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Embracing SEO and Knowledge Panels with Austine Esezobor
23 Plays7 months ago
In this episode, we delve into the intriguing world of SEO and explore the niche area of knowledge panels with Austine Esezobor, an experienced SEO consultant and Google knowledge panels specialist. Austine shares his journey from aspiring music producer to becoming a seasoned professional in the digital marketing sphere, particularly focusing on SEO.
Austine Esezobor is an SEO Consultant who specialises in attaining and managing Google Knowledge Panels. He is also the Founder and Host of the Democratizing SEO podcast.
https://www.democratizingseo.com/about/austine-esezobor/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/austineesezobor/
Austine's SEO Journey
Austine is a musician and producer who has transitioned to digital marketing after being intrigued by the possibilities of SEO. He explains how SEO captivated him due to its blend of creativity, methodical planning, technical skills, and analytical thinking. Austine describes his process of self-education in SEO, which eventually led him to pursue it professionally.
Insights into Knowledge Panels
Throughout the conversation, Austine emphasises the significance of knowledge panels in the realm of SEO. He believes that knowledge graphs, which represent how search engines view relationships between different sets of data, are going to be fundamental to the future of search. This idea extends beyond traditional search engines like Google to encompass other platforms with search functionalities, such as Netflix and TikTok.
Austine suggests that knowledge graphs allow for a more structured delivery of information, making them crucial for businesses aiming to improve their online visibility. He discusses how entities—whether individuals, brands, or organisations—play a vital role in this new SEO paradigm by ensuring that they are correctly represented and connected within these graphs.
The Evolution of SEO
The discussion also touches on the evolution of SEO practices and how the focus has shifted from simple keyword optimisation to a more complex understanding of content and user intent. Austine explains that the future of SEO may rely heavily on providing direct answers to user queries rather than just listing possible sources of information, a shift from "search results" to "search answers."
Recommendations for SEO Practitioners
For SEO practitioners and business owners, Austine recommends adjusting strategies to focus more on visibility and entity representation rather than traditional metrics like keyword rankings. He advises that embracing this shift and understanding the importance of knowledge panels will be crucial for staying relevant in the rapidly changing landscape of digital marketing.
Conclusion
This episode provides valuable insights into the less-discussed areas of SEO and digital marketing strategies, particularly the use of knowledge graphs and panels. Austine’s expertise and forward-thinking approach offer a fresh perspective on how businesses can optimise their online presence in an increasingly competitive digital world.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to SEO and Networking
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, you're back with the untitled SEO podcast. This is one of our special LAN editions. LAN stands for live action networking. I identified that people in SEO, we sort of talk to each other, but nowhere near enough. And quite often if you're in SEO, you'll go to, let's call it a standard SEO meeting, standard networking meeting.
00:00:22
Speaker
And it's very rare that there's anyone else there who's in SEO. Now, there's one exception to this, dear listeners, and that's a networking group called The Creative Collective, which I'm a big fan of. And I hadn't been for a little while. I went along and while we were going around the room and everyone was doing their like 30 second pitch of, hey, this is who I am. This is what I do.
00:00:45
Speaker
Somebody piped up and said they were an SEO consultant. I nearly fell out of my chair. I thought, wow, there's another one. There's another one out there. It's kind of exciting, really. So I've invited them on the podcast. So honoured guest, would you like to introduce yourself?
Austin S.'s SEO Journey
00:01:00
Speaker
Hi, Andrew. I'm Austin S. Asivore, SEO Consultant and Google Knowledge Panel Specialist. Very happy to be here with you. Thanks for having me on. Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. Listeners might be able to tell that we have spoken before, but not at great depth. I wanted to save a little bit of meat on the bones, as it were, for this conversation.
00:01:19
Speaker
So your mention of knowledge panels, I want to get to that. I'm really, really interested in exploring that. But first of all, I'd like to know, I ask every guest this, what brought you to SEO? What was the shining light of SEO that drew you in like a moth?
00:01:37
Speaker
So I started music tech at uni and wanted to be a music producer and publisher. Like Quincy Jones, I was more into the publishing side of things. Started to spend a lot of time online looking for avenues to go ahead and do this. So essentially just researching. One day I came across an ad that said earn money using MySpace.
00:02:06
Speaker
This was of course during my space era. I clicked on the ad. I later realised it was a display ad and it introduced me to affiliate marketing, which introduced me to digital marketing. Out of all the channels, I found SEO to be the most fascinating because
00:02:26
Speaker
It ignited all areas of my brain. It's creative, methodical, it's technical, analytical. You really have to have a structured approach to make SEO work and that was just fascinating to me. So I had to spend a lot of my free time studying SEO and building websites and I
00:02:50
Speaker
realized one day I was spending literally all of my free time. It was like 30 to 35 hours a week doing it in my spare time. And I thought to myself, can I get a job out of this? Is this a thing? I had no idea. What year was this out of interest?
00:03:09
Speaker
I'm guessing Myspace puts it early 2000s. I refuse to call them the noughties. Yeah, so I came across SEO. I want to say it was either 2005 or 2006. It was right around about the time when I discovered YouTube. I think it was 2005. And then a year later, I discovered YouTube or YouTube became popular.
00:03:32
Speaker
Yeah, around about then. Okay, cool. So, nearly 20 years. Yeah, but I would say that was when I discovered SEO. I became an SEO professional. I would say from 2009,
00:03:49
Speaker
Yeah, 2009, I would say. That was my first full-time role as an SEO. Prior to that, I had like 30, 35 hours a week, literally every single week I was doing SEO.
Transition to SEO Professionals
00:04:00
Speaker
I came via the affiliate route, right? So I built websites.
00:04:04
Speaker
and had a great body of work which I could show to people and that was my portfolio essentially into getting a job as an SEO executive and that was the mark as me as an SEO professional. It's an odd thing and I don't talk about this very often because it doesn't come up but affiliate marketing was a big part of what got me into SEO. Initially I got into SEO
00:04:34
Speaker
because we were late 90s, we're building websites and I just sort of thought, hey, no one's going to look at these. So I figured it out. But what started to really get me into it was the affiliate marketing side of it. Do you still do any affiliate marketing now?
00:04:49
Speaker
I don't know. I sometimes wish I did because I have an itch every now and then, but I have way too much going on. Yeah, I don't do it as much as I'd like to. I do bits of it, and I'll only do it these days on something that really, really interests me. So I've done affiliate marketing on bikes, like road bikes.
00:05:09
Speaker
And I bought a website from a journalist, an author who sadly was losing his eyesight and he didn't want his website to just die, so I bought it off him. It's making-music.com if anyone listening wants to have a look. And I'm sort of starting to refresh the content on that and it ranks really well and I'm just sort of trying to find an avenue. But what's really interesting to me about affiliate marketing is how little of it's known
00:05:36
Speaker
known about outside of us professionals. I've got a situation where I've got a client who is absolutely ripe for affiliate marketing. Their product is niche enough that with the right publishing network, they'll do really, really well. I went to go and see them yesterday to explain what affiliate marketing was.
00:06:00
Speaker
I found it kind of challenging. In the end, I realized that everybody in the world has clicked an affiliate link probably today without knowing what it is. It's like the foundation under so much business growth, but it's just not known about unless you're actually a digital marketer.
00:06:21
Speaker
Yeah, totally agree.
Understanding Clients in SEO
00:06:23
Speaker
I mean, digital marketing, I think we sometimes forget how young the channel is, right? The discipline is. Add to that SEO, how young SEO is. It's a baby compared to marketing overall. It's very much a baby. And I'm finding that there are some people who
00:06:47
Speaker
are new to being online. They're new to digital. Whereas I can find my way around the web quite easily. I had a client
00:06:59
Speaker
a month, maybe six weeks ago, asked me, what's a CMS? I hadn't been asked that question in years. And I thought to myself, oh, wow, people are at different levels, or sorry, not levels, excuse me, different stages with their online experience and browsing and familiarity with digital as a whole. I like
00:07:29
Speaker
If I was to very harshly split typical SEO clients into two halves, which will miss out many, many degrees of little variations, but I think you've got one half of the clients who, like the results, appreciate the value and will invest their time and obviously money in making SEO happen, but don't really want to
00:07:59
Speaker
tiny little details. And the other half, I can only describe them as hobbyists in a very positive use of the word. They want to know everything. They want to know every tiny little bit. And I think running or working professionally in SEO, you really have to have a mix of the two because you're going to lose your mind. If you've got all your clients who don't want to know, you can end up feeling undervalued and
00:08:27
Speaker
your ego can get a bit stung. Well, mine can. I'm not speaking for you. And if you've had everyone on the other side who wanted to know every teeny weeny little detail, it would just be absolutely bonkers. I've got got a few clients like that. And I do working for them because they're they're really challenging. They they sort of keep me keep me honest. That's a terrible thing to say. But they make me think because they will say, well, why is this? Why is this? And ultimately, an SEO sometimes the answer is
00:08:56
Speaker
that I don't know and you can ask Google and Google doesn't know, you know, it's like that.
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I have to say I'm with them. I definitely prefer the camp that wants to know everything because I love training people in SEO, whether it's businesses or fellow SEOs or even different departments, right? So developers, I love appropriating SEO to the person I'm speaking with. And for me, that's... That's a lovely phrase. Say that again. You're appropriating SEO to the person you're working with. Yeah.
00:09:35
Speaker
That's such a lovely way of putting it. Oh yeah, for me I realised quite early in my career that having a strategy is great, having recommendations, brilliant, but if you're not able to
00:09:50
Speaker
communicate with the different departments, you're not going to have your work implemented.
Importance of Soft Skills in SEO
00:09:56
Speaker
And if you can't have your SEO recommendations implemented, there's no moving the dial, right? So internally, especially folks who are client SEOs, who are client side, internally, your soft skills have to be on point. They really, it really does. Otherwise, why is a web developer going to work on
00:10:17
Speaker
what you recommend. They have a task list to work on. Why should yours be what they work on? Why should yours be what they have joy in working on? You're going to get pushback unless you know how to communicate the benefit to SEO, to the developers, to the business overall. Then it's the case of, okay, this is
00:10:39
Speaker
We all see the North Star. Let's go forth together. It's a much more collaborative environment that way. I've never worked in an agency, but I've got friends who have. And from what I understand, the learning curve for how to interact with other humans is quite steep when you leave an agency and start working just for yourself. Because you don't get to sit in a semi-darkened room listening to
00:11:06
Speaker
don't know, I was gonna say loud drum bass or whatever, and just, you know, up to your eyeballs in spreadsheets and cracking on having a lovely time. I think it's incredibly important. And if I'm honest, I don't think it's, it's talked about enough in our industry is the soft skills, as you might call them. I'm not virtue signaling here, but everyone who comes to work for me,
00:11:30
Speaker
including freelancers, if they're going to work on a project or two, I send them a copy of the old Dale Carnegie book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which I mean, the title hasn't dated well. But it's, it's basically I can I can hand them that book and say this is how well we want to treat people. This is how much work we put into understanding what motivates people and how we can assist them. Yeah. Have you read it?
00:11:56
Speaker
Oh yeah. Many, many, many moons ago I read it. Absolutely. Definitely one of the most read books as far as anyone who's interested in working on their communication skills, which in my opinion should be everyone. Communication and sales are essential for a freelancer or an SEO consultant.
00:12:20
Speaker
Oh, just for anyone, I think. Listen, the reason I keep kind of tittering is that when I first spoke with Austin, we just kept finding things in common. So both musicians, both producers, there's a lot. I'm actually a member of, have you heard of Toastmasters?
00:12:41
Speaker
Yeah, of course. Yeah, I'm a member of Toastmaster. I can't reach it because I've only got a very short headphone cable, but I actually have a little trophy up there. Nice. I was invited to speak in Ireland at a competition. I came second in the area competition for
00:12:57
Speaker
It's this brilliant thing called table topics. Part of the reason I go to Toastmasters is for this table topics, you volunteer and you go stand at the front of the room and somebody gives you a topic and you have to talk about it for two minutes. A bit like just a minute on Radio 4 but no one's allowed to interrupt you and I found that is so useful.
00:13:19
Speaker
because it allows you to really connect with what's actually in your brain rather than panicking when a client asks you a question. For example, you should never panic when a client asks you a question. That's a sign you might not be in the best relationship. But if somebody wants to put you on the spot, having that ability to trust that the response you're going to give them is the one that's actually coming from your brain and your intellect. I think that's incredibly useful training.
00:13:46
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. And I won the award for it. Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. You know, they are now online tools where people can train themselves with their communication skills.
00:13:59
Speaker
I don't have one that I can call off hand, but there are tools for it. I came across one on TikTok. For the life of me, I forget the name of it. But yes, there are tools out there now that helps you train your communication skills, especially your presenting skills. It's crucial. I mean, the number one thing, I can usually tell if someone has read the Dale Carnegie book, actually, and I would have pitched and said that you have.
00:14:29
Speaker
Because the number one thing that people who have read it learn is to shut up. Just let other people. So we're now, neither of us are going to talk to prove the point. It's knowing when it's your turn to speak, like picking up on those, those skills, those soft skills. This is all absolutely fascinating and I can never quite tell the direction that one of these podcast editions is going to go in. But there is something very specific I want to talk to you about.
00:14:58
Speaker
What's your favourite BPM?
00:15:02
Speaker
My favorite. I'd love it. I was a stupid question to ask. I beat per minute for listening. Oh, okay. 89. 89. Yes. For 89 and 115. Those are the two that stick to mind from what I used to use. I love that you've got an answer. I'm tinkering around with 137 at the moment.
00:15:29
Speaker
Okay, because I'm trying to make horrible sounding brutal techno, but I don't think I've got it in me. The actual question, the actual thing I want to talk to you about is knowledge graphs, because you're doing something I'm not seeing anybody else in the industry do you are nailing your flag to the mast, and, you know, all over LinkedIn.
The Future of Search: Knowledge Graphs
00:15:49
Speaker
And every time you introduce yourself, you did at the beginning of this episode, you mentioned knowledge graphs, and nobody else is doing that. Why is it
00:15:58
Speaker
Why is it such a big thing for you? I truly believe Knowledge Graphs is going to be fundamental to search and I'm a big believer that search is central to digital.
00:16:14
Speaker
And this is going beyond searching on Google, way beyond Google. People search on all sorts of platforms. Any platform that has a search functionality influences people to search, including platforms like Netflix.
00:16:33
Speaker
They have a terrible UI, UX, in my opinion, for a reason. I can touch on that later on. But yeah, UX, Netflix, and TikTok are the two that I noticed. I am an SEO guy, right? I love SEO, even in my free time when I'm just browsing, whether it's TikTok, YouTube, and whatnot.
00:16:59
Speaker
Every now and then, my SEO mindset will kick in when I see something, I notice something, and it gets me thinking, huh, that's interesting. So when I look at Netflix and I look at TikTok, I see a brilliant approach to get people searching. And TikTok, no, two years ago, actually maybe even longer than that, during the pandemic, I noticed they're very much focused on influencing people to search.
00:17:28
Speaker
Later on, as the moms went on, they started to visibly influence people to search. So they had the prompt on the app itself. So search for whatever is the most prominent thing out of the video you've just listened to, which immediately brought me back to something I used to do for fun when I was working at corporate. I used to look at ads.
00:17:56
Speaker
and almost project the keywords that people will be searching with. And I, I'm sure- There was only one career you were going to end up in when you were asking. If you're sitting doing that for fun. I'm sure SEOs will relate to this, but if you watch an ad on TV and you see something or you hear something that makes you think, okay, people will be searching for XYZ from this ad, um, the,
00:18:27
Speaker
Christmas ad that, oh, I forget, John Lewis, right? Dear Christmas ads is a thing. When I first saw of it, I knew that people would be searching for John Lewis Christmas ad, as well as the name of the ad itself. So you can just, after a while, you can just project the keywords that people will be using. Nowadays, you see it at the end of advert, it says search with or search for, and they placed the keyword. Anyway.
00:18:54
Speaker
This is a roundabout where you're saying, I believe knowledge graphs is going to be fundamental to the way big tech services information or provides information. Every big tech company are working on their knowledge graphs, every single one of them. Just so that we're both starting from the same place here, or just for clarity.
00:19:19
Speaker
When you say knowledge graphs, are you using it as a generic term to cover schema data and rich snippets, or are you being more specific? So schema is a part of the way knowledge information is dissected. So if one were working on providing their knowledge graphs to, or should I say improving their visibility,
00:19:46
Speaker
with or for knowledge graphs, they would work on their schema information. So it's a part of it. Knowledge graphs are, in my opinion, the way that Big Tech are seeking to understand information. So it's the information itself and the relation with the information. Think of if I were to give two sides that are great for studying.
00:20:11
Speaker
Wikipedia is an obvious one, but I wanna go with IMDB. Okay. They have, if a site who's aiming to be very much an entity-led or an entity-based site should study IMDB, because they have their knowledge information down on point, their schema is everything they do, has schema on there.
00:20:40
Speaker
I believe all Big Tech are working on their knowledge graphs, and I believe it's a way for them to provide information and deliver information to users when they search in a succinct way. The term information, I've been doing a lot of studying around it. In my opinion,
00:21:04
Speaker
I don't have any data to back this up, but just from my SEO hat, when I have my SEO hat, I see these things. Information is being changed from, as Google puts it, from strings to things. And I relate that to, okay, every big tech company are looking for branded, brand-led information, not generic anymore. If you think about it,
00:21:32
Speaker
Google, Gemini, and all AI products, in essence, they can create information that's generic, a generic-led information. Someone's seeking information that's very generic. They don't necessarily need to pull it from a size. They have this information, and they can provide it to the user who's seeking it.
Personalized Information in Big Tech
00:21:55
Speaker
What they are not able to provide just yet, because they don't have this
00:21:59
Speaker
within their database which is what they're building as far as they're known as graphs go is information that's brand-led entities names places things and I think the core of that is people individuals every single person online is an entity is a brand is a personal brand and if they're working on their knowledge
00:22:22
Speaker
If they're working to have a knowledge panel on Google, this is information that Google wants and all big tech companies want. Social media, as an example. When you open up a profile, when you create a profile, you're essentially creating a knowledge graph of yourself.
00:22:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's all coming together now. Yeah, that is that to me was a very interesting realisation when I
00:22:53
Speaker
when I came across it many, many years ago. And I started to think, search, social, they really share the same audience, and they're after the same thing, information, right? They seek information. The way they achieve it is different. Google, in my opinion, with their web index has a wealthy index, but it's
00:23:20
Speaker
dare I say, out of date. It's old school. They sought after information in a very generic manner, right? And in everything. That's why it's a mess. But social media, they sought after information in a
00:23:38
Speaker
streamlined approach that focuses on entities first entities being people as the main type of entity you have different entity you have different types but they focused on people and because of that they're able to realize the information that the people produce
00:23:58
Speaker
This is a run-about way of saying it's better to know who Jeff Bezos is and all of the things associated with Jeff Bezos than to know of the things and then try to associate those things to Jeff Bezos. It's a better way of organizing information. Proof of this? You kind of blow my mind a bit. Carry on.
00:24:21
Speaker
Proof of this is the way that all big tech companies, to bring it back to what I said earlier, are working on their knowledge graphs, every single one of them. Now, Google calls theirs, they have two names, or no, sorry, three that they tend to go with. Knowledge graphs, every big tech company goes with that term. Knowledge panels, that's the visual representation that you see on Google search and other search engines as well. And ultimately, they call theirs their knowledge vault.
00:24:51
Speaker
This is their database of them going from strings to things, entities. This is them focusing on entities. The right-hand panel
00:25:05
Speaker
where the knowledge, sorry, the right-hand rail where the knowledge panel sits and also where the Google business profile sits is becoming far more important than the left-hand rail information, which deals with the web index and classic SEO approach, keywords, rankings, et cetera.
00:25:28
Speaker
You want to see proof of this? Just type in any brand and notice where your eye goes to first. It's because of the logos there. We're trained to go straight to recognize the logos. Totally. Another way of realizing this is when you're on mobile. So I mentioned the two rails, right? This is when you're on a desktop or a laptop.
00:25:53
Speaker
When you're on mobile, there's just one rail. And what tends to happen is the right-hand information, whether it's a knowledge panel or a business profile, is shown first. Way down the page or the screen is the equivalent of the left-hand information. And Google is doing this for a reason because users expect this information.
00:26:21
Speaker
I believe in the months and years to come, we're going to transition from search results to search answers.
Shifting SEO Focus: Keywords to Entities
00:26:32
Speaker
Search results, a list of information which the user researches, spends time doing the research, where search answers is the platform that you're on providing the information. As a user, you expect the platform that you're on to provide the information. You expect them to know it, which is why all big tech companies are working on their knowledge graphs.
00:27:00
Speaker
If I am, sorry, go ahead. No, no, I was just going to say that I was just going to relate back to you that I published a podcast edition, hang on, when this comes out, it would have been yesterday. And it was about the FT licensing their news to open AI. And it got me thinking that it
00:27:25
Speaker
People in SEO at the moment, it's almost become a bit of a meme like, oh, is AI going to replace SEO or is it going to replace Google? At some point, probably inevitably, whether it's 200 years, five years, 20 years, none of us know. And at the end of any of that type of podcast, when I'm saying, ooh, looks like something's shifting, I always try and give a bit of what can you do about it? What can you do to prepare for change kind of thing?
00:27:52
Speaker
and it always just comes back down to Knowledge Graph, ultimately, isn't it? Because what it comes down to in its most mechanical terms, as I understand it, is information that's well-documented, well laid out, easy to find, logical, relatable. Information that's in a platform's database. The web platform, as I mentioned, is very old. If you wanted your information to be on there, you first had to be
00:28:22
Speaker
indexed. If you're not indexed, you're not going to be within their database. Now we're moving into a case of if you're not in Google's Knowledge Vault or any of these big text knowledge graph, you're not going to have the visibility that you wish you had. And that's a very key thing right there. That's, I don't want to call it conclusion as such, but unfortunately that this episode can't go on forever.
00:28:52
Speaker
So absolutely fascinating, Austin. I really, really appreciate your time with us. It's really lovely meeting somebody in SEO who's got an insight or has given a great deal of thought to an area that you haven't. And I'm always happy to admit ignorance, or not ignorance, but I'm happy to admit gaps in my perception because
00:29:14
Speaker
That's what collaboration is all about. It's not about working with people who think the same way you do. It's about working with people who have another way of looking at things. So you brought an incredible amount of value to this episode, which I very much appreciate. But to my previous point about how I like to end episodes with, well, what can you do to prepare? What should business owners
00:29:37
Speaker
and help people in SEO? What should they be doing to prepare themselves or position themselves? What do you reckon? Tell them what to do, Austin. One thing is to shift your mindset from keywords and rankings into entities and visibility.
00:29:58
Speaker
two different things, all right? You want to ensure that your entity, your brand has visibility. The way you go about doing so is changing. It's not going to be a, well, I believe it will be a revolutionary change, but it's not going to put people, SEOs out of work. It's going to, I believe, expand SEO and become more comprehensive, which to me is more fun. But to begin with, start thinking of entities.
00:30:27
Speaker
your visibility that you have of your entity, and a way to ensure that your entity has the visibility in the eyes of search engines, or better yet, algorithms. We could go so much deeper, but I think as a conclusion,
00:30:46
Speaker
I think I'm going to leave it there because that's absolutely brilliant. I really appreciate that. Thanks, Austin. Thanks for having me on, Andrew. Oh, absolute pleasure. So everyone listening, I'll put Austin's links in the show notes, of course, but I heartily recommend you go follow Austin on LinkedIn because when you find people like Austin,
00:31:10
Speaker
You can, you, I can learn a lot. I can't speak for everyone unless you, but yeah, so it's all about different perspectives and new ways of looking. So listeners, just don't, don't bother about following me or anything. I'm not going to put my links in the show notes, but go follow Austin, connect, say hello. Can I ask everyone to say hello to you or is that a burden? Of course, absolutely. I'm, I'm on LinkedIn literally almost every single day. I'm five to six times a week. So you will most likely hear back from me within
00:31:38
Speaker
24 hours, I would say. Brilliant stuff. All that remains then is for me to say goodbye. Would you like to say goodbye, Austin? Thanks everyone for listening and all watching. And Andrew, again, thank you so much for having me on. Always loving conversations about SEO and knowledge panels. So always happy to have a nice chat.