James Dooley Podcast

James Dooley
Triggering a new knowledge panel is all the rage and a lot of people are asking the question of how do you trigger a new knowledge panel. Today I’m joined with Chris Walker, the founder of Legit, who successfully does this week on week. Chris, it’s a pleasure having you. I want you to jump straight in. I don’t need to explain who you are and what you do personally because a lot of people watching this are going to know who you are. So, how would you go about triggering a new KGM ID, which stands for knowledge graph machine ID, which then leads on to you getting a knowledge panel.

Chris Walker
Yeah, thanks for having me. The first thing is to make sure that you exist. You have to do the basic stuff. You need a brand website. I’m going to answer this as if you’re a person trying to get a knowledge panel rather than a business, because that’s more my experience.

A personal brand website helps a lot. You need a home base. Even if it’s not your main business, you should have something like jamesdooley.com. I have chrismwalker.com. You also need the main socials, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever, and you need to post to those regularly. It sounds like day one marketing stuff, but a lot of people try to buy services and skip that part.

It’s important to get it in place first. Not just set up the accounts, but make sure they are not a ghost town. Use consistent photos everywhere so Google can associate you with it. Everything we’re doing here is telling Google that this one person, this one site, this one entity is the same thing. We’re trying to tie it all together.

Then there are certain sites I’ve found to be very effective, like Wikidata, and other wiki properties like Wikialpha. Those make a big difference and it seems like Google pulls from them.

This one is a bit of a hack, but if you can get an IMDb page, that’s really big for triggering a knowledge panel. There are different ways to do it. The way I got mine was years ago I donated $200 to an independent movie and they put my name in the credits as a special thanks. Later I realised IMDb has a category for that, so I added myself as a special thanks, it created a page, I built it out, and that was one of the big movers for my knowledge panel.

There are other ways too. Craig has a legit one because he’s been in TV series and things like that. I’m not willing to go to that extreme.

James Dooley
A little hack on that. I’ve launched eight new podcast series. This podcast is going to go live and it’s also going to go on IMDb. You’ll be a guest on this episode and each episode gets put onto IMDb by us, then you get attributed to it, with the write up and links back to your profile. There’s something called the star meter within IMDb which strengthens your profile. If you can get on other people’s podcasts, and they list the episodes on IMDb, that can create a profile for you.

This year, in 2026, I’m launching eight podcast series. A big part is every episode gets put on IMDb, so anyone who is a guest can get an IMDb profile created.

Chris Walker
Now that you mention it, I’ve seen that. Do you know Paul Andre?

James Dooley
Yeah. The SEO show.

Chris Walker
I saw he was getting them that way as well. Definitely try to get an IMDb page. There are at least three different ways to go about that.

Then you have to go through the process. It can be a pain to claim it. You have to log in and claim it. I screwed it up the first couple of times and eventually got somebody else to do it for me. It’s a lengthy process. It’s not hard, but it’s tedious and there are a lot of steps.

James Dooley
With regards to that, you’ve got one for Chris N. Walker, because there are loads of different Chris Walkers. You went down that route.

Chris Walker
Funny story. I wanted Chris Walker because that’s my name, but there was a one hit wonder in the 90s. When you Google Chris Walker, he shows up. Whenever I do SEO talks, I tell that joke. I messaged him once and thanked him for making my speeches more entertaining. He replied and said he was glad to help. Chris Walker is actually very awesome.

James Dooley
That’s cool. You’ve got it for Chris M. Walker. You mentioned social media. Would you recommend any software, like n10 or make.com? If someone didn’t want to post every day on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, are there any AI agents people could use to keep profiles warm, or do you not recommend that?

Chris Walker
Yeah, you can. I don’t do that myself because I’d rather have something valuable. You can automate it or hire somebody to do it for you. I haven’t tried it specifically to get a knowledge panel, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.

James Dooley
You’ve said core social media profiles need to be done, which is marketing 101. The issue is some people have Facebook or Twitter for personal use, not business use, so they might need to create a second one for business.

Then in schema markup, when you mentioned jamesdooley.com, the terminology for that branded profile is the entity home. The entity home is where you wrap the schema markup with who you are and what you do.

Would you recommend people protect properties like chrismwalker.tumblr.com and chrismwalker.blogspot.com and grab the web 2.0s for branding and reputation management?

Chris Walker
Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know how much impact it has, but there’s no reason not to. It’s simple to do. You’re giving Google more information.

Our job, whether it’s knowledge panels or SEO in general, is to make it easy for Google, search engines, and now LLMs to understand things. The more you can feed it, the easier it is to understand and the more likely you get results.

I forgot to mention schema. That’s a big one. You put it on the main site to tie in all your profiles and say, this is me and these are mine.

James Dooley
What about press? Do you do anything around different facets of you, like awards, promotions, guest posts, press releases, to make more noise around who you are and what you do?

Chris Walker
Totally. I’ve done tons of press releases over the years. I’ve done them so much that it didn’t occur to me that’s part of it. Whether it’s a new product, a new YouTube channel, you can always find an angle, and you should probably do them every 90 days.

Some of those links will rank on their own and some will stick around for years. There’s a Yahoo Finance one I did in 2020 and it’s still around now, almost 2026 as we’re recording this. It’s crazy how long they can stick around.

James Dooley
That also supports personal brand SERP and reputation management. If you own the properties on page one, you control how you present who you are and what you do.

Going into 2026, people need to look beyond the corporate brand and invest in personal branding. There’s one thing you can never sell and that’s Chris M. Walker. You can sell Legit, but your personal brand remains. Not enough people invest in themselves.

Chris Walker
You can take that and apply it to whatever you do. The example is MrBeast. He made himself famous and now he can stick his name on a chocolate bar or an energy drink and it takes off because he puts his face on it.

Another thing with personal brand is, sorry, I forgot where I was going with that.

James Dooley
Having a personal brand helps with new investments, attracting staff, and lots of other benefits.

Chris Walker
That’s it. The number one direct response traffic channel for Legit is my personal brand. There’s no bigger axe I can swing for quick sales and quick traffic. I think it’s our number one traffic source. When I post on my personal Facebook it gets a thousand times the engagement that the company page gets because people like the face. I’m not particularly good at it, I’m kind of an arse sometimes.

James Dooley
No, you are good at it. You’re playing yourself down.

Chris Walker
That wasn’t intentional when I started, but it worked out. I can make a post and drive sales. There is a downside though. You can get too tied to the brand and it can make it harder to sell because it’s tied to you.

James Dooley
On this video we’re talking about triggering knowledge panels. Business owners can use this for succession planning. If you want to sell a business, you can build up the profiles of a new CEO, COO, CMO and slowly move away. That’s my last question. How important is it to trigger a knowledge panel for people in 2026?

Chris Walker
You mean people like your employees?

James Dooley
Yeah. Or business owners. Getting the owner to have a knowledge panel.

Chris Walker
It’s incredibly important. I don’t really do clients anymore, but I worked with insurance agencies and wedding photographers and I would always get the owner to get one. Some fought me hard on it because they’re introverts or something, but it gives huge trust.

People will search you and decide if you’re worth working with. Having it there is one of the biggest conversion factors. Even if it’s nonsense, people see it as important. It’s like YouTube play buttons. That’s social currency.

Beyond SEO, it isn’t that hard. It takes work, but the ROI is tremendous.

James Dooley
Anyone watching, we hope you like the video on how to trigger a new knowledge panel, also known as a KGM ID. Both myself and Chris Walker have managed to do it.

It’s important for clients to get the business owners or CMO set up as an entity. If they do not have a KGM ID, they’re not a known entity. A lot of people talk about entity SEO, but if they don’t have a KGM ID, they’re not a known entity within the knowledge graph. You’ve got to connect the nodes and entities together. If the founder has a knowledge panel, that connection matters.

Chris Walker
One more thing. If you want one for your company, you have to get one for your founder first. Some people say they want one for the company, but you need one for the founder, so you might as well do it.

James Dooley
I think it’s vitally important for C level staff, CEO, CMO, COO. I think they should all have knowledge panels. The business can have one for the corporate brand and then separate ones for the Google Business Profile locations, because that is about the location, not the brand.

The trust signals matter. Even connecting a Google Business Profile to a website increases trust. It’s not if you should get it, it’s that you need to get it. It’s mandatory now.

I think this is a big reason affiliate sites got hit with the helpful content update. The affiliate site doesn’t have a KGM ID and there’s nobody behind it. Even if they have an author bio, if that author isn’t a known person, it might as well be a fake name. Getting that person a knowledge panel and connecting them to the brand matters. Agencies can sell this as a service and charge three or four grand for it.

Chris Walker
Yeah, for sure.

James Dooley
Anyone watching, check out the links in the description. There will be links to the Legit services Chris mentioned, like Wikidata, wiki setups, press release services, and guest posts. There are lots of freelance services on Legit.

Chris, you’ve done an amazing job elevating people and helping them sell services. Make sure you head over to Legit and check the links in the description. Chris, thanks for being on.

Chris Walker
Thanks for having me.