Entities

What are Entities?

Entities (in search) are standardized “general truth” records in the knowledge database.

Search engines have an extremely difficult job as they need to analyze, index, standardize, and serve vast amounts of content.

Entities help search engines serve information that is “universally accepted as true” and is not based on one, but multiple online sources.

Entities are Not Keywords!

Up until 2013, all searches were mostly lexical. Lexical search means that whenever you would type something into the search bar, the engine looks for exact keyword matches.

But that’s not the case anymore!

Thanks to Hummingbird's update in 2013, then the BERT algorithm release in 2018, and current SGE AI releases, search is becoming more and more semantic.

This means two things:

• Search engines can understand the “meaning” behind your content
• Search engines can understand the “intention” behind your search query

Keywords are things of the past, mostly because the same word can have multiple meanings. 

Apple.

Is it a fruit? A company? What is it?

It depends on the context.

That’s where entities, knowledge graphs and rich snippets come in. 

What is a Knowledge Graph?

First introduced in 2013, Knowledge Graph changed how SEO and internet search work forever.

Knowledge Graph in SEO is a search engine knowledge base that consists of entities and entity relationships.

Knowledge Panel

The easiest way to spot knowledge graphs in action is by analyzing knowledge panels.

Knowledge panels are types of rich search results (snippets) that appear whenever you search for entities like:

• Places
• Organizations
• People
• Things

The same information can be presented in a different format, all thanks to entities.

Furthermore, we can continue our research and learn more about this entity by following entity relationships…

‍

Connections Between Entities

Because the knowledge graph is basically a huge database of “entities and their relationships”, it allows us to get quick snapshots of related information relatively easily.

Who is married to whom?

Which buildings are at this location?

In which movies did this actor play? 

All these are examples of how entities connect to other entities. 

People connect to other people.

Companies connect to locations.

Movies connect to actors.

That’s what “widely accepted knowledge” fundamentally is… What is X and how does it relate to Y, and Z?

Entity Importance for SEO

The introduction of entities changed SEO for the better!

Google described this improvement by stating “things, not strings”. Which meant, no more keywords, only topics.

Search Intent

This gave birth to the concept of search intent.

Because search engines could understand the hidden meaning behind your search inputs (queries),  topics became more important than keywords.

Example:

You type in “cafe names in Sagrada Familia”.

The results on the map won’t be inside the church. Google’s algorithm is smart enough to know that what you meant was “I want to see cafes that are in close proximity to  Sagrada Familia in Barcelona”.

You can learn more about this in our search intent guide, but the point is: 

What you type and what you mean by that are two different things. And both search engines and great SEO strategists know how to analyze that difference.

So we build websites for topics and goals, not for keywords and phrases.

Structured Data

Another big change that helps understand how entities work is structured data (also called schema markup).

Structured data allows us to communicate with crawlers and search engines, without needing to state obvious information that our visitors would see on web pages. 

Structured data also allows us to control how we want our content to be presented within search engine result pages.

Rich Snippets

Rich snippets or rich results are parts of Search Engine Results Page (SERP) content that add more information about your page than just the basics: title tag, URL link, and meta description.

The most common rich snippets are:

• Reviews and ratings
• Prices
• Events
• Job listings
• Recipes

Your rich snippets are created by search engines based on data found in your structured data within your head code.

Search Generative Experience (SGE) in Google

Now that you learned some brief basics about entities, it’s important to mention that because AI is becoming part of the search engine experience.

This is the third huge step for entities and topical authority SEO. That’s because SGE is fundamentally the third generation of semantic search. 

The first step was in 2013 with semantic search launch, and the second step was in 2018 when search engines released algorithms that can understand the content better…

Now AI adds another layer of sophistication on top of that. Soon, we will find out what that layer exactly is and how it will affect building SEO-optimized websites. 

But one thing is certain search results will be more and more accurate. That’s why creating high-quality content and building topical authority will never get out of fashion.