How to optimise for Entity SEO

Key Takeaways

• Understand your audience: Optimise for Entity SEO by moving beyond demographics and using psychographics to tailor content to your ideal customer’s needs and interests.
• Build a knowledge graph: By mapping the connections between topics in your niche, you showcase your comprehensive understanding to search engines.
• Create insightful content: Create high-quality, informative content for niche topics and user queries. This establishes you as an expert in your field.
• Link it up: Utilise internal linking to connect related content on your website. This improves user experience and helps search engines understand your information architecture.
• Schema power: Implement schema markup to provide search engines additional context about your content and entities.

Entity SEO is the key to Topical Authority

Instead, Entity SEO is the future of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). With advancements in AI, search behaviour will transform, making the search ecosystem more complex and search traffic more dispersed.

Traditional search engines like Google won’t be replaced; instead, they will coexist with AI-powered alternatives.  To navigate this shift, SEOs must change their focus and understand how to optimise for Entity SEO, which emphasises optimising for concepts and connections rather than just keywords.

Consequently, optimising for Entity SEO can help you achieve topical authority – an essential element of any AI search engine strategy to improve AEO visibility and get featured in AI tools like Google’s Overviews.

However, transitioning to Entity SEO isn’t a simple keyword swap. It demands a strategic shift for SEOs, requiring them to delve deeper into understanding a topic and crafting niche, authoritative content. In this article, we explain how you can optimise for Entity SEO and prepare for the future of search.

7 steps to optimising for Entity SEO

Have you ever wondered why Wikipedia is almost always at the top of Google search results? Or how a quick Google search for Tom Cruise’s birthdate leads you into a Wikipedia vacuum, where you land on a page about the actor and 3 hours later you find yourself reading about his hometown?

The answer is that Wikipedia is a great example of Entity SEO. Its knowledge base is so vast, that search engines like Google reward the platform for its insights.

In 2012, Google launched Knowledge Graphs, with a focus on things, not strings. Their mission was to understand specific topics and user intent.  For instance, if someone searches for Gemini are they looking for the star sign or Google’s AI chatbot?

Consequently, the launch of Knowledge Graphs was the start of Google wanting more data on specific topics known as entities. The more they can understand what people are searching for the better the results they can provide.  That’s why Wikipedia is so powerful. It gives so much information on a topic, you could spend days sifting through it.

However, when optimising for Entity SEO your focus shouldn’t be to become the next Wikipedia. As a platform, it’s too vast for most companies to replicate. Instead, when optimising for Entity SEO you should focus on being an expert in your niche by answering as many of the questions your target users may have.

In the following steps, we outline the key steps you need to undertake to optimise for Entity SEO.

1. Understand your niche and customers

Imagine you provide online bodyweight fitness classes using an interactive platform. However, fitness is a vast topic meaning, building authority can take a significant amount of time.

Therefore, perform a psychographic analysis first. Unlike demographic analysis, psychographics looks at people’s behaviours and beliefs. Consequently, when done ethically, you can begin understanding who you need to target and what your content will be about.

Moreover, focus on understanding your niche. Ask yourself, what would I like my company to be most famous for?

2. Build a strong foundation of entities

As a result of your initial analysis, you may discover your target customers are people who lead busy lives and don’t want to buy gym equipment.

However, the typical SEO approach would start with keyword research and write content with a high volume of searches. Yet, this means you cover many topics without adding depth of information.

Conversely, when optimising for Entity SEO your first goal is to break your expertise into components known as entities. To do this think of entity sets as categories that group related topics. For example, for our online fitness platform, the entities could be:

• Fitness goals: Muscle building, strength training, endurance training
• Workout types: HIIT, yoga, strength training
• Exercises: Squats, push-ups, planks
• At-home equipment: Stairs, chairs, tables

Strategically targeting these entities on your website builds a strong knowledge base, facilitating a deep dive into specific topics.

3. Create a knowledge graph to optimise for Entity SEO

A knowledge graph maps the relationships between your entities. For instance, the online fitness platforms knowledge graph might connect the primary entity “muscle building” to entities like “protein meal plans,” “stretching” and “lower body exercises.” This showcases a comprehensive understanding of muscle building to search engines.

The relationships are important to demonstrate because they show search engines that you have a deep knowledge of a topic. For instance, if you only wrote about weight training to build muscle, it would only give part of the answer. Moreover, it’s not helpful to everyone, because people are at different stages of their fitness journey.

Therefore, you need to build these relationships to optimise for entity SEO. For our online fitness platform, a knowledge graph could look like this:

• Primary entity: E.g. Strength training for women
• Connected entities: E.g. Healthy meals for vegans/carnivores etc, cardio exercises, body fat percentage, motivation, women’s hormone and sexual health.

4. Optimise for Entity SEO by building topical authority and creating insightful niche content

Once you have your knowledge graph, you must create niche content. Therefore, you will need to understand how to optimise for topical authority.

Building topical authority is the main objective of optimising for Entity SEO. It helps tell search engines that you are an expert in your field.

For example, imagine hiring a personal trainer (PT). You tell the PT you want to sprint quicker. However, the PT proceeds to tell you about the work they have done with weightlifters. Would that fill you with confidence? Probably not.  

Therefore, topical authority is about building on the entities you have built in your knowledge graph by providing various in-depth articles and insights.

For example, if you want to write about HIIT training, you must go beyond basic explanations. Instead, you should also write articles about proper form to prevent injuries, discuss HIIT warm-up and cool-down routines, and provide meal plan recommendations for optimising HIIT results.

This is why AI content doesn’t work. It has to be insightful, which is often impossible with AI-generated content because it’s generic and riddled with errors, which can lead to a loss of trust.

5. Use an entity linker to optimise your website structure

When optimising for Entity SEO, it can be easy to get lost. After all, you are now looking to build a giant web of information all related to your chosen entities.

Therefore, ensure you organise your content. This is where entity linking can help.

Entity linking is the process of identifying entities in your content and linking to another article to offer more insights. In short, you use internal links to connect your content with other articles and entities.

For instance, when you go onto Wikipedia, one article will include many different links enabling you to navigate deeper into the topic. This helps search engines and users move around your website and better understand the information available.

6. Leverage schema markup and optimise for Entity SEO

Schema markup can be a powerful tool to optimise for Entity SEO. By implementing schema markup, you can provide search engines with additional context about your content and entities.

Schema markup, also known as structured data, is a set of code that search engines use to read, understand and categorise your content.

However, the type and extent of the schema you use will depend on the content you have. For example, if you write an opinion piece the schema won’t be as extensive. This might include details like article name, author, and date published. In this situation, the schema is helpful but not as critical.

Yet, it can be much more powerful in other situations. For instance, the online fitness platform may run events such as live fitness classes. Therefore, it may use an event schema like the date, time, location and description. This can improve the platform’s visibility in search results for relevant searches. 

7. Keep on top of your evolving knowledge base

As you develop your optimisation for Entity SEO, you will need to keep up with your expanding knowledge base. However, there are tools available that can help.

For example, InLinks uses natural language processing and AI to analyse the content across your website and identify entities. It can then turn those entities into a knowledge graph and optimise your internal linking.

If in doubt, start small in your Entity SEO optimisation efforts

Optimising for Entity SEO can become complex. You are looking to build an entire knowledge base of information to send positive signals to search engines that you are an expert.

However, it’s easy to get distracted. That’s why it’s important to focus on finding a specific niche. In the example used in this article, the online fitness platform could very easily start writing content about everything related to fitness. However, unless you have a large team of content creators, it will be difficult to cover every aspect and achieve topical authority quickly.

Therefore, it’s important to be laser-focused. The more focused you are on a specific topic the more likely you are to rank well for that content.