Brick-and-mortar SEO – A Comprehensive Guide to Brick-and-Mortar SEO

The SEO entity is a new concept full of opportunities, in which solid methods still need to be developed. This process includes techniques, tools and theories for using entities and optimizing your website. If you hear the term "SEO entity" or have any confusion, you will learn more. When you take advantage of professional SEO services, you can take advantage of them perfectly.

You can find many articles on online entities and their role in the evolution of web indexing. Still, many business owners struggle to understand it clearly. They don't know how to use entities to improve website performance.

This guide provides an overview of what SEO entities are, how Google uses them, and how to use them to improve your SEO. Here, you'll also learn why you need entities to improve the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and strengthen your website framing and traffic acquisition methods.

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What is an SEO entity?

SEO is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of website traffic through search engine results. Since its inception, the SEO process has focused primarily on keywords to drive traffic.

While SEO entities focus entirely on entities, not just keywords. It's a fairly simple process, but requires a basic mindset development.

So, what are keywords? In SEO, keywords consist of single or multiple words that users enter into search engines such as Google and Bing. When search engines came along, the concept of keywords laid the foundation for natural referencing techniques, the motivation of which was to ensure your site's visibility in the SERPs for one or more specific phrases.

Here are the two main characteristics of keywords: Ambiguity

A keyword can refer to different topics. For example, the keyword "cookie" may refer to edible cookies or information sent by a web server when a web page loads.

• Specific language

In most cases, keywords are specific to a language. For example, the keyword "lavadora" in Spanish corresponds to "machine a laver" in French and "wash machine" in English.

Now, let's discuss clearly what an entity is.

Typically, an entity is a single, well-explained concept of something that can be linked to a knowledge graph.

A keyword is just a collection of letters specific to a language. At the same time, an entity is meaningful, independent of the language and synonyms that specify it.

In the SEO world, an entity is any topic that can be linked to a search engine knowledge graph, such as the Google Knowledge Graph.

Wikipedia acts as a basic, reliable seed set for knowledge graphs. To be precise, an entity is any topic you can attach to a Wikipedia article page rather than a category or disambiguation page. To optimize your on-site and on-page SEO, you must focus on which basic entities are used to help search engines understand the inner meaning of your site's content.

You can use other types of entities, such as you, your company, and your brand, and you can link to other knowledge graphs (such as Linkedin and Google My Business) without a Wikipedia page. However, optimizing these entities will only improve your reputation, not SEO.

Common SEO entity mistakes

Users make several mistakes on the web about SEO entities. You need to get out of any confusion and be clear on this one.

The following are commonly encountered errors in SEO entities:

Mistakes Encountered in the SEO Literature

You need to use entities to optimize your website content.

The screenshot above reflects the text analysis results of the Google NLP API. This suggests that Google found entities such as "player", "best basketball shoes" and "basketball" when analyzing basketball text.

So, what errors are encountered here? "Best basketball shoes" certainly doesn't refer to an entity, as there is no Wikipedia page on the subject.

"Basketball shoes" is not an entity either. It is a synonym for "Entity Sneakers".

The term "Nike" refers to the entity "Nike Inc." Google NLP correctly detected that the entity created a synonym, the word "Nike", but pointed to the Wikipedia page for the entity Nike, Inc.

Remember, Google only lists keywords in its natural language API interface. These entities correspond to the Wikipedia links associated with each word.

Other errors encountered

The examples given by Wikipedia on its page related to named entities are very confusing.

Now, let's discuss terms Google uses, such as entities and topics.

Different terms used by Google

The king of search engines i.e. Google, use entities in many of their web services, mainly Google Search, Google Discovery, Google Trends and Google News.

In contrast, Google rarely uses the word "entity", preferring "subject" in English or "subject" in French (pictured below).

All specified "subjects" are usually entities. So you need to pay attention to how Google names components; however, you probably know.

Read on to learn how Google uses them.

Why and how does Google use entities?

When looking at SEO entities in detail, you need to know why they are important to the Google algorithm and tend to replace keywords slowly. One of the obvious reasons is that Google uses entities to connect global information, regardless of language.

Entities make it easy to understand the meaning of this information and the user's center of interest.

When Google detects an entity contained in a webpage, the search engine can link two websites that talk about the same issue in different languages. Personalization through entities goes well beyond Google Discover.

But before using entities, you should know the main advantages of implementing them.

Key benefits of entity-based SEO

Entity-based SEO is more granular, granular, and relevant than keyword-only SEO. Advances in automated natural language processing and the latest search technologies such as digital assistants and chatbots may increase the length and complexity of search queries. Even without quantifiers, search engines can customize their results based on early entity context and knowledge.

As a marketer, you get more specific searchability thanks to entity-based SEO. If you make sure your brand is a concrete entity, it can help you add tons of keywords that might not have been available before. For example, a user can search for Nike by tennis shoes or running shoes.

Which Google services use entities?

Google claims to find and index entities including all pages and several major applications published on the web. In defining all these applications, we can say that Google utilizes entities to evaluate and categorize web pages, establish relationships between entities (and therefore, between pages), and provide better query responses for internet users.

The following are Google services that use entities:

Google Knowledge Graph

According to Google, Google Search uses a knowledge graph to help users discover information easily and quickly. Knowledge graphs contain most real-world entities such as people, objects, and places. Wikipedia dumps refresh them every night.

The implementation of the knowledge graph helps Google to display knowledge panels for entities searched by online users. The search engine also refines the results of its other services based on user interests.

Google search

The use of entities helps Google personalize search engine results based on user interests and search history. Many focus on entities (Google Hummingbird, Google Rankbrain, and Google BERT) without carefully considering details about Google's algorithm updates.

Google Hummingbird is an update that helps Google change the way it manages Internet user queries by moving from a keyword (string)-based approach to an entity (thing)-based approach.

Google Rankbrain helps Google better respond to queries they've never encountered before. It is implemented using SEO entities and an AI layer.

Google BERT implements natural language processing (NLP) to understand search queries, evaluate web page text, and find entities and relationships that connect them.

Thanks to these continual advancements, Google can now rework requests from internet users, and possibly the content of web pages. Google's search suggestions increasingly include entity suggestions.

The first four recommendations are entity recommendations. If you search for "french" without using suggestions, you'll get all kinds of ideas in the search results. However, when you use the suggestion box, you get a surprising list of results because it has no errors (e.g. no tennis tournament or revolution suggestions). The results clearly show that Google only shows search results based on entities, not keywords.

Google find

Google Discover provides results based on the user's interests (that is, the entities that the web pages used contain). Google builds an "entity layer" (a graph of all user interests) from these pages.

Once a new article is published on the web containing one of these areas of interest, Google may recommend it to the corresponding user in Google Discover.

Google Trends

Google offers the following two studies for its Trends tool:

• Search by "search terms", i.e. keywords

• Search by "subject", i.e. by entity.

How does Google recognize entities?

According to research conducted by Industry Reports and InLinks, Google finds, on average, only 20% of entities in text. They mainly use the Google NLP API to provide results.

However, research has shown that in many cases the Google API does not directly identify the main entities in the articles it provides on Google Discover. So you can think that Google implements various techniques to determine which entities a page contains.

The NLP algorithm is the same as its API, it detects about 100% of people, organizations, and places, but very few things or concepts.

Page factors, such as Schema.org markup to detail the entities the page contains. Off-page factors, such as entities detected in other web pages, act as contextual entities and contribute to an extra step of disambiguation.

How to upgrade your SEO strategy to brick-and-mortar SEO

When you add an entity focus to your current SEO strategy, it helps you prepare for the latest algorithm updates. Knowing which SEO entities your business connects to and your brand as an entity itself will become increasingly important in the years to come.

Follow these tips to upgrade from your previous keyword-centric strategy to an entity-centric strategy:

List your business in appropriate directories

To get the most out of brick-and-mortar SEO, list your business in relevant online directories. For example, businesses use Google My Business (GMB) as the data source for the Google Knowledge Graph.

Yelp and other listing platforms can also help you build strong and domain-rich backlinks for your brand and well-known entities. In 92% of Google web searches, Yelp appears in the top five search results.

Since listing sites may change from one location to another, you should do thorough research when deciding where to list your business. Make sure to choose a website with high Domain Authority (DA) to improve your search engine rankings.

With this strategy, businesses listed on these platforms can create entities and start connecting with proprietary keywords.

Value brand building

Brand building is a key strategy for brick-and-mortar SEO. You need to bring all your offline brand presentation strategies online. Make sure to implement the latest strategies to create a unique and well-defined identity for your brand.

Since your brand reputation is so important in SEO entity creation, you should prioritize online reputation management. Add only the keywords you want to rank for. Identify and fix any issues that may arise in the future.

Consider your interface management tool implementation

Interface management is becoming a key SEO entity. Keep in mind that the associated silo approach can adversely affect search engine visibility. This can happen even after good keyword rankings that can significantly impact some businesses.

Focusing on relevant keywords won't help you get ahead of the competition. Business owners and marketers should turn their attention to SEO entities. You should immediately start implementing those strategies to ensure your content is connected to the entity.

Bottom line

SEO entities can be a great technique for communicating brand relevance and context online. Entities help build a larger picture of your content targeting context and ideas, not just phrases or words. This helps users go beyond convenient keyword research strategies.

Marketers have more opportunities in the future to add depth to their brand development strategies by prioritizing brick-and-mortar SEO.

Hopefully this comprehensive guide to SEO entities has helped you get a clear understanding of the concept. So what are you waiting for? Take advantage of it to significantly grow your business online.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an SEO entity？ An entity in SEO is anything that can be properly specified, such as a term, place, or project. Qualities that identify a legitimate entity include uniqueness and distinguishability. Entities don't have to be tangible to exist. What is entity-based search?

Google suggests additional context for users, which has the dual benefit of speeding up searches, by showing popular possibilities and prompting users for more information (if none of that is what they need). Entity-based SEO helps people find the information they need by using context rather than keywords. While they're an essential part of any SEO strategy, keywords don't accurately reflect how people search for content.

What are entities in Google?

According to Google, an entity is "a single, unique, well-defined and distinguishable object or concept". Names, types, properties, and relationships to other entities are often used to describe these entities. The purpose of Google entities is to organize data, and entities are useful building blocks for data organization. Concepts, colors, and sensations are examples of abstract nouns; they are little different from concrete nouns in terms of organizing information. So Google treats them like real people and things.