Latest / Online Reputation Management Podcast / Entity Home - The Missing Piece in Personal Brand SEO (James Dooley Interviews Jason Barnard)
Transcript
- James Dooley: entity home. Lots of people speak now about the entity home. Obviously, Jason, you founded the term entity home. There's a lots of different variations that Google and other people are calling it now. Um, but obviously everyone I speak to, I'm always saying you need that entity home, you need that website, you need to make certain that's the kind of hub for everything of who you are. So, I've got a question for you, Jason. You created the entity home concept. It's now used across the industry. Before we get into what it is, why did you need to invent it and what was missing? Jason Barnard: It's a really lovely question because nothing was actually missing because most people have about pages, but it isn't systematic. So, there were two things that I realized. Number one is not everybody has one and they have to. Number two is if I say your about page, people think, yeah, I've got to talk to I've got to talk to my audience and so you have our vision of the world. We help the world become a better place. The AI and Google can't make sense of that. It's your mission statement. It's the stuff you're trying to charm human beings with. So the entity home becomes this foundational um algorithm focused uh explanation of who you are, what you do, who you serve, and why you're credible. And it's an absolute must-have. So the concept of entity home was to place in front of people the obvious fact that you have to have a place online where your entity lives and where the algorithms can find you and find what you want them to say about you. and every single entity needs it. And John Mueller from Google did a video a couple of years ago talking about the point of reconciliation. And as he explained it, basically he's just saying entity home. James Dooley: What other terms are people using that is the same concept of entity home? You said there the point of reconciliation is what John Muer said from Google. What other terms are used for the same thing? So if people listen to it and they go, "Oh, right. Okay, that is an entity home. I've heard this or I've heard that." What other terms are used? Jason Barnard: About page. Um, very very common. So about page is an entity home by definition. James Dooley: Yeah. Jason Barnard: Uh, profile page is not an entity home. A profile page is a third party, second party, or even first party confirmation of what's on the entity home. And that's really important. Entity home equals about page. Other pages are profile pages. James Dooley: So, so let just let me got you on that. So, I've got if I've got jamesdly.com, I've got jamesdly.com and I've got content on the homepage and then I've got jamesdly.comabout or about jamesdly. What what what's the difference? Like is is my jamesdly.comabout my entity home? Is that what the entity home is? Jason Barnard: Um the you you need to define which one it is. Now with companies this happens a lot that they have uh website and then they have the page that's for human where they talk about their mission statement and then slabout company and they give the factual information to the machines and we'll talk about the exact structure of the perfect entity home afterwards. So you can have it as slab about slash company slab about slashperson or you can have it as about slashabout. So for a company you would tend to have that deeper um structure and for a person you would tend to have just slashabout because the homepage already serves the purpose of your mission statement. James Dooley: Yeah, that makes sense. Jason Barnard: Another term that people use is the canonical URL or the entity canonical URL. James Dooley: Right. But so what so what's the difference on the content from jamesduly.com jamesduly.comabouts? I'm presuming you're going to say one's quite factual and the other one is still showing yourself off or something. But what what does people need to understand on that entity home? What different differentiators do you need to put on the about page and on the homepage? Jason Barnard: Yeah. Well, I mean the homepage is all about your brand as is perceived by humans. So it's humanf facing. So you need to tell your human audience what they need to know to feel that they want to engage with you, get closer to you, whatever you want to do them to do. The about page, the entity homepage is dedicated to educate the machines. But if you're smart, you write it so it educates the machines and reassures the person. So although on my homepage I might say uh I serve entrepreneurs to make millions of dollars from their personal brand by leveraging it in Google and AI on my about page I can say I own Cali cube I've got my my companies have got a combined 64 years in existence of profitability and I can start to get them to trust me and I can give them the backstory. I wouldn't put that on the homepage. So the about page can be um very useful for human beings and I've got a German client which is this is not to do with personal brands but corporate brands. A German client we working on his personal brand and his corporate brand which we often do. We will work on both the corporate and the personal brand. We talked about in another episode a rising tide lifts all ships. Our clients will come to us and say can you work on these multiple brands? In fact you've done that so that we can pull them all up together. uh he's obsessed by uh AB testing. We implemented the perfect entity home for him and the conversion rate for people who saw the entity home at some point in their uh journey with with the with the on the website the conversion rate went up by 6%. James Dooley: That's a huge win. Jason Barnard: Yeah. James Dooley: Yeah. It's massive. So, what's the difference then between a normal homepage and an entity home? Jason Barnard: A a normal homepage is, as I said, it's it's the it's the humanfacing first page that people see, and it's um going to present your business or yourself to your audience in a way that's going to engage them. It isn't factual. It's designed to sell and to charm human. James Dooley: In regards to the entity home, what does this page teach the algorithms? Jason Barnard: It teaches them the facts. It's all the facts and stuff like that. James Dooley: So you talk there about um cooporation. What what needs to corroborate what Jason Barnard: you need to corroborate every single statement you make that is aimed at educating the algorithms about you. So if I say um I own Cali cube for me in my mind it's so obvious I don't need to corroborate or prove it but for the algorithms I definitely do. So I need to then make the statement on my about my entity home sorry and I then need to link out to the proof and that can be a government website that that that says Cali cube CEO and founder is Jason Barard. It can be crunch base. It can be my own LinkedIn profile. It can be an article. It can be a podcast episode. If you now say Jason Barard, CEO and founder of Cali Cube, that is a third party proof because you as a human being know that I'm the CEO and founder and I can use this as corroboration as proof of the claim that I am the CEO founder of Calikq. James Dooley: And with regards to entity homes, how can you connect an entity home to other peers and profiles and people? people. Jason Barnard: I'm sorry. You're going to have to repeat the question. My earbuds have run out. James Dooley: How does the entity home connect to other people and profiles? Jason Barnard: Right. That's a really kind of in interesting question because it's quite intricate because once again we come back to what are the relationships that you have that are important and you need to focus on those relationships within your entity home. So once again, I'll talk about Up to 10, sorry, Cali Cube. I'll talk about Up to 10, my previous company. I'll talk about WTPL Music, my previous company, but I won't talk about the music band I was in in the '9s, or the TV series I made in the in the 2000s, because it doesn't serve my current purpose. But what I do need to do is state clearly the relationships that make sense to me today, that serve my needs today, and I need to focus on the close, strong, and long relationships. James Dooley: And then with regards to the relationship of the entity home, what is the relationship of the entity home and the knowledge panel? Jason Barnard: The it it's the source of reference for knowledge for Google and indeed for the AI. And you will find that when the description in your knowledge panel comes from your own entity home, that's when you can feel really comfortable that you've done a great job. Uh, and it's the hardest thing to do because James Dooley: and then if someone wants to redesign their entity home, what's one thing that you'll be saying that they must include? Jason Barnard: The first thing I would say is always start at the present and work your way backwards. So, it's an upside down chronological biography. If you're a company, you must add your official uh government tax number because that's identifiable. you I would add my GDPR compliance officer or whatever laws apply in your country country that's all about transparency and trust and it's something that companies miss um as as an individual and this this is nuts the title the H1 is the single most important thing on that page and the number of times we have clients who come to us and it says about me my story and for companies. Everybody loves us. You have to stay that say the name of the entity in the H1. It's non-negotiable. James Dooley: Would would you say the H1 just needs to be about James Douly? Is that it? Or would you add any extra to that H1? Jason Barnard: You could have about James Douly um lead genen expert entrepreneur. That's fine too. James Dooley: So you could add the Yeah, add the bits to go with it. Jason Barnard: And and there is a neat trick. If if if a client really wants to have my story in big at the top, take a step back and think actually that's just design. The biggest text on the page doesn't have to be the H1. So you can do a design class and have my story in really big letters at the top and then the H1 much smaller underneath which is the practical one that educates the machine. James Dooley: And I've got one last question with regards to the entity home because now everyone's now starting talking about it and the importance of the entity home and they all believe that the most important part is schema and you've had someone tell me recently that Jason LD and schema is not the most important part but you believe that that's just reassuring what's already on the page. Can you expand upon that a little bit more? Jason Barnard: Yeah, I mean schema markup is helpful, but it isn't the magic bullet that most people think it is. If you talk to Jano Vandreil, who is absolute expert on schema markup, who talks to the people at Google, talks to the people at Bing about schema markup, he's in the schema markup community, he's contributed enormous amounts to schema markup, they all agree it's supporting evidence. It's it's bringing together what's already in the page in a machine readable format or a native machine readable format. And if you look at it that way, it becomes more powerful. And I talked to you the other day, I've had multiple clients who who really don't want to get geeky. And I've done a consultancy session with them and they said, "I don't want the schema markup because it's too geeky. I'm gonna get it wrong and I'm not interested." I just tell them how to build a beautiful clear uh HTML page that's incredibly well structured using tables, lists, semantic uh HTML 5 correctly, and they get a knowledge panel and there's no problem. They don't need the schema markup, but the schema markup definitely helps. And I'll give you a little um illustration of that. If you imagine the the the bot comes in, analyzes your page, it says, "I think this page is about James Douly. I think he's an entrepreneur. I think that he founded this company. I think that the description I should use is this. I think that he was born in this year." So on and so forth. I'm 60% confident because he's written a great HTML page and because other resources around the web that I've I can refer to confirm it. Add the schema markup. it will look at it as a a comparison. It will say well that confir confirms it. I am now 80% confident. So the schema markup is about confidence in the understanding of the information that's in the web page not in understanding itself. I talked to Fabris Canal who's the principal program manager at Bing who built Bingbot and he said our LLMs and small language models for that matter can extract information much more reliably than the schema markup we're seeing. Schema markup is simply a confirmation that our machines have correctly understood and it builds confidence. James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. To anyone who's watching this, the importance of entity homes is huge. If you're looking for branding SEO or entity SEO, if you're looking to get a KGM ID, it acts as the hub. Um, it's something obviously I've learned from you. You've been doing it since 2015, Jason. Um, in doing knowledge graphs and stuff like that. So, huge thank you for introducing the concept of the entity home. Jason Barnard: Thank you very much.