It’s not long ago when ranking on top of Google SERPs was a matter of keywords, backlinks, and technical tweaks. SEO has evolved drastically since then, and today search engines like Google don’t show results based on exact keyword matching.
Optimizing only for keywords is the past. This is not how modern search engine algorithms work today – they now work with intent, entities, and context – not just keywords. Semantic search has become the core mechanism of Google (with RankBrain, MUM, and BERT updates) and other search engines.
Modern marketers and SEO strategists should therefore focus on Entity SEO, which is not a frequently used term in this domain. It is an entity-based approach to SEO that allows you to optimize your content for semantic searches.
Building entity maps is an essential process in this strategy that organizes key entities and their connections around a topic. This allows search engines like Google to understand content’s relevance, which leads to improved search rankings.
This blog delves deep into the concept of Entity SEO, building entity maps, and how they help grow your search engine ranking. Keep reading to learn more about better SEO strategies that will help your business stay competitive instead of going invisible.
What is Entity SEO and Why Does It Matter?
Entity SEO is a search engine optimization strategy that is centered around entities – a well-defined and distinct concept, place, person, organization, or thing – not just keywords. This involves understanding the context behind a search query and optimizing for the meaning behind a search term, not just taking it in the literal sense.
Hence, Entity SEO is a broader concept than traditional keyword-based SEO strategies that emphasize optimizing for specific phrases or words that are typed by users. It focuses on optimizing content for the context in which a particular keyword was used by understanding the intent and connections among entities.
Why does Entity SEO matter? As SEO is evolving and AI becomes an integral part of it, clickthroughs are dropping rapidly. In fact, AI overviews have become the hotspot for most information for users, and they barely visit websites underneath. This is causing a devastating drop in web traffic.
Therefore, marketers must upgrade their strategies to stay visible and get traffic. Now, featured snippets, knowledge graphs, knowledge panels, and AI overviews are the sweet spots for website traffic and brand visibility.
Entity SEO is going to be the bedrock of modern search that will influence how Google ranks a page. By leveraging this strategy, marketers can enhance their brand visibility.
How to Implement Entity-based SEO?
Search engines like Google leverage complex algorithms to understand entities and their relationships. For example, now Google is smart enough to make distinction between a fruit and a technology company when someone searches for “Apple.”
This is all the magic of entity-based SEO that enables search engines to make distinctions with clear, contextual information. Marketers needs to focus on the following to implement entity-based search engine optimization.
- Identify the entities: Start by recognizing the entities and mention the relevant ones within the content. It means explicitly referencing and naming the particular entity your content is about. Clear mentioning of the entity allows Google to connect your content with its knowledge graph. For example, mention an entity like “Apple Inc.” clearly and early in your content.
- Contextual relevance: It refers to the surrounding content that provides clarity and meaning to an entity. For example, building content clusters will build more context around a topic. This allows search engines to understand the angle you are covering in your content.
- Build authority: Create comprehensive and authoritative content to build your site’s authority around the entity. Consistently posting high-quality and expert-level content around the entities will enable you to build trust and authority. You should focus on EEAT and topical authority.
- Structured data: Use structured data (schema markup) to define a proper structure of your web page. This provides a clear understanding of different elements on your page, such as products, persons, events, organizations, etc. A proper structure will enable Google to parse the page and help in semantic understanding to appear content in knowledge panels, featured snippets, and AI overviews.
Key Steps to Build Entity Maps for Better SEO Ranking
The following are the key steps to implement entity SEO.
Step 1: Discover the Core Topic
First of all, identify the core topic of your content. After this, you can start with the main subject, like if the content is about “electric cars”, the core entity of this content is “electric vehicle.” For this, Wikipedia and Wikidata are useful.
Step 2: Find Related Entities
Once you have identified the core topic, look for the related entities that connect to the core topic. For example, the related entities for the previous “electric cars” example can be:
- Tesla
- Charging Stations
- Battery Technology
- EV Incentives
- Zero Emissions
There are useful tools like MarketMuse, SEMRush, and Google’s NLP API for this.
Step 3: Map the Relationships
Once you have discovered the core and related entities, the next step is to map their relationships. Identify the contextual relationship between them to understand how they relate. Discover the semantic relationships, for example, ‘Tesla’ is a company that manufactures ‘electric vehicles’ and uses ‘Lithium-Ion batteries.’ You can use graph visualization tools or understand the linking via diagrams.
Step 4: Align Content with Entities
Make updates in your content to ensure it aligns with the entities. For this, clearly mention entities and also clarify their context. Include Schema markup for proper structure.
Step 5: Structure Content Around Entities
Leverage topical clustering to build a semantic relationship between your content. By creating a pillar page for the main entity and several pages for related entities, you will create a semantic hierarchy. Besides, interlinking is crucial for semantic SEO to build relationships between distinct content but with similar context.
Step 6: Perform Optimization
After creating content around entities, the next you can do is optimize them for search engine visibility. Create fact-based and concise content with high-authority external links.
Step 7: Monitor and Refine
Continuous monitoring is crucial to identify any gaps and fine tune your content for greater visibility. You can use Google search console to monitor and refine content.
Elevate Your SEO Strategy with Growthym
In today’s search landscape semantic SEO rule the game that is based on context and entities. If you are still doing SEO the old-school way relying heavily on keyword, your growth might see a downfall. If you want to get consistent growth and outrank competitors, Entity-based search engine optimization is indispensable.
At Growthym, we have recognized this shift and offer modern AI-driven solutions. Our AI SEO services empower your business to increase your ranking by leveraging AI for optimization and workflow automation.
Our services help you optimize content for topical relevance, entity recognition, and AI overviews – not just keywords. We help you build smart content structures, optimize for knowledge graph, implement schema markup and perform other optimization to ensure enhanced search engine visibility. Schedule a call to discuss your requirements.