How can you leverage Google's Knowledge Graph to gain more visibility in the SERPs?

[PCSEO]

How can you leverage Google's Knowledge Graph to get more visibility to your website when someone conducts searches for your brand name, branded terms or non-branded terms?  I've read about having a Google+ page to trigger the KG for brand name searches, but that is not working for us even though we have a verified Google+ page that is linked to our website.

[MatthewBarby]

It's a tricky one with linking up your Google+ page to your website - make sure you're using rel=publisher. You can also markup your site further by using Schema.org data (which I'd highly recommend). Having said this - I've noticed that on some of my websites Google will pay attention to this and some they won't. make sure you check in the rich snippets testing tool first though.

[Dr-Pete]

Agreed w/ Matthew that rel=publisher is worth setting up, but KG is a tricky animal. On the one hand, Google is trying to do entity analysis, which may depend on similar factors (to a point) as traditional SEO, just from a different perspective. There are many cases, though, where brands that clearly are entities have no KG listings or just have an G+ box.

For example, Amazon, Apple, and Wal-mart have no KG listing. Clearly, these are huge brands. K-mart and Taco Bell have G+ brand boxes. Some small local businesses (like Gene's Sausage Shop here in Chicago, which I used in my MozCon talk) have full KG boxes.

Google does seem to tie some KG boxes to local one-boxes ("authoritative one-boxes"), which are the stand-alone pin entries that come after the snippet (and not in a pack or "near" result). That implies to me that there's still a preference to show KG boxes for business with a single brick-and-mortar location.