Looking to increase your personal or professional online presence? Want yourself and your employees to be noticed by Google as specialists in your field? From published authors to SEO professionals, there are plenty of benefits to being recognised as an official entity by search engines.
Entity SEO offers professionals and businesses a whole realm of new opportunities to be categorised and noticed by Google — but getting to that point can be tricky.
In this blog, we’ll take you through the best practices when it comes to getting Google to know who you are and becoming an official entity.
Although not everyone wants to be an entity on search engines — as this comes with increased online visibility and, yes, a digital footprint — it’s great for your own personal brand, job prospects, and, most importantly, it helps the Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust (E-E-A-T) of your business.
Being a person entity usually means that Google will be able to understand and show users more information about you in formal features such as a Knowledge Panel. Here, Google will display lots of images, your age, associated people, Tweets, news, and carousels about what you’ve been involved with, as well as your standard Knowledge Panel features.
In order to get a great Knowledge Panel, Google needs to be able to find lots of facts about you, images of you, and places where it can confirm those facts it’s found. This is so that it can 100% confirm that the information it knows about you is actually about you and not a different person with the same name.
You’ll start off with nothing, maybe just your name, or a link in search results to your LinkedIn / Author page. However, if you follow the steps in the blog, your Knowledge Panel will slowly build up over time. Just like SEO, it is a bit of a long game as it can take up to 12 months to see the best results.
As we mentioned, some individuals are worried about what information about them is accessible on the web. Usually, this relates to anxieties about the crossover between personal and professional spheres.
If you have personal social media accounts or a personal blog, for example, and you want to build your brand as a professional, you could try the following:
Now that we know the benefits and caveats, let’s get into the how-to when it comes to personal entity creation.
When it comes to entities, consistency is key — even down to capitalisation and name spelling. So, always use the same variation of your name everywhere where you are mentioned. If your name is Anthony, but you are also known as Ant, choose one and try to stick to it to make things easier for Google.
This is especially important in source attribution or in matters of authorship for, say, any blogs you’ve written or events you’ve spoken at.
Although not everyone wants to be an entity on search engines — as this comes with increased online visibility and, yes, a digital footprint — it’s great for your own personal brand, job prospects, and, most importantly, it helps the Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust (E-E-A-T) of your business.
Being a person entity usually means that Google will be able to understand and show users more information about you in formal features such as a Knowledge Panel. Here, Google will display lots of images, your age, associated people, Tweets, news, and carousels about what you’ve been involved with, as well as your standard Knowledge Panel features.
In order to get a great Knowledge Panel, Google needs to be able to find lots of facts about you, images of you, and places where it can confirm those facts it’s found. This is so that it can 100% confirm that the information it knows about you is actually about you and not a different person with the same name.
You’ll start off with nothing, maybe just your name, or a link in search results to your LinkedIn / Author page. However, if you follow the steps in the blog, your Knowledge Panel will slowly build up over time. Just like SEO, it is a bit of a long game as it can take up to 12 months to see the best results.
As we mentioned, some individuals are worried about what information about them is accessible on the web. Usually, this relates to anxieties about the crossover between personal and professional spheres.
If you have personal social media accounts or a personal blog, for example, and you want to build your brand as a professional, you could try the following:
Now that we know the benefits and caveats, let’s get into the how-to when it comes to personal entity creation.
When it comes to entities, consistency is key — even down to capitalisation and name spelling. So, always use the same variation of your name everywhere where you are mentioned. If your name is Anthony, but you are also known as Ant, choose one and try to stick to it to make things easier for Google.
This is especially important in source attribution or in matters of authorship for, say, any blogs you’ve written or events you’ve spoken at.
To become an entity, you’ll need something called an ‘entity home’. This is a singular place online where Google can verify the facts it finds out about you. Here are some examples of possible Entity Homes, in order of best-to-worst-choice:
You can find out what your entity home is by looking for the world symbol on your knowledge panel once you have one.
It is important to choose wisely, here, as this is a long-term decision — once Google has accepted an entity home, changing its mind on that is something that has proven exceptionally difficult. It’s not impossible, but is certainly time-consuming, slow, and costly. That being said, Google will eventually attribute you an entity home, whether you educate it or not.
Wherever you decide your entity home is going to be, you need to follow the steps below when it comes to populating this page with content about yourself.
Lastly, when writing, it is essential that you use something called semantic triples to convey your personal information to Google as clearly as possible and in a format that it can easily understand. These are sentences that use the following linguistic structure:
‘Sleeping Giant Media is a digital marketing agency in Kent’ is a good example. While flowery writing is tempting, it is better to save this for your blog. Use plain and simple semantic triples to tell users and Google about this information. The first sentence about you should always be a triple — and this main semantic triple should be used consistently everywhere across the internet where you are mentioned.
Here are some more basic examples:
If you are two things, then Google will normally choose the first one in the triple.
Not everyone will have their own website or author page on their company’s site. So, for many people, a social media platform, like LinkedIn, is the next best thing. If this is the case for you, you’ll want to make sure that your profile is as optimised as possible. Here are some tips to help with that:
First of all, you need an active LinkedIn account with every section filled out and up-to-date with relevant information about you. Be careful, here, not to leave any part unfinished otherwise, this may act detrimentally. Make sure you have your account set up as a creator account too as this will optimise your account for publishing content and boosting visibility to other users. Alongside this, creator mode will also give you access to additional features like post insights.
Visually, you should ensure that your profile picture and header are relevant and up to date. Similarly, the content you choose to be ‘features’ should also be recent and relevant to you and your specialisms. Include relevant hashtags and follow relevant industry pages and users as a final tip.
Making yourself an entity is an ongoing process that requires you to pay constant attention to your online presence. Wherever you are mentioned you need to make sure that the facts are correct. You may need to spend some time going through all the profiles you have on the internet and making sure they are up to date. As best practice, be sure to add the same image everywhere, use the same name, and use the same semantic triple to describe yourself.
Look through and find mentions of yourself. Reach out and ask the authors to update the facts about you. (Top tip: Be nice, here).
The more content you write, the more Google will understand your expertise and authority as an entity on a certain topic. If you have an author page on a website, make sure all the articles you’ve written link back to it too.
In terms of how Google actually makes these connections, the step-by-step process is as follows:
Once Google all of a sudden has a eureka moment and joins all the dots, a Knowledge Panel can take only a few days to appear. If it’s still confusing, then things can take a few more weeks.
If you’re using a website which you own (a personal website) the process is much quicker than trying to use a social network. However, it will take longer if you have a very common name, if there’s a famous person with the same name as you, or if there’s historical baggage where Google has already joined the dots incorrectly and you have to put that right.
Making yourself an entity is an ongoing process that requires you to pay constant attention to your online presence. Wherever you are mentioned you need to make sure that the facts are correct. You may need to spend some time going through all the profiles you have on the internet and making sure they are up to date. As best practice, be sure to add the same image everywhere, use the same name, and use the same semantic triple to describe yourself.
Look through and find mentions of yourself. Reach out and ask the authors to update the facts about you. (Top tip: Be nice, here).
The more content you write, the more Google will understand your expertise and authority as an entity on a certain topic. If you have an author page on a website, make sure all the articles you’ve written link back to it too.
In terms of how Google actually makes these connections, the step-by-step process is as follows:
Once Google all of a sudden has a eureka moment and joins all the dots, a Knowledge Panel can take only a few days to appear. If it’s still confusing, then things can take a few more weeks.
If you’re using a website which you own (a personal website) the process is much quicker than trying to use a social network. However, it will take longer if you have a very common name, if there’s a famous person with the same name as you, or if there’s historical baggage where Google has already joined the dots incorrectly and you have to put that right.
Ok, so you’ve put in the hours and followed the tips above. But how do you know if you are an entity or not? Well, there’s a series of handy tools such as TameTheBots’ and Carl Hendy’s knowledge graph checkers.
There’s also the option to manually check by clicking on a kgmid or ‘View on Google’ button to see if there’s a Knowledge Panel or not. If the result is the same as the normal search on the entity then you’ve done it! Google is very confident that it understands you are the same person as the kgmid.
Just like regular content optimisation, it is best practice to check the content on your entity home before you publish it with a tool like Kalicube NLP checker. Make sure the sentiment about yourself is strong enough. It needs to be above 60% for your author page.
Make sure the categories (in green) are also correct and have high enough relevancy. If you’re already an entity, you will see a kgmid come up when you check this content — make sure it’s definitely you, though.
From harnessing the connective power of entities to support SEO strategy to writing entity-driven content, we’re not strangers to entities at Sleeping Giant Media.
If you require entity support for your business — be it brand entity consolidation or entity gap analysis — we can help. Check out our Entity SEO FAQ page for more information, get in touch with our experts, or check out the list of entity resources below.
Just like regular content optimisation, it is best practice to check the content on your entity home before you publish it with a tool like Kalicube NLP checker. Make sure the sentiment about yourself is strong enough. It needs to be above 60% for your author page.
Make sure the categories (in green) are also correct and have high enough relevancy. If you’re already an entity, you will see a kgmid come up when you check this content — make sure it’s definitely you, though.
From harnessing the connective power of entities to support SEO strategy to writing entity-driven content, we’re not strangers to entities at Sleeping Giant Media.
If you require entity support for your business — be it brand entity consolidation or entity gap analysis — we can help. Check out our Entity SEO FAQ page for more information, get in touch with our experts, or check out the list of entity resources below.
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