James Dooley: Google knowledge panels. Getting yourself that KGM ID, also known as a knowledge graph machine ID, and the importance of it. Today I’m joined with no other but Dennis Yu, who is an absolute legend when it comes down to knowledge panels. Dennis, first and foremost, before we start about how to trigger it and a more in depth conversation, is it important initially to have a knowledge panel and why?
Dennis Yu: It is if people are going to Google your name, your company’s products, your company, and you want to dominate the search results with those coloured boxes. You want to win in AI search. You want the featured snippets to show up, then yes. If you are just somebody where you’re trying to be invisible, then it does not matter. But if you’re a public figure, if you’re an entrepreneur, then by definition, you’re a public figure. And that would be important.
James Dooley: Anyone now that says, “I want to be seen in AI. I want to grow my business. I want me to be the founder that’s attached to a successful business that I’m really proud of”, but they do not have a knowledge panel. What’s the first steps for these to start going, “Okay, I’m going to start now working towards getting myself a KGM ID”?
Dennis Yu: You can use Google’s tool. You do not need to use anyone else’s tool. Look yourself up. We built a tool too, just to show how many other James Dooleys there are to see what the competition is. Usually you’ll get a few other people. Maybe you’ll be unlucky and there’s an athlete or a porn star or someone like that. Even if there is, you can still get your knowledge panel. You have to decide what you’re really known for. What have you achieved? What are you notable for? Not Wikipedia notable. A different kind of notable. Are there citations and facts that are not from your websites, not from your social media, that show credibly that you are someone worth listening to about a particular topic or having achieved a certain result?
Dennis Yu: That should tie with your why. That should tie with the reason why you started your business. If you’re an entrepreneur, that should tie with the expertise that you have. Most people do not have the footprint of all the social media. They do not have a personal brand site. They do not have schema on the company site and the personal brand site. Their company about is really their personal about. They have confusion which creates disambiguation. If you get that basic layer sorted out, schema with WordPress takes care of half of that, then get on other people’s podcasts. Interview other people that you think should be notable or are notable in the area you want to be known for.
Dennis Yu: Take those podcast episodes and each becomes a chapter in a book. Use your favourite AI to turn it into a book, put it on Amazon, have the print and Kindle copies, put a dollar a day against it, make it a bestseller, take a screenshot showing your bestseller. Then it’s driving traffic. You repurpose those podcast episodes to YouTube. Now you have a virtuous circle. No matter where Google is looking, they look on social media, they look at Graipedia, they look at X, they look at Facebook, they look at people’s blogs, and all of those corroborate. Yes, this is James Dooley.
James Dooley: With regards to that, there’s quite a lot of stuff in there that needs to unfold. You’re talking about disambiguation. For anyone listening to this that is not familiar, can you explain what disambiguation means between different people with the same name?
Dennis Yu: You want to show that you are distinct. If there’s this John Smith and this John Smith, how do we know it’s the same John Smith? Maybe you have a business name, ABC Plumbing. How many other ABC Plumbings are there? That’s when you go down to the facts of the name, address, and phone. That’s when you go down to the other entities that are attached to that particular company or that particular person.
Dennis Yu: Think about that entity. How clear is that entity? The entity could be a person, a place, whatever company. Say James Dooley is a person. What are the facts about that entity? What is your date of birth? Who are your relatives? What books have you written? What companies are you involved in? What are the facts that detective Google would find in researching you? A lot of people, because of the way they do hypertext, or because they create pages the wrong way, or because they do not have a personal brand website and they use their company about, all of those things create confusion.
Dennis Yu: Disambiguation is just a fancy way of saying reduce the confusion so we have clarity on information tied to each particular entity and then how those entities are connected. If the structure is set up properly, including all the social medias for each of the names, and that information is connected together, it sends a very clear signal. Google can be very sure. Yes, this is James Dooley. Yes, this is Dennis.
James Dooley: That leads me on to the next question because you said about connecting the entities together. You mentioned earlier about getting a personal branded website. For me it’s like jamesdooley.com. Some people call it the entity hub, the brand hub, whatever it is. That’s the central source of who you are and what you do. You said about getting schema with the sameAs and linking to your social profiles. Pretty much everyone should have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, the basics, and link through. You speak about the dollar a day amplification. You mentioned podcasts. If you’re on this podcast now, would you go and do a post about this podcast on your own entity hub and wrap that in schema? Or do you wrap it in schema on one podcast page for all the different podcasts? Or do you do a dedicated URL for each one and link to that?
Dennis Yu: You’ve been listening to Jason Barnard. That’s what he would say. One page for each of these that all link together. But when you look at that, it looks like someone is designing that for the robot. In an ideal world, yes. But practically speaking, it’s this. If you have a relationship and there’s proof of it, like you and I have done multiple podcast episodes, and that’s distributed on blog posts, on YouTube, YouTube tubes embedded inside the blog posts, and we use schema to identify the objects within that page, then yes. If it’s an important object then we’ll have a whole page for it. It ties to other related topics and objects. All the things you would do as SEO, you would do that.
Dennis Yu: But literally it’s as simple as saying, of all the different things I want to be known for, of all the people I know, can I prioritise the top two or three topics, the top two or three people I want to be associated with? Is there long form content like a podcast episode? The podcast is the easiest, most effective way to gather a whole lot of content in one go. Then that can be repurposed a hundred different ways. Chopped up clips, social media edits, articles, chapters in a book, so many different ways.
Dennis Yu: I like podcasting as a hack because I only need to sit down with someone once or twice and then I’ve got content for days. That enhances their ability to show up on Google. My stuff will show up in their knowledge panel and vice versa. My favourite part of the knowledge panel is not when people look for my name and they see the panel. It’s when you look at someone like Neil Patel or Mari Smith and it also says people also look at Dennis Yu and these other people. That’s when you know. When you’re connected to these other people, you speak together, you tag them on Facebook, but not in an annoying way. You reference them by saying here’s one thing Gary Vaynerchuk told me and you show a picture of you and Gary Vaynerchuk. That shows the audience you’re credible. I am not even doing it for Google. I’m doing it because it shows the audience that you’re credible.
James Dooley: So that notability and credibility then, with people also search for, is there any other ways of getting in there or does it come down to how much noise you have together and the connections together? Is it related to follow on searches where people have searched Neil Patel and then searched Dennis Yu?
Dennis Yu: It’s when people who consume Neil Patel’s content also consume my content. That’s a Venn diagram and there’s that overlap in the middle. That’s what Google is looking at. Just like with YouTube. If you like a topic, it starts showing you stuff that is related, but also by other people on that topic. Consider what topics you want to be known for so you can be recommended in ChatGPT or YouTube or whatever. Also consider who are the people. The intersection of people and topics is where the sweet spot is. Do a podcast with a couple of those people and you’ve hit the bullseye.
James Dooley: Does Google Images ranking in Google Images have any impact in improving your knowledge panel or not?
Dennis Yu: It does. Remember, when you have a podcast or a video with somebody, you can pull images out of that. Once you have a knowledge panel, you can go in and edit it and choose which pictures you want, correct information, and whatnot. More common folks like you and me will have duplicate knowledge panels and then we’ll try to merge them together, that whole messy thing of trying to consolidate, disambiguate down into one.
James Dooley: What about Google Scholar? Do you do anything with Google Scholar?
Dennis Yu: That’s great for books. There are many other places you can publish. If you’ve done anything in terms of academic publications, which is not the same thing as self publishing on Amazon, that does carry more weight. It’s kind of like an edu link versus a dot com link.
James Dooley: With regards to the books, do you always publish it on Google Books as well? It seems to pull that in as one of the bio descriptions in knowledge panels. Do you publish it there or only Amazon?
Dennis Yu: In an ideal world, you publish to all of these. We would think Google would be biased towards their own sources. They’d be biased to YouTube and Google Maps and things like that.
James Dooley: With regards to the book bestseller, how are you looking to get the bestseller? Is that using the amplification of a dollar a day strategy?
Dennis Yu: Yeah, in our other episode we talked about dollar a day. If you have interviewed someone on your podcast who is well known and has the depth of expertise you want to be associated with, and then that gets turned into a book, which is very easy to do using your favourite AI tool, and you publish that to Amazon. Say you interview 10 people and then you send out that book to all of those 10 people and now they’re co authors and they’re sharing that. They’re excited to be in James Dooley’s book, in chapter three. All of them are sharing that book which ties to that entity. That’s an object tied to you. You’re another object as a person. You’re creating third party signals, improving your personal brand.
Dennis Yu: Then when you run dollar a day ads on Amazon, maybe $5 a day, but you only spend like $150, you can choose up to three categories. When you become a bestseller in one category, it’s very easy. You take a screenshot of that. Google can see that. Amazon can see that. There’s actual traffic, people like your book, you get some reviews. You’re showing real behavioural signals, which is ultimately what we want to show.
James Dooley: Is there any specific choice of category you go for? I’m presuming if you just went marketing in general, it would be hard.
Dennis Yu: This is the whole niche. What niche do you want your business to be in? I have a friend, Jabez Labret, and he wrote arguably the book on digital marketing for lawyers. He went to conferences and he would advertise that he was number one bestseller in digital marketing for lawyers. He told me, do not tell anyone, I only sold seven copies of my book. How many other people have produced a book on digital marketing for lawyers? My buddy Danny Librandt chose the super niche of SEO for pest control companies. How many other people do you know that are experts for SEO for pest control companies? He interviewed all the top people in pest control. Some of these guys have $50 million a year companies. He went to the conferences. He interviewed the Neil Patels of the world. Anyone connected with pest control now knows who he is. He’s a celebrity when he walks around at the conference because he chose that.
Dennis Yu: He did the podcast thing, turned it into a book, gave out copies, set up a table. People love to take pictures and autograph copies with him as the author. All of those things multiply together. Then run ads, free plus shipping, use it to sell your course or coaching programme or give away your book.
James Dooley: Let’s say someone’s done all that. They’ve got books, lots of videos, promoting on social media, doing the dollar a day strategy. There’s three powerful Dennis Yus. There’s a porn star, there’s a sports player, and there’s yourself. When you type it in, your name is not coming up. Apart from amplification on socials, is there any third party sources someone should be looking to get? Not Wikipedia because they might not have notability yet. I’ve seen you talk about Graipedia. Is there any other sources people can get that will improve clarity and confidence?
Dennis Yu: You could publish that book, cross publish, on free ebooks dot net, which has been around forever. I’m an owner in it. It’s got a domain rating 75. We have half a million visits a day coming organically from Google. You’re coming from the UK, you type in free ebooks, I’m number one.
Dennis Yu: But here’s the other thing. If there are other people with your name, context is important. Maybe that porn star is in India. I’m not trying to rank in India. I’m trying to show up for the audience I want to reach. Google is smart enough to know when someone is looking for Dennis Yu and they’re in home services or local. Google knows to show me. There is a Dennis Yu Hong Kong film director because Yu is a two letter last name. Super common. Like Smith. If you’re in Hong Kong and you type Dennis Yu, you’ll probably get that guy. I do not think it matters to win everywhere all the time. When do you need to show up? When there’s business value to you.
James Dooley: I think I’ve seen you’ve done a video on the free ebooks, have you? If there is, send it me through. I’ll put the link in the description. I think you’ve got a whole strategy around how you should be sending that out.
Dennis Yu: I’ll do this for you, James. You’ve got 280 episodes or something. You have so much content. If you want to package that up into a book and follow our book guidelines, which are straightforward, I’m the publisher. I will publish it. I will feature your book. I will link to you from many places and you could not even buy links of that quality. I’ll do that for you because I want you to see.
James Dooley: Last year I published eight books. They’re on Amazon, Google Books and stuff. Eight different books. I did a similar strategy where I got influencers in the SEO space, got them to write a chapter each, syndicated it out, bought copies and gave it out at events. The exposure was incredible. I did not do the free ebooks and it was painful writing because I had to check it all. A lot of people were coming back with AI content and I was having to change it. It became hard work. This year I’m going very aggressive on the podcasting circuit. I’ve launched eight podcast series. Last year it was books. This year is going to be podcasting. I do not know if you could do any of the existing books. We can talk off air. Some of the existing books I have, could that get syndicated out to the free ebooks?
Dennis Yu: I’m a big fan of starting with real podcast content like you and I having a real conversation. I just assume it’s AI content if it’s a submission. I need to see you and me or whoever are actually talking face to face. I’m trying to prove to the AI beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is not AI generated. That’s why I want to see you. I’ll fly out to Manchester later this year. We’ll record a whole bunch of these all at once to show this is real. We’ll even live stream it to prove this was real.
James Dooley: Let’s do it. I’m more than up for it. We can do a whole playlist about what we did, why we did it, and so on. I think it will be incredible. Anyone watching this with regards to knowledge panels, is there anything else we’ve missed there about specifically knowledge panels, improving KGM IDs, that people can take away?
Dennis Yu: Consider this. If you are podcasting with other people who will all say yes, believe it or not, even if they’re a big deal, and they have a knowledge panel, they’re notable, they have authority and credibility, then you by interviewing them actually enhance their knowledge panel. By associating with them, when people look up their name, it might also show you. In the same way your personal brand is what other people have to say about you, the best way for you to build your knowledge panel is to honour all these other people in your industry and they even could be a competitor.
James Dooley: Incredible advice there, Dennis. Dennis, it’s been an absolute pleasure. If anyone wants to know any more about knowledge panels, comment down below. Dennis has agreed that he will do other videos to discuss whatever you’re struggling with. Whether you want to know specifics of triggering a KGM ID and triggering that knowledge panel, or you’ve got one and you want it strengthening, Dennis can go in depth. He is previously a search engineer. He knows all the ins and outs related to knowledge panels. Make sure you like and make sure you drop a comment in. Dennis, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
Dennis Yu: Thank you, James.
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