Leanne Summers says, "My digital insight for SEO in 2023 is to focus on your brand narrative and educate Google about your brand narrative so that you can control it for the entire customer journey."

How would you describe what a brand narrative is?

“A brand narrative is your story. So it’s not your logo, brand, or color palette, which is most people associate with a brand. But if I were the manufacturer of this pen, then I have a pen business. But how do I differentiate myself from the competition? What's special about what makes me different? And why would you want to do business with my pen business? Your brand narrative provides a consistent message across the entire digital universe about who you are, what you do, and who you serve and why do you it better than anyone else?

A lot of people in our industry assume that a brand search is a navigational search. So you type in Facebook because you want to go to the Facebook page. I'm a really firm believer in people trusting people. So if I'm the pen manufacturer and you meet me at a conference, you’ll go home and Google my brand. So if your brand narrative, which is your story, doesn't tell the story you want to portray online, you potentially have a problem.

I work with Jason Barnard and the Kalicube process with a lot of clients who work very well to create an entity home to tell your story to educate Google about who you are, what you do, and whom you serve so that it makes Google's job easy because Google is a business, it's a brand, and it's a semantic search engine.

So instead of matching keywords to keywords, we moved from strings to things a long time ago, because its business model could be more efficient. When you think about the volume of links, it's got to crawl around and be put somewhere. So in two ways, you can ensure your brand narrative, and the reason I think it's important is because when people look you up, you want Google to tell the story that you want people to read and see about you, rather than leave it to the algorithms.

So as a copywriter, I'm fascinated by words and Google as a semantic search engine. Its algorithms digest and absorb the information we send or deliver to it in a certain way. It's got a number of Knowledge Graphs, but that's a story for another day. So the end goal for me, in terms of controlling your brand narrative, is two-pronged – it’s following Jason's Kalicube Process and establishing your entity’s home with consistent message across all of your digital landscape, getting your information propagated by a third party so it's a loop of information about you so that Google starts to develop that trust.”

You've mentioned establishing your entity home - is that the key initial step that you need to establish as a way to go about educating Google about your brand?

“Yes. Well, I think the first thing you need to do is establish who you are, who you serve, and what you do, and establish that message. I'm starting my experiment to demonstrate that any little person, not just famous people, can influence their brand SERP with Google. So over the weekend, I created a new website with a new domain name that I will use as my entity home. The ‘about’ page on my entity home now, I can't tell Google this is my entity home. But I can feed that information to Google through my ‘about’ page and send it structured data or schema markup. And then corroborate that evidence through third-party sources by making sure that all my social profiles and you think that I've talked about on YouTube are consistent so that Google has a home base to consistently loop back to and say, ‘that's what the end says on her entity home.’ That's what David says about the Majestic. That's what that Trustpilot review says. And so it's us a reaffirming virtuous loop, I suppose. So that would be the first thing I would do. The second thing would be to go across and out to your social media and change your description so that you know it aligns with your brand and narrative. And then it's about educating the algorithms.

I've just finished Koray Gubur's semantic SEO course on topical authority, which blew my mind. I've followed him around a bit, and I love the power of language and unpacking and learning about how the algorithms use semantics and natural language processing and their neural networks to decipher the meaning behind these funny little searches that we put into the search engine. Because we’ve become so lazy and we type in any old thing to Google, they have this very difficult job of trying to work out the search context and intent. So the other element of controlling the brand is positioning yourself as a topical authority in that space, and my job as a copywriter is to not only get a page ranking, but also to achieve click-through and sales.

Once you understand the power of the language you use and make it easy for Google to decipher what the user wants and produce the answer across the entire user journey, then Google's going to say, ‘Hey, thank you so much for making our job much easier,’ because it costs us a lot of money to crawl a billion links a day. They’ll start to trust you because you’ve got your website sorted, and everything you've got on there takes this particular audience set through their customer journey. Google can then come to you as the authority, and maybe put you and your website in their knowledge graph of facts of entities and attributes and the values and the connections, or maybe give you a knowledge panel, which turns up on the right-hand side if you search for a brand on a desktop. They will provide your brand SERP as a set of recommendations. This all means that you end up with the brand service that you want, and if you watch any of Jason's videos, you'll see he's been doing this for a long time.”

Are you better off ensuring that the content that appears not about you but what you write about on other websites is definitively primarily related to what you do as a business? Or can you get away with being evolved in your writing as long as your author bio at the bottom summarizes what you and your brand does?

“Yes, is the answer. From a commercial point of view, the primary focus is that if you're making money out of a particular niche and want to continue making money out of that niche, then you want to become known across the industry. And in Google and Bings' eyes, as the expert on this particular topic, having said that core, it doesn't mean you can't explore other related topics. So, Koray talks about context and ensuring you're always connecting back to your source context. So I recommend that you guest post on a related website about either your core niche topic or something that relates to your core niche topic. If I were a brand SERP SEO, I wouldn't necessarily go and talk or do a guest blog post about something I wasn't yet seen as an authority, because once Google gets confused about your brand and who you are, what you do, and who you serve, it's very difficult to un-confuse it.”

So the goal is to control your narrative through the entire customer journey, which makes sense from a brand perspective. But measuring the true financial impact from that can sometimes be challenging. So if you're doing that for a client, and you're charging them for it, how do you justify the value of what you're doing?

“I guess the easiest way is to look at your click-through rate for your brand name. So go straight into Google Search Console, and see how many searches have people clicked through. That's the first part. The second is once you build out your topical authority or cover the entire customer journey. So as a very quick example, in Vietnam, where I live, I have a second business: destination wedding planning. I'm a destination wedding celebrant, meaning that from a brand or customer journey perspective, people don't wake up in the morning and decide, ‘Oh, I'm going to go to Vietnam and get married.’ So there's an entire process where they might start with a search about whether they can marry overseas. Where are the best places to get married overseas? Is the wedding legal? Etc. So the second part then covers the entire customer journey, creating impressions in that whole customer journey, and then, ultimately, the click-through rate and transactions on the business.

I think that the absolute value in controlling your brand narrative, the reward, and what people are paying for is the KGMID, which is the Google stamp of approval that says you have earned a place in our Knowledge Graph. So your Knowledge Panel is Google's representation of the facts that it understands about your brand, and if you are an international business with a Knowledge Panel different from your Google Business Profile, that can have an enormous impact because you then start to build it out and fill it with more rich features as you build your connections and relationships. So if I do a guest blog for Majestic on brand search, link it back to my home page, then it’ll work. I wouldn't link it back to my entity home because it's about something other than me. But I'm building my spider web. So, Google building a solid graph is building out entities, attributes, values, and properties. And so a lot of people will say, ‘Well, an entity is just the same as a keyword. It’s just a different thing.’ But it's not. They're entirely different. But it's even semantics. It's not about the entity isn't the important thing. Once you establish your entity, it's about filling out the property’s attributes so every entity has a property.

If I'm able to trigger and populate a client's knowledge panel with their brand and then have people also search with other people from the same industry who are in the same cohort, then in terms of the future, generative AI, all of those things, you've hit the jackpot because you are inside. When people search for you, have got a one-stop shop, and you're in the right spot, you're in the right position, you dominate the page above the fold and there’s no one else there.”

You shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023, now let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“I'm going to get lots of enemies when I say this, but I wish people would stop talking about keywords and relying on tools to produce their SEO strategies and tactics and perhaps use their brains more. Let's reengage with our brains and start thinking about the world, people, humans, and the things they show. We can use tools to sense and gut check to ensure you’re not going off into an area that will not deliver you any rewards. But continuing shock about keywords harking back to SEO ten years ago. And we are now talking about semantics. We are not talking about the lexicon. We're not talking about matching this exact keyword with this exact keyword. We're talking about trying to help a bunch of algorithms understand the context and the meaning behind a query that people report into a search engine, and as much information that you can wrap around the topic, the context, the attributes, the better because you're helping the search engine do what its brand does, which is build a set of search results that satisfies their users in whatever format they prefer to consume it whether that's video, or even whether that's Twitter/X boxes.”

Leanne Summers is an SEO consultant, and you can find her over at theleannesummers.com.