Latest / Online Reputation Management Podcast / How to Build a KGMID Entity and Control Your Online Brand Identity (James Dooley Interviews Chris M. Walker)
Transcript
- **James Dooley:** Triggering a new knowledge panel is all the rage, and a lot of people are asking the question of how do you trigger a new knowledge panel. Today I’m joined with Chris Walker, the founder of Legit, who successfully does this week on week. Chris, it’s a pleasure having you. I want you to jump straight in. I don’t need to explain who you are and what you do personally because a lot of people watching this are going to know who you are. So, how would you go about triggering a new KGM ID, which stands for knowledge graph machine ID, which is then what leads on to you getting a knowledge panel? **Chris Walker:** Yeah. Thanks for having me. I think the first thing to do is just to make sure that you exist. You’ve got to do the basic stuff. You have to have a brand website. When I say a brand website, I’m going to answer this as if you were a person trying to get a knowledge panel rather than a business because that’s more what my experience is. Having a personal brand website helps a lot. You almost have to have a home base. Even if it’s not your main business, just have it. You probably have jamesdooley.com, I have chriswalker.com, something like that. **Chris Walker:** Then you have to have all of the main socials, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever, and then regularly post to those. Have all that out there. That sounds like day one marketing stuff, but a lot of people will try to go buy some services or something and skip that part. It’s important to get all of that in place first. Not just to make them, but to at least post to them regularly enough to where they’re not a ghost town. Have regular use, consistent photos everywhere so it knows how to associate you with it. **Chris Walker:** Everything we’re trying to do here is tell Google that this one person, this one site, this one entity, is the same thing. We’re trying to tie all that together. Then there are certain sites that I found that are very effective, like Wikidata, and there’s a bunch of different ones. There’s Wikidata, WikiAlpha, a whole bunch of those. I find that makes a really big difference, and it seems like Google pulls from that when it’s getting its knowledge. **Chris Walker:** Then this one’s kind of a hack, but if you can get an IMDb page, that’s really big for triggering a knowledge panel. There are ways to go about that. I can give this away. I have it on my channel. The way I got mine was years ago, before I even knew I was going to do SEO, there was an independent movie taking donations to help get the movie made. If you donated $200, they would put your name in the credits as a special thanks. So I spent $200, I got my name in the credits. Years later, I realised there’s a category on IMDb for that. So I went in and I put myself in as a special thanks and it created a page for me. Then I built it out. That was one of the big movers for a knowledge panel. **James Dooley:** There’s other ways to go about it too. Craig has actually got a legit one because he’s been in TV series and all sorts. **Chris Walker:** Yeah. I’m not willing to go to that extreme personally. **James Dooley:** A little hack on that. I’ve launched eight new podcast series. This podcast is going to go live. This is also going to go on IMDb, which means you’re then a guest on this episode. Each episode gets put onto IMDb by us and you get attributed to it, with the write up, and it links back to your profile. There’s something called the StarMeter in IMDb which strengthens your profile. So if you can get on other people’s podcasts, I’ve got eight of them, each episode gets put on IMDb, and if someone hasn’t got one, they can get an IMDb profile created like that. **Chris Walker:** Yeah, now that you mention it, I have seen that. Do you know Paul Andre? **James Dooley:** Yeah. The SEO Show. **Chris Walker:** Yeah. I saw he was getting them that way as well. Definitely try to get an IMDb page and there’s at least three different ways to go about that. **Chris Walker:** Then you just have to go through the process. It’s kind of a pain. Trying to claim it. You have to log into the certain thing and then claim it. I screwed it up the first couple of times and I eventually got somebody else to do it for me. That’s kind of the whole process. It’s not hard, but it’s tedious and there’s a lot of steps. **James Dooley:** With regards to that, obviously you’ve got one for Chris M. Walker, because there’s loads of different Chris Walkers. You went down that route. **Chris Walker:** Funny story on that. I eventually wanted to do Chris Walker because that’s my name. Apparently there was a one hit wonder in the 90s and when you Google Chris Walker, he shows up for that. Whenever I do SEO talks at conferences, I tell that joke. I messaged him one day and said he’s been helping make my speeches more entertaining. He said that’s hilarious and he’s glad to help. Chris Walker is actually very awesome. **James Dooley:** With regards to what you’re doing, you mentioned social media. Would you recommend any software, like n8n or make.com? If someone didn’t want to be posting every day on Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and stuff like that, is there any setup of AI agents people could be using to keep them warm, or do you not recommend doing that? **Chris Walker:** Yeah, you can. I don’t do that myself because I’d rather have something that’s at least somewhat valuable. You can automate it or hire somebody to do it for you. I haven’t tried it specifically to get a knowledge panel, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. **James Dooley:** The only issue I foresee is certain people might have a Facebook or Twitter for personal use and not business use. They might need to create a second one for business. Then in the schema markup, the schema on what you spoke about, like jamesdooley.com, the terminology for that branded profile is called the entity home. The entity home is where you wrap the schema markup with who you are and what you do. **James Dooley:** You’ve done it successfully. Quite a few other people have used Legit services to do it. I’ve got one or two other questions with regards to Legit. Would you recommend people go out and protect things like chrismwalker.tumblr.com, chrismwalker.blogspot.com, and get all the web 2.0s? **Chris Walker:** Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know how much impact it has, but there’s no reason not to. It’s such a simple thing you can get done or do yourself. There’s no reason not to own that. Again, you’re just giving it more and more information. Our job, whether it’s with a knowledge panel or SEO in general, is to make it easy for Google, the search engines, and now the LLMs to understand things. The more you can feed it, the easier it is for it to understand it and the more likely you’re going to get results. **Chris Walker:** I forgot to mention schema, by the way. That’s a big one. Put that on the main site to tie in all your profiles and say, this is me and these are mine. **James Dooley:** What about press? Do you ever do anything with regards to multiple facets of you? Different versions of you. Chris Walker wins an award at Legit. Chris Walker does something else. You’re promoting awards on guest posts or press releases. Is there anything to make more noise of who you are and what you do? **Chris Walker:** Totally. I’ve done tons of press releases over the years. I’ve done them so much it didn’t even occur to me that’s part of it. Whether I launch a new product or have a new YouTube channel, you can always find an angle. You should do those probably every 90 days as a good matter of principle. Some of those links will rank on their own and some of them will stick around for years. There’s a Yahoo Finance out there that I did in, I think, 2020. It’s almost 2026 as we’re recording this. It’s crazy how long they can stick around for. **James Dooley:** Plus, anyone watching this, we’re talking about triggering a knowledge panel, but it’s also about building your personal brand. Controlling your reputation online. If you own the properties on there, you can deliver who you are and what you do in your own terms. You can control it. Going into 2026, people need to look not just at the corporate brand, but who they are and what they do because personal branding is huge. **James Dooley:** There’s one thing you can never sell and that’s Chris M. Walker. You can sell Legit, you can sell businesses, but your personal brand remains. Not enough people invest enough in themselves. **Chris Walker:** Yeah. You can take that and apply it to whatever you do. The example I like is MrBeast. For years all he did was make videos and make himself famous. Now he can stick his name on a chocolate bar or an energy drink and the business takes off because he puts his face on it. **Chris Walker:** Another thing with a personal brand, sorry, I forgot where I was going with that. **James Dooley:** Having a personal brand is not only great for new investments, it attracts A player staff and stuff like that. There’s so many benefits. **Chris Walker:** Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. The number one direct response traffic channel we have for Legit is my personal brand. There’s no bigger axe I can swing to get quick sales and quick traffic. I can’t quantify it but I’m pretty sure it’s our number one traffic source. When I post on my personal Facebook it gets a thousand times the engagement compared to the company page because people like the face. **Chris Walker:** I’m not particularly good at it. **James Dooley:** You are good at it. You’re playing yourself down. **Chris Walker:** That wasn’t intentional when I started doing it, but it worked out where that’s the big thing. I can make a post and drive sales. **Chris Walker:** There is a downside though. You can get too tied to your brand and it makes it harder to sell something because it’s so tied to you personally. **James Dooley:** On this video, we’re talking about triggering knowledge panels. If you’re looking to sell Legit and you’ve got a two year plan, knowing you can trigger knowledge panels means you can build up your C level staff. A new CEO, COO, CMO could come in and you build up their profile. You slowly move away from the brand. People have knowledge panels set up. That’s the key. **James Dooley:** That leads to my last question. How important do you think it is to trigger a knowledge panel for people in 2026? **Chris Walker:** You mean people other than yourself, like employees? **James Dooley:** Yeah. Getting the business owner, the founder, the CMO, people like that. **Chris Walker:** I think it’s incredibly important. Especially for clients, like insurance agencies and wedding photographers. I would always get the owner to get one. Some would fight me because they’re introverts or whatever. It’s not just SEO. It gives so much trust. People will search you and figure out if you’re worth working with. Having it there is one of the biggest conversion factors. Even if it’s nonsense, people see it as important. It’s social currency. Beyond just SEO, it’s not that hard to do. It takes work, but the ROI is tremendous. **James Dooley:** Anyone watching this, we hope you like the video on how to trigger a new knowledge panel. It’s also known as a KGM ID, which stands for knowledge graph machine ID. Both myself and Chris Walker have managed to do it. **James Dooley:** It’s important if you are working with clients to get the business owners or the CMO to get that entity set up. If they do not have a KGM ID, they are not a known entity. A lot of people talk about entity SEO. If they do not have a KGM ID, that person is not a known entity within the knowledge graph. You’ve got to be connecting those nodes together. If you can be the founder of a company and the founder has a knowledge panel, that connection matters. **Chris Walker:** One more thing. If you want to get one for your company, you’re going to have to get one for your founder before you do that too. Some people say they want one for the company, but you need one for your founder first, so you might as well do it. **James Dooley:** Yeah, for sure. It’s vitally important. Not for all staff, but every C level, CEO, CMO, COO, all of them should have knowledge panels. I think the business can have two. One for the corporate brand and one, or multiple, for the Google Business Profile. The Google Business Profile is a different KGM ID to the corporate brand because it’s about the location. **James Dooley:** The trust signals are huge. Even the minute you’ve got a Google Business Profile connected to a website, the additional trust that website gets is huge. It’s not if you should get it, it’s you need to get it. I think it’s mandatory now. **James Dooley:** This is a big play for why a lot of affiliate sites got hit with the helpful content update. The affiliate site doesn’t have a KGM ID. There’s nobody behind it. Even if they put an author bio, that author bio is not a known person within Google. You may as well put Mrs Smith. It doesn’t mean anything. Getting that person to have a knowledge panel and be connected to the brand becomes very important. **Chris Walker:** It also gives you something you can sell. You can sell just that as a service and charge three or four grand for it probably. **James Dooley:** Anyone watching this as well, check out the links in the description. There will be links there to the different Legit links Chris mentioned, the wiki setups, the press release, guest posts, and stuff like that. There’s lots of different freelance services you can get from Legit. Chris, it’s been an absolute pleasure. **Chris Walker:** Thanks for having me.