How Fast Can Define Your Entity Create a Knowledge Panel? | James Dooley Interviews Paul Truscott

James Dooley: How quickly can DefineYourEntity.com create a Google Knowledge Panel? Today, I'm joined with Paul David Truscott. And Paul, I want you to jump straight into it. How quickly can Define Your Entity create a Google Knowledge Panel?

Paul David Truscott: I think from memory, James, the quickest result we ever had was seven or eight days. Um, so, it can be really fast if a lot of things are already aligned and it... We've just got to come in and essentially rejoggle what they've done because everything's there that needs to be there, but the message isn't being hammered home to Google in the appropriate way. So, in that situation, uh, it's just about us coming in, using what we know to reorganise that information in the places that it needs to be reorganised, um, getting the bots from Google to come and, and crawl, and they'll make a reassessment and there you go. Bang, it can kick in that quickly. So, yeah, on occasions it can be really, really fast, but it depends on the, you know, where the person or the business is at with, you know, if you're literally starting from a dead start, then of course it's not going to be a week.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. For anyone who's listening to this, the case study that we have where we created a Google Knowledge Panel, and it was exactly seven days. It was a week exactly. So, I remember it clear as day. The guy already had a KGM ID, just to make people aware of this. He already had a lot of things. He already had a personal website. He already had a KGM ID. He'd already written a book. In fact, he'd written two books. Um, he already had a lot of this information, but it was like a jigsaw piece where everything was out of place and we needed to put things back into place. And we needed to create this jigsaw, this whole picture in a specific way. So, what we ended up doing is he already had the entity home. I remember the schema was initially positioned on the homepage, and the homepage was showing off about who he was, and we moved it. We moved the entity home, the ID node reference, to the About page. We defined everything about him. We wrapped every single profile in the sameAs schema. And what we ended up doing then is we loaded it into Indexable so that Googlebot could crawl it a lot faster. We also updated quite a lot of his bios on his Twitter, on his LinkedIn, and there's a lot of information where I think on one or two of them he was saying he's an entrepreneur. On one of them he was, I think he was a plumber on one or two of them. And what ended up coming back was one of them he said he was an author, which he was an author. He was a plumber. He was an entrepreneur. He invested in a couple of different businesses to do with, like, boilers. Everything was all over the place and he was an entrepreneur that, generally speaking, was buying lots of plumbing businesses and he'd written two books. The information just needed presenting together in a nice format. Once we'd recheck... Once we edited the bios, we force-indexed all them again within, inside of Indexable. I remember it was a Friday afternoon where we initially placed the order and paid the invoice. Friday morning, so it was just under a week. It was seven days, but it was Friday to Friday. Friday morning it had popped and he couldn't believe it. Now, he'd already done majority of the hard work. So we actually ended up doing it as a slight discount. Now we're normally £15,000. For anyone that wants to know more about the costs, check out the link in the description where we'll have a whole episode on how much it costs to create a Google Knowledge Panel. But because he'd already done all the hard work, he'd already written the two books, he already had all the social media profiles. There was some missing. There was, like, Crunchbase missing, and Paul needed to do quite a bit of work with regards to popularity for some of the entity attributes. I think, Paul, you can expand on this in a minute about... I think he'd won one or two awards, but it was like this where you've got a trophy, but there was nothing on his website showing about it. And I think you, you might have done a press release or something about one of his awards or what had been won. And all that got wrapped in the sameAs schema as well. But it was just, like you said, it was repositioning things in a way. And what I found amazing was this information was already out there. All as what we did is build the clarity so we could build up that confidence. And I was amazed within your 125-point checklist with DefineYourEntity.com, Paul, that we've put together, how much that just by changing what was already there... All right, we added one or two little nuances, but he already had a lot of the things on the 125-point checklist. How we just changed one or two bits, that Entity Confidence Score that we have, that proprietary software scoring system that we have within Define Your Entity, how much that jumped up. Now, I think alongside with the popularity, that's what triggered it so fast. I don't know if there's anything there that I missed, but if you want to expand on that a little bit more of what you did about the award, the press release, and the popularity signals.

Paul David Truscott: Yeah, it really was just bringing all of that to bear. I mean, he had all these things, uh, but they weren't presented. Some of them weren't online too. As you said, the awards weren't even online. Those were just things that he'd won, industry awards that he'd won, and there was no record that we could find online about them. So, we had to create press releases for those to, uh, to just... To notify online that he'd won these things, which he legitimately won. So, I think the other thing worth mentioning, that gentleman's case though, um, James, is that he had not, not an unusual surname, but it wasn't a very common surname. And so, it was a little bit easier, um, with him because we didn't have to do all the work that you would have to do with disambiguation. Because this is one of the problems with... If you've got a name, or it's not so common with company names, although it still does happen. But with a person, you can have the exact same name as another individual. Um, I've actually got this issue right now because there's a boxer that shares my name, and he's very, very high... Was very, very high profile. And so he's a difficult, um, persistent, annoying...

James Dooley: [Laughter]

Paul David Truscott: ...person to dislodge. But if you've got, like... If your name happened to be, um, you know, I can't think... If it was, uh, Paul Smith.

James Dooley: Paul Smith, yeah.

Paul David Truscott: I mean, it's, it's unlikely that there isn't going to be a Paul Smith that's notable for something. All right, so you... And you're probably going to find there's a lot more than one of them. And so you're up against this problem. So where it's an issue is if you share a name with a really famous person who's got a very, very high profile, then that, that takes longer. Uh, or if you've got a very common name, and so you're sharing that with lots and lots of other people that may not be really famous, but there's so many of them that you have to, uh, disambiguate.

James Dooley: So, so let me play a bit of a game, and I'll, I'll try and give my answer. And I'm going to ask you first, and then I'm going to give my answer to it, right? The fastest we have ever generated a Google Knowledge Panel has been seven days. So when someone says, "How quick can you generate a Knowledge Panel?" we can generate it within seven days, right? So that's the fastest. If someone came along with the name Paul Smith and they didn't want to put a middle name, which is a nice little hack to do a, a middle initial, if they said, "No, I want it for Paul Smith," and they had big budget, how long... If you could... I mean, it's going to be very, very difficult to do it, but how long do you think the slowest would be to generate a Google Knowledge Panel? So a week is the fastest. What's the slowest, you would say, to generate a Google Knowledge Panel?

Paul David Truscott: It could... It could take even up to a couple of years, James. It potentially could take that long. You know, in a worst-case scenario, if you've got a very common name or you're up against someone who's very, very high profile. Um, the other thing that people have to, um, think about too is, uh, where the person's famous. So, for example, if you are based in the UK and you share a name with a high-profile person who is based in America and that... The bulk of their popularity is in America, they're not a global, uh, sensation, then it's easier to get your Knowledge Panel to pop in the UK for people searching from the UK. Right? Because Google will infer that if you're, if you're in this country and you're searching for that name, you probably mean this person. Whereas, if you're in America, you probably mean this person. So, it will differentiate based on geography. Um, but if you're up against somebody who's globally famous, or if you've got, as you said, a very, very common name, Paul Smith or John Smith, yeah, then it could take that long. Uh, and, and for most other people, it's somewhere in the middle. Six months or so would be not uncommon, you know, depending on, on, um, what you're actually, uh... What your name is and, and what you're... What you're known for, yeah, what it is that you do.

James Dooley: Yeah, so, so to, to round up this episode, when people are asking how quickly can you generate a Google Knowledge Panel, the answer is at DefineYourEntity.com, the fastest we can generate a Google Knowledge Panel is seven days, generally speaking. If you're also asking how long does it generate to... How long does it take to generate a Google Knowledge Panel for a very, very popular name, it could take up to 24 months. It could take two years to generate that. And there's a lot of different nuances, and the honest answer is, which everyone would hate, it depends. And it really does. It really does depend. Now, if you are looking at how long does it normally take, if at present you have got no trusted sources, I would probably say it's going to take in the region of six to 12 months. And what might need to happen is if you're a person, you might need to write a book or launch a podcast, which would massively help. You might need to get all your social media put into place, getting things like Crunchbase, a consistent bio, being to, to have the clarity and build the confidence around who you are. And, and it would take, I would say, for a person around six months. For a business, it could take 12 months. But it does really depend on what you already have in place. So if someone's looking, the easiest way, if you're asking how long does it take to create a Google Knowledge Panel, go over to DefineYourEntity.com. We have something that's called an Entity Confidence Score. It's a 125-point checklist, which we can look at and we can give you a definitive answer that in your scenario, it might take four or five months. If it's a popular name, it could be 18 months, even two years. If you have everything in place, it could be as quick as a week, two weeks, or even just within one month. We can wrap everything and glue everything together and we can do it at a very, very fast pace. So if you want to know a little bit more about how to generate a Knowledge Panel for a person or how to generate a Knowledge Panel for a business, check out the links in the description. We also have a whole episode to do with the costs involved with generating a Google Knowledge Panel. Paul, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much again, James.

Paul David Truscott: Thank you very much again, James.