Your Company Can Appear in the Knowledge Graph

Have you ever done a Google search and seen a bunch of information about the company in the search engine listing? This is called the Knowledge Graph. With a little code, your company might be able to show up in this way, too.

Why do you want to show-up in the knowledge graph?

If someone searches Google for your brand name, what do you want them to see? A bunch of links or a featured set of information? Which of these options do you think will make the biggest impression on your customers?

Showing up in the Knowledge Graph gives your company credibility. In a sense, it looks like Google is vouching for your company. People trust Google. This trust might extend to your company, too.

How do you feature your company in the knowledge graph?

The short answer: schema markup. You need to send Google information about your company in a certain way, for Google to understand it. Once you send Google that data it can decide to show it in the Knowledge Graph. Please note: there is no guarantee that Google will show your website information in the SERPs, even with properly encoded schema data. But unless you send them this data, they will not show this in the SERPs.

Pro Tip: if you use Yoast’s SEO plugin on your WordPress website, it can add most of the following information for you.

If you’re not using WordPress, I’ve created a Google Spreadsheet that will create the Schema markup you’ll need to use in order to make this happen.

Show your company’s logo in the SERPs

The most simple way to show-up in the SERPs is by adding your company’s logo. To add a logo to the Knowledge Graph you need to have a logo image saved on your website and provide that URL in the schema.  I’m just speculating here, but I believe that logo needs to be hosted on your domain, for Google to render it in the SERPs.

If you’re using the spreadsheet I created, you just need to enter the URL in the second green box, after your homepage’s URL, to get the schema.

Show contact numbers in the SERPs

Not only can you show your logo, you can also provide contact numbers in the SERPs. This does more than make it easy for people to reach you. It also makes your Knowledge Graph box larger and stand-out more.

If you’re using the spreadsheet, put the information in the green cells. Not all these cells are required. Please read the notes for each cell, so you know what you need in each one. For instance, only certain values are accepted in “contactOption”. Also- if you want to have more than one phone number appear in the Knowledge Graph, take the information provided within the { and } and separate them with commas.

Show social network accounts in the SERPs

A third way you can grow your listing in the Knowledge Graph is by listing your social network sites. At this point Google is only accepting the following social networks:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Instagram
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Myspace
• Pinterest
• SoundCloud
• Tumblr

Using the spreadsheet, enter the full URLs for each of the social networks that you want to appear in the SERPs.

Show Site Search in the SERPs

Another way of showing up in the knowledge graph is to allow Google to provide a site search box- right in their search results. To do this you first need to have the ability to search your website. Most modern CMSes have search features that make this easy.

Once you know your website can be searched, you need to determine the internal search query string for your website. To do this,

1. Use your own site search for a word (any word, really).
2. You’ll see a bunch of gobbledygook in the URL. You’ll see a lot of ? and & and =. These are the parameters. Look for the word you searched for in this URL.
3. Once you find your word look for an = right before it. Immediately before your = is a letter or word that is preceded by either a ? or an &. This letter (or word) is your search parameter.  For example, given the test word of “pizza”:
   1. In http://example.com/search.php?query=pizza the search parameter is “query” because it is separated from “tacos” by an =
   2. In http://anotherwebsite.com/?s=asf64as6dfas6df46&q=pizza&u=aweiocaw465afawfe54fawe65f4 might be intimidating but if you find “taco” you can see that the search parameter is “q”
4. There might be a lot of other information in your internal search string. If we want to see a site search in Google, we need the most simple form of this search string. To find the most simple form try to remove everything from the URL except for a ? followed by your search parameter (the letter or word) followed by an = and then your search word. Enter that URL into your browser to test if the simple search string gives you the same search result. To revisit our examples:
   1. In http://example.com/search.php?query=pizza is already the most simple search string because there are no other parameters in the search URL.
   2. In http://anotherwebsite.com/?s=asf64as6dfas6df46&q=tacos&u=aweiocaw465afawfe54fawe65f4 you should try to remove the other parameters and replace the & before q with a ?. This will give you http://anotherwebsite.com/?q=pizza which might be your most simple search string- but you’ll have to test it to make sure.
5. Once you have the most simple internal search string possible, you can give this to Google (without your test word).

Of course, all this work might be in vain. Google only allows the biggest websites to have site searches in the SERPs. Most websites won’t get this feature (even if they can figure out their most simple search string.

If you’re using the spreadsheet to install this schema, you have to use the Website tab. This also needs to be within a separate <script> tag than the Organization markup. Just fill-out the REQUIRED fields with your information and test the script before adding it to your homepage.

Here’s a link to the Organization and Website Schema Spreadsheet, again.

If you have any trouble with this, or my directions need some clarification, please feel free to ask in the comments, below.