Entity SEO is an approach to search optimization that focuses on entities — unique, well-defined concepts such as people, places, organizations, or products — rather than just targeting keywords. As search engines evolve, this shift to entity-based understanding is redefining how visibility and authority are earned online.
Why is Entity SEO Important in Today’s Search Landscape?
Search engines no longer rely solely on keyword matching. Instead, they use entities to gain a true semantic understanding of what the user is looking for. This enables them to provide richer, more relevant search results.
Modern AI-powered search experiences, such as Google’s AI Overview, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, depend on entity recognition to deliver accurate, trustworthy information. These systems draw from structured data and knowledge graphs – such as Google’s Knowledge Graph – that define entities as well as their relationship to other entities on the web at scale.
For enterprises, this means that optimizing for entities, not just keywords, is essential to showing up in AI-enhanced search results and controlling your brand across the web.
What is an Entity in SEO?
According to Google. An entity is “a thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined, and distinguishable.”
Entities can be anything from a product to a person to a company. Unlike keywords, entities are contextually grounded and clarified by their relationships.
What is the Difference Between Entities and Keywords?
Keywords are the traditional foundation of SEO. They reflect the terms people search for, but they can be ambiguous, duplicated across topics, and lack the clarity search engines need to confidently understand content. Entities, by contrast, are specific, clearly defined concepts or things that can be uniquely identified and linked to additional information.
Where keywords describe what someone is searching for, entities provide the meaning behind those words. Search engines use entities to interpret context, disambiguate terms, and return more relevant results.
For example:
Consider the word “Mercury.” As a keyword, it could refer to the planet, the chemical element, the Roman god, or even the car brand. Without context, it’s impossible to know which one a page is about. But when you use structured data to clarify “Mercury” as the planet and link it to trusted sources like Wikidata, search engines can disambiguate the term and accurately associate the page with astronomy content.
By optimizing for entities – instead of peppering your content with keywords – you’re giving search engines the clarity they need to interpret your content correctly, and in turn, increasing your chances of appearing in the right search results.
Key Elements of Entity SEO
To succeed with Entity SEO, focus on the following core components:
Schema Markup (aka structured data)
Schema Markup allows you to identify and contextualize the entities on your website in a machine-readable manner. It helps search engines interpret content with clarity and accuracy and, in some cases, display it in visually enhanced formats like rich results and knowledge panels on the SERP.
Entity Linking
Entity linking reinforces relationships between entities, building context and authority.
You can do Entity Linking for entities related to your brand on your website. This helps search engines understand how the entities defined by your brand are connected semantically. At Schema App, we call this Internal Entity Linking – because you’re linking entities that were defined by your organization.
For example, our CEO, Martha van Berkel, is an author on our website and we’ve defined her as an entity using Schema Markup on her author page. Martha has written a blog post on ‘How to Measure and Optimize Your Website’s Performance in ChatGPT and AI Search Engines’. We can define that blog post as an entity using Schema Markup, include the ‘author’ property, and link it to Martha’s entity that we’ve previously defined. That way, search engines clearly know which ‘Martha van Berkel’ has written the article.
You can also do Entity Linking and connect the named entities on your website to authoritative and recognized knowledge bases like Wikidata, Wikipedia, or Google’s Knowledge Graph. At Schema App, we called this External Entity Linking and it helps search engines and machines disambiguate the entity mentioned on your site.
Ultimately, implementing Schema Markup and entity linking:
- Clarifies entity meaning and removes ambiguity
- Signals to search engines that your content references trusted, identifiable entities
- Can increase your chances of appearing accurately in rich results, SERP features, and AI-generated answers
At Schema App, we automate both the Internal and External entity linking process at scale through our semantic technology platform.
Our tools implement dynamic Schema Markup and precise entity linking, giving enterprise teams the control and flexibility they need to implement effective Entity SEO.
How Does Entity SEO Connect to Broader Digital Strategy?
Entity SEO is more than a technical SEO tactic. It plays a strategic role in how your organization structures, presents, and connects its digital presence. When implemented thoughtfully, it strengthens your content strategy by helping organize and interlink content in a way that search engines can interpret. It also supports your SEO efforts by improving how content is discovered, understood, and ranked across different platforms.
Beyond content and SEO, Entity SEO reinforces your brand architecture. By clearly defining your brand’s entities, such as your products, leadership team, services, and locations, you create consistency in how your brand is represented across the web. This clarity helps search engines, AI assistants, and other systems accurately associate and present your brand in their results.
When your entity structure is well-established, your brand is more likely to appear in Knowledge Panels, AI Overviews, and responses from voice or text-based assistants. This level of visibility builds credibility and positions your brand as a trusted source of information.
How Google Uses Entities in Search
Google’s search algorithms rely heavily on its Knowledge Graph (a massive network of entities and their relationships) to deliver relevant and meaningful results. Google’s Knowledge Graph connects facts about entities and informs how search results are enriched with visual panels, quick answers, and related content.
Entities influence many familiar features in search.
- Knowledge Panels summarize key facts about people, organizations, or products
- Local packs show location-based listings
- Product results to surface ecommerce offerings
- Featured snippets and AI Overviews also depend on accurate entity recognition to generate helpful, context-aware answers.
Understanding entities enables Google to interpret user intent more effectively and personalize results across various devices and touchpoints. For enterprise brands, adding structured, consistent, and well-linked entity data on your website increases the likelihood of being included in these enhanced search experiences.
Why Entity SEO Matters for Enterprises
For enterprise organizations, Entity SEO offers both tactical and strategic benefits. It enhances visibility by increasing the chances your content will appear in rich results, AI Overviews, and chatbot responses.
At the same time, it strengthens brand authority by anchoring your presence in Google’s Knowledge Graph and other AI systems.
Entity SEO also provides long-term value. Because it’s based on meaning and structure rather than keyword trends, it is more resilient to changes in search algorithms. This makes it a future-proof investment in your SEO strategy.
Consistency is another key advantage. By clearly defining and linking your entities, you ensure your brand is understood the same way across different websites, platforms, and channels, supporting omni-channel consistency. As AI continues to shape how people search and engage with content, having a strong entity foundation ensures your brand is not only discoverable but accurately represented.
How to Implement Entity SEO
So now that you’re convinced Entity SEO should be a critical part of your digital strategy, let’s dive into how to actually implement it!
Step 1: Identify and Define Page Entities
Start by identifying the core entities on each page, whether they are people, products, services, or locations.
Step 2: Author and Deploy Schema Markup
Use the Schema.org vocabulary to describe each entity in detail. Avoid rigid plugins that only support basic markup. Instead, use flexible and dynamic tools like the Schema App Highlighter to:
- Customize your Schema Markup at scale
- Capture and nest detailed context within your markup
- Automate entity linking across your site
Step 3: Add Unique Identifiers to Schema Markup
Each entity should have a unique identifier or URI to make it machine-readable and linkable. In JSON-LD, this is done using the @id attribute.
Example:
The author page for Martha van Berkel uses Person markup and assigns a unique @id such as: https://www.schemaapp.com/author/martha/#Person
This identifier can then be reused throughout your site to consistently refer to the same entity in other schema objects, such as when describing her as the founder of Schema App.
For more information on how to include @id’s in your Schema Markup, read our article: What is an @id in Structured Data.
Step 4: Connect Your Entities
Once you define your entities in your markup, link them internally and externally to establish context and meaning.
- Use Schema.org properties to define relationships (e.g., founder, employee, location)
- Link to external knowledge graphs like Wikidata, Wikipedia, or Google’s Knowledge Graph to disambiguate
Example:
If your business is in Cambridge, Massachusetts—not Cambridge in the UK—linking to the correct Wikidata entry ensures search engines interpret your content accurately.
Optimize Your Entity SEO With Schema App
Entity SEO is not just about improving rankings. It’s about taking ownership of your brand’s identity in a search environment that is increasingly driven by AI and semantic understanding.
Schema App provides the solution to implement this strategy at scale. From advanced Schema Markup deployment to automated entity linking and centralized entity management, our platform and expert team will help you define and control how your brand is understood online.
Schema App’s new Entity Hub platform gives enterprises a centralized solution to manage, and optimize entities across their entire digital ecosystem. It enables teams to collaborate on entity strategy, maintain consistency across content, and accelerate AI readiness.
Ready for your organization to be a leader in the entity-driven search landscape?
Book a demo to see how Schema App can help your organization implement and scale Entity SEO.
Andrea Badder is the Digital Marketing Specialist at Schema App. She specializes in SEO and develops educational resources to help marketing teams understand the value of Schema Markup and Content Knowledge Graphs for semantic search, content strategy, and AI-driven initiatives. Prior to joining Schema App, Andrea worked as a brand strategist and copywriter at a marketing agency. She is also a graduate from the University of Guelph.