On this episode of #serpstat chat, we’ll talk about How (and Why) to Be a Google Entity. Twitter is a never-ending “firehose of information,” with fantastic “Tweet conversations” and dialogues.
| Founder of MyBlogU.com and ViralContentBee.com
Entities are “things.” Think of people, places, events, specific time periods, physical items, etc. (basically anything that is a noun). Google has a big database (the Knowledge Graph) filled with such things…
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)
A1: Google entities are “a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable.” Understanding entities on a page and how they relate on and off the page helps Google determine relevance. The knowledge graph is filled with entities and relationships.
Boyd Lake SEO
A1: A Google entity ID is Google’s perception of you or your business. Ideally, you want it to be the same as how you see it. If google thinks your are an ice cream shop but you a candy store that’s bad
Joey Trend
How to tell if your (your competitor’s) brand is an entity?
A2: Easiest way to tell is the Knowledge graph. Otherwise, do some market research with @Similarweb
Sweepsify
A2: Are they doing what they preach, if its car rental brand, and the products they sell are cars, that makes them an entity
Avast Zumac
The simplest way is to search. In most cases, if G recognizes them as an entity, there will be a knowledge panel for them. You can also look at using the Knowledge Graph Search API (tad more technical :D)
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)
A3: Simply ask, how to become an authority in your field? 1-Be knowledgeable and contribute to open projects. Vice versa, blog about your niche and promote accordingly, by following the guide in the previous chat. Then measure
Avast Zumac
Usually by being included in a “trusted source”, such as Wikipedia etc. Google utilises such 3rd party data sources to build/expand/enhance it’s Knowledge Graph. The specific sites may vary, depending on the nature of the entity (movies vs people etc.)
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)
A3: Structured data for the pros. However, creating a google my business profile is a sure fire way for local businesses.
Joey Trend
A4: That depends on how active you are online. If you get featured all the time, you will become an entity quickly. However, if your business is using GMB, it will become one as soon as you verify your physical location.
Joey Trend
In all honesty, – no idea! All I do know is … I’ve never seen it happen quickly. This may be due to the processes of getting “into” the sites G uses, processing the information, or rolling out updates to the KG. But don’t expect fast!
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)
A4: Are you being of value to the end consumer. If a source marks you as a solution, you’re on your way to being an entity
Avast Zumac
It’s pretty much the same way you would handle any business information. 1) Provide accurate information from the start; 2) maintain consistency across sources. 3) Update stale info (across sources) 4) Utilise (correct) schema on any properties you control
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)
A5. – Feed your knowledge graph w/ data demonstrating that you are a “schema:publisher”; via every article/post you publish on your home entity as “publisher” or “author”. It informs Google what your interests/skills/knowledge/services are. – Publish consistently
Jeannie Hill
A5: Make sure that it’s always up to date. If you change the phone number, address, etc., make sure it matches.
Sweepsify
A6: There are entity extraction tools and APIs for working at scale, though I haven’t used them much. I use G’s Rich Snippet & the http://schema.org validators for testing schema. I use schema generators and visualizers to help formulate & evaluate JSON schema.
Boyd Lake SEO
A6: Rank Math helps entity optimization with their structured schema data features.
Joey Trend
Specifically for knowledge panels or Google’s knowledge graph? None. But there is no shortage of tools to help with entities in general. Named entity recognition and extraction is an established subject for NLP and computational linguistics.
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)