Knowledge Card
Knowledge cards are a grid of small information cards across the Google SERP 1. Knowledge cards are only shown for well-understood entities 2 in the Google Knowledge Graph.
Most knowledge card grids are dominated by photos and images.
Most knowledge cards are basic facts, such as a person's birthday or a citation index for scientists.
The Role of Knowledge Cards in KGO
Google knowledge cards in your brand search results are a sign of Google understanding your entity well. As usually about 50% of the cards are images, you want to provide many images for your entity. Furthermore, you want to associate the images through alt-text and schema markup with the entity.
If you can trigger a Google Knowledge Panel 3 and Google Knowledge Cards for your entity, you will dominate the SERP for your brand query.
Knowledge Cards vs Knowledge Panel
Knowledge cards span across both columns of the SERP. In most cases, the knowledge cards are above the knowledge panel and present visual information such as images. Yet, knowledge panels are always in the right column of the SERP.
It is highly desired to trigger knowledge cards because they dominate the SERP for the entity.
Footnotes
The search engine results page, or SERP, is the page you see in response to a query into Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine.↩
An entity is a "thing" that is well-defined and has an identity. For example, a person, a location, a concept, or an event can be entities in a knowledge graph.↩
Knowledge panels are information boxes that appear on Google SERP when you search for entities (people, places, organizations, things) that are in the Knowledge Graph↩