, and the more accurate and well-cited that content is, the more Google is going to be likely to recognize you as a reliable source of information and get you in that knowledge panel. Now, that knowledge panel, because a lot of it will be zero-click, but, as I spoke about in an earlier episode about zero click strategy, it's important to start appearing in the zero click places, where people will not click to you, but they'll see you and they'll see your brand mentioned and you become more of a go-to brand for those people. So don't worry about it being zero click. This is about brand relevance and building brand.

Speaker 2: 8:48

So some tips for optimizing for the knowledge graph are you know? First of all, start with structured data. So this is like schemaorg data. So this is machine readable data that you mark up your content with, which helps search understanders understand the content of the page and the content of your data, what it's about, and there are special markup schemes for things like products, events, local business information. Go to schemaorg. I've done previous episodes on schemaorg. That's the thing you need to be looking at, because google trusts and understands that structured data and that kind of structured data will really help you towards being optimized for the knowledge panel.

Speaker 2: 9:33

And next, consistency. So I said before, the more times Google sees information that matches each other, the more it's going to trust that information and then start to include it in the knowledge graph. So, for example, it's going to trust that information and then start to include it in the knowledge graph. So, for example, take Leonardo da Vinci it's found his date of birth mentioned in multiple places across the web and they all match and it will use that as the authority it now decides. That is authoritative. That is data we can use in the knowledge panel because it is cited reliably and consistently across the web.

Speaker 2: 10:02

And finally, if you can get into Wikipedia, one of those sources which Google really takes credibility from, such as Wikipedia or Wikidata. Now, I know this is a big ask and you can't just create that for yourself. You've got to be of a certain size, so it's going to be really tricky if you're not a major brand or one in personality. Other options are to try and get into internet movie database, if you can. There are various ways of doing that. You can get in, for example, if you're a podcast host, or if you've authored a book that has gone to Amazon, if you've self-authored it. So there are ways around this. But yeah, I know this one is a trickier one to get into those knowledge panels. It depends on where you're coming from. If you're working for a big brand, then you're fine, easy, you're going to be able to get this into those kind of places easily. If not, then it's going to be trickier. So you know good, good luck with that.

Speaker 2: 11:01

Now, I did promise you a tool so that you can explore the knowledge graph in a way that, other than just using sort of Google itself to do searches things, you can actually explore the knowledge graph by, for example, if you put in Albert Einstein and look for a person, then into this tool it will find your research results around Albert Einstein and all the different sources and places where that data is coming from. Now, this is a tool that was created by a guy called Carl Hendy, who's a friend of the podcast, and his website is at auditscom and I'll put this link in the show notes. But you can just Google Carl Hendy Google Knowledge Graph Tool. That will bring you on number one.

Speaker 2: 11:41

Or you can type in auditscom slash tools, slash knowledge hyphen graph, hyphen search. That's auditscom slash tools, slash knowledge, slash hyphen graph and you'll get it there. But I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Also, if you're really techie and you are used to working with APIs, google actually provided a Google Knowledge Graph Search API where you can search and interrogate the knowledge graph through their API. Just Google it. If you're interested in doing that, you know you'll find information about that and where you go with it. So, anyway, hope you found that useful today and yeah, if you've got any questions, comments, anything, just do get in touch.

Speaker 1: 12:18

I've to hear from people and until next time I'll see you later before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at keywords people use that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I'll show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Speaker 1: 13:01

Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUsecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at KeywordsPeopleUsecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO. Is not that hard?