SEO entities to boost your topical authority

/ What are Entities?

Entities are actually quite simple to understand, but some people confuse them with "keywords," and they're not the same thing.

While keywords are specific terms or phrases users type into search engines to find relevant information, and which SEOs study so they can place them in strategic spots like the meta title, meta description, headings and body copy, entities are specific concepts that represent unique people, places, things or ideas, which search engines like Google recognise and understand. They don't depend on the exact words used, but on their meaning.

In this article, I'm going to try to explain what entities are so that you not only grasp the concept, but can also take action to improve your topical authority and search rankings.

The idea behind working with SEO entities is that, instead of optimising by focusing only on keywords, your approach is based on these entities, which allow search engines to better understand the context and the relationship between concepts. Working this way, your optimisation aligns much more closely with modern search engines, which process and understand information through advanced NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques.

If you're up for it, let's dive in !!!

As I was saying, technically, entities refer to specific people, places, things and concepts that have a unique identity and are recognisable by search engines.

To put it simply, an SEO entity is anything that is unique, well-defined and distinguishable.

If I say "The Great Wall of China" to you, you've got that unmistakable image perfectly placed in your mind, right? And if I say "Star Wars," I don't need to give you any more details. Now pay attention. If I mention "John Mueller" in this article, you'll identify him quickly without a second thought — but without even realising it, your mind has run an extremely fast process to identify that person in the context of this article. Through the relationship between the meanings of all the entities included in this article, you knew I wasn't talking about the American political scientist.

but rather about "our" John Mueller from Google, right?

Even though this might seem like a simple process, your brain has unconsciously mapped out the relationship between all these entities to determine the "correct version of John Mueller" I was referring to.

• SEO Entities
• Keywords
• Search engines
• Google
• Topical authority
• Search rankings
• NLP (Natural Language Processing)
• Search Engine Land

All of these concepts, through their meaning and the relationships between them, give you context. Here's a document on the types of entities. You also have this information straight from Google itself.

See how simple it is to understand entities? In reality it's quite a bit more complex than that. But what I want is for you to grasp the idea.

Now that you're clear on this concept, it's worth knowing that Google tries to understand these entities and their relationships in much the same way you just did, or the way any human would. So I don't need to spell out how beneficial it can be for your SEO optimisation to work with entities instead of focusing on keywords.

/ SEO optimisation with entities?

Optimising with SEO entities requires researching concepts related to a topic, not so you can slot them in like keywords, but so you can address them in your content. Once you've mapped out your "Topical Map" and have the ideas you're going to work on to improve your topical authority, you can pair each idea with the concepts you're going to cover, sources, and anything else that can help search engines and users situate themselves perfectly within the context of each article.

You can use tools like Blinpete to find relationships between Wikipedia entities. It's important to remember this isn't about adding words, but about drawing ideas from the topics to be covered, of course including these concepts in our content.

To analyse the entities your competitors use in Google, you can use a Chrome extension. It was created by Fede Gómez and is now maintained by Jose Gris. Here's the link. Google also has an API for entity extraction.

/ Structured data and SEO entities?

In Google's own words: "Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, this could be the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on."

If you look closely, in this very same Google documentation, they point out that the main advantage is that search results can be more appealing to users and encourage them to engage more with a website.

Some time ago, SEOs used structured data to gain better visibility in the SERPs through what's known as Rich Snippets. Over time, we've come to understand that the advantages of using structured data go far beyond that. It allows search engines to better understand a webpage's content, and this has a direct relationship with a website's topical authority. But let's start with the basics.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data?hl=es-419

Structured data can help you a lot with your topical authority strategy.

By this point, there's no doubt that SEO entities and structured data have a relationship you can leverage to convey your topical authority to search engines.

If SEO entities are tied to how search engines recognise content, structured data serves the same purpose. In the image above you'll see Google saying: "Google puts a lot of effort into understanding the content of a page. You can help us by including structured data on a page."

Although context helps Google, structured data can be decisive when it comes to disambiguating concepts.

You can use Google's structured data testing tool. You can access all the information about structured data at Schema.org, which has its own validator. Study carefully which types of structured data you can use and make the most of them for your content.

/ Internal Linking

Internal linking will also help search engines understand the context and the relationship between the different pages on your site. Another use of the Topical Map is defining internal linking strategies for the relationship between URLs and entities. Here's how to design a "Topical Map".