Make sure your brand-related entities are in Google’s Knowledge Vault

Austine says: “Get your entities into Google’s Knowledge Vault, starting with your brand.

Your brand-related entities will include the main brand, your products, and anything else that’s brand-related, such as personal branding for CEOs, CFOs, and C-suite individuals – especially for businesses in the B2B sector.”

Do SEOs often neglect their products as brand entities?

“I think so. For example, Apple is the main brand, but the iPhone and iPad are products that fall within the brand grouping. They are essentially brands themselves.

All businesses need to have their entities within Google’s Knowledge Vault. You can think of entities as nameplates of things. Quite a while ago, Google mentioned that they are moving from ‘strings’ to ‘things’. One of the reasons why they are doing this is because the traditional way that they seek information, their information retrieval system, is out of date. When you want to have an entity on a social media platform, you input your entity and you provide the information to them. This is where Google has slowly been headed over the years.

They started with logged-in users – on Android, for example. Whenever you’re on a mobile phone, you’re logged into Google. When you’re logged out on desktop, Google prompts you to log in to your Google account. That is them having data of users. I believe they’re headed into the same sort of methodology with businesses, brands, and websites.”

What does the optimum entity footprint look like?

“Start with your brand. That should be the root of everything on the website. Once you have the brand on there, you should then focus on brand-related terms. The least important will be generic keywords. If you target brand, you’ll be able to associate your branding with generic keywords in the long run.

In terms of what it looks like, having a knowledge panel for the main brand, that the business owns, is a stamp of approval by Google. They not only know who you are, but they also know the audience you’re trying to target. Remember, the audience you’re trying to target is Google’s users.

Whenever you attract visitors via Google, you’re essentially seeking to attain a subset of Google’s users. In order for Google to recommend you, in 2024 and beyond, you need to provide Google with the understanding they need to recommend you as best as they can to their users. You must not think of SEO in terms of the users that you acquire. You’re acquiring Google’s users. Whichever search engine you’re attracting users from, you’re acquiring their users, so you have to play their game.

Google is quickly moving toward ensuring that their users have all the information that they want, seek, and (to some extent) expect on their platform. This requires Google to have a better understanding of entities.”

What’s the ideal source of information for the knowledge panel for Google?

“Ideally, you want it to be from a website that you own and have control of. Wikipedia, IMDB, and even Wikidata used to be ideal sources, in the very early stages of Google focusing more on entities. Nowadays, the key is to have the site you work on provide Google with the same level of confidence that they have in Wikipedia or IMDB. Those websites dominate search queries because Google has confidence in them.

Ideally, you want Google to have this level of confidence in your own website – not a social media platform that you own. It’s your land that you own and control. Having this as the source of information means that, whenever you update it, you can update the way Google presents you to your prospective audience.”

Why are branded keywords becoming more important than generic keywords, with the introduction of the SGE?

“Think of the overall search journey that users are taking, from the beginning right until the end. The SGE is designed to shorten that; it’s designed to make their search journey a lot quicker. One of the ways Google is aiming to do this is by providing the information on the SERPs themselves, starting with generic keywords.

If a user were to search for ‘home insurance’, they almost don’t expect to browse through different sites, find the information they want, go back to Google, and then enter another site. That is a lengthy, unnecessary process. Google will aim to provide the information that they believe their audience is seeking within the SERPs themselves. Therefore, from a business point of view, the value will be around branded, bottom-of-funnel keywords.

This is why I mentioned brand – and products are essentially branded keywords as well. These sorts of keywords will become increasingly more valuable to users because they’ll be starting and ending their search journey a lot quicker. They’ll be getting to those brand-led queries quicker, and they’ll be using more of those brand-led queries to pinpoint what they’re seeking.

You want to teach your users to use your brand keywords within their searches to educate Google about what your brand represents, and make it more likely that they’re going to come back to you.”

If you’re producing content in other areas (podcasts, video shows, etc.) should you subtly incorporate your brand as part of that as well?

“Absolutely. These are the sorts of things that people will expect when they carry out a search. They will start from an unknown point of view and quickly become a lot more informed. Their queries will be based on those that they trust, which will be those that they see and have seen throughout their search journey.

If you target and focus on having your entities within Google’s Knowledge Vault, you are automatically targeting your generic keywords, so there’s no point focusing on them.

Throughout the years, SEOs have focused more on generic keywords as the richer source of traffic, demand generation, and acquisition. These days, though, it’s the brand that’s going to be more important. Bottom-of-funnel keywords will have a lot more value than top-of-funnel keywords and, by targeting those bottom-of-funnel keywords and having those entities within Google’s Knowledge Vault, you will ensure that you capture everything that’s related to what your business does and who your business is.

You can think about entities in line with your head term branded keywords. As I mentioned earlier, iPhone and iPad are top-end, branded, head term keywords, and they are the kind of entities that you’re trying to ensure Google is aware of and has confidence in knowing. You want Google to have the information from your website (in this case, from Apple’s website), rather than a competitor.”

For a user who isn’t aware that a brand exists, does generic keyword targeting still play an important role?

“It is a less important form of targeting. SEOs have historically focused on the generic term, aiming to have that generic term within the left-hand panel and be recommended when that term is searched for.

If you target ‘Barclays home insurance’, by having that branded ownership of that generic entity, you ensure that you’re associating the brand with the generic term. On top of that, whenever someone searches for the generic term, Google already knows you’re associated with it, so they serve you up – whether the user searches with the brand term or not.

To build on this, you can actively encourage users to search using your brand terms. We’re already seeing a lot of this in above-the-line advertising, namely TV. I like to call it the third call to action. The first call to action is the brand, the second is usually the brand’s social media platform, and the third is ‘Search for X’. They explicitly tell users to search for the term that the brand wants their prospective users to be searching for.

This is a way of directing what people search for and ensuring that Google is aware that this search phrase is pertinent to this brand.”

How do you establish the right keyword phrases to be targeting?

“Start with the brand. Ensure that you have a description that is shown concisely on the site that is the entity home of the brand, then look at your product-led keywords and have their descriptions in semantic triples. Then, you can start associating branded terms with the generic terms that you research.

If the business is in the maritime industry, what are people searching for in the maritime industry? Associate your branding with that generic keyword research, whichever keyword you choose. Ideally, you want to ensure that your brand is prominent within the targeting of the generic keywords.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop doing ineffective activities, such as reporting on individual generic keywords. That’s a thing of the past, which is slowly evolving out. Instead of reporting on generic keywords, focus on entities and pages. Google doesn’t rank keywords, it ranks pages. Pages are what matters, and they are the value that we have. If you want, you can have keywords as a secondary activity, but you should primarily be reporting on your entities and pages.

To track that, you can use all the typical tools, such as Search Console, SEMrush, SearchMetrics, BrightEdge, Pi Datametrics, etc. However, have your view focused more on your pages, which GA is ideal for. Have that focus on your pages, particularly to ensure that business leaders move away from generic keywords and start looking into pages. This will also mean that marketing teams and departments are better integrated with SEO, and vice versa.”

Austine Esezobor is an SEO Consultant, and you can find him over at DemocratizingSEO.com.