Entity SEO Explained (With Tactics You Can Actually Use)

Hey everyone. Uh, thank you for being here today. Super excited to be here as well. Uh, I've been doing SEO for eight years. Uh, I work both agency side and client side. I've also worked with big businesses, small businesses, international brands. And I'm super excited to be here today. Today I'm going to talk to you about entity SEO. Um, it's such a big big topic. The reason I picked that topic is that I found that most of the content about entity SEO is more about the theory part more than the tactical and execution part. So today I'll do my best to make sure you understand what is an entity and why it's important, how to incorporate that into your uh SEO workflows and to have the right mindset to approach content moving forward. So before I keep talking about entity, entity all the time, I wanted to make sure we understand we have um an established uh ground of what an entity is. So an entity as per Google's definition is a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well- definfined and distinguishable and uh I would like to stress the or or highlight the concept

that it about being singular. So for example, if you search on Google for book versus searching for books, you get very much somewhat different results. If you search for a celebrity versus celebrities, you get different results again. So an entity can be a person, a place, an item, an idea. It can be uh it doesn't have to be a physical thing. the uh I've seen people define entities as anything that has a Wikipedia page. Uh but uh I think the best definition or the best way to identify an entity is just if it's a noun or not linguistically. This graph you see there, this is something I just um brainstormed every single yellow circle there is a is a is an entity, right? And it this graph shows the connection between entities, right? And and this is a very simple basic example of a semantic network or what we are going to be talking about today as well a knowledge graph. So uh an entity some beauty can be like it can be an entity but beautiful is not running shoes is an entity but best running shoes is not and

uh best running shoes is more about like a list of entities right uh a book is an entity books is not an entity with that said I will walk you through why we need to think of entities in the first place like what happened here like we were doing keyword research and you know it was good so why do we need to think about entities now so actually it's it's the concept Concept of entities is not new. It's just more talked about today. So around 10 years ago or a bit more, the SERs were filled with lowquality results. Things like keyword stuffing, so um copied content, thin content, and so on. A cloaking where the user sees content that's different from what the search engine sees. and the version that search engine sees has so many uh keyword stuffing you know in in the same background the text in the same color as the background. So um Google wanted to move away from those tactics that can be easily manipulated to rank and therefore

not providing users with the best results. So, in 2011, Google launched or released the Panda update. And it said that it's one of the biggest, if not the biggest uh Google update to date. It did take a lot of business websites out of business because it doubled down on any lowquality content and rewarded quality content. While the SEO community was still recovering from Panda, Google stried again with the penguin update and that was more about black hat uh SEO black hat SEO link building tactics. And then in the same year, Google introduced a new concept which is the the knowledge graph, right? The purpose of that was again to move away from tactics that would be easily manipulated or easily used in a spammy way to manipulate search results. And then later on Google released hummingbird which is more about search intent and so on and a lot of things happened ever since. So with the introduction of the knowledge graph Google wanted to be able to help the

user better right to find the right things get the best summary and go deeper and broader. And what does that mean? So in that example when we search for Diana when was Diana born right you you didn't mention any information about Diana who is Diana or like just Diana right? So Google is able to know that you're talking about Princess of Wales, Princess Diana. It's able to get you the best summary and the best answer. And then it's also able to return related entities. If you go, if you look at the bottom, people also search for there's Charles, Queen Elizabeth, Prince Harry, these are all related entities. So that was the one of or or some of the main benefits of having a knowledge graph, right? So basically Google moved from moved to things not strings right. So the concept was no more focus on words but the things right and real world entities. So for example when you search for Robert Downey Jr. very famous actor on image search you'll see that using image image search you'll see there are

some entities returned below that are relevant to Robert Downey Jr. like Avengers, like uh Mark Raphael, like um a lot of things, right? And that shows that these entities are connected for Google. Okay. So, I want to give you an example of how Google approaches text to converts and converts it into a semantic network or a knowledge graph. So, for example, that's a a text a paragraph that can be on any page. Google analyze it and create a knowledge graph out of it. Right? So this is why we basically need to consider thinking about content in a knowledge graph way because when Google evaluates your content, it's also going to use the knowledge graph it has. Google also have uh one of the evidence of importance of entities is that Google has um if you click on those three dots in search in search results about about this result a while back it used to get to return more information about why you are seeing this result. Why was this result selected? So for example, when you search for how to cook fish in the

fish in the oven, you would see for example the first the because obviously the this result has the keywords that you have in the query. But you also see that because this this page has other words or other entities that are important to this query. For example, ingredients, right? Uh recipe, uh bacon. So things that are important to have in the page that are not in the keyword, right? In other words, can you write a recipe without talking about ingredients? It doesn't make sense. You may be able to work around it. So the the purpose is that when you write a a topic, you want to make sure that you mention all the entities that Google think are relevant because it's important for Google because this will make your content more relevant and appear u and and perform better in search. So you may be wondering how does that look like? Let's take an example topic road trip to Florida. So if you're doing uh keyword research as usual, you

would go about it like okay these are the keywords road trip to Florida, Florida road trip road trip L which also stands for Florida but if you're considering entities you would add words like map travel itinerary planner right and then another example 7-day Dubai itinerary keywords would be the usual uh Dubai itinerary Dubai trip itinerary 7-day Dubai itinerary Dubai itinary 7 days but if you're talking about entities again you're going to add some terms or entities as we're talking about that are not part of the keyword like tour Airbnb tourist attraction these terms need to be also on the page and if you notice that keywords they have to they usually have similarities between them right like road trip is in all the keywords right but for entities they don't have the same words as the main topic or as the keywords okay so with the introduction of entities What does that mean for SEOs? It means a few things. First of all, spelling is not

that important. Color and color in the the American and the British um spelling it doesn't really matter. You you don't need to go, oh, this is this has a higher search volume. I'm going to use this one. Because Google knows that both mean the same thing, the same entity. Uh keyword matrix. When we talk about density and how much uh you repeat the same keyword exact match keyword on the page so by shoes online by shoes line by shoes online it's really less and less relevant now it's more about the entire entity as a whole and how much thorough you are when when you cover a topic uh variations Google understands that for example Robert Downey Jr. the actor is the same is same as RDJ which is his uh nickname. Um and then topical authority. This means that you cannot have actual achieve topical authority without being able to have include entities. You cannot have topical authority without

entities because entities help you go go in depth and cover the topic as you should like thorly. Okay. Now we know what an entity is, why we need to use entities, how do we do entity research. There's someone asking, yes, I will show you how you can take advantage of entity SEO to grow your business. I have a case study uh and it's it's really really awesome. So yeah, stay tuned. Um as I showed the first uh way, it's simplest way. First of all, there's a lot of automating automated tools, but there are also other ways you can do that. So for example, you can search for um a keyword or and and and or an entity the your main entity for example and see what other um entities are returned. And there are two things you need to take to into consideration that you need to do this in cognto mode because you don't want personalized results. The second thing is that the the the data returned here or that list are is a mix of search terms and entities. It's not all

entities. So you'll need to like filter through it, note down relevant entities that you want to include in your content. Um, second thing you should try is going to Google Trends, pull related quer queries and uh topics. Again, you'll need to filter through them and find depending on what your entity is, find the relevant entities. Again, collect data from autocomplete and search suggestions. Uh, for example, for swimsuits, um, bathing suits is another entity, right? it it's actually another name for the same entity because Google probably knows that swimming suits is the same as bathing suits. So you can actually use both in the body of the content. Another uh thing you can consider is going to Wikipedia. So for example, if you're writing an article about Florida, you can search for Florida on Wikipedia. Go to Florida page and then analyze it. Analyze it there and find what relevant entities are mentioned there. You can take note of that and these are things you may want to mention in your article. One more

thing or there's still a few things. So also you can use Google knowledge graph to pull relevant entities. So for example search for British royal family or whatever entity you're interested in finding relevant entities for and then you you can click on people also search for and then you'll get a list of other relevant entities. Also this I like this one so much. Google knowledge graph uh search API can use the demo. you don't need to um buy it or anything. And the the you can paste paragraphs or paste just a sentence or whatever. And Google shows you what in that in that text that you pasted what it considers as an entity. And then non web resources as the graph I created I created just off the top of my head. You can brainstorm. You can just sit down. Okay, I'm writing an article about how to bake fish in an oven. what is relev what are relevant entities that make sense to be mentioned on that content okay we know what entities are we know why they're

important uh we know how to find them but how to include them in my workflow like I'm doing SEO today um what should I do to include entities first of all and I feel this is a really good strategy for you to uh do anytime like if you're executing uh a contest the strategy or doing a content audit. It's a great way to start by creating a topical map. A topical map is basically like I created this on on Google Sheets and I did it manually. Um it's it's just a map showing you like the topics and subtopics and how they are all structured on the website. There are diff many ways you can do this. Uh you can do it manually if the website is small. You can use tools like uh screaming frog uh and use the uh tree graph. But then the only thing is that um if the website is too big, your graph is going to look so messy and in Screaming Frog and you're probably not going to be able to use it. So I recommend that you only crawl like 200

or 300 pages at most and then understand like what's going on in the website. Another thing you can do is actually go through the site map and that that's actually one of the very very useful techniques like just go through the site map and understand where are topics and how they're structured, what topics you have and how they're structured. Right. Next, so you have your graph. Uh, okay. Let's say you want to optimize uh Zeon National Park page. So, you have the page. You know, you you'll do your usual keyword research. You pull longtail keywords. Uh, you'll have some information about it. Okay. What about the entities? Again, you'll do use the tools that we mentioned above. Um, image search, uh, entity, Google knowledge graph, and so on. And you'll for example for this example and for simplicity I just picked two entities hiking and cable mountain but there are a lot of other entities that we can include as well. So you end up with something like this. This is again is a very high level. Some people like to include for example a lot of other details for the keywords but just as a high level you'll have okay that's the topic. This is the

main keyword. These are the longtail keywords and these are the entities. Um, and if you notice that bottom of funnel pages usually represent one single entity. Uh, and bottom of funnel pages are usually like conversion pages, service or or um or uh product pages. They usually represent one single entity usually. Um, but what if you're working on something like how to uh bake fish in an oven? This is not an article representing one entity. It's it's it's a guide for a process and it does mention a few entities, right? So, um the reason I'm saying that is I don't want to give the impression that every single page necessarily have one main main entity. Yeah. Once you have this sorted out, you have your uh keywords, longtail entities, and you're optimizing. Once you have the this information and you start optim you're done optimizing your page, the next thing is schema, right? And um one cool

thing you can do or great thing you can do is when you if your page has one main entity, you can use web page schema and then add main entity data, right? And um look for like for example, I'm talking about a park. Yeah, there's a schema.org type specific type for park. So main entity is park and then you add the information there and then you add same as and you mention the Wikipedia page that refers to parks right you want to tell Google this entity is the same as that because Google uses Wikipedia uh in in its knowledge graph right so that is the case if you have one main entity and you have a schema type for it but what if you don't have a main entity or you won't have a specific schema type, right? Like for example, for tour, what if you want to tell Google that this page is also talking about an entity called tour. So, uh this is where you use the other um schema code that I have

on the slides and I I did put put those codes here. So, you are able to you'll get the slides afterwards and you'll be able to like test that and you know experiment with it. So you can just create the type type thing and then give it a name which is tour and then it's same as and then refer to a Wikipedia page the the relevant Wikipedia page representing that entity. So um you have your you updated the content, you added your schema. The last piece of the puzzle is the internal linking, right? Internal linking, there's nothing new here. Uh it's it's same as usual. You'll you'll do your usual uh routine. Uh for every main entity of your website, every entity that means something, you'll you make sure that anytime it's mentioned on your website, it's linked back. You have an internal link to it, right? So for example for the Zeon national park that's a page representing the that entity anytime on any page that Z national park is mentioned you'll link back to that page

right so u internal linking is so important and it gets more important when you're creating entities um I hope that the the process is is no it's not thank okay Olivia that's a really good question entities is not limited only to English language actually entities help Google understand different languages. So it understands for example the like um car in English is the same as uh in in in German for example. Okay, this is like the funnest part for me uh case study and um yeah so this is a case study by Brian Ko and I did add the link to it. It's it's really really good. What happened is that this is a small business, a local business and it's offering some sort of service and they wanted to do SEO for it. So what they do did was really cool. They um did entity SEO and using Google maps and

they identified local entities. So geographical entities. So for example, if you're a like a business, what what are the main landmarks that are near you that are identified by Google as entities, right? And then they started to they took note of all of these uh entities and then they started to incorporate them and sue them into the content. So for example um XY Z contractor which is the client is located in Oldtown Fort Collins which is an entity and then just ahead of Horus Tooth that's another entity and minutes from Colorado State University another entity. So it they incorporated all those local entities in into the content and the it was amazing to see that this website so the to to be very transparent the work done was mainly technical and then entity SEO and you know the the usual on page optimization and entity SEO um and the website received 32% lift by simply adding geographically relevant terms to the page and linking to driving

directions right so they added driving directions from those nearby entities to to the client location and um yep it it's it's a really really good case study because it's so simple but it's so smart as well. Okay. Uh I see someone asked how to rank entities on search. So first of all what does that look like? Um a good example is if if you search for father of SEO you'll have Bruce Clay is like is it shows up. So that's a um a way that what that's what we mean by ranking entities on search. your entity appears for the the the relevant names it have for example right um so how does that happen it happens first of all relatedness how related an entity is this to the search term when you type father of SEO how how much is Bruce Clay or any other SEO related to that that term how often is Bruce Clay mentioned in the

context as the f in on other websites It's as the father of um SEO, right? So that's relatedness. How how how like how much are you known for that? And then notability. So notability is uh it was a it's it's um okay. Um what's the when you search for Apple on Google, don't don't do that right now. Just guess. Are you going to get um Apple the company or Apple the fruit? You're going to get Okay, I'm I'm I'm going to break this out. Let's see. you're going to get Apple the company. Why? Why are you getting apple the company not apple the fruit even though you know apple the fruit is also an entity like because because of notability. So notability is Google is able to compare how important and how valuable an entity is in an industry compared to other industries. So what that mean is that Apple as a fruit versus Apple as a company which is more notable and that's based off a lot of

things like links, reviews, mentions and relevance. So a lot of things. So even though they're not in the same industry, it's not like there are two companies called Apple and then Google needs to decide. No, they are two comp two things two entities called Apple in different industries. So Notability Google is able to compare them across industries and decide this is what the user is actually looking for. This is more likely what the user is looking for. And then the third thing is contribution. So contribution is in the same. So notability is across industries or segments. No contribution is in the same segment or industry. So for in if you assume that there are two companies called Apple, which one is going to be returned or rank when someone search for Apple or if there is two people called Alles, right? how many who who is who's going to be um who's going to show up when you um search for that person and and um that that's that's that's so

contribution and notability are a bit different because as I said not contribution is how much someone is known for a specific thing in a specific segment and then notability is across different industries totally uh last prizes so if you've been and one more thing about contributions is also how often you are referred to or how often you are um mentioned in in the in an industry as well. Prizes is very clear from its name. Did you get any awards? Do you get any prizes? Any notable or any remarkable uh prize is definitely uh would would definitely help you rank. And this is why we always recommend to website owners and anyone who's trying to rank really if you have uh like any certifications, if you have any prizes, any awards, any thing of that sort, you definitely need to mention that on the website and you know add like add the badge, link back, maybe give a brief like write the name of the award or that

sort of thing, right? All these things are valuable. Okay. Uh I didn't mention tools but this is like a super tool that I also added a link to and I encourage you I highly encourage you to uh try it. So basically what you do this tool can take a bul like a a bigger chunk of text and show you all the entities there and this is useful because it helps you analyze your competitor's um pages. So for example you can like whatever pages you're competing against and you like okay I want to like pull all the entities they have there or see what's relevant that I want to mention. That's a really good tool uh to help you do that. And yep, I uh added a list of resources. It's really hard to talk about entity SEO without mentioning KAI and holistic SEO. Uh please make sure to check his website. He's has tons of content there. And um super happy to be here today. And yeah, that's it for today.