How To Check Your Brand Entity on Google

With the launch of the Search Generative Experience (or SGE) just around the corner, having a good brand presence on Google has never been more important.

As search environments become more dynamic, businesses are increasingly having to adapt to new search trends in order to maintain their competitive edge. Just because you have a Knowledge Panel on the SERP, doesn’t mean your brand is optimised to its full capacity.

In the advent of Generative Search, perhaps the most crucial part of staying on top of brand optimisation is entity work. If you haven’t already, check out our blog series on introducing, understanding and optimising for entities.

In today’s blog, we explain how you can see whether your brand exists as an official entity on Google — and, if not, what you can do to remedy this!

How do you know if your brand entity is good?

Here are some ways that you can check if your brand entity is as good as it can be. If the answer to any of the following questions is “no”, then you have some work to do:

1. Do you have a world icon on your Knowledge Panel?

2. If you Google your legal name, e.g. Sleeping Giant Media Limited, does your main Knowledge Panel come up?

3. If you Google your founder’s name, do they have a Knowledge Panel? Does your business come up as a pill box?

4. Search for your business name using this tool. Does only one brand name come up? If you have multiple names, like in the image below, then there’s a problem with your brand entity.

5. When you click on one of those ‘View On Google’ buttons in the above tool, does your full Knowledge Panel come up? If you get a small Knowledge Panel (otherwise known as a Knowledge Panel sprout) as in the image below, then there’s a problem with your brand entity.

What can you do to improve your brand entity?

If your brand entity could use some TLC, completing the following actions can help you turn things around.

1. NAP

One of the things we see most often is that the NAP (name, address, and phone number) are inconsistent across the web. Most commonly, the name is the issue where multiple different variations are used at the same time. As an example, your brand name might be spelt in any one of the following variations:

• Brand Name
• Brandname
• Brand Name Ltd
• Brand Name Limited

Unfortunately for you, Google sees these as being different entities. So, it’s really important that your brand name is consistent across all the places you are mentioned. Similarly, having a consistent address is vital too. Make sure that it’s spelt the same everywhere — even using Road instead of Rd, or Avenue instead of Ave for example.

2. Google Business Profile

Firstly, check if all the information in your Google Business Profile account matches what’s on your website. We’re talking opening hours, description, menus (if you’re serving food), and services.

Secondly, make strategic improvements to the rest of your profile by adding a description of your business, more photos, services you offer, and — most importantly — answering your questions and reviews!

3. Improve your entity home

If you don’t have a world sign on your Knowledge Panel, then you don’t have a clear entity home. Your entity home is the place where Google can find and confirm facts about your brand. Normally this is your ‘About Us’ page or your Homepage.

You need to improve the content on these pages in order for Google to truly understand your brand and business. This is where it goes to learn about your awards, people, founders, and the history of your company. If your About Us page is just a short sentence or two about the services you offer, then you’ve got some work to do to build this up into an excellent, factually informative page.

4. Add bespoke structured data

One of the most effective ways to improve your brand entity is to add custom structured data to the core pages on your site as part of your SEO strategy.

We can do brand entity analysis to find all the different aspects of your brand that we need to merge, and then write structured data to help search engines like Google understand that Brand Name Ltd and Brand Name are in fact, the same company. We can also add entity-based structured data to the core pages on your website to create relationships between your brand entity, products and services.

In previous case studies, we’ve proven that this can increase your traffic by up to 95% depending on your industry!

Bespoke brand entity support

Here at Sleeping Giant Media, we have a dedicated team of SEO experts who are always on hand to help with industry innovations. When it comes to entities, we have our fingers right on the pulse of the latest updates.

As such, we have created a brand entity audit, which identifies whether or not your brand entity is as good as it should be. Contact us today for more information, or visit our blog for more entity-related content.

If your brand entity could do with improvement, our expert SEO team have created a brand repair programme which can help to consolidate any additional entities, make your people more prominent in the industry, and increase relevant traffic to your website.