What Is Entity Search And Its Importance In SEO? The Semalt Answer
Entity search has become a gold mine for businesses and brands that understand how to use it.
With Google shifting its focus to topic APIs and releasing more comprehensive intent learning algorithms such as MUM, PaLM, and LaMDA2, we need to step back and look at the overall evolution of SEO and how we can track its changes.
In this article, we will be exploring entity search and how you can benefit from it.
Why Do We Need Entity Search?
Before we explain what entity search means, it's important you understand why they are needed. Why do search engines need entities, and what problems do they solve?
The simple answer is that search engines have always needed to evolve to provide the best and most satisfying answer to every search query.
In the early days of search engines, search queries were a basic set of words, actually, everything we were searching for was keywords. Today, search queries have changed to a point where over barely 50% of searches are from computers. Users now search using voice, images, and a string of words that needs to be "UNDERSTOOD."
This change has become challenging for search engines because they need to be able to understand the intent and context behind the user search query. Search algorithms that were designed to match content to keywords in search queries have become obsolete.
Search engines are only able to cater to the change in users' needs by updating their algorithms to understand the semantic meaning of search queries.
What Are Entities and Entity Searches
An entity could be any noun. It could be used to refer to a person, object, location, concept, or a numerical value that a search engine understands without mistake. For example, let's look at a query like "what is the cheapest hotel in Manhattan?"
Search engines must be able to answer this question in different languages and understand all the different ways that question can be asked.
To do this, the search engine breaks down search queries by identifying their entities.
What: a concept= a question qualifier
Cheapest: numerical expression= lower
Hotel: organization
Manhattan: location
By understanding these entities, search engines are able to understand the query and the intent behind it.
Once the search engine is able to understand the query and intent, it finds pages that have been indexed with relevant information around the "entities" in the query.
Search engines do this using various data sources that provide raw and accurate results. The process of searching content and using AI to fish for the most relevant result is called entity / semantic search.
How Does Entity Optimization Work?
Entity optimization combines three of the most holistic concepts. Simply put, it answers all three Ws.
What:
Understanding "what" tells you the central idea in a search query and the intent behind a user's search. It sounds like keyword optimization, but this goes deeper. Because the intent of a user can be searched in an infinite number of ways, search engines see these many variants as subcategories under one topic.
Websites that rank on the first page do so because they've been ranked among the best source of information on that topic.
Why:
Understanding the reason behind a query makes it easier to identify what content caters to the user's need. Are they seeking information? Do they need directions? Do they want to transact?
Search engines are able to identify all the possible entities relevant to your content by using a combination of the What and Why. Websites can create a content strategy that creates content around the umbrella topic and interconnect them, creating a network of relating entities in a website.
How:
Presentation is just as important as the information stored in your content. If your audience expects a playful page and your website has no pictures or videos, it may not have the expected effect.
Common ways to optimize content structure using short sentences, paragraphs, images, headings, questions and answers, and videos.
Aligning Content Strategies with Search Engines
Search engines are evolving, and content marketers need to evolve as well. Searches can now be made from screenless devices, and search engines must think and react like human beings, so they come up with accurate results.
With the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, search engines decode a chain of words (sentences and paragraphs) or query and create a list of the best matches. This is where entities come in.
Deploying schemas and markup entities within your content allows search engines to understand your content in an unambiguous way.
How To Develop An Entity First Strategy:
- Step 1: identify the schema vocabulary.
- Step 2: Determine the schema gaps
- Step3: mapping schema
- Step4: find market opportunities and potential sizing
- Step 5: map topic gaps
- Step 6: identify content opportunities
- Step 7: content enhancement
- Step 8: keep improving the web page.
Advantages of Entity SEO
Search engines have evolved beyond keywords and now understand queries by understanding the relationship between entities.
Entities help provide the most comprehensive source of content ideas. When the page structure has been optimized for entities/topics, the page focus is to provide a network of pages that provide quality and complete information about the topic.
SERP results referencing this topical page are most relevant across all types of search queries.
Other areas to rank in SERP. We've had many cases where Google Discovery or Google Trends appear in results based on entities.
Longer steady growth. Optimizing content around semantic search or entities often results in long-term growth.
Improved KPI performance. Pages will see stronger impressions, engagement, and traffic value.
SERPs with rich results provide traffic that is more likely to convert. This is because the content seen is directly relevant, and it satisfies the user's intent.
Zero Click searches
Marketers are beginning to worry that providing too rich results will lead to no click searches. There are reasons to be worried, but when you weigh the pros and cons, being on the first page has many benefits, which outweigh the perceived determent of websites that don't get clicked.
In fact, entity optimization can cause you to experience better CTR from SERP.
What Entities Should You Focus On?
The easiest way is to think of entities that relate to your content and create two categories for your entities.
The first category should be for entities that can help reduce ambiguity, such as product details, description, contact address, type, color, numerical value, etc. To guarantee that you are optimizing for the right entities, you should review the Schema.org classification for your website.
The second category is for elements in which Google provides insights and displays the structure of the business in the Search Console. The entities you have here should ensure the topic/structure is well understood.
Conclusion
Creating quality content goes beyond writing. It becomes more complex and robust as you continue adding new aspects such as design, topical entity, schema, and development. To have a fully functional webpage, all these elements must work in unison.
Organize the content structure of your site such that you create a cluster of relevant related content and connect them using links. Consider each page to be the main category page and link it to several other relevant pages. Using interlinks helps improve the relevance of your site. It also makes it easier to see and index other web pages.
Once you've figured out an entity-first strategy for content, you need to find better ways of:
- Understanding the entity
- Organizing schema
- Pruning broken links and errors as they happen
- Continuing to add and remove content.
If you need to learn more about the subject of SEO and website promotion, we invite you to visit our Semalt blog.