What is an entity? A simple definition would be “a thing or a concept,” but it extends to include people, organizations, objects, and even concepts like website design, a job profile, or a recipe. Google defines an entity as something that is singular, well-defined, distinguishable, and unique. In English grammar, it is defined as a noun—a place, person, item, idea, etc.
Why are entities important for SEO? Over the years, search engines have evolved. With NLP and machine learning, search engines are now trained to understand entities, which are at the core of search. Search engines understand entities and provide results based on the meaning of the phrase, with entities as the focus. For example, if you search for “Movies in Manhattan,” the search results would return all the movies currently playing in Manhattan. If search engines were to rely completely on keywords and not entities, the results might include the movie “Manhattan,” which was produced in 1979. But if you search for “movie Manhattan,” the result would be the 1979 movie instead of all the movies playing currently in Manhattan. The ability to understand entities and produce results according to the search phrase makes entity-based content creation and entity-based SEO effective and different. With Search engines turning to Entities to provide results, Search engine optimization industry in general is moving away from the concept of Keyword based SEO to Semantic SEO.
While keyword-based optimization is still important, entity-based SEO is more effective in comparison. The rise of semantic SEO emphasizes building topical authority in your content, and at the core of semantic SEO and topical authority lie entities.
How do search engines understand entities and provide the right results? Search engines rely on contextual relevance to understand entities and their meanings. The content surrounding the entities provides a deeper meaning to the entity. When you are talking about movies in Manhattan in your content, the surrounding entities would be theatres/cinemas playing these movies, the times these movies are shown in each cinema, etc. But when you are creating content on the movie “Manhattan,” the surrounding entities would be the cast, plot, directors, producers, etc. Based on the surrounding entities, search engines provide the results.
Apart from contextual relevance, you can also create structured data for search engines to understand the core entities of your article. Your article can also be strengthened by creating relevant content related to the main entity to support the article. This helps establish authority and expertise on a particular topic or entity.
The Importance of Entity-Based SEO
With changes to search engine algorithms, their ability to understand concepts and the meanings of words and phrases makes keyword-based SEO increasingly obsolete. Over time, search engines will rely more on entity-based SEO than keyword-based SEO. With search engines able to understand concepts and entities, entity-based content creation will gain prominence. Creating entity-based content improves search engine results and helps provide relevant content to your audience. With entity-based SEO, your audience will have a better user experience not just from Google results but also from your content. With NLP in play, you can also expect more entity-based content to appear in voice search, as the content aligns with voice queries.
How to Create Entity-Based SEO Content & Optimize It
- Understand Your Primary Entity: Your first task is to understand your primary entity. What are you writing about? If you are writing about web design, your primary entity would be web design. If you are writing about responsive web design, your primary entity is “responsive web design,” not “web design.” It’s easy for content creators to be carried away and dilute the value of their entity with more content on web design rather than responsive web design on a page. This could happen with any topic. For instance, if you are talking about dog training but dilute your content with more general content on dogs, you lose focus. Be aware of your main entity and create content centered around it. Do not dilute your content with other entities or concepts.
- Create Surrounding Entities: Create content surrounded by relevant concepts. When you write about web design, surround your main entity with relevant entities related to web design. For instance, responsive web design, static web design, dynamic website design, fluid design, UI/UX design and development, HTML, CSS, and Figma are all related to web design. Use these entities while creating content related to web design. These core entities are often related to LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing), which are keywords closely related to a particular keyword, in this case, the entity.
- Determine if You Need Multiple Pages to Cover the Primary Entity: Often, a single page is not sufficient to cover a concept. A concept like cars, agriculture, farming, or web design cannot be covered on a single page. Create multiple pages to cover sub-entities of the primary entity, surround the primary entity, and link to the primary entity page. The primary entity page will often be referred to as a pillar post or pillar page in this case. This creates a spoke-wheel structure around the primary entity, surrounded by sub-entities related to the primary entity.
- Link Relevant Pages Based on Context and Conceptual Relevance: While linking from the primary entity page to all the sub-entities creates a navigational link to the sub-pages, creating contextual links adds value to the linked page. A page should only link to another page if the content is relevant to the topic discussed on the linking page and more information is available on the linked page. Artificially linking to a page that is not relevant has unpredictable consequences in search results. Search engines may become confused between the source page content and its relation to the target page if the context is varied. For instance, a page about dog food linking to a dog training page makes no sense. Search engines will take this into account but find no relevance in the content, often ignoring this link in terms of link value or, worse, taking it into account and showing poor search results for unrelated queries, creating a poor user experience. Link to relevant pages and ensure that the links are contextually and conceptually related.
- Create a Structured Markup for Your Content: Search engines analyze content and create a map of your website structure and your entity-based content based on your website’s core structure and links based on context. This may not always align with your structure, especially when content creation is in progress. You can assist search engines by creating structured data for each of the articles and linking articles conceptually with the help of structured data. Though this is not a guaranteed method to get Google to understand your content and its mapping, schema markup is known to help search engines understand the core entities of your content and your site structure based on the importance of each page.
