According to Google, an entity refers to a single, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable thing or idea.

Entities can be diverse, ranging from tangible elements like people, organizations, and products to abstract concepts and creative works. They possess defining characteristics or attributes, like size, colour, and duration. And most importantly, entities exist in relation to other things/entities.

Take, for example, “xylopental”. This is a string of characters that have no meaning to humans and, therefore, have no meaning to machines. However, if I invented a new musical instrument named “Xylopental,” this string of letters would become an identifiable entity. It is understood in relation to musical instruments, which is also an entity.

Entities need to be described in relation to other entities to have any meaning.

In its information architecture, Google often refers to entities as “topics.” From a content perspective, we can consider entities in SEO as topics within your content that become well-defined by referencing other related things.

Entities and their connections are crucial in developing Google’s Knowledge Graph. Google’s Knowledge Graph is a database that Google uses to quickly retrieve information about specific topics or entities. Any information Google has on a particular entity will show up in the Knowledge Panel, as shown below.

For example, when we search for “Berkshire Hathaway” on Google, we get a knowledge panel that conveys information about Berkshire Hathaway’s owner, stock prices, revenue, and more.

In the “People also ask” section, we can see queries that don’t specifically name Berkshire Hathaway, like “Does Buffett own McDonald’s?”

As the long-time owner and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett is often synonymous with his brand. McDonald’s is Buffett’s favorite breakfast meal, and he had previously purchased 4.3% of McDonald’s stocks but sold it in 1999.

This explains the inclusion of the question “Does Buffett own McDonald’s?” even though it doesn’t mention Berkshire Hathaway at all. All this information is derived through context from entities that are related to one another.

Difference Between Entities and Keywords

A common misconception SEOs have is that entities are just like keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that searchers use in their search queries. It can be a single word, a phrase, a sentence or a question. Historically, search engines would rank pages on the SERP using keyword matching.

However, the method of lexical search presented a few challenges.

1. Keywords tend to be ambiguous because certain words can have multiple meanings. For example, the word ‘Java’ can refer to either the programming language or the island of Indonesia.
2. Different languages tend to phrase the same things differently. For example, the term ‘rebord de fenêtre’ in French translates directly to ‘edge of window’ in English. But it is actually referring to a windowsill.

As a result, the old search algorithms were producing less relevant and accurate results for searchers.

Entities, on the other hand, are universally understood concepts that are not bounded by language or ambiguity. They are broader topics that keywords can stem from. They are distinguishable, especially through their relation to other things. Unlike keywords, entities have an additional layer of context, which can provide greater clarity to search engines.

How do Entities Relate to SEO?

Search engines are evolving toward a more semantic approach, analyzing the concepts and meanings within user queries. They identify relevant pages that answer the entities in question with greater context and accuracy.

As search engines advance in their understanding, there is inevitable demand for SEO strategies to also become more semantic to better align with this sophisticated and nuanced way of search. The good news is that you can assist search engines in grasping the entities and context of the content on your site.

Your website serves as the information hub about things related to your organization. The services provided by your organization, your postal address, your customer reviews, your blog articles – these are all entities related to your organization.

However, the content often exists in the form of plain text, images, videos and infographics. Humans can consume this form of information but machines and search engines cannot comprehend information in this unstructured manner.

Creating Machine-Readable Content

To bridge this gap between human understanding and machine interpretation, implementing semantic Schema Markup to define, describe and connect your entities is crucial. By meticulously defining entities within your content, you are essentially structuring your data in a format that search engines and machines can understand.

You can also further define the entities on your site by linking them to other linked entities in external authoritative databases like Google’s Knowledge Graph, Wikipedia, or Wikidata. This helps search engines disambiguate the entities on your page.

Defining these entities ensures your content is contextually understood by machines. This contextual understanding allows search engines to display your content for a broader range of relevant queries, expanding your site’s visibility and attracting a more qualified audience.

If you leave AI search engines to their own devices without informing them about the entities on your site, you are leaving it to them to decide on what is “true” for your content. You can control how machines interpret your content by defining your entities to prevent hallucinations and inaccuracies from being presented about your organization. This strategic approach safeguards your organization’s E-E-A-T and credibility.

So, now you know why you should define your entities, but how do you do it?

How to Identify and Define Page Entities

Author and Deploy Schema Markup

To have your content topics recognized as entities by search engines, use the Schema.org vocabulary to structure your data. You can use the Schema.org Types and properties to describe the entities across your site.

Many organizations tend to use a Schema Markup plugin to automate their Schema Markup process. However, many of these plugins will only markup certain page Types or properties. As such, you cannot customize your markup to properly define your entities or link them to other entities on your site.

If you want to provide search engines with a clear understanding of your content, you need to describe your entities thoroughly and leverage as many relevant properties as possible. The Schema App Editor and Highlighter are two great options if you want to implement custom semantic Schema Markup on your site.

Add Unique Identifiers to Schema Markup

For your entity to be identifiable and retrievable, it must have a distinct Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). URIs can help machines identify unique resources (like entities) and enable data interlinking.

In JSON-LD, this is expressed with the ‘@id’ attribute. By adding the ‘@id’ attribute to the entities in your Schema Markup, you can easily connect and refer back to other entities on your site so that search engines can clearly understand the relationship between different entities on your site.

For example, the author page for Mark van Berkel contains all the information about the person Mark van Berkel. Therefore, we can use Person markup on that page and define the entity ‘Mark van Berkel’ using the Schema.org properties. When we create the markup, we can add an ‘@id’ so that any connections to Mark can be indicated using the @id.

Search engines like Google can still read and qualify your page for a rich result if you don’t include an @id for your entities. However, you wouldn’t be able to connect the entities on your site in a machine-readable manner.

When you publish your Schema Markup using the Schema App Highlighter or Editor, our tool automatically generates HTTPs URIs for the entities defined in your Schema Markup.

Connect Your Entities

Connecting these entities on your website to explain how they are related, and extending these connections to external knowledge graphs, such as Google’s Knowledge Graph, Wikipedia, or Wikidata, helps search engines to disambiguate the entities on your site.

For example, Mark is one of the founders of the organization Schema App. We can leverage the ‘founder’ property under the Organization type to express that Mark is the founder of Schema App. And since we’ve already defined the entity Mark on his author page, we can link the entity ‘Mark’ using his @id to the entity ‘Schema App’ in the Organization markup.

That way, search engines know that this specific entity, Mark van Berkel, which is described on this page (https://www.schemaapp.com/author/vberkel/#Person), is the founder of Schema App.

As mentioned earlier, you can also connect your entities to external knowledge graphs to distinguish the entities on your site. External knowledge graphs are authoritative databases comprising millions of entities and their relationships. These entities link to other entities across the web which is why they are referred to as “linked entities”.

The linked entities identified in these external knowledge graphs also have unique identifiers, enabling connections to your own entities.

For example, Vancouver is the name of a city in British Columbia, Canada and also the name of a city in Washington State, US.

If your organization is a restaurant based in Vancouver, BC, you can describe your organization’s areaServed property by linking it to the right entity on:

• Google’s knowledge graph (/m/080h2), OR
• Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver), OR
• Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q24639).

That way, search engines can clearly understand which Vancouver you’re referring to.

By establishing these relationships, you empower machines not only to comprehend existing information deeply but also to infer new knowledge based on this contextual understanding.

How do Entities Relate to Knowledge Graphs?

This process of defining and connecting entities effectively constructs a robust knowledge graph for your organization, providing a comprehensive and accurate representation of your content from a digital scope. Entities serve as the foundational building blocks of information that knowledge graphs organize into explicit relationships.

By capturing these complex relationships between entities and building context, knowledge graphs provide machines with a robust understanding of how different entities are related. Linking your entities internally and externally enriches the information available to search engines to create a holistic view of your organization.

This approach also helps prevent misrepresentation of your content and avoids machine confusion between ambiguous entities. Consider the thing, “Apple”, as an example; it could refer to the fruit or the brand. By linking your entity to the relevant external definition using the sameAs property, you offer an explicit distinction and enable search engines to align your content accurately with user queries.

Schema App Helps Define Your Entities & Develop Your Knowledge Graph

You can help search engines further understand, contextualize and distinguish the entities on your site using Schema Markup. If you are looking to leverage semantic Schema Markup to define your entities and develop a robust marketing knowledge graph for your organization, we can help.

At Schema App, we help enterprise SEO teams leverage semantic Schema Markup to define and link their entities, develop their knowledge graph, and improve search performance. Visit our website to learn more about our Schema Markup and knowledge graph solution.

Curious about how we can support your organization? Fill out this form to get started and connect with us.

The post What is an Entity in SEO? appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Before diving into the rich results that exist and how they can support your business, let’s explore what rich results are exactly.

What is a Rich Result?

A rich result (formerly known as a rich snippet) is an enhanced search result displayed on Google’s search engine results page (SERP) that can be achieved by implementing the appropriate structured data (aka Schema Markup) on your site. Structured data helps search engines better understand the content on your page and display that content with a more detailed appearance on the SERP.

Unlike standard organic search results, rich results offer users additional information beyond the typical page title, URL, and meta description, enhancing their search experience.

Rich results go beyond conventional search results by offering a more informative and decorated appearance, which significantly enhances a page’s visibility in search.

When implemented correctly, rich results provide users with additional information such as ratings, pricing, reviews, job locations, and more, allowing pages to stand out beyond the usual blue links and short previews.

By enriching the user experience, these decorated results not only make the search process more informative but also yield measurable advantages for businesses.

Benefits of Rich Results for Businesses

Stand Out in Search & Gain a Competitive Advantage

For businesses, rich results offer a competitive advantage by presenting content in a more compelling and authoritative manner. Businesses can showcase key information directly in the SERP, informing users that their content is best aligned with their queries, and persuading more qualified traffic to click through for further information.

Reduce Spend on Sponsored Content

With a stronger organic presence through rich results, businesses can save on advertising costs and sponsored content while still effectively reaching their target audience, increasing CTR, and driving valuable traffic to their websites.

Drive Qualified Traffic

A rich result can also drive more qualified traffic to your site. When searchers see elements like pricing on a product they are interested in, or a relevant job description on a job posting, they can self-assess and determine if your content will provide them with an answer to their query.

This self-qualification process can lead to a higher likelihood of getting clicks from users genuinely interested in your listings, leading to a higher chance of converting them to your page.

Delight Your Customers With Answers

Rich results streamline the process of providing customers with relevant information directly on the SERP, ensuring a seamless user experience.

For instance, when users search for specific recipes, rich results promptly showcase essential details like ingredients, cooking duration, and ratings, eliminating the need to visit individual websites for such information.

Similarly, for local businesses, rich results efficiently present vital information such as operating hours, contact details, and customer feedback directly in the search results, facilitating quick access to necessary details.

This approach not only enhances user satisfaction by delivering instant answers but also saves customers time, thereby increasing the likelihood of further engagement with the business.

Build Trust With Your Audience

Some rich results like review snippets can help your brand establish trust, authority, and credibility with new customers at the start of their buyer journey. They enable you to showcase positive reviews and high ratings for your brand, which reflect the trust that other users have placed in your product or service.

By doing so, you can build strong E-E-A-T, which represents the Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness of your brand and can have a strong influence on conversions.

Drive Measurable Results for Your Business

At Schema App, we’ve seen the impact a rich result can have on the click-through rate of a web page. Our customer, Baptist Health saw a 491% increase in the CTR when comparing physician pages with a review snippet to those without.

Implementing Schema Markup to achieve rich results is a strategy that can provide your company with measurable ROI.

Develop Your Content Strategy

Just like how you need to have the necessary content on your page to markup with structured data, you can customize your content to meet the required properties for a specific rich result.

Your Schema Markup strategy is unique to the goals of each page, and which rich results would serve your page’s user queries and intent the best. It’s essential to adhere to content guidelines specific to each structured data type to ensure your content contains the relevant Types and properties for your rich result goal.

Are you looking for more product sales? Be sure to include product images, pricing, and ratings to be eligible for Product rich results.

Looking to get more appointments booked? Include reviews and ratings on your physician pages to build trust and establish credibility with potential patients to encourage them to book.

All in all, being aware of the desired outcomes and rich result goals you have for each page can help drive your content strategy in an actionable way.

See how Sharp HealthCare utilized the schema.org vocabulary to architect their content strategy.

By leveraging rich results effectively, businesses can gain a competitive advantage and enhance their online visibility organically, ultimately offering users a more engaging and informative search experience.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the rich results available on Google.

Rich Result Examples & How They Support Business Objectives

Review Snippets

Review snippets appear in the SERP when a user searches for a product, local business, movie, and other content types. It displays a concise summary of review ratings and other information, such as the average rating and the number of reviews, directly on the SERP.

Review snippets help users make informed decisions before clicking through to a specific website. For businesses, review snippets can significantly impact their online reputation and trustworthiness, as positive reviews can instill confidence and entice potential customers, boosting click-through rates to their website.

Product Rich Result

When a user searches for a specific product, the Product rich result provides detailed information about the product, including its name, price, availability and reviews, directly on the SERP.

This rich result offers users a quick glance at essential product details, allowing them to compare options and make purchasing decisions without needing to visit a specific website.

For instance, if you have a product page, achieving a Product rich result will provide you with an enhanced result that can display product images, pricing, ratings, availability, and even shipping and return details directly on the SERP.

These details allow potential customers to make quicker purchasing decisions before even visiting your website. This immediate access to essential product information can have a significant influence on buying decisions.

Google recently started awarding rich results even without structured data. Our experience, however, is that they don’t always get it quite right. We’ve seen Google providing Product rich results on non-product pages or even highlighting incorrect prices.

By implementing structured data, you can build trust with your users by taking control of what should be highlighted on your product pages and be reassured the correct details are shared with your users.

Job Posting Rich Result

JobPosting rich results appear when a user searches for job opportunities. It displays relevant job listings directly on the SERP, providing essential details such as job titles, locations, and company names.

This rich result allows job seekers to view and compare job openings without needing to visit individual job boards or company websites. For employers, job-posting rich results can significantly improve their recruitment efforts by increasing the visibility of their job listings and attracting potential candidates.

We have seen our client Baptist Health increase their CTR by 1194% when JobPosting rich results were achieved. You can read the case study here.

These are just a few of the many rich results available on Google. There are, however, other search features on Google that are not considered a rich result. Let’s dig in.

What is NOT a Rich Result?

On top of rich results, there are other visually appealing Google SERP features you can optimize for without using structured data.  While rich results are powered by structured data, there are other formats that can achieve a similar outcome, and it’s important to know the difference.

Knowledge Panel

For instance, a knowledge panel is an information box that appears on the right side of the search engine results page, offering concise details about a specific entity or topic. Though not technically a rich result, it displays relevant data, including images, links, and key facts, making it highly useful to users.

Featured Snippet

Similarly, a featured snippet showcases a summarized answer to a user’s query at the top of the search results, often extracted from a webpage. These features enhance the user experience by providing quick, relevant information in an easily accessible manner, even without structured data markup.

Other Google search results that resemble rich results, but are in fact not rich results, include:

People Also Ask

The “People Also Ask” feature presents a list of related questions that users frequently ask based on their original query. When users click on these questions, additional drop-down answers appear, offering more detailed information.

Though not directly utilizing structured data, this dynamic presentation of information can resemble rich results due to its interactive nature and visually appealing design.

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content, which includes paid advertisements and promoted links, can also resemble rich results in appearance. These sponsored listings are often displayed with attractive images, catchy titles, and additional metadata to capture users’ attention.

Even though they are not organically generated through structured data, sponsored content can have a visually rich and distinct format, leading to potential confusion with true rich results by users.

HTML Tables

In the SERP, an HTML table is a structured layout used by search engines to display certain types of information from web pages. It organizes data in rows and columns, making it easier for users to interpret and compare different data points

If a webpage contains a table with data that is relevant to a specific query, search engines may choose to display that table in the search results to provide users with a quick overview of the information they are looking for.

Though the HTML table itself is not a rich result from structured data, it can be utilized in conjunction with rich results like Product to further enhance the user experience.

Rich Results Vs. Other Enhanced Results

While alternative results in the SERP can still be visually engaging and informative, structured data remains the preferred way to achieve enhanced results by achieving a more query-focused presentation of data in the form of rich results.

By leveraging structured data, you ensure that the information displayed aligns precisely with user search intent. Interactive elements present in many rich results further engage users.

The Schema Markup used to generate these results enables better comprehension for search engines, leading to improved rankings, better search performance, enhanced user experience, and even greater preparedness for the future of AI-Generative Search.

Overall, rich results powered by structured data provide a competitive advantage, offering a context-rich experience and greater authority in SERPs, making them a preferred choice for businesses and SEOs aiming to optimize their online presence.

How to Achieve a Rich Result on Google

As mentioned earlier, you can achieve a rich result by implementing the required structured data on your web page. However, there are a few other factors that can affect your eligibility for a rich result. Here are the steps you can take to be eligible for a rich result.

Step 1. Identify which rich result your page could be eligible for

Google currently boasts over 32 different types of rich results, each catering to distinct content intents and page structures. Deciding which rich result is most beneficial for your page hinges on understanding the intent behind your content and optimizing its structure accordingly.

Before deciding what rich result to target, you need to understand:

• Who the target audience is for your page
• What query would best match your content
• What your intent is with your page
• What rich result would convey the information on your web page most effectively

Rich results offer distinct benefits based on the type of content you have on your website, which means that your rich result goals should be page specific.

For example, if you have a product listing page, a product rich result would be most appropriate because it already has information about pricing, shipping, ratings etc.

On the other hand, if you offer a service that receives reviews and ratings, you might consider targeting a review snippet for your page because it promotes credibility and trust to people seeking that service.

Step 2. Ensure the content on your page fulfills the required Schema.org properties

Based on Google’s Structured Data Guidelines, you need to markup your page with the required properties for the specific Schema.org Type that you are using to achieve your targeted rich result.

For example, if you want to target a review snippet for your physician page, you need to add Review structured data markup and include the required properties listed in the guidelines.

You can also include the recommended properties to add more information to your structured data to decorate your rich result with even more information. A good example of this would be the product rich result.

At its basic level, a Product rich result requires at least one of the following three properties in your content: review, aggregate rating, and offer (price). However, by including all three properties or additional ones like price ranges, shipping availability, starting prices, and discounts, you can make the product rich result more informative and compelling.

This way, a more dynamic and detailed result will appear on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

That said, you should only mark up content that exists on your page and is visible to the readers of the page. If you mark up content that is not present on your page, it will result in schema drift and you will not be awarded the rich result.

Here are some additional tips on how you can optimize your content to achieve a rich result.

Step 3. Author the structured data markup for your page

Once you’ve ensured that your page has the content needed to fulfill the required properties, you can go ahead and author your structured data markup.

To be eligible for a rich result, Google requires you to markup your web page using one of the three supported formats: JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa. However, Google prefers JSON-LD as its markup format.

You can manually write the JSON-LD code or you can use tools like the Schema App Editor to generate the JSON-LD code for you. Before adding the JSON-LD code to your web page, you should also check to ensure your markup follows Google’s structured data guidelines and content guidelines.

Step 4. Add the JSON-LD structured data markup to your web page

There are a few ways to add the JSON-LD code to your web page. You can manually paste the JSON-LD structured data to the HTML of your web page. However, if you make any changes to the content on your site, you will need to manually update the structured data to prevent schema drift.

Alternatively, you can use the Schema App Editor to generate and deploy the JSON-LD code to your web page. This method is less complicated and allows you to easily manage and update your structured data without having to do any coding.

Once you’ve added the structured data to your page, you can use Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool or the Schema.org Validator to test that your structured data is working properly.

It is important to know that adding structured data to your web page does not guarantee that it will appear as a rich result, despite rich results being powered by structured data. Google tailors the search results to provide users with the best search experience. If they do not deem a specific rich result to be appropriate for the query, they will not award you the rich result.

Make Your Content Eligible for Rich Results

Rich results are a valuable asset for businesses aiming to enhance their online visibility, organic traffic, and user experience. Utilizing Schema Markup is key to achieving these results, as it allows search engines to understand and present content in a more contextual, visually appealing and informative way.

While adding structured data to your pages doesn’t guarantee a rich result with Google, you can increase your chances by ensuring high-quality content, expertly implemented markup and alignment with Google’s structured data and content guidelines.

To see how Schema App can help your organization leverage quality content to execute an effective Schema Markup strategy and drive measurable results, contact Schema App today.

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