When it comes to bespoke structured data, there’s nothing better than being able to do it yourself!

In this blog, Kelly Sheppard, Senior Technical SEO Lead and resident structured data writer here at Sleeping Giant Media, explores 10 reasons why custom structured data is the best.

As the saying goes, if you want something done properly, you’ve to do it yourself. Relying on plugins such as Yoast to write your structured data means that you are restricting your site to the most basic types – and may not be getting the results you truly deserve. And if you’re going to the effort of thinking about structured data, you want to be seeing results.

Let’s dive into 10 reasons why custom structured data is absolutely worth investing in.

1.Flexibility

When we’re in control, we can tailor the structured data we write to the exact length and specificity we need for a site – which helps us align with a business’s priorities and product features. Plugins, however, can’t do this – as they are often restricted to certain types of content.

Just look at the difference between entities here. The image below shows entities from automatically generated structured data:

Whereas the screenshot below shows the entities from the same page, but where the structured data was written by us:

2.Schema types

Did you know that there are over 800 different types of schema? By writing custom-based structured data, we can use as many as we want to (within reason – and obviously making sure they don’t conflict). Plugins are normally restricted to one or two types per page, and only around 20 different schema types overall. A significant difference.

3.Accuracy

When creating, we check our schema with 3 different testers to make sure that it conforms to both Google standards and Schema.org standards. We also visualise all of the entity connections, in order to make sure they all line up and are related to each other correctly.

As you can see below, structured data created by plugins often has errors or warnings.

4. Control

When we’re the writers, we have complete control over how we nest the structured data together with the other types on a site. Creating these connections can often be tricky, but by doing it manually, we can make sure they are the best possible ones to use. This means we also have complete control over how we connect the entities on a site too.

5. Uniqueness

When it comes to Sleeping Giant Media, our structured data offering is unique. In fact, we’d go as far as to say that we don’t know of any other digital marketing agency in the UK that can write structured data like us!

Automatically generated structured data from plugins is all the same – with the same connectors, same schema types and same features. This is why bespoke schema can really help you really stand out from your competitors.

6. The strength of connectors

There are some connectors which are stronger than others. When writing, we can make sure that we use the strongest connectors for the best entities on a page – meaning that search engines will consider these pages stronger for that entity than other less relevant pages. Plugins can’t do this, as they don’t understand the entities and the relationships between them.

7. Unique information

Using structured data in this way means the website will really stand out from the crowd – as well as standing out to search engines. You can provide unique and relevant information that search engine bots otherwise wouldn’t necessarily know about by marking up the pages with special structured data types and fields. All of this can help Google and other search engines understand your content better, and even index your site more quickly!

8. Results!

We know that around 58% of users click on Rich Results1 in SERPs. Structured data can help you show up in the search results for things like product results, review stars, featured snippets, tables, images and much more!

We added structured data to 34/8,200 pages on the website relating to the screenshot above, and in just 2 months they are showing rich results for 14,000 keywords – which bring in 130,000 clicks a month.

9. E-E-A-T

By strengthening your brand identity through entity based SEO, we can help the E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authority, and trust) on your website, as Google will have more of an idea of what you offer and how those products or services connect with your brand. We can also add reviews, awards and more information about the people who work for you. All of these things help increase your brand visibility and overall E-E-A-T value.

We added custom structured data to two pages on this customer’s website – the homepage and ‘About’ page. In just 2 weeks, clicks increased by +74% and impressions by +25%, as we increased their EEAT and they started appearing for various rich results regarding the topic of dementia – even outranking the NHS in some circumstances!

10. Entity based structured data

I saved the best reason until last. Plugins can’t yet write entity based structured data – whereas we can!

Using knowledge bases such as Wikipedia and Wikidata, we can let search engines know exactly what your content is about, meaning less ambiguity around those entities and how they relate to each other, your business and your products.

When doing a page by page strategy and entity SEO process, we need the structured data to strengthen and bond all those things together. In our case, our Content Team writes fantastic entity-based content, the technical SEO for the page is sorted, but we need the final piece to pull it all together. This is where the entity-based structured data supports the content on the page and tells Google what it’s all about.

In the image above, we updated this client’s structured data on their homepage to entity based structured data. This is the traffic generated just by adding entities to the page, so Google actually understands more about what the content and website is about. That’s a +30% increase in clicks and -1.6% decrease in impressions (meaning traffic is more relevant). The average CTR and position have also increased. This is the last 28 days compared to the previous 28 days.

So, to recap – writing custom structured data is important. Why?

Custom structured data can help search engines:

• Understand your content better
• Index your site more quickly
• Improve your E-E-A-T
• Boost click through rate
• Aid brand visibility
• Reduce uncertainty around entities
• Create new connections between brands, products and services
• Find out new information about entities it otherwise might not know about

Want to know more, or want some help with creating structured data for your site? Reach out to the whizzkids on our dedicated SEO team – they’ve got all of your structured data needs covered. And, to learn more about entities, technical SEO, and structured data, keep up with our blog.

Sources:
1 https://blog.milestoneinternet.com/seo/seo-click-curves-get-58-clicks-per-100/

If you’ve read our previous blog on entity SEO, you should know what entities are, how they work, and what Google’s ‘catalogue’ for them looks like. Good job.

Now, it’s time to put it all together – and take a look at how to optimise your site for entities.

We’ll explain how to perform an entity audit, how structured data can support entity SEO and how to optimise your content for entities, so you’re in the best position possible if changes to SERPs start to happen in 2024.

There’s a lot of information to cover, so let’s get started.

 Performing an entity audit

If you want to start optimising a website for entities, you need to start from the beginning – and work out what your entities should actually be. To do this, you can perform an entity audit.

You’ll need to look at all of the entities on the site, and work out how they are connected – and whether they’re the entities you should actually be targeting. To perform an audit:

1. Get the top search queries for your site

2. Extract the entities which occur most frequently – using tools like Google NLP, TextRazor, Inlinks or the SEMRush topics tool

3. Cluster the entities (draw it out) or use a tool to do it (AI tools can help with this)

4. Once grouped, analyse the topics in more detail – using these to make suggestions on other content that could be created to support them, or other entities that should be being targeted.

 Lean on structured data

If you’re looking to optimise for entity SEO then structured data is going to be your friend.

We can use structured data to strengthen the entities on webpages, as well as helping to create relationships between them – which Google wouldn’t necessarily recognise on its own.

Structured data is a type of in-page markup code that you can weave into the head section of the page that the information applies to, which essentially clarifies different elements for Google. Think of it like labelling certain aspects of a page — or entities — to provide Google Search with explicit clues about the meaning of the information found within.

The different types of structured data markup we can use to tell Google about the entities on a page include:

• sameAs, knowsAbout, about, and mentions to reference other places talking about that entity, such as Wikidata, Wikipedia and even Google searches
• employedBy to show that a person works for a business
• parentOrganization or subOrganization to tell Google about other businesses related to the main business

Remember, the aim with structured data is to strengthen the connection of a website or brand with certain terms and entities.

Kelly Sheppard, Senior SEO Lead, explains the importance of structured data when it comes to the future of entity SEO:

“Google’s Knowledge Graph uses structured data to understand entities and the relationships between them. By writing bespoke entity-based structured data we can “talk” to the Knowledge Graph, which will play an essential role if Search Generative Experience comes into play in the future.

“The AI learns from entities it knows about and connects those entities with content in order to serve answers, so by strengthening those entities on your pages and between your brand and your products, you are helping the AI to understand more about those entities and relationships – which it otherwise might not know about.”

 Prepare for the SGE shift

While the main shift to Google’s new Search Generative Experience is expected to happen in 2024, our in-house SEO experts believe that people need to start thinking and planning now if they want to stay ahead of the curve.

And how can you do this? By optimising your content, considering the relative importance of keywords, and understanding the newfound significance of internal links compared to external links.

 Optimising your content for entities

There has been a lot of talk about the future of Google’s Search Generative Experience. What we do know for now is that it’s still an experiment in beta (Google has always referred to it as an experiment), and there is no certainty whether it will or will not launch in the future.

So, what can SEO experts and content writers do in the meantime? Well, it’s fair to say that AI isn’t going anywhere, particularly with the search engine experience. Therefore, it’s important that we think ahead and start optimising our content, taking into consideration the relative importance of keywords, and understanding the newfound significance of internal links compared to external links.

In order to optimise your content for entities, you’ll need to focus less on keyword-optimised landing pages and more on semantics in search. This changes how we think about site architecture, NLP & structured data too!

When writing or reading content, look at the concepts, brands, products, and things they are talking about. These will be your entities. Creating high-quality and relevant content around these entities will be the key to success in the future.

Keywords vs entities

Keywords are specific queries that users type into search engines. In contrast, entities are distinguishable objects or concepts that keywords often refer to.

• Keywords may be a phrase, a statement, or a question. Keywords act as the bridge between user queries and web content.
• Entities are a “thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable”. These entities should be distinct from other entities or keywords on each page.
• Use more keywords when there’s an entity that is not very well known, e.g. one that doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry. Keywords with poor to no entity coverage will not rank well for your topic

Here is an example of the difference between keywords and entities, using Sleeping Giant Media as an example.

Keywords

• Digital marketing agency
• Digital marketing services
• Digital marketing kent
• Local seo services
• Paid search agency
• SEO agency

Entities

• Digital marketing
• Agency
• Paid search
• SEO
• Kent
• Marketing services

Kiss AMSV goodbye!

Previously, content would be dependent on keywords and topics with high AMSVs (or Average Monthly Search Volumes). However, writing content which doesn’t exist — or about things with 0 search volume — is actually a great way of creating extra depth around entities.

When considering that 15% of daily searches are brand new, it makes sense to target a wider range of topics anyway, regardless of popularity. If you create content about things people want to read — AMSV aside — you will likely still start to get volume, as Google will show your content as relevant information.

Look on the Wikipedia page for that entity and expand on that! Add value, facts and unique insight. Remember – there can’t be a search volume if there’s no content in the first place to show them!

Arthur Filipavicius, our SEO Lead, said that there are currently a lot of question marks around how SGE and entities will affect the way we use keywords, with uncertainty around how we’ll acquire volumes, and how they’ll be categorised once SGE is launched.

“One thing that we do know is that content is going to become more relevant and important than ever. Users will be asking a wide variety of questions and ideally the site will have to have the answers somewhere to get quoted by search engines,” he explains. “For now, it’s about testing entity SEO to see if it works the way we understand it will – and remaining agile to how future strategies around things like keyword research will be affected.”

Looking to the future of SEO …

Optimisation included, it’s safe to say that lots of SEO best practices for content and keywords alike may change dramatically with the introduction of more AI into the search experience, and as a result of the increased importance of entities. Let’s take a look at what some of these changes might look like.

 Later, link building 👋

Link building may no longer be necessary thanks to the rise of entities. This is because Google understands “brands” are entities, so any mentions of your brand, whether linked or not, all adds to its Knowledge Graph about that brand! (We’re shocked, too, trust us).

That’s why brand reputation is so important now. Google can understand the sentiment about a brand (positive or negative) and that affects your rankings; remember, Google wants to give customers the best experience.

Mentions on pages with a strong relationship with your entities are more important than a high Domain Authority, and the relevance of that mention is now more important than the authority of the source of the backlink.

Internal linking

However, internal linking is likely to become more important than ever with Entity SEO. If you don’t link your entities together with internal links as well as structured data, the relationship won’t be as strong as it should be.

This is where something known as ‘pillar-based marketing’ will come into play. This is a form of marketing that uses a strategy that revolves around entities and connections. Here’s an example:

• Create a main entity page
• Create secondary entity pages linked to the main entity page and point them to the main page
• Create blog posts or content around those entities and point them to the most relevant secondary or main entity pages

You can use tools like InLinks to do internal linking automatically. Pro tip: If you add some Javascript to the page, you have control over all the internal links on the site.

Entities explained

So, there you have it. From what they are to how to optimise for them, you should now feel pretty confident with entities.

Don’t forget that you can find further information about SEO, entities, and digital marketing on our blog

Still got questions? Get in touch with our team of technical SEO experts today.

A Deep Dive Into Entity-based SEO

Welcome to part two of our series covering the world of entities. If you haven’t yet read part one, well, honestly, that kind of chaos is something that we kind of respect. But seriously, you should read it.

Don’t forget that you can download our full guide to all things entity SEO at the end of this blog. And, keep an eye out for the next in our series of blogs where you can find out all about practical tips for optimising for entity SEO – and what the future looks like.

Entity SEO

Now that we touched previously on what entities are, you might well be wondering how this entities business affects the practice of search engine optimisation.

You may have even heard people discussing ‘Entity SEO’ as if it’s its own discipline. While we’ll soon come to how you can optimise your site for entities, the actual connection between entities and SEO is simple.

Entity-based SEO essentially describes the practice of using context — not just keywords — to help users reach the information they are looking for. While keywords are a crucial part of SEO strategy, they are quite static and don’t fully reflect the way in which users are searching nowadays.

As an example, the keyword “IT Support London” is not fully reflective of the nuanced search language that a user seeking managed IT services in London might use. Instead, they might Google “cheapest cybersecurity support services in London near Clapham”, as an example.

 Google & entities

As we use entities, Google is able to determine the topic of a webpage and whether it’s relevant to the user, without the need to explicitly contain the exact keyword.

Google understands this because it can look for other terms related to the same entity, and understand the relationship between them. As an example, we can show Google that we are talking about ‘IT support’ without ever mentioning that phrase by creating the correct context, and using other words related to it, such as: managed service provider, cyber security assistance, IT consultant, and so on.

Now for the more technical bit.

Google’s Knowledge Graph

So, we know what entities are and how they’ve changed the game for SEO, but what about the back-office, Google-y bits we don’t see behind the scenes? We’re feeling a ‘How It Works’ section coming on…

Things online are only considered official ‘entities’ if included on Google’s Knowledge Graph. This is a huge map of interrelated topics built out from data sets including Wikipedia, Bloomberg, LinkedIn, and the CIA Factbook.

Identifying entities

Not sure what entities your site is currently targeting? Fortunately, there’s more to it than simply plucking a guess from thin air – but it doesn’t have to be too complicated.

As a first step, you can absolutely identify entities with your own eyes – simply by reading the content of a page on your website, and thinking about what it should be focused on. If you want to expand on that, or take a more techy approach, you can also use a number of free tools, such as:

• Google’s Natural Language API
• Salient
• TextRazor (text only)
• Carl Hendy’s Tool
• This basic Knowledge Graph search tool
• Rosette entity tool (text only)

Some AI tools, such as ChatSonic, are also able to identify the entities on a webpage; however, bear in mind that in order to do this you’ll need an AI which is capable of looking at real time data – which most AIs can’t do at the moment. As internet-connected AI tools start to develop further, we may see this become a viable way of assessing a website’s entities in a fast and efficient way.

Do your entities ‘exist’?

When ‘doing’ entity SEO, it is important that you check whether the entities on your page exist formally in Google’s Knowledge Graph. You can do this by using the Method entities.search tool on the Knowledge Graph API page.

• If the entity exists, the tool will respond using structured data, giving a “200” status code to show the entity has been found.
• At this point, it is wise to check the entity name in particular, and also the @type of organisation it thinks it is. Take a note of the @id as you’ll need it later.
• Just a note here – it’s not a good idea to reference your Knowledge Graph @id in your sameAs structured data, as it might change.

What if my entity doesn’t exist?

If there is not already a Knowledge Graph for your entity, you can create one! It’s quite tricky to get a page on Wikipedia, but you can create your own entity on Wikidata for a brand, company or product! You’ll need to link this to the Wikidata page in your structured data in order for it to work.

1. Firstly, make sure a Google Business Profile is set up for the business.

2. Go to https://www.wikidata.org/ and search several times for the entity. If it does not exist, you can create an account.

3. Create a new item – BUT you need a logo which will be released via CC or a WikiPedia, WikiCommons page to verify it, so it’s not always possible to create one.

Google Knowledge Graph ID

You’ll have likely seen something called a Google Knowledge Panel on the search engine results page. This is a search results feature that offers users a helpful condensed breakdown about a certain entity (company, brand, person, etc). This is collected by Google from a variety of sources.

Every Knowledge Panel has something called a kgmid (sometimes just called a kgid) — a sort of identification code. Aside from looking up the entity on the Knowledge Graph API page, you can also use the kgid to see what Google understands about your entity.

Finding the kgid for an entity

So, how can we find the kgmid for an entity? One of the easiest ways to do this is by using a tool like Kalicube’s Graph Explorer.

Alternatively, you can use the Page Source on Google when a Knowledge Panel shows up. All you need to do is view Page Source and search for either /g/ or /m/ which starts with ‘[null,’. The sequence after the /g/ or /m/ s the kgmid:

Using the kgid to get information about your entity

Once you know the kgid, you can actually use it in a Google search, EG: https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/g/12hrpjyrx.

This will show you the search engine results page associated with that kgmid https://www.google.com/search?q=Sleeping+Giant+Media.

As a best practice, it is a good idea to then perform a normal Google search for that entity. If the two search results pages look the same, you can feel confident that Google’s understanding of that entity is pretty solid.

Want to learn more about entities, and the impact they’re going to have on the future of SEO? Download our full guide here – where we talk about everything from how to identify your entities, to the practical optimisation steps you can take right now to make sure you’re ready for Search Generative Experience. It’s got everything you need to stay ahead of the curve.

Entities & Search Generative Experience – Are you up to speed?

Heard your colleagues talking about ‘entities’ lately? Want to get clued up on generative search? Well, you’ve come to the right place.

We’ve put together a guide to all things entity SEO – including the lowdown on the changes you can expect with the shift towards entities and the ongoing testing developments for Google’s Search Generative Experience.

As well as being able to download our full guide at the end of this blog, we’ll also be releasing a series of blogs detailing everything from when entities first came about, to how to identify and optimise for entities on your own website.

So, let’s not waste time, huh?

Mythbusting: Are SEO entities new?

First things first, let’s get one thing straight: entities are not new. While they might be all the rage at the moment, taking online forums by storm in the same way that ChatGPT has done, entities have actually been around for about 10 years.

In May 2012, what is now known as entity SEO was ‘born’ with the creation of Google’s Knowledge Graph (more on this later). The introduction of the Knowledge Graph saw Google be able to understand the meaning and connections behind a keyword, leading to the coining of the phrase that all SEOs love: “Things not strings”.

So, why is everyone suddenly talking about entities now? If entities have been important to SEOs for over a decade, what’s bringing them to the surface now? We have our suspicion: the testing of AI search features like Google’s generative search.

 What’s Google generative search?

SGE — or the Search Generative Experience — is an experimental version of Google’s search engine that uses artificial intelligence to generate contextual answers to complex questions. While all of these features are meant to help people find better answers faster, they are also designed to encourage the exploration of online content.

SGE is currently still only available in Search Labs as a beta test — and we are unsure as to whether it will ever launch fully. What we do expect to see, however, is the integration of some of the AI features that are currently being tested with SGE into Google’s search landscape.

The AI features involved in SGE aim to take the work out of searching, making the connections between things quicker, and showing users more of what they are looking for without them having to re-search or click around so much.

Similarly, AI features may slightly change the face of SERPs as we know them. Instead of the traditional blue links we are used to seeing on the SERP, we may see sources or entity snippets instead— and where Google gets this information from may change too.

It may well not be the biggest names or the highest-performing articles getting shown at the top of SERPs, but the most expert and experienced. Blogs and sites with smaller followings but expert content that shows first-hand experience may be brought into general search results a lot more, seeing the extra ‘E’ (experience) in Google’s E-E-A-T acronym skyrocket in importance.

The pros & cons of generative search

Cons

Google normal search is a manual process. Users search with a question or keyword, and Google uses its algorithm to determine the intent / entities you are asking about. It then returns a list of websites containing the content it thinks you want, which is syndicated from other websites.

AI searches may be more limited, as the AI will analyse all the search results and then collate that information to generate custom content based on what it’s learnt. So, an answer could be pulled from several sources (which we hope will be linked in the sources section). The problem with this approach is that it could be “learning” from misinformation or incorrect facts, which is why Google is concentrating so heavily at the moment on helpful, factually correct content, so that it can “weed out” what’s true and what’s not, ready for AI to learn from.

Things like generative AI search will only really “work” if a user asks a follow up question, otherwise it will remain a little bit like the featured snippet or a Knowledge Panel but at the top of the page, rather than the side.

Pros

On the other hand, with AI search features, users will spend less time visiting websites and more time asking questions to the AI. It will be distraction-free browsing, as users won’t be faced with as many ads as now. While this sounds great for the user, as marketers we’ll have to wait and see how this impacts our strategies going forwards – as time on site and reliance on paid advertising are obviously major players when it comes to digital marketing in today’s world.

What’s more, search results will become more visual, with more videos, images, audio, and rich results. Google is already experimenting with “intent bubbles” to act as filters to see what else people want to know about a topic when searching.

But what has this got to do with entities?

Our Head of SEO, Kathryn Bevan, explains: “While entities have been a concept in SEO for a number of years, we are anticipating that this is going to become even more important. As Google’s AI search features continue to develop, the core way we expect to be able to influence the information it will surface about different topics is by clearly defining and marking up entities on websites, so that Google builds a good understanding of the topics that you are relevant for.”

 What are entities in SEO?

So, now let’s meet the main event: entities. Before things went digital, an entity was simply defined as an existing real thing or object — perhaps even a concept. Now, however, thanks to SEO, we have a different definition that focuses more on the relationships between things in our increasingly interconnected society:

An entity is a uniquely identifiable object or thing characterised by its name(s), type(s), attributes, and relationships to other entities.

In SEO, an entity is only considered to exist when it exists in an entity catalogue like Wikipedia, Wikidata, dbpedia.com, or Google’s Knowledge Graph. In terms of how search engines perceive entities, they are broken down into the following 5 categories:

1. Person
2. Place
3. Thing
4. Idea
5. Concept

So, what do entities in SEO actually look like and how do you find them?

Examples of entities in SEO

On every web page with content, there will be a discernible amount of entities — and it’s up to us to identify them, so that we can optimise them and build an entity framework displaying:

• What entities are on the site
• How the entities relate to each other
• Any gaps where things should be entities but aren’t

Taking our own PPC Services Page as an example, we would expect the entities to be things like ‘PPC’, ‘PPC services’, ‘pay per click’, ‘Sleeping Giant Media’, and so on. Using a tool like Text Razor allows us to identify the following entities in the content.

Here are three examples:

1. PPC Marketing Company

2. As a Google Partner, we offer expert PPC campaign management and advertising services from a team of certified, experienced Giants.

3. Pay Per Click Company

Want to learn more about entities, and the impact they’re going to have on the future of SEO? Download our full guide here – where we talk about everything from how to identify your entities, to the steps you need to take to be ready for future changes in Google’s search.