Entities and Entity Search: The Future of SEO?

Ed Pronley

April 19, 2022 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

Understanding which search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are most important for your content marketing campaign is a hard task; especially when the guidelines change year after year. Luckily, there’s an SEO tactic that seems to be here for the long haul: entity search. But what is an entity, and how do you create one? And why does it even matter? Good news, it’s possible you’re already practicing entity search and you don’t even know it. With a few purposeful tweaks to your content marketing strategy, your SEO performance could skyrocket.

What Is an Entity?

Google defines an entity as “a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable.” There’s a lot that can fit into that definition, but that’s kind of the point. Search engines, like Google, are constantly trying to develop better practices for interpreting search queries and displaying the most relevant websites to the user. Entities help with that, and the singular part of the definition can include many things, such as:

People
Places
Things
Organizations
Companies

The other half, “unique, well-defined, and distinguishable,” is what’s most important for search queries, and it’s what Google focuses on the most.

Why Should Marketers Create an Entity?

Google sometimes uses another word when referring to entities: topics. This is helpful because that’s a term you probably already recognize. For example, let’s say someone wants to find a marketing company for their business, so they type “marketing” into Google.

Image via Google

As you can see from the screenshot, that didn’t exactly give them the results they wanted. That’s because this entity or topic is broad and so much information can fall into that bucket. But isn’t the point of using a search engine to find exactly what you’re looking for as easily as possible? Let’s say what that person really wanted help with was social media marketing. Typing that into the search box would give results much closer to what they were looking for.

But how does this affect marketers and business owners? If you’re the owner of a social media marketing company, how do you let Google know so you can appear in the search results? What way can you inform Google you have specific, distinguishable services to offer? By building and establishing an entity.

How Do You Build an Entity With Your Content?

When attempting to establish an entity with your content, the best place to start is by focusing on what your business offers and what industry topics your content should cover. Going back to the previous example, if you run a social media marketing company, it’s helpful to create content around subjects like “social media metrics to measure” and “how to get more social media engagement.” Creating content on these subjects helps search engines identify the entity topic you’re targeting but also understand exactly what your company does.

It’s also important to stay as locked in as possible on your entity focus. For instance, a social media marketing company wouldn’t write an article on how to change a flat tire. Though that information might be helpful to readers somewhere, they’re not within your target audience. That could confuse both people and search engine bots, and damage your SEO efforts and SERP rankings.

If you’re looking for the right entities to target, request your free content analysis report from CopyPress. This report can show you gaps in your keyword and SEO strategies and help you find key focus topics for your entity that your audience wants to see.

“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”

Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

What Is Entity Search?

Entity search is a way that Google and other search engines deliver better results to their users. Humans have a unique way of communicating. We use language and sentence structure to interpret meaning and express ideas. Search engines do this too, but instead of language and sentences, they use structured data. Structured data allows machines and search engines to understand the meaning and determine the topic or entity of your content more easily so they can display it to the right people.

Entity search is a way for bots and crawlers to better understand human language, syntax, and search intent so they know exactly where your content fits in the search engine results page (SERP) or for which queries to match it. Keywords are helpful, but they don’t function in the same way that entities do. This was something we saw in the “marketing” vs. “social media marketing” example. “Marketing” is a keyword, while “social media marketing” is an entity. Experts agree that targeting entities is the future of SEO.

How Should I Adjust My SEO for Entity Search?

If you’re currently practicing quality SEO—like researching keywords, improving readability, and generating backlinks—that’s great! Now, add a bit more targeted strategy to your campaigns. That means reviewing your content and determining search intent to provide more value to your audience. It also means analyzing how each piece of content connects to your business, and if each one fits into your chosen entity. Adding entity development strategies to your SEO campaign helps boost your content marketing efforts and allows you to stay up to date with the future of search engine optimization.

Looking for ways to build an entity effectively and ensure you’re following SEO trends? CopyPress has a team of content marketing experts who create high-quality content that helps businesses rank higher in SERPs and attract their target audience, all while matching their brand, industry, and style. Schedule a free call with us today to see how we can boost your content marketing campaign with expert SEO knowledge.