Strategies for Strengthening Entity-Based SEO

Key Takeaways

• Entity-based SEO is the practice of establishing clear context around your brand so search engines and AI systems can better understand your relevance, expertise, and relationships to related entities.
• Strategies such as using schema markup, building contextual pages on your website, implementing a brand outreach strategy, and testing brand perception can all reinforce your entity-building efforts.
• At collystring, we’ve seen success by expanding clients’ “About” pages, incorporating schema markup, and creating hub-and-spoke content models.

The Rise of Entity-Based SEO

Search engines and large language models (LLMs) rely on complex systems for understanding and categorizing information. Google’s Knowledge Graph, for example, is a database that collects significant amounts of data from across the web to tie information together based on what users may be looking for. 

The knowledge graph pulls from many different sources to create one large profile of information about a business or concept. As search engines increasingly rely on semantic meaning and context rather than keywords alone, entity-based SEO helps establish the signals they use to understand and identify your brand.

Establishing your brand as an entity helps search engines develop a consistent understanding of your brand, its attributes, and its relationships to relevant topics and entities. By applying entity-based SEO principles, you can better organize your content, know what information to include, and structure your site so LLMs can easily pull from it. 

In this guide, I cover how we’re adapting to entity-based SEO by creating an infrastructure for our clients with some easy-to-implement strategies.

What is an Entity?

In SEO, an entity is a uniquely identifiable person, place, organization, product, or concept that search engines can recognize, even independent from the words used to describe them. Keywords are strings of text, but entities are search concepts and all of the topics that fall under their umbrella.

Consider an entity as a singular profile with a world of context behind it. When you hear “Arizona,” you likely also think of “the Grand Canyon,” for example. The Grand Canyon is a distinct entity that has a strong geographic relationship with Arizona.

Search engines continually connect search terms to relevant entities to better understand what users may be looking for based on context. For example, a search related to Arizona might surface entities such as Arizona State University or Sedona as relevant topics, depending on the searcher’s intent.

Entities work the same way for brands. Building out an entity in SEO means creating a consistent brand image that is as clear and authoritative as possible so that Google and other search tools can understand your brand and all of the services it has to offer.

Why Do Entities Matter?

Entities tie information together to provide a clear and distinct picture of what your organization or brand is, allowing search agents and LLMs to instantly recognize your brand as a singular entity and present it in the same way anywhere online, regardless of the exact query.

Entity-building helps your brand appear in more relevant search results and AI-generated responses by reinforcing the context in which it should be surfaced.

Benefits you may see for your brand include: 

• Stronger topical authority and relevance
• Clearer connections between your brand and related entities
• Greater visibility across relevant search results and AI-generated responses

Examples of Placements from Entities

Entity-building can strengthen your brand’s visibility and representation across search and AI experiences, including:

• Traditional organic search results
• Local and map results
• Image and product search
• Related searches and question-based results
• AI-generated answers and recommendations

How Do Entities Work?

Entities work by connecting all of the pieces of information about your brand into one singular context to deliver on the user’s query. Search algorithms have become increasingly complex, no longer just relying on keywords and search terms to respond to queries, but instead focusing on a concept as a whole. 

For example, when you begin typing into Google, you can watch the search recommendations attempt to identify what realm of information you are interested in. Then, instead of just offering information for that singular query, Google provides you with information about the potential additional context or tangential information you may want to know next.

SEO professionals and content creators alike can support entities by understanding the process in which search engines use entities:

• Entity detection – Platforms review the search term to identify the entities that may be of primary interest before narrowing down.
• Context analysis – The tools then analyze the query and the surrounding information to identify what entity is being addressed. For example, is the user referencing the Phoenix Suns? Or suns in the universe?
• Knowledge graph matching – Search engines and LLMs match the identified entities against their extensive database to provide information about the topic.
• Relevance evaluation – The tools assess the relevance of the information to the query to determine how deeply the topic is covered by various pages and which information to present. 

Strategies to Start Building Entities

Building your brand as an entity requires a comprehensive, proactive effort to establish its background. We’re using the following strategies to build entities and expand brand presence for clients.

1. Ensuring Clear Brand Positioning Across Your Website

Clear brand positioning across your website is important for establishing a consistent identity that search engines, LLMs, and humans alike can use to form an accurate perception of what your brand is about. LLMs and AI tools pull information from various pages on your website, so presenting a consistent brand image is key. 

Ensure that all of the following are clear across your site without contradictions:

• Areas of expertise 
• Brand story
• Unique value propositions
• Services and products 

Maintaining clarity helps these tools understand who your brand is, what it offers, and in what situations it provides relevant insights. This ensures LLMs and search agents can discuss your brand with uniformity and relevance.

2. Improving and Expanding on Pillar Pages

Since your website is your brand’s biggest footprint, you should expand and organize all of your website pages in a manner that makes it clear who your brand is and what it has to offer. Developing content to support brand positioning, service offerings, and unique value propositions across web pages is crucial.

An “About” page is one of the easiest first steps to expand your site’s presence. If you do not have one already, or if it is not as expansive as it could be, this is a good opportunity to provide more information about your brand story, values, and any other relevant context.

Building out service pages also matters. A robust directory of services and subservices allows the algorithm and AI tools to identify what offerings are quintessential to your brand, where your brand exhibits topical relevance, and emphasizes the foundation of your brand’s entity.

A hub-and-spoke content model is valuable for this. For example, create key services pages and build topic clusters surrounding each one with comprehensive content that reinforces the main service. Then, link between each of the main and sub-services to establish your brand as an authority on these topics.

3. Building a Positive Online Presence

LLMs and search engines learn about your brand from sources beyond your website, making a strong presence across relevant third-party sites and platforms an important part of entity-building. Earning credible mentions and references can reinforce your brand’s authority, expertise, and relevance across the web.

Outreach strategies like link-building, digital PR, earning media, and producing articles or quotes for other sources can help increase your digital footprint and establish your brand as an authority online. The larger the footprint your brand has, and the more that other sites demonstrate trust in your services or insights, the more search engines and other tools view your site as worthy of citation.

4. Include Schema Markup

Using schema markup helps provide additional context for your site in a way that is easy for LLMs to understand. Schema markup is a type of structured data added to a website’s HTML that tags and identifies your content.

This markup allows search engines and LLMs to understand and extract your content to present it in AI overviews, featured snippets, or rich results. By being mindful of what information you mark up, you can make it easier to identify and surface for LLMs, as markup is easier for these tools to read than natural language. 

Examples of Schema markup include: 

• FAQs
• Local Business
• Product
• Service
• Website

Implementing schema markup can provide quick technical SEO wins by giving search engines additional context about your content and the entities it describes. It can also help reinforce how your site and its content are understood across search experiences.

5.   Test Brand Perception in LLMs

Testing brand perception in LLMs can help you see how your brand is already viewed as an entity. I recommend testing this before making any changes to your website in order to see how well LLMs capture and understand your brand already, and then again after implementing changes to see how the perception may shift.

Simply search for your brand and see what pops up in the AI overviews or prompt an LLM to tell you what it thinks about your brand based on the information it finds on your website and around the web.

These prompts can help you see how your brand is perceived: 

• “Tell me what you think of this brand”
• “Are there any inconsistencies across the site?”
• “What would you point out about this brand that is vague or unclear?”
• “Within this industry, would you recommend this brand? Why or why not?”
• “How does this brand compare to others in its niche?”

Answers to these prompts can help you understand how your brand may be perceived by people who discover it online and how LLMs may interpret where your brand is relevant. By identifying gaps or inaccuracies in that perception, you can refine and clarify your brand signals to help ensure it is accurately identified and represented.

How We’re Adapting at collystring

We’ve begun making subtle updates to our clients’ websites to improve brand consistency and recognition across LLMs. We’ve leaned heavily into entity-building to substantiate our clients’ websites and fortify their online footprint by implementing schema markup, producing expanded Content, and more.

Some of our implementations have included: 

• Expanding the “About Us” page for an event planning client to better represent the brand and its history and make it more clearly aligned with its values.
• Quickly adjusted the metadata on a homepage for a branding agency client to specify what they do and where they are located in the title tag.
• Creating an “About” page for a staffing technology client who previously did not have one.
• Expanding FAQs for a law firm client to establish authority in their field. 
• Adding Organization data to each of our clients based on their industry (such as LocalBusiness).
• Creating a hub and spoke model of content for multiple clients to build topical authority around their key services and subcategories.
• Conducting link-building outreach for an experiential travel client to expand their online presence.

These small changes have helped improve clients’ visibility across AI search experiences while strengthening their brand authority and broader search presence.

Embrace Entity-Building and a Jump in Organic Traffic with collystring

Small, subtle changes can go a long way toward establishing your company as a recognizable entity. Creating a consistent brand experience and expanding your online footprint helps ensure that your brand is capable of being recognized across search engines.

Our SEO team at collystring is prepared to help you identify gaps on your website that could expand your entity-building strategy and make your brand more prominent. By increasing the use of structured data across our client websites and expanding the information on vital pages, we’ve been working to make our clients stand out more. 

Reach out to us to discuss a free SEO audit and a six-month roadmap for your brand.