Using reverse engineering, an International education organization in Shanghai was able to rise to the first position in Google’s carousel growing its brand visibility by 80% YoY.
Background
An inbound marketing team was frustrated that despite following best practices their client’s were not included in Google’s carousel.
The carousel is a feature that appears at the very top of Google search results page for certain queries in a list-like rotating image display.
Because of how this feature influences brand visibility and search queries for educational organizations, it is imperative to be included.
The Solution
By analyzing the school profiles for those displaying we were able to find a pattern between:
- Wikipedia infobox
- Wikipedia categories
- Google knowledge graph card
- Google My Business listing
Once each of the above were aligned the educational institution became the top position in the carousel within 24 hours.
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When analyzing a carousel result, look at each entity that is ranking:
- What is the knowledge graph card category?
- What source is the knowledge graph card pulling a description from?
- Does the wikipedia infobox main category match with the knowledge graph category?
- Is this the category that you want to be ranking for?
- Does the location in the wikipedia infobox match the address in the knowledge graph card?
- Does the location match the identifier in the search query?
- Does your target query have a wikipedia category?
- Would it be ranking in the top 5, if it exists and is a factor?
- Is that category included on the wikipedia business page?
- Is there a wikipedia page displaying in search results?
- Can you link it to the wikipedia business page you’re trying to rank?
- If you dislike your image in the carousel, edit the GMB cover photo.
- …or if you just want to show the client a fun magic trick.
The Results
Since its inclusion in the carousel, the educational organization in Shanghai has achieved an 80% increase in brand visibility.
This effort has aided in a n additional 17,800 impressions and 8,730 clicks to the website in the past 12 months for the specific brand name query.
This process was duplicated for 6 international organizations.
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