Adam says: “Predominantly, I wanted to speak today about entity building – or how I usually speak to my team, which is, how do we build brand and how do we build trust in the eyes of Google?”

Okay, so entity SEO. What would you say are the key elements to building a successful online entity?

“Yeah, of course. So, to give people a little bit of a background, I run an agency. We're not an agency that works with 3 or 4 customers; we have quite a few customers. What we're always looking to do is find where we can get the quick wins.

Often, when businesses come to us, they want guest posts, they want niche edits, and they want all these fancy things. When you look at their actual entities themselves (even with very large businesses), there are massive gaps. What we like to try and do when we're working with people is, initially, we do a foundational phase sprint to try and figure out where the gaps are. That’s both from an on-page point of view of their entity – making sure they've got their About pages, Meet the Team pages, and all that type of stuff – but then also their off-site signals.

Predominantly, what we're looking at with that is their Google Business Profile, what references they have online, PR mentions, review websites, and all of those types of things. Rather than just looking at the individual website, we're trying to look at things more holistically. That's really what I meant by ‘holistics is building brand’, or trying to build brand, at least in the eyes of Google. That’s at the heart of everything that we try and do for our customers.

What I tell my team is, in a world where AI is producing content at scale, and there are scam websites at scale, how do we make it extremely easy for Google to go, ‘This is a trustworthy, real business. They're not there to scam people, and there is all of this external data to support that consensus.’ That's what our focus is on when we speak about entity building or building brand.”

I certainly understand that, and it resonates with me, but does it resonate with first-time customers? Because a lot of people have a perception of SEO as being, ‘Okay, I'm ranking at number 10 on page 1. Get me up to number 1. That's the most important thing to be doing first.’

“Oh, yeah, 100%. I always use the analogy that you wouldn’t build a house on dodgy foundations, so what we want to try and do is fill the gap. But often what we find is, by doing that, they do get the ranking increases.

One of the things that we look at is a three-step approach. Step 1 is defining the brand on page. I'm clearly saying what the brand represents, its products and services, and its unique selling points. Surprisingly, a lot of customers and businesses are actually very bad at doing that. Often, they'll get conversion increases from doing those things.

Then, the consistency across all platforms – making sure it's consistent – and then, obviously, looking at things like structured data.

The long and short answer is we try and educate customers who work with us that, if you're wanting very quick, short-term wins – obviously we do things like quick wins on content, etc. (maybe we do Facebook ads, maybe we do PPC or whatever), but really we don’t want to work with people for 3 months, we want to work with people for 12 months or 18 months.

Having them understand the philosophy, and where Google is and where SEO is, and getting them to buy in for the long term, is something which we prioritise above a scattergun approach to the website or just heavily focussing on one singular page.

A customer might as, ‘Why are we not ranking for ‘phone systems’ when we used to be?’ Then, you look at the internal page and one page has around 350 links pointing to it and everyone else's page on page 1 has 15/20. In that case, you don't need any more guest posts. Focus on building the trust and the entity as a whole and you will probably get that on the backend from doing that.”

Understood. So, you also talked about analysing gaps in an entity. Do you go about doing that on a fairly manual basis? Do you use software to do that?

“That’s a great question. You can use things like ChatGPT, especially with ChatGPT 4 now. You can ask it to start doing that. We do it manually with VAs. I'm always building the processes and doing it manually with VAs. We have a number of audit spreadsheets that we do, and then we have a customer's entity spreadsheet. (I'm happy to share that with anyone if they want it. It's just an empty spreadsheet with different types of audits.)

What we're predominantly doing in that is trying to look at 5 key areas, mainly. One is the backlink side, but we sort of ignore that initially. One is social platforms – what social platforms do they have and what do their competitors have? Online review platforms, I think they are very important. Also, their local platform citations – how consistent they are, Google Business Profile, etc. Then, brand mentions like PR, etc.

The big recommendation I would give to everyone is to reverse engineer the competition. We try and look for competitors who are ranking, and predominantly competitors who are ranking with domain ratings (or Trust Flow, Citation Flow, etc.) that are not crazy high. What are they doing to get these rankings? Often, they have really strong entities.

One of the best ways I would recommend going about doing that is Googling the name and using the ‘more about this’ page in Google. That will bring up Google's understanding of your entity, it will tell you what your entity name is, etc., and you will often be able to reverse engineer what they have on there.

So, do the competitors have a Trustpilot? Do they have a Crunchbase? What type of directory site’s on there? Fundamentally, if it's featured on there, there's a very good chance that Google thinks it's quite important for that specific industry.

We try and do that, and we try and figure out where the consistencies are and then we compare that to our site or the customer’s site. Then we go through and start filling those gaps – even to the extent of the number of reviews. If there's a consistent basis of having 50 reviews on Trustpilot, we'll work with the customers to say, if we only have two reviews, we should really start bridging that gap. We do the same with Google Business Profile and all of those types of review sites.

That's what we try and do: fill the gaps and reverse engineer everything.”

That probably leads me to trying to understand a little bit more step 1 of your 3-step approach. That is defining the brand. What does that actually mean in practice?

“For us, what we're trying to do when we’re defining the brand is understanding the unique selling points, understanding what unique elements there are to that brand, and making sure they're very clearly displayed on the site. Usually that’s on an About page. We're quite big fans of using the About page as the entity home.

However, it’s all well and good saying that you're great, and that you're award-winning, and that you've been established since XYZ, and whatever else. But then, on the back of that, you need to be corroborating that information on reference sites.

Obviously, Jason Barnard is the expert at this sort of entity-type stuff. He has an awesome feature on his website where you can see what the main reference websites are – things like LinkedIn company pages – and the weight of those. Starting there's quite a good idea.

Even with things like Crunchbase, which I think is the other one where it shows the company information. Making sure all those things are corroborating one fundamental brand message is somewhere where we would start.”

You mentioned guest posts a couple of times as well, and a case where it’s not necessary to get any more guest posts pointed to a particular page.

What are the good links that you should actually be getting nowadays? What are the key links that you do recommend, if you don't see them there?

“So, we do all of the internal stuff. We do guest posts, and we do niche edits internally for our customers. I'm a big proponent of it but I just feel like it's the go-to. I'm not saying it shouldn't be the go-to, but I just feel there's this obsession with just chucking hundreds of pounds, or thousands of pounds, or tens of thousands of pounds at guest posts.

They’re often average guest posts on average sites, with high DR but low traffic that’s not really relevant. We sometimes feel that there are other quick wins. For us, we're trying to build a diverse foundation layer of links. Google Business Profile, first and foremost – making sure that's fully filled out. Make sure you've got really good five-star reviews. Make sure you link to all your social profiles on there.

A few of the other ones are, obviously, citations for geo directors. Again, if we're trying to prove to Google that we're a trustworthy entity and a real business, having a consistent name, address, and phone number on your citations is very important.

Even things like data aggregators – and social media profiles. I had a customer who said, ‘We don't want to do TikTok.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, but when you search your three main competitors, they all have TikTok. Isn't it worth just creating a TikTok and doing a 20-second video saying, Coming Soon?’

Also, YouTube company pages. They might say, ‘Oh, we don't want to do video.’ Okay. Well, is it not worth just setting that up at least, and having that reference there – especially if it's on page 1 of Google when you're searching your competitors?

There’s also digital PR, or even syndicator PR. Getting those brand mentions is super important. To be fair, there are quite a few. We have a really big list of things like social signals, even as far as Web 2.0 and getting articles in places like Medium.

The big thing that we're trying to do is look at what the competition has, especially in the top 3/4 pages when you're searching that competitor's name. What websites are they in, and how can we make sure that we tick the sensible ones in that list?”

You've mentioned many ways to build your authority and build your brand, but I don't believe you've mentioned the word ‘blog’. Is it still important to have your own blog on your own website as well?

“Yeah, 100%. That, again, comes down to entity building as well. We're big on doing topical maps. We have a topic-down approach when we work with customers. When they come in, they purchase topic research and subtopic research.

This also comes down to educating our customers on the way that we work. We start with, ‘What are the primary 2/3 topics you really want to focus on? What are the subtopics? Then, from that, what are the keywords? Then secondary keywords, etc.’

So very much so. For informational blog posts, when we're looking at a topic we try and cover it in its entirety and use internal links to push people down the funnel. That's a big thing which often people go wrong. They have topical coverage, but they misconstrue that to mean they have topical authority, and it's not always the case.

With blogging, again, we’re reverse engineering that: matching the intent and making sure that the intent of the page that we're producing is the correct intent to rank for those phrases.”

Superb. How do you report on the success of what you're doing to clients? Because a lot of what you're doing isn’t necessarily having a direct impact on the bottom line.

You mentioned earlier that some entity building can have an indirect result on rankings, but is that just what you focus on or are there other elements to your reporting?

“No, I report, but I never feel that we mislead a customer. We pride ourselves on being KPI-focused and we try and understand what the business is looking to achieve, through leads and all the rest of it.

What we're saying to customers is, we're not going to completely neglect the foundations just to get quick wins. We don't want things to fall over. We want to make sure that it's built on solid foundations. All of these things are communicated directly with the customers, and then we will have an entity audit where we go through and show them the progress of that. We do have to explain to people that there's a compounding effect to this type of stuff, and it isn't always simple.

People are very keen on investing in things at the bottom of the funnel, and they're very happy to neglect the things at the top of the funnel. Something like building brand or building entities, which is at the top of the funnel and will benefit you for 5-10 years to come, is worth an exercise to get sorted.

But no, you are correct. It's one of the reasons we couple that approach with quick wins. We do have a quick win analysis, where we go through and try to find these opportunities and get them improved to show that to the customers. However, that’s whilst we're working on a longer-term goal.”

You talked about the About page as being the entity homepage. That's obviously going to have structured data on it as well. Is structured data key for other pages in your site as well?

“I would definitely say that people should check out Sara and Ulrika’s tips on schema. They’re very good at schema. There are definitely people who are better at schema than me.

We have a lot of success with a WordPress plugin. I won't mention which one it is, it’s a premium WordPress plugin, which does a lot of the sites of WordPress. Obviously, you can do it by yourself.”

You're allowed to mention other software. It doesn't matter.

“Actually, I'm trying to think whether it’s called Schema Pro or WP Schema. It's by Brainstorm. It's not the perfect solution, however, writing it by hand could get us 20% better results but it's going to take us 60-70% more time.

We are using common sense schema organisation for local business schema, homepage, location pages, about schema on the about page, product schema, review schema, etc. I think the big thing when it comes to entity building, or any of these things, is that we have to remember why we're doing it. We're doing it to make Google's life easier.

With sameAs schema, we're connecting the dots. That's what I'm trying to explain to my team. How do we connect the dots between these things? Using sameAs to link to those PR mentions – or say you've got a Wikipedia or Wikidata page, or you've been featured on BBC or IMDB. Make sure that you use the sameAs schema to combine that information so that Google can have an internal loop.”

You talked about making Google's life easier. It's not necessarily going to be just Google in the future, of course, with AI and perhaps people receiving the answers that they're looking for directly without having to visit websites.

Does this entity building assist with the evolvements that we're seeing in AI?

“I think so because, fundamentally, AI hallucinates. I understand that the progress curve for AIs is incredible and, who knows, maybe Google won't even need schema, or they may make it redundant one day.

I don't completely buy into it, though. The reason why is because, coming back to one of the initial points I said, in a world where content's never been produced at such a scale, there must be more websites now than there's ever been. It must be insane for Google to try and keep track of this stuff. You can see that in the SERPs, with Google struggling to handle different types of pages. For me, the SERPs don't seem as good as they once were for actually getting your answer.

I feel like it's all about the micro wins. Having something there that uses something like schema, which is completely taking out all of the guesswork, makes it very easy for them to be able to go, ‘This is consistent information. We can rely on this, and we don't have to go through and try and figure this stuff out.’

Google's overhead must be insane, so surely they must reward the sites which are making their lives a little bit easier – or you'd hope so anyway.”

Is it giving a little bit of a greater level of trust?

“You hope so, but who knows, right? Google works in mysterious ways, so maybe not.

But I think the more that you can do to connect these dots for Google, and have it go, ‘Oh, thank you for making my life a little bit easier. That's going to save me a little bit of processing power.’ – you would hope that there's some sort of reward for that.”

So, you've shared what SEO should be doing in 2024. Now let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“From my experience, SEOs love SEO, and I love that – and I think the SEO community's got some fantastic people in it. But at some point, you have to understand that there are only so many hours in the day, and you're only one person.

I feel like, when I see some SEOs – even some people in my team – I have to bash them over the head and really force them to make sure that they're going, ‘I could do this task and it will take me 45 minutes but, no, let's build processes. Let's ensure that we have a good team, either in-house or offshore, and let's make sure that the SEO is working on the things which truly matter – like the overarching strategy rather than the micro stuff.’

I feel like people, especially SEOs, can get very obsessive over trying to fix these specific very, very small tasks, which may only benefit the campaign a little bit. What I would say to SEOs is to try and learn to delegate. If you're doing tasks over and over again, just create a spreadsheet of the tasks that you're repeating on a weekly basis and start working through them going, ‘How could we offshore this? How could we create a simple process to do this?’

You may have to pay a little bit to get it done, but if it's going to give you your sanity and your peace of mind, allowing you to focus on other things, then the net, hour-wise, is substantially better. That would be my biggest thing. I think that was the biggest change for me, and it is hard to do. But, if you can get someone to do what you would do 90% as well (maybe it's not going to be as good), then you'll be able to help more people and achieve more results.”

Adam Collins is Founder at Ignite SEO, and you can find him over at IgniteSEO.co.uk.