How to customize your Search Profile in Google

If you've ever searched for an organisation or person using Google, you might have noticed that a few of the top results show up with extra information in the sidebar. This additional information often contains things such as logos, social profiles and even phone numbers.

For example, let's say that you searched for "Google" in the search bar (crazy, I know!) - you might be presented with something similar to the image below.

All of this is possible because of Google's Knowledge Graph. It is a system for organizing information about millions of well-known "entities" such as people, places, and organizations in the real world. The best thing about it is that you can now customize your own data in the Knowledge Graph and have your results show up just like the example above.

In order to customize your own data, you simply need to include a bit of structured data markup to your site. The easiest way to do this is to use a bit of JSON-LD markup format which is an open standard for embedding structured data in your web pages. For example, if I wanted to update my data in the Knowledge Graph for this site, it might look similar to the code below.

That's it! In order to test if your markup works and is well formed, head over to Google's Structured Data Testing Tool and paste in your markup to check that it is correct. If you'd like to see this in action, simply view the source of this very web page and you'll be able to see the markup for this blog.

The next time that your web page is crawled by Google, the markup will be picked and the data added to the search results. It is important to note that your changes might not show immediately, as it takes up to a week to appear.