What Are “Knowledge Panels” and How Can They Benefit Your Business?

Why do your Google searches sometimes return additional information on the right-hand side of the page? Have you ever wondered how that information gets there? Or if you have any control over what’s presented? Or, perhaps most importantly, if it can benefit your business or organization?

This grouping of information is called a Knowledge Panel. The screenshot above is a search for one of our clients and shows basic information like company name, logo, photo, address and phone, a link to Google Map for directions, link to the website, and even the ability to send this info to a phone.

This is not only helpful to those searching for your company, but it is a great way of “spotlighting” your company. Your information literally stands apart from the search results. And the best part is they are free.

So how do you get a Knowledge Panel for your business?

Knowledge Panels appear when people search Google for things like a business, person, or even recipe. Though there is no guarantee a panel for your business will come up, there are recommended things you can do to increase the chance of a panel appearing for your business—as well as controlling the information that appears:

1. Claim and edit your local business profile through Google My Business.
2. Publish rich and accurate information about your business on your website.
3. That information needs to be formatted as Structured Data called JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (“SD-JSON-LD”).
4. Google wants to provide the best search experience for their customers, and typically rewards businesses who do this.

Structuring Your Data for the Knowledge Panel

First, let’s talk about Structured Data (“SD”), which Google defines as “a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content.” In other words, you are not just providing data, such as your company name, in your coding that will show on your website page, but you are classifying this data specifically so that Google is told: “this is our company name.”

The JSON-LD part is simply the format this structured data takes, a format that organizes and connects this data so that it can inter-operate at the web level (as opposed to operating only on your website). In the case of the Google Knowledge Panels, it allows Google to know what information to pull and display in the panel.

Furthermore, this format is flexible in what types of data can be organized and displayed, as well as provide multiple uses. For instance, the JSON-LD data can be structured to display a law firm’s general information when that firm is searched for, but also display each of the firm’s attorneys when searches are done specifically for them. The overall firm information can still be shown, but differing information, such as a direct phone number or a regional office address for a particular attorney can also display:

Knowledge Panels Benefit a User's Experience and Your Business

The tangible benefit is easy to see: increased visibility for relevant Google searches through the inclusion of a Knowledge Panel vs just a plain text search return.

We, at Animus Rex, find SD-JSON-LD so powerful that when Google first introduced the use of it for these panels, we went back and modified all of our client’s websites to include a basic automated universal version—and we continue to do this for every site we build. That baseline is just the start. At a client’s request, we can customize this automated structured data further to create even more relevant Knowledge Panels associated with site-specific types of pages.

Knowledge Panels can greatly benefit your business by enhancing a searcher’s experience and directly focusing their attention on your company.

Are you doing everything you can to maximize Knowledge Panels for your benefit?

Have additional questions? Contact us. 

Thanks and be well,
~Your Friendly Animus Rex Team