How To Add Social Profiles To Your Google Knowledge Panel – 107

Transcript For How To Add Social Profiles To Your Google Knowledge Panel – 107;

Caleb Baumgartner: Welcome to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I am producer Caleb Baumgartner. Your Google knowledge panel maybe one of the first points of contact that a client sees for your business. In today’s episode, Jesse explains how to link your company’s social media accounts to your Google knowledge panel to expand your digital footprint and deliver more information to clients, to deliver a better person impression.

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Jesse Dolan: Welcome come back to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan. Another solo episode here for you today. We’re going to be talking about a Google My Business/knowledge panel topic here. Let me share my screen with everybody just to kind of show, as we talk, show what we’re going to be looking at here. I’ve done a Google search for Intrycks SEO, Intrycks is the name of our agency, the name of our SEO firm.

Off to the right-hand side here, you’re going to see our knowledge panel, which is essentially your Google My Business listing and information, and then additional information too that google will pull in. One of those things that we’re going to be focusing on here today is the profiles within the knowledge panel. Not one of the things, that’s the thing. I don’t know why I said it that way. I don’t want to bury the lead. That’s what the episode is about here today, how to get Google to show your social profiles within your knowledge panel for your GMB listing.

After the right here, you can see our knowledge panel, name of the business. We’ve got our Google Reviews, some other information. Here’s a few reviews it’s highlighting, a business description. Then you have our most recent Google posts. And then down here, you’ll see this is the section where it says profiles. And for Intrycks here, our knowledge panel is showing our Facebook profile and our LinkedIn profile.

What we’re going to talk about here today is how to provide this information to Google, how to make them aware that these are your profiles, and how to get it linked so that they’re going to show these profiles for your business in your knowledge panel. Before we get any further, I want to mention our instant SEO audit tool. Go on out to localseotactics.com. Top right corner, click on the yellow button, that is our free SEO audit tool.

If you haven’t used it before, we’ll give you the quick nickel tour on what it does. You’re going to plug in your webpage. This is a tool that’s page by page, not your entire website. Click in the page that you want to rank or you want to check how good it is optimized for a certain keyword, and then plug in that keyword that you want to check it against.

The tool is going to run fairly quickly, a couple of seconds, maybe a minute or less tops, and it’s going to then give you a PDF with a kind of overall score, the different areas of optimization, a bunch of to-do, kind of a punch list for you to take care of and increase your rankings and better optimize your page. Check that out. You can use it as many times as you want. Localseotactics.com. Click on that yellow button for the free instant SEO audit. Now, let’s get back to the topic of the episode here.

How do you communicate to Google what your profiles are and how do you get them to pop in that knowledge panel? The first question is, what are the social links in the knowledge panel? And basically what I mean by that is what are they, what’s their purpose. They’re going to be links to those actual social profiles. So using our Intrycks knowledge panel, as an example, we saw in two listings there, one for Facebook, one for LinkedIn. If you were to click on the one for Facebook, that’s going to take you right to the Intrycks Facebook page.

And if you’re to click on the one for LinkedIn, that’s going to take you to the company page on LinkedIn for Intrycks. If we had YouTube in there, it’ll take you to our YouTube channel, right? If we had Instagram in there, it’ll take you to our Instagram page. These are just direct links from the knowledge panel to those social profiles. That’s what those are when they’re listed down there in your knowledge panel. What is the benefit for you of having this?

Well, number one, the benefit of having it, meaning in the context of that it is there, the benefit is that Google understands that these are your profiles, and it’s going to kind of disseminate some of the information from those profiles and add it to the database, if you will, of your information for your company and your entity within Google.

There is a big benefit not for the usability or the interaction of those links, but just by having those, the accomplishment is maybe even a better way to put it of having those links there, that means Google understands you as an entity, understands these social profiles belong to you, and it helps your overall digital footprint, right? Trace all back and give you that power and the relevancy for all of those. And that’s a big thing.

If you have information out there for digital marketing, if you have these resources, these social profiles, it’s definitely in your best interest for Google to be aware that these exist and that they’re yours. The more you can feed that database, if you’re doing this and your competitors aren’t, that just gives you more legitimacy, maybe more trust, more authority, depending on what’s on those profiles and the types of niches that you work within.

But that’s for me the biggest benefit by having this as the victory that you’ve communicated these things to Google, right? Now, on the other context of what’s the benefit, you’re giving more exposure to your brand, having those profiles down there, your clients or your prospects are going to be seeing that you’re active in these social media, that you have a YouTube channel, there’s videos. They can directly access this content. They can explore more about your business and things like that for further engagement, for the branding, further awareness.

There’s definitely some benefits from the user side as well for those links being there to actually be explored and clicked on. Do you need them? No, you don’t need them. You can be just fine without them. But for the reasons that we just talked about, if you want to enhance your business, to enhance your listing, enhance your knowledge panel and just make sure all that is enabled, then yes, you need them.

I would recommend, as we go through, this is not going to be a super complicated thing that you have to do for these to show up and for you to communicate this information to Google. So even with that, even if you don’t need them, this is not that hard to do within the grand scheme of everything else that’s related to SEO. I think the benefits definitely outweigh the potential time and energy investments you may have into pulling this off. How do we add them? There’s really two main ways that we’ve been able to add these two profiles.

The first one is pretty easy, and I would, by the way, recommend that you do both of these. This isn’t so much a one or the other discussion. This is the two things that we would do to make sure that does show up. I would kind of put this in the same vein as site maps, where redundancy is going to be your friend. We make sure with all the projects that we work on… This is a bit of a side trail here, but it’s kind of a parallel on the situation.

A site map is obviously very important for your website because that’s effectively your index or your table of contents of all the content on your website. You create new pages or posts, they’re going to show up in your site map. You want Google to know your site map so it can discover that and always crawl and find your new content so it can get indexed and then be found in search. In the same thing here… I’m sorry, let me back up. I didn’t finish my analogy. That’s what your site map is.

Now, you want to submit that site map to Google Search Console so that they’re aware of it. Technically, you can be done at that point for communicating your site map. However, we like to make sure your site map is linked to in the footer of your website or maybe it’s embedded in your robot dot text file. You just want to have a level of redundancy for something like your site map, because it’s so critical. In the same way here, you could do just one of these two things that I’m going to explain and be just fine.

But for pretty much as easy as they are, I would do them both for that redundancy. Because if you want these to show up, if you do both of these things, they’re going to show up for you. It may not be immediate. This is all up to Google, right? There’s no button to push that says, “Show this listing.” It’s not quite that simple. But you do these things, it’s going to show up. It might take a week or two. It might take a month or two in some cases. Again, this is all free.

Google does this for us, and so we can’t complain about the timelines on some cases, especially depending on what’s happening, whether there’s COVID or not, there’s a new pandemic or not, their resources kind of get allocated and adjusted from wherever needs them. This is an area that you’re going to do this work, and then sit back and be patient and your profiles will show. It’s just a matter of when and how quick they’re going to show.

The first thing you’re going to want to do is add your social profiles to the footer or if you have a sidebar, whichever is kind of better fit for your website. You want to add them to your website in the footer or the sidebar. Now, you can just do a text link. You can just link like, “Click here for our Facebook page,” or you can do what’s more common is like the icon, the Facebook logo. Most themes nowadays are going to have some kind of built-in widget or built-in element that you can just, “Here’s my social profiles.”

I’m going to enable Facebook. I’m going to enable LinkedIn. I’m going to enable YouTube. And then you link or paste in the link for those said profiles and it’ll easily add it to your website, especially if you’re on WordPress. These things are pretty common. If not, you can make your own graphics. You can include them into your footer, even the sidebar. There’s no necessarily a standard way to do this. At the end of the day, what we’re looking for is a link to those profiles on your website. The second way to do this is actually to inject the schema into your website.

And within this schema, you want to use the sameAs schema. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the schema.org page about the sameAs which will kind of give you a little bit of a look for how this was constructed. But basically this is going to live within your site-wide schema or your organization schema. And what you’re going to do is leverage the sameAs schema, which is used to just draw relevancy. And basically what that says is here’s Intrycks, here’s the Intrycks website. This entity, if you will, this is the same as here’s our Facebook profile.

In that, you’re drawing these connections for Google or any other search entity to… We say Google because it’s always Google that we’re concerned about for the most part, but really any other search engine that’s able to parse the structured data. The schema is going to read it the same. What we’re telling you with the sameAs connection is this webpage, this business, this entity is also this Facebook profile, is also this LinkedIn company, is also this YouTube channel. And that kind of forces them to understand and kind of draw that connection.

You can do these things. Link to it on your website, inject the sameAs schema in your organization and site-wide schema. Google’s going to this on basically every page. It’s going to be in the footer, let’s say, if you did the linking with the icons. It’s going to see that in the footer of every page, and it’s going to pull this sameAs schema out of the header on every page. And very quickly, they’re going to understand that these profiles are yours.

If you do that and if your website is indexed by Google, your pages are indexed by Google, it’ll just be a matter of time before Google picks these references up, these links up, and then you’re going to see that added to your knowledge panel. That’s it. There’s no big reveal at the end or anything here. It was just kind of that two step process. Sit back and wait. Like I said, it could take maybe a week or two. It could take a month or more, but you’re going to see that show up in your knowledge panel down there.

It’s pretty cool when it does pop. Just to be clear on that, there is no spot to go into your GMB listing and add these. There’s no other way. This is something Google kind of automatically does if they can draw this association. If you’re doing these things that I just mentioned here and let’s say 45 or 60 days passes and it’s still not happening, maybe reach out to us. We can take a look and see if something was done wrong.

I should say, too, if you’re not familiar with schema and how to type up that code, you might want to use the Google structured data testing tool before you paste that into your website to make sure you’re doing it the right way and that doesn’t have any errors. Even though you thought you’re doing it right, if you’re pasting it in there and Google can’t parse it, effectively it doesn’t exist. It’s not going to return what you’re looking.

But assuming you do all that stuff right and it’s still not working, we can help you investigate that and just see where the error was or what the disconnect might be. But usually it’s going to work just fine if you follow the steps that we just laid out there. So if you’re interested in getting your social profiles connected and getting that showing up on your website, I’m sorry, on your knowledge panel for your business, do those and you should be in luck. All right, I’m going to get here to our five star review for this episode.

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