How Jason Barnard’s Branding Tips Led to My Million-Pound Success | Brand SERP

James Dooley: Hi James here and I'm joined with Jason Barnard from Kalicube and today's video is about some branding advice that I received a few years ago from Jason Barnard that has actually led to one of our businesses doing millions extra in revenue. I didn't realise the power of the brand SERP until these outcomes started to come along and it didn’t just happen once. It's happened several times. I'm going to run through a case study of how just on one job alone it made us half a million pound. But to start with Jason can you just explain to people very briefly who you are, what is the brand SERP and the power of brand SEO and branding online.

Jason Barnard: Yeah great question. Well I'm Jason Barnard, the Brand SERP Guy. I focus on the search engine results pages for brand names, people's names or corporate names. I understood years ago that the people searching our name are bottom of funnel. They're the people who are most important to your business. In this case it's purchasing from you and they will Google your name before making that final decision when they're researching the last couple of choices. What's been interesting is this has been a conviction of mine for the last 12 years and I've seen it work for Kalicube. But James is one of the first people who's told me a story with actual numbers where intentionally and proactively improving what people see when they Google his name and his company name has driven the bottom line to the tune of millions. So tell me about that, I'm interested.

James Dooley: So the branding advice that you gave me that has made me millions was to do with a company called Soft Surfaces Limited. People can Google it and go on Companies House. We've grown the business from a million to ten million in revenue per year and it builds playgrounds and sports pitches in the UK. We have an amazing company that builds playgrounds and sports pitches throughout the UK. Until we met you all my testimonials and reviews were via colleges, head teachers at schools, universities sending an email saying how amazing we’d been. We might then say could you put it on letterhead paper as a PDF that we could send out to customers when people were asking about case studies and reviews. Never once had I heard until I spoke to you that you need to take everything offline and put it online. And that's exactly what we did. We went through everything. All positive reviews, all jobs where we had before, during and after pictures. We put case studies together. Everything that was offline we put online. We wanted to shout and scream that we are the best in the UK at doing what we do. Now this specific job was for Bradford Council. It was a sports pitch for a private school. There have been many others but this one job sticks out. It was a £540,000 job. We were doing the groundworks, the tack coat, the surfacing, the fencing and the floodlighting. And there were five companies we were up against on price. All five companies were good companies and we were all relatively similar on price. We knew it was going to be a tough job to win. We got down to the last two companies. It was us and another company. Now this other company actually does more revenue than us. We’ve built up to ten million. They do anything from fifteen to twenty million a year. They're a bigger player than we are at doing the work. However they hadn’t spoken to Jason Barnard and they hadn't put offline online. What happened was the head teacher of the private school had two quotes side by side. There was negligible difference in price. Both quotes looked good. They met the £550,000 budget. There was only a few thousand difference. So the head teacher had to make a decision who to go with. After we won the job I asked the head teacher just out of interest why they chose us. They said they spent 30 minutes online checking our company out and checking the other company out. Not what we were saying because we’re both going to say we are the best. They wanted to see what others were saying. Other schools, other colleges. They said literally after 30 minutes it was night and day. They had to go with us. That all came down to our branding and our reviews. Everything we’d put online delivered the message that we might not be the cheapest but we’re the best value. Look at all these other jobs and see what others say about working with us. The other company was great offline and they’re a great company. Side by side it’s a flip of a coin who's better. We both do a great job and are similar on price. But we won that job and many others because of our branding. The branding advice you gave me has literally made us millions in extra revenue. Some of these are high ticket jobs. People need to understand it's not just about E-E-A-T signals for Google. This helps your conversion rate. If you're an SEO agency charging £5,000 a month and you're going up against another SEO agency charging £5,000 a month, who does the customer choose? You're both the same price, delivering similar services. They're going to go online. They’ll Google you, your company, you personally. If you can improve that brand SERP to be more positive it can be the difference between winning and losing jobs. You always said this is bottom of the funnel. When they're ready to buy, if you can win at the 11th hour it can double your revenue. If your brand SERP is negative you’re losing all the 50/50 battles against your main competitor. That’s why brand SEO, branding and the brand SERP are so important.

Jason Barnard: That's brilliantly said. I don't think I can add anything to that.

James Dooley: Sounds good. Anyone who doesn't have a positive brand SERP or wants a knowledge panel, I strongly recommend hitting up Jason Barnard at Kalicube. Leave a comment and let me know what objections you've got to improving your branding. You're not going to get a return on investment next week. You're not going to get an enquiry next week. This is a long term strategy. But if you're looking to sell assets or recruit people who will compare you side by side, the benefits are huge. Check the link in the description. There's a link to all the benefits that come with brand SERP, branding and brand SEO. If you’ve not got a positive brand SERP hit up Jason Barnard at Kalicube because he's definitely changed our business for the better. Hopefully he might be able to change yours.