Knowledge Panel: the Knowledge Graph arrives in SERP

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As we have seen, Google increasingly shows information about people, places and things through special boxes called Knowledge Panels by the Mountain View giant. According to the Californian company, these boxes are used by users to quickly learn and delve deeper into a certain concept. For desktop searches they are generally shown on the right section of the results, as shown in the image below.At the beginning the graph was only shown for desktop searches as the dimensions of the boxes were not compatible with mobile. Fortunately, this problem was circumvented by changing the layout of the knowledge panel. Try repeating the same previous search using your smartphone this time.

As you can see, now the same notions are reported from mobile Special Data but this time they are displayed within the scrollable tabs.How Google's Knowledge Graph worksKnowledge panels, i.e. the representation of the knowledge graph in SERP, are created automatically by Google. Each time the search engine fishes out the information it deems most popular and impertinent. Even if each entity is represented in its own way, there are some elements that recur systematically :title and brief summary of the topicimage of the person, place or thinga long description of the topicsalient facts, such as the date of birth or the address of a placelinks to social profiles and websiteOver time, graphs have evolved to incorporate increasingly engaging information and features . For example, today we can find on our SERPs the ranking position of our favorite team, the next episodes of our favorite TV series and also the latest releases of the bands we love.How to be included in Google's Knowledge GraphBeing included in the Knowledge Graph is not at all easy, especially for companies, and there are no official guidelines on the matter.





However, there are optimization strategies and activities that can increase the chances of incorporation such as:take care of the About Us page carefullyhave a Google My Business profileuse structured data correctly on your websiteproduce and promote valuable contentbe active on social mediaobtain significant coverage on third-party, authoritative and independent sources (in short, backlinks and/or quality citations)be present on Wikipedia and Wikidata.orgThe last point will seem rather daunting to you but, as we will see later, it is becoming an increasingly less stringent requirement. Wikipedia aside, most of these activities will certainly not be a surprise to those who do SEO, optimizing content is their daily bread. It seemed bad to dismiss everything with the usual " Content is king " so let's try to get to the heart of the SEO strategies to implement.