Reading Time: 2 minutes

This is a placeholder post for a future possibility that I hope does not occur. If it does, this is the “I told you so.” record. Hence identifiable details are missing. One of my hobby horses is that the C-suite of companies does not place much importance on SEO. Either they acknowledge it but don’t want to know anymore, or they reject the idea completely. This story is the latter kind.

It’s about a small, VC-funded company that has just raised a third round. It was founded more than six years ago. It has a brilliant, niche technical product and its customers are B2B professionals. To obscure the company’s identity further, let’s say the product is a left-handed electric drill and the company name is Acme. It has almost no competitors. There is also a software suite to manage such a drill – two products, at best. I think I’m more excited about the product than its CEO.

Site Crawl

The WordPress website is hosted at WPEngine and built with WPBakery. A two-product website should have about 20-25 core pages at best and any number of blog posts. A site crawl should take less than an hour. The crawl took 53 hours, running at around 5 URLs per second! Google crawls much faster.

The image shows 81,671 HTML pages out of a total of over 800,000 URLs, which include supporting code files (JS, CSS) and images. For just two products?

The page load time is poor, but it’s not the biggest challenge for the company.

SEO Challenges

There are a few red flags:

• The company name ranks #1, as it should. (This is not a red flag.) The name is shared with at least two, perhaps more, products in other industries. Many companies have chosen their brand names like that, but it’s too late to change it. As an aside, a previous employer’s name was changed to an everyday verb! It did not survive the name change.
• 99% of third-party mentions of the company are about its VC funding efforts.
• If you search Google for this niche technology, this company does not show.
• The website is nowhere to be found for its likely unbranded keywords.
• Unsurprisingly, according to Ahrefs, the highest number of daily organic visits in the past 12 months was 13. OK, I don’t have access to their analytics data, but external estimates are usually in the ball park.
• I cannot find any independent product reviews. A lone “review” was written by their own consultant two years ago after some seed units were installed in a few dozen locations.
• Several relevant forums and social platforms have no mention of this company or its products.
• Experienced SEOs can easily work out the likely reasons for the huge URL count. I’m not spelling it out here, as this isn’t an audit.
• I have known the CEO for many years, but he has ignored two emails asking to discuss their SEO.  Being on two continents and time zones, email is the best channel for now. As another aside, at least 10 other CEOs I have known personally showed no interest in discussing SEO.

Why are CEOs like this?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The course is called “Triggering and Managing Knowledge Panels”. I paid full retail for this 12-month expiry course. It is a collection of videos and quizzes to be completed at one’s own pace. I completed it in 

Lesson 1

Duration: 12:35

The first lesson is an introduction to the course.

Lesson 2

Duration: 9:54

My main revelation here was that I needed an “Entity Home” – a definitive source of truth about me. I have a few websites that contain scattered information about me, so I need to create this Entity Home. That is probably my “name site” – https://ash.nallawalla.com.

Lesson 3

Duration: 6:35

This lesson asks you to confirm three things:

• Who you are
• What you offer
• Which audience you serve.

This lesson reinforces the exhortation to implement schema tags, even though it has not been covered in depth so far.

Lesson 4

Duration: 8:10

This lesson is about building your Entity Home. You need to own and control it completely. I have one, but I need to improve it.

Lesson 5

Duration: 11:17

The next most important thing after the Entity Home is the Entity Description. It needs to begin with a “subject-verb-object” that describes the entity.

Lesson 6

Duration: 13:10

It is important to corroborate facts about the entity. Some sites are more effective than others when they mention you (the entity).

Lesson 7

Duration: 8:42

If possible, you need to link from the Entity Home to the corroborative sites and vice versa.

Lesson 8

Duration: 13:11

Using Schema tags is the best way to corroborate. I did this some time ago, tweaking it by adding subJectOf.

Lesson 9

Duration: 11:25

This lesson covers nodes, edges, attributes, and paths.

Lesson 10

Duration: 16:23

We learn about six knowledge verticals that can trigger a knowledge panel and the Google Knowledge Graph (Vault).

Lesson 11

Duration: 5:23

This lesson is about claiming knowledge panels (and when not to).

Lesson 12

Duration: 11:28

Sometimes, you may want to change the information Google has chosen to show for your entity.

Lesson 13

Duration: 6:08

This lesson describes what information Google shows in a knowledge panel and how to trigger and manage the information in your control.

Lesson 14

Duration: 11:47

In this lesson, you will learn that machine learning algorithms drive every aspect of the Knowledge Vault, Knowledge Panels, and brand SERPs. 

Lesson 15

Duration: 9:48

This lesson is about the Google Knowledge Extraction Algorithm.

Lesson 16

Duration: 13:59

Jason explains how a Knowledge Panel Is built.

Lesson 17

Duration: 11:40

This lesson is about getting your entity Into Google’s Knowledge Vault.

Lesson 18

Duration: 13:44

This module is about getting your Knowledge Panel to show on your brand SERP.

Lesson 19

Duration: 9:15

Here, you learn about “People Also Search For”, “Related Searches,” and how these elements work.

Lesson 20

Duration: 8:32

This lesson covers how Google chooses what photos and logos to show.

Lesson 21

Duration: 8:48

Jason teaches us how to build Google’s confidence in your entity.

Outcome

I enjoyed doing the course.

Did it give me a Knowledge Panel? No. Try searching for “Ashok Nallawalla“.

I already had a “partial” knowledge panel before completing the course. I have a problem with my formal name being cited in authoritative places, such as the National Library of Australia since the early 1980s, and Amazon for my early books. My nickname “Ash” is the only name I use professionally all the time. It’s unique, as I know we are a small family and there is nobody else with my name. Yet, Google the “child” is too infantile to grasp that I am the same person as Ashok. It has not noticed that I published a new book in 2022, and it is still showing the previous book from 1985. If you search for “Ash Nallawalla“, the partial knowledge panel does not show.

Of course, this does not detract from the Kalicube course. You should consider doing it if you are serious about this topic.