Here you find the transcript and a link to the youtube recording of SEOnerdSwitzerland meetup about Project Entity SEO with Sara Taher.
How what and why do you need to learn and incorporate entity SEO into your workflows.
You learn concepts, tools, tactics and the type of impact and uses cases for entity SEO.
Sara Taher, SEO Manager, Consultant, Author & Speaker
Sara Taher is a Canadian-based SEO consultant with over 8 years of experience in the field. She is most known for her SEO tips and riddles that she shares on her LinkedIn account.
Follow Sara Taher on Twitter: @SaraTaherSEO
Follow Sara on LinkedIn: Sara Taher
Full webinar recording with Sara Taher
Thank you Sara Taher for your presentation
Thanks to our speaker, we are so happy to welcome you! Preparing a presentation and being present at the meetup take a lot of time.
SEOnerdSwitzerland is nothing without speakers willing to share their knowledge. I am happy we got to welcome Sara!
About #SEOnerdSwitzerland
SEOnerdSwitzerland is a non-profit association that aims at promoting and sharing knowledge about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEOnerd Switzerland organizes events in person and in webinars.
Join the community of SEO enthusiasts.
Follow us on Twitter @SEOnerdSwitz where we share slides, nexts events and articles we enjoyed.
Transcript of the webinar Entity SEO with Sara Taher
Sara M-S: So here we go. Oop. I shall start from the beginning, obviously. So slideshow. Yeah. So thank you so much for joining SEOnerdSwitzerland, first of all. I think most of you would enjoy it, know SEOnerdSwitzerland is exciting because this is the first event of 2023. Yeah! Hey, thank you, Sara, for joining. And what I want to say is explain a bit about SEOnerdSwitzerland. So we are an association, which is co-founded by Isaline and I.
Today, Isaline will not be here because we decided to share the events now. So each of us, we do one event. And this association, we built it because we wanted to speak SEO, to be honest. We did it for ourselves. We wanted to speak SEO. We wanted to hear other people speaking SEO. And then what happened is like it became important for us that everybody could have the knowledge about the SEO, that everybody could have access to SEO. This is why we have these fantastic speakers as Sara today.
Now, this is super cool. We have three sponsors. And I am so excited to say that we have a new sponsor, iqual. Yeah! Yeah! So let me introduce the sponsor. So we have Liip, which is our traditional sponsor, which is a web and mobile development company. And they have a wide range of services such as development, obviously, and then with SEO, et cetera, et cetera. Then we have iqual, which is our new sponsor. And we are very, very, very, very, very grateful for this new sponsor. And it is a full-service agency, so super good because that means that they do everything. Then it’s related to online marketing, SEO, and web development. So thank you so much for these two sponsors.
And now we go to our last sponsor. Last one is Work in SEO. I am sure that most of you know Work in SEO because it’s a podcast where people share their career story about SEO. It’s Isaline that organized this podcast. And I find it fantastic because it’s really human. You can really hear the people’s story. But Work in SEO is not just that, obviously. It’s not just a podcast. It’s also a job board. So if you are looking for a job, you can go and check Work in SEO.
What’s next? Okay. This is nothing to do with SEOnerd but let me just spend a few minutes on this. Ulrika and I– don’t know if you know Ulrika but I guess that most of you know her. She is the lady from the north that speaks at all the conference. Anyway, Ulrika and I decided to organize special events about international SEO. And the first event will happen on February 9th at 5:30. We will have Aleyda and Jo to join us for this event. And you can check the website. I will send it later on, and you can subscribe if you want. And the other will be the description of the talks.
Anyway, let’s pass to go back to SEOnerdSwitzerland, which is very important. What is our next event at SEOnerdSwitzerland? We have Veruska. I love Veruska, And it will be Isaline that will take care of this event. What is fantastic, she will speak– she often speaks about content, so the importance of content in international multilingual SEO. So she will speak about that. And what’s next? But next is our fantastic Sara. So I’m happy to introduce you, Sara. If it is possible, I will take just a few minutes to introduce her, and then she will go where–
So Sara is an SEO consultant, obviously, as probably, everybody knows it. She’s based in Canada. So I’ve seen outside of her window. There is something like three meters of snow at the moment. As she has been doing SEO since 2014. Sara, correct me if I’m wrong. But I think that that’s what I saw.
Sara T: Correct. That’s correct.
Sara M-S: Okay. Okay, but she’s more than that. She is a lot more than that. She also gives valuable tips on LinkedIn. So if you want to learn something, follow her on LinkedIn because I think– I don’t know if you do it once per week or almost every day. But regularly, I see very useful tips from your side, some advice. And she has a newsletter. So she has directly a website. Maybe Sara will share it at the end, or if you want to share it now, or I can share it at the end, your website. And people can directly subscribe to your newsletter, which is also very valuable, so absolutely worth it subscribe.
And something that I also know, she’s a mentor. So I know that you are also the woman in the community as a mentor. And so I think that I say most of the thing about you. And maybe there are some few things that we can say, apart from the fact that you’re fantastic and funny. [laughter] She’s funny. Let’s [unintelligible] that she’s funny also. Do you want to add something else about you?
Sara T: No, thank you. That was great. And I’m super happy to be here today.
Sara M-S: Super. So now, it will be me sharing the slides, as they say. And then let’s hope that I catch to do this the right moment. So okay, to change the slide, let me go back. Where is the slide? Just a second, then I will catch it.
Sara T: Hey, Lydia. Hey, Denise. Hey, everyone.
Sara M-S: Ah, yeah, I have them. Ah, yeah, they’re– Oh, there are a lot of hellos. Hello! Hello! Let me check that. Okay, so let me share it now. Oh, entire screen. Here we go. Okay. Ready, Sara?
Sara T: Okay. So hi, everyone. Today, I want to talk to you about entity SEO. Can we go to the next slide?
Sara T: So the purpose of this is I want– when I was thinking of this topic and how to talk about it, I wanted to remove all the jargon, all the things that will not make a difference when it comes to execution. I wanted to focus it to what I need to know to execute on that. And that’s what I’m trying to communicate with you. So by the end of this webinar, you’ll understand what entity SEO is and why it’s important, how to incorporate it into your SEO workflows, because sometimes, we do share tips. I wouldn’t want to leave you puzzled, “Okay, how does this fit with what I do right now?” And then you also learn the right mindset to approach content today and in the future.
Next slide, yup. Okay. So before I drag you on for the rest of the slides talking about entities, I want to make sure that we are all on the same page. What is an entity? Basically, an entity is a thing or a concept that is a singular and the easiest way to think of it is a noun. So, for example, beauty is an entity but beautiful is not. A book is an entity, books is not. And if you actually search for “book” and “books” on Google, you’ll get a little bit different results, because “book” is more of an entity but books, you’ll probably get lists, and a list of top books, or stuff like that. And that’s not only for this word. Most of the time, if you search for something in singular and in plural, you’ll find them different.
There is also a graph. I’m not sure if you can see it well. So we’re not only concerned with objects and things. We’re also interested in how these things connect or relate to each other. And this is a simple example of a knowledge graph, which we are going to talk about in the next slides. And it’s basically made up of entities and how they relate to each other. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Why do we need to think of entities? What happened? What changed that we need now more than ever to think of entities?
Entities or that concept is not new. It’s actually one of the things I learned about when I started SEO back in 2014. It was just not very widespread. It was more complex to explain. And no one talked about it, right? So what happened? How–? Why do we need to talk about it? Next slide. Yup, so 10 years ago or more, the SERPs was filled with a lot of low-quality results like content farms, I think content– keyword stuffing, all sorts of– like the entire spam SEO handbook was actually– that was what SEO was, right? And obviously, the results were not good. And Google didn’t like that. And they wanted to change that.
This was the starting point. So what happened, I don’t want to give you a lot of theory but I’ll walk you through it quickly. In 2011, Google released Panda. Panda was targeting low-quality sites. A lot of businesses actually, with the Panda– when the Panda algorithm was first launched, a lot of websites or businesses went out of business literally. The next one was Penguin in 2012. Again, in an attempt to improve the result, the quality of results– Panda was about black hats techniques, black hat link-building techniques, which some of them still work today but the most obvious ones or the ones that were easy to detect, obviously, were killed at that point.
And then, okay, so low-quality content and low-quality backlinks were addressed a bit to a great extent. But then Google wanted to move away from techniques that could be easily manipulated into techniques that would definitely provide value to the user. So keyword stuffing is obviously something that can be very much or very easily manipulated. So that’s why Google started moving away from measuring how relevant a content is based on keyword density and how many times the keyword is mentioned in the content and move towards entities and creating the knowledge graph.
And that’s when– The announcement was things not strings. So no more focusing on repeating the exact same keyword in the content. It’s more about things and entities. And then later on, a lot of other, obviously, algorithm updates were launched ever since. One of them, for example, is a Hummingbird. It improved Google’s understanding of sophisticated search intent, and entities, and the meaning of things, and how they are related. And yup, this is where– obviously, there are tons of other algorithms but this is where everything started.
Next slide. Yeah. So with the launch of the Knowledge Graph, Google had more capabilities. If you write, for example, “When was Diana born?” Google is able to know that you’re talking about Princess of Wales, and obviously, get the right date of birth, and then also return related entities. And in that situation, the related entities are people. So Google was able to understand the context, right? And understand the context of the query, and what you really mean, and who Diana is, and collect all the information, and give you the answer that you want, right?
Next slide. So as I said, Google moved from things– from strings to things. No more thinking about “Ah, if you take that exact keyword and write it 10 times in the body of the content, then this is going to be– this is more relevant than other content that doesn’t have the same number of keywords repeated.” And one of the real examples we see, if you type anything in search results, in image results, right? You get a list of search terms and entities. It’s a mix. And that shows you that Google understands the relationship between those.
Again, the graph we talked about was entities and the relationship between them. So for example, Robert Downey Jr. He’s an actor. He played Iron Man. Iron Man is part of Avengers. So it also returned, for example, Mark Ruffalo because Mark Ruffalo is also part of Avengers. So Google is now able to understand, more and more, the relations between things and answer you based on that. But then, it also means that this is what Google expects to find in your content, right?
Next slide. So basically, when Google reads your content, like a piece of text, it converts it to a graph, right? And right now, it does have the graph. So it’s able to actually find if your content matches consensus, for example, if there’s a specific piece of information that all resources agree on or reliable resources agree on, and you also agree on, or you’re contradicting it, it’s able to understand a lot of things based on the knowledge graph they built and also add new information.
So for example, if you’re a new entity, for example, when I started building my knowledge graph or focusing on building my own knowledge panel on Google, I am a new entity. Sara Taher, for Google, is a new entity. So you start showing that you’re a new entity and what are the other entities that are related to you like SEO Assembly, for example, which is my company. LinkedIn, because I’m active on LinkedIn, and so on. So Google now, when it looks at text, it looks for entities.
So there was time, I’m not sure, like, two years or three years ago. I’m not sure. If you click on “About this result–” “About this result” still exists but in the past, it used to show related terms. So when you say, “Okay, how to cook fish in the oven,” and you click on “About this result,” it did tell you that some of the reasons– it shows you why are you seeing this result, right? One of the reasons why is that this result has related terms. It has ingredients. It has recipe. It had– Is it breaded? So there are related terms that Google looked for.
So in other words, this result or the answer to this question needs to have specific entities or mention of specific things. You cannot talk about how to cook something without ingredients, without a recipe, right? So there are specific entities that need to be there when you talk about specific topics. And that’s why, again, why we’re talking about entities today. So just to give you an idea, the direction we’re going towards keyword research versus entities, in the past, if you’re doing keyword research for a topic like road trip to Florida, you would have something like– keywords would be like “road trip to Florida,” “Florida road trip,” “road trip FL,” which also stands for Florida.
Now, you need also to include entities, like, what are entities that need to be on that page or on that content that are not part of the keywords but still are important for Google because they show that this content is relevant, and it has covered all the topics or all the related entities. It’s thorough enough, right? So for example, if you’re talking about road trip to Florida, you need to talk about map, about travel, about itinerary, about planner. There’s a lot of other entities as well, but this is just something to summarize. I’ll discuss the other example as well. And hopefully, that will make it clearer. If you’re writing about a seven-day Dubai itinerary blog, again, the usual keywords, but then Google expects to find specific– mention of specific entities in that content because this signals to Google that this content is thorough enough.
And when we say thorough enough, this is what we mean by topical authority. You have covered and discussed all the related entities to the topic you’re talking about, right? And this can be on the page level, or on the content piece level, and then on the website level, right? And we’re going to talk about that in the next slides. Yeah. And one more thing, entities as I mentioned, I just want to reiterate that, that entities don’t have to have the same keyword– words as in keywords. Like keywords, when you’re doing keyword research, they turn up very similar but when you’re doing keyword research for a specific keyword. But entities are not like that.
So what does using entities mean for us now? First of all, don’t stress a lot about color or spelling of things, unless you’re doing internationalization and trying to localize your content. Keyword metrics like– stuff like keyword density are not important at all right now. It doesn’t matter how much time you mention your keyword anymore, exact matching word? What matters more is how thorough your content is and whether there are entities or not. And then things like search volume. And then people may say, “Why search volume is not important right now,” because if you want to achieve topical authority for a specific topic or an industry, you need to cover all the entities regardless of the search volume of them, right?
If you’re talking about trips to Florida, and then there is like one specific long-tail keyword that doesn’t have any search volume, it doesn’t work like that anymore. You need to make sure that you’re mentioning everything, right? Variations, searching variations. So Google understands clearly that Robert Downey Jr is RDJ. And Diana, just Diana, is Princess Diana. So if you type “the father of SEO,” you get “Bruce Clay.” Google understands that these are the same thing as well as simple things like a dog is a puppy, for example. And then the last thing, which we discuss is that you cannot achieve topical authority without doing entity, entity SEO. Am I talking too fast?
Sara M-S: No, no you’re fantastic.
Sara T: Okay, so we talked about what is an entity, why we need an entity, but how do we find entities, right? So that’s what we’re going to talk about in the next slide. So there are many ways and more and more tools are coming up. And every day, literally, every few days, there’s someone sharing a new tool, but these are some. For example, image search, search for your topic, the thing you’re writing about in images, and start looking at what is Google suggesting below it. Some of these are entities, and some are just search terms. You’ll need to use your better judgment and understand, “Okay, this is relevant.” “This is not relevant.” So some of them may be interesting for you. You may come up with ideas you never thought of, right?
Sara M-S: I’m analyzing if there is something that I wasn’t expecting. [laughs] Okay, we’ll go to the next slide. Sorry.
Sara T: No worries. [laughs] No, if you want to stop, you can take your time.
Sara T: So also, things like Google Trends, related queries, and related topics. This, I think I was looking for Dubai itinerary. So for example, one of the related topics is tourist attraction, right? That’s something Google expects you to talk about on that page. For some unknown reason– so there are others that I see very relevant, Yas Island. But for example, Airbnb. I would have not thought about it if I’m talking about an itinerary. But for any city in general, I would have not thought about Airbnb, naturally. I mean maybe some people would, but I would have not.
So this is something you would– okay, maybe this is something you should mention, for example, average price of Airbnb, or prices start from, or maybe recommend a few, like, this is something you may– or is it a good idea to rent an Airbnb in that area or not? So this would give you an idea of, “Oh, I would have not mentioned this. Okay, So now, I need to mention it.”
I will discuss that Lydia, by the way, at the very end. Okay, so collect data from autocomplete, search suggestions. So as you can see, so far we’ve discussed three tools. And the free tools are Google Tools. Always try to play around with Google Tools. One tool I forgot to add to the slides is actually Keyword Planner. Sometimes, they give you on-the-side suggestions for– like they automatically sort the keywords by category on the– you’ll find it on the side. It’s really useful. Again, let’s stick to the slide, so I don’t cause a mix up.
So collect data from autocomplete and search suggestions, for example, swimsuits. Now, we know that it’s okay to write “swimsuits” and “bathing suits” interchangeably. Google understands these are the same things. If you’re writing, for example, “top swimsuits” or whatever, “one-piece swimsuits,” for example, or “la Vie en Rose,” right? You can get an idea of what Google thinks is relevant to that search query.
One thing is also try to do that in Incognito, so you don’t get personalized results. Wikipedia. Wikipedia is one of the most awesome places to get entities. If you’re writing about a topic or an entity that happens to have a Wikipedia page, definitely check that. For example, if I’m writing about Dubai, you can come here, “Okay, what are the most important entities?” And you can just get them from Wikipedia. It’s very clear. If you’re writing about Dubai, these are things you need to mention. Obviously, some things may not–
You may not find some of them relevant. For example, if you’re talking about a trip, maybe you don’t want to talk about religion, maybe, or a lot, or it wouldn’t be your focus. I don’t see well, but I mean you’ll go through them and get an idea of what entities you see– again, you need to use your better judgment. Another place to look is Google Knowledge Graph. Once you search, for example, for the royal family, you’ll get other suggestions, for example, for other entities that Google sees as related.
So in this case, for example, other royal families, right? If you’re writing about royal family, maybe you want to mention how they relate to other royal families in Europe, for example, or– and again, it depends– you’re using your better judgment, it depends on the angle you’re addressing the topic. And you’re using different tools to make sure that you’re mentioning related entities. If you feel that this is not related to what you’re writing about, then you can definitely skip it.
Yeah, Google Knowledge Graph Search API. So all you need is to just use the demo. You can copy and paste, like, competitor analysis. You can search for something on Google. Go to the first result. Copy some of the text. Paste it here. And then Google will show you what are the entities that are on that page. And then there is [Salis?], which is basically how important or how relevant an entity is to the topic, right? I really encourage you to play around with this.
Yeah, last but not least, I don’t think this is last. I don’t know, let’s see. But this one, it’s a very underestimated– we are very addicted to using tools in SEO. Use non-web resources. You just brainstorm them. You meet with your team. Talk about, “Okay, what else should we cover?” “What else–” Like if I’m writing a topic about SEOnerdSwitzerland, let’s say, I’m writing a blog about it, right? I would sit down with Sara, and what are the things I cannot forget to talk about when I talk about that topic? For example, how they started, Who are the founders? How often they do their events? Is it only online? There’s a lot of things online or in-person, sponsors, and so on.
There’s things you cannot say, “Okay, I covered this topic thoroughly enough without talking about it,” right? Find them. That’s the whole purpose of this. Okay, so you know how to find entities, how to make them part of your workflow. Okay, so this is a really good example, and you can do it in different ways. You can do it for site-wide. If you’re talking about– If you’re doing– for a small website, you can create a topical map. For example, you’re launching a website about road trips or you’re doing SEO for a website about road trips, you can just start, okay, road trips. Then we’re going to talk about places. And then list the different places.
And just as we said, you’ll do your– you’ll do your research, and you’ll– do a research and you’ll– find all the entities you should be covering, right? And think about them as topics. But again, you need to make sure that you cover all the entities. One way to do this, sometimes, if it’s a small website, I crawl one of the competitors’ websites, for example, and then check for it on Screaming Frog and look at the graph, understand how the website is structured. If they’re optimized and well-structured, you will usually find that they have, for example– you can understand how their content is structured from the graph, if it’s a clean structure, right?
And then you can come up with your own topical map from there. You can get inspiration and fill the gaps, right? And that’s okay for a small website, but if it’s a big website, like yesterday, I had to do it for a gigantic website, it’s going to be so time-consuming, and it’s going to be very hard to do. So what you can do is focus on– find the most profitable existing page on the website, for example, and start doing a topical map around it. So for example, if the most profitable page, at least, this is how– one way you can approach it.
Let’s say, the most profitable page on the website is about– there’s a product page about email marketing software, then this would be like, “Okay, I’ll start with this section or this topic and make sure I covered it thoroughly.” So this will be the top of your topical map. And then from there, “Okay, what are the things that I need to cover and topics I need to write about to make sure I covered that?”
On next slide. Okay, so if we take the road trip example, we said places. And then we have national parks. And then we have Zion National Park. So let’s say, okay, I’ll start with Zion National Park. That’s the topic I want to write about. You’ll do your usual keyword research, but you also do your entity SEO research. For example, in our situation, you’ll find “Okay, Cable Mountain. That’s something I need to talk about if I’m going to talk about Zion National Park because Cable Mountain is in Zion National Park. Hiking, because that’s an activity people do in Zion National Park. Weather, hotels, and so on. These are, obviously, things you need to talk about. So yeah, you’ll do your research, find the entities, right?
So basically, you’ll end up– for Zion National Park, you’ll end up with recommendations at a high level looking like this, right? Like keywords, and then long tail keywords, and then entities, right? And if you notice, bottom-of-funnel pages or pages that are money pages or where the user is ready to buy are usually related, sometimes– a lot of times, are related to one main entity, but that does not mean that every single page would have one main entity. Some pages would have two main entities. In our case, it’s Zion National Park. It’s one entity, and that made it easy. But for example, if we go back to– if we think about the– our– one of the examples we talked about, how to cook– how to bake fish in the oven. This is not one entity. This is fish, oven, cooking. So it’s a lot of entities there, right? Okay, you have your keywords. You have your entities. Now, you need to add your schema. If you have one main entity on the page and you do your best to find one, but for– in our case, for example, the main entity is Zion National Park. It’s a park, right? So I went to schema.org, looked if there’s a park schema, yes, there is. So I created them. And so I flag this. You flag this, you add the schema, and you say, “Okay, the type is park. The name is Zion National Park.”
And then you add all the other attributes. And one good thing you can do is add “sameAs” and then link to the Wikipedia page of Zion National Park, right? So you’re telling Google, “The main entity of this topic is the same as that one on Wikipedia.” Because Google uses Wikipedia to build its Knowledge Graph, right? Yeah, can we still see? Yeah.
Sara T: We’re still on the schema page. Yeah, and– oh, but then sometimes, you have– many times, you have a lot of other entities or most of the time, you have other entities on the page. You can also add a schema, highlighting other entities on the page. So for example, type schema name “tour.” There’s a tour entity on the page. And then “sameAs.” And then you link to the Wikipedia page as well, right? Yup. And again, internal linking, there’s nothing new. This is–
Again, if you talk about entity in a place, you need to– if there’s a page about an entity and then you mentioned that in other pages, you’ll need to link to it, nothing new here. It’s just we need to highlight it. It’s more important than ever because it helps in building our topical authority and the clusters, and organizing our website. And that all adds to having a clean information architecture. This is my best-est part. [laughter] So okay, how does that look like in practice, in real life, right?
Okay, so some background, a small business wanted to do SEO. The SEO– what the SEO did is basically, okay, it’s a small local business. They went to Google Maps and took note of all local entities around them. For example, the business is located at X Street. Then what other famous or established entities are available near it. And then they went back to the website, and updated the content on the website, and referenced and mentioned those entities, right? And you can be as creative as you want. There is no one way to do it. In that situation, they added driving directions, for example, from those other locations, right? Like if there’s a university nearby, you mention the university. And then you mention how to find your way to the business from that place, right?
Once that was implemented, the website received 32% increase in visibility simply by adding those geographically relevant terms, right? Like finding the local entities and optimizing your website with them, it signaled to Google that you are more relevant and have a better topical authority in your industry or in your target keywords. Yeah. This was what Lydia was talking about. So ranking entities on search. So if you’re a new entity, right? Or– And sometimes, it’s not a person. What if it’s a brand name, like a new business, right? Anything, right? How does Google decide which entity to show, right?
And if the query should return an entity, how does Google decide on that? And why with Lydia–? And even in my– if you search for my name, there are others, people that pop up in the images. And why is that happening? So first of all, as I mentioned, if you search for father of SEO, you get Bruce Clay, right? So Google understands how related an entity is to your search query, right? So if you’re mentioned on many websites, every– let’s say, every time someone talks about Bruce Clay, they mention that he’s the father of SEO, or he has backlinks with anchor text. So “father of SEO” or that sort of thing, okay?
So Google measures the relatedness between the entity, which is Bruce Clay, and the keyword you’re searching for. The second thing is notability. So if you search for “apple,” and I encourage you to do this. So now, what do you think you get? Would you get the apple fruit or Apple, the company?
Sara M-S: Company.
Sara T: Right? Why is that? Why do you think we are getting Apple, the company, and not apple, the fruit even though–? I think everyone knows Apple, like– Obviously, everyone knows Apple but if we’re talking about– I mean, the fruit should be more famous in theory, I don’t know. Apparently, not online. Notability is– Google is able to compare two entities in totally different industries, right? Like fruits and Apple, the company, two totally different things. And even if they are in low-competition categories, right? With low search volume, and– Google is able to compare between them and decide, “Okay, which is more relevant to what you’re searching for?”
And what Google sees is that when people search for Apple, they’re looking for the company and not looking for the fruit. So that’s one way. Apples– No, apples is plural, right? But what about Apple, single. Try the single one. Right? So yes. Yes. So Google is able to compare and understand which entity is related to what’s been searching– searched for. Where we are? I’m sorry. I got distracted.
Sara M-S: Notability, and now, we will start contribution. And by the way, if you want, I can try Apple live. But I never miss the company.
Sara T: Yup. And then contribution. Okay, what if we had two Aleyda Solis in SEO? What if? Which one Google’s going to show, right? So again, we talked about how Google was able to decide which entity to show when there are two different industries, but what about when they are in the same industry? This goes back down to contribution, who of the two entities are contributing the most, getting linked to the most, getting coded the most, and so on. So– And based off that, Google would make that decision, right? This is the person that is much likely related to the query that you’re searching for.
One last thing, it’s prizes. And I think this is something that’d been recommended years ago. Generally speaking, if your business or your personal brand or you have been awarded any type of awards or certificates, right? Always link to them. Always talk about these things on your website. Or if your business, for example, has the ISO, whatever, or that sort of thing, always add that on your website. And maybe you want to add like a one-line, one-sentence description of what that is because these things also help rank the entities.
So when we have an entity that’s mixed up, like, when you search for something and you– like if you search for Sara Taher, right? You’ll still see some other Saras. Sara Taher is there. I’m not the only one. I started to have a Knowledge Graph, but there are other people. And that means while I’m maybe more notable than the others potentially, I’m not strong enough yet. Like my entity is not strong enough yet to be definitely sure that most likely, in a very– to be the Apple versus apple. I’m not there yet, right? So that’s what that means. [chuckle]
Sara M-S: So there is a small story that I discussed with Jason Barnard once about that. And it’s like the first year is the most difficult.