How Brightview Senior Living Used Entity Linking to Win Local Search & Future-Proof Their SEO

Scaling Local SEO Across Dozens of Local Markets with a Lean Team

With a small but mighty digital marketing team, Brightview faced the challenge of scaling SEO and visibility across 47+ independently branded community pages. Each location had unique nuances and local context, and the team needed to make sure their pages reflected this while standing out in search.

This made it clear that they needed a scalable, structured data solution. Schema Markup would allow them to clearly communicate the purpose and context of each community page—helping search engines accurately interpret and present their content to the right local audiences.

“We were trying to scale a hyper-local strategy with limited resources, and the algorithm wasn’t always picking up our intent—like mistaking Phoenix, MD for Phoenix, AZ.”, said Brendan Moore, Digital Marketing Specialist at Brightview Senior Living.

Existing Schema Markup Technical Debt

Inconsistent Schema Markup was also holding them back. Incomplete and competing markup formats (including microdata and Schema.org JSON-LD) and technical debt from previous implementations resulted in unpredictable rich result eligibility—particularly for reviews, a critical part of their online visibility strategy.

The Brightview team knew search was evolving, and simply optimizing content with keywords wasn’t enough. They needed a future-proof strategy that would enable search engines to understand their content accurately and align it with intent-based searches.

Schema Markup at Scale

Enter Schema App. Brightview’s SEO partner, Ryan Pitcheralle, was already familiar with Schema App and advocated for the partnership from day one.

Brightview was assigned a Customer Success Manager who created a strategy with them to determine how their pages would be marked up and what types of rich results they would target for each page set. The Schema App team got to work and deployed structured data across 98% of Brightview’s site within 4 months.

Early wins came in the form of consistent review snippets and FAQ rich results. Brightview Senior Living’s community pages that achieved review snippets saw a 55.5% increase in impressions compared to pages without rich results within just a 3 month span.

However, in 2023, Google announced that FAQ rich results would be shown less frequently and only be available for authoritative government and health sites. As a result, Brightview lost their opportunity to stand out using FAQ rich results.

That said, Schema App was able to help Brightview pivot with agility—ensuring their Schema Markup was maintained for semantic value, not just rich results.

But the real game-changer came when Brightview leaned into entity linking using Schema App’s External Entity Linking feature.

Perform Entity Linking for Local Authority

Brightview’s strategy evolved from keyword optimization to entity optimization—marking up mentions of specific services, locations, and concepts with links to authoritative sources.

This helped search engines disambiguate terms like “Phoenix” (Maryland, not Arizona) and associate Brightview’s pages with the services they provide—like assisted living—at the local level.

They implemented location-specific external entity linking on their community (location) pages, using the “mentions” and “areaServed” property to ensure relevance and clarity. This supported their strategy of showing up in “near me” and geo-modified searches—critical for driving traffic to the correct community pages.

We’ve established capabilities through our partnership with Schema App to move and respond to the evolution of search as agile as anyone in the space can.”
— Ryan Pitcheralle, SEO Consultant, Brightview Senior Living

Entity Linking for Non-Branded Queries

Brightview knew that their long-term SEO success depended on being found not just by brand name but by what they do. Key entities like “assisted living” and “independent living” were central to their offerings—and they needed to show up for those terms, even when potential customers didn’t yet know the Brightview brand.

To support this, Schema App implemented External Entity Linking on all marked up pages across Brightview’s site, including community pages, blog posts, and informational pages. External Entity Linking connects entities found in the website content to authoritative sources (e.g., Wikipedia or Wikidata) using the “mentions” and “sameAs” properties.

Doing so helps search engines clearly understand that pages are about specific topics —like assisted living—not just loosely related keywords. This gave Brightview’s content broader semantic reach and improved how their pages aligned with relevant, intent-based queries.

By performing external entity linking, search engines could more easily associate Brightview’s content with the core services they offer—leading to measurable improvements in visibility for non-branded searches.

As Ryan Pitcheralle, Brightview’s SEO consultant, put it:
“We knew entity SEO and topic authority were critical. Schema App helped us improve our content so we’re not just found by name, but for what we offer—and where we offer it.”

This strategic use of entity linking helped Brightview shift from keyword optimization to entity-driven SEO, establishing stronger topic authority, improving alignment with AI-powered search experiences, and increasing discoverability for users earlier in their decision-making journey.