Traditional SEO has often focused on the words people type into Google and the pages that should rank for them. Entity SEO adds another layer. It focuses on helping search engines and AI platforms understand who or what your business is, what it does, who is connected to it and what it is known for.
Instead of viewing your website as a collection of individual pages and keywords, Entity SEO considers the wider picture surrounding your business. This includes your people, services, locations, content, structured data, external profiles, links and mentions.
This is becoming particularly relevant as search evolves beyond traditional lists of links towards AI-generated answers and more complex search experiences.
Entity SEO does not mean keywords no longer matter. It means businesses need to consider whether search systems can confidently identify their brand and understand the relationships surrounding it.
What Is an Entity in SEO?
An entity is a distinct thing that a search engine can identify and distinguish from other things. An entity could be a person, business, place, product, service or recognised concept.
For example:
Fly High Media is an organisation.
Manchester is a place.
SEO is a concept.
A named member of the Fly High Media team is a person.
This differs from simply recognising words on a webpage.
Take the word “Apple”. Without context, it could refer to a type of fruit or the technology company. The surrounding information helps establish which entity is being discussed.
Entities can also have attributes. A business may have a name, location, telephone number, founders, services and website. A person may have a name, job title, employer, qualifications and areas of expertise.
More importantly, entities can be connected.
A person can work for a company. A company can provide a service. A company can operate in a particular location. An expert can write about a particular subject.
These connections give search systems more context than individual keywords alone.
What Is Entity SEO?
Entity SEO is the process of making it easier for search engines and other information retrieval systems to correctly understand a business or subject, its attributes and its relationships to other entities.
For a business, that means providing clear and consistent information about who you are.
It can involve your:
- Business name and contact information
- About page
- Service and product pages
- Team and author profiles
- Website structure and internal links
- Structured data
- Social and business profiles
- Backlinks
- Brand mentions
- Citations and references on other websites
Imagine a fictional accountancy practice called Smith & Co Accountants.
A strong collection of signals around the business could establish:
Smith & Co Accountants → is an accountancy firm → based in Manchester → provides tax and bookkeeping services → employs named qualified accountants → publishes expert accounting content → is referenced by relevant external organisations.
No single signal creates that understanding on its own.
Instead, Entity SEO is about creating a clear and supportable picture of the business across its wider digital presence.
It is also important to recognise that Entity SEO is not a new type of SEO that replaces everything businesses have previously been doing. Many of its principles overlap with good technical SEO, content strategy, Digital PR, on-page optimisation and brand building.
How Is Entity SEO Different From Keyword-Based SEO?
Keyword SEO asks what people search for and which pages should answer those searches. Entity SEO additionally asks whether search systems understand the people, organisations, topics and relationships behind those pages.
A simple way to compare them is:
| Keyword SEO | Entity SEO |
|---|---|
| Search terms | Identifiable things |
| Query relevance | Identity and relationships |
| Keyword and topic targeting | Entity attributes and associations |
| Page optimisation | Wider business ecosystem |
| Search demand | Machine understanding |
For example, a solicitor might use keyword research to discover that potential clients search for “employment solicitors Manchester”.
Traditional SEO would consider whether the firm has an appropriate page targeting that search, whether the content satisfies the intent and whether the page is sufficiently authoritative to compete.
Entity SEO asks additional questions.
Is it clear that the company is actually a law firm? Is Manchester clearly established as a location it serves? Are its employment solicitors identifiable? Do those people have relevant profiles and credentials? Is employment law a subject the website covers in depth? Are there reputable external sources that support some of these associations?
Neither approach replaces the other.
Keywords remain extremely useful for understanding what your audience wants. Entity optimisation helps create additional context around the business providing the answer.
How Do Search Engines Identify and Understand Entities?
Search engines can encounter information about a business in many different places.
Your website is an obvious starting point. Its homepage, About page, service pages, location pages, team profiles and articles all provide information about your organisation.
Structured data can make some of that information more explicit by describing what a page contains in a machine-readable format.
Information can also exist beyond your website through business profiles, social profiles, industry associations, news coverage, directories, links and other references.
Search systems can use information and connections between known things to build a broader understanding of a subject rather than treating every webpage as completely isolated.
This is where the idea of a knowledge graph becomes useful.
In simple terms, think of it as connections between things and information about those things.
For Smith & Co Accountants, a search system could encounter its Manchester address on the website, see the same location on an external business profile, find named accountants on its team pages and encounter references to the company elsewhere.
The goal of Entity SEO is not to manipulate this process. It is to reduce unnecessary ambiguity by making important information clear, accurate and consistent.
How Are Entities Connected Through Relationships and Context?
Entity relationships provide the context that turns isolated facts into a more meaningful picture.
Returning to our fictional accountancy firm:
Smith & Co → employs → Jane Smith
Jane Smith → specialises in → corporate tax
Smith & Co → located in → Manchester
Smith & Co → provides → bookkeeping
Jane Smith → writes about → tax planning
Each connection tells us something different.
If Jane Smith regularly writes articles about corporate tax but her author page says nothing about her role or experience, an important connection is missing.
If Smith & Co has a bookkeeping page but its main services navigation, About page and external profiles never mention bookkeeping, that service has less supporting context around it.
This is why Entity SEO extends beyond adding your company name and address to a website.
We’ve seen the importance of these relationships first-hand. During a 100-page SEO audit for a solicitors’ firm with offices in Chester, Liverpool, Altrincham and the Wirral, we found that the firm had virtually no mentions within the local areas to reinforce its physical presence there.
To strengthen those connections, we created seven service-specific landing pages for each location, optimised the Google Business Profile for each office and made the firm’s locations more prominent across its main service landing pages. For the Chester office alone, we also secured more than 300 citations within the first three months of working with the firm.
From an Entity SEO perspective, the important part wasn’t simply mentioning “Chester” or the other locations more frequently. We were creating clearer connections between the business, its office locations and the legal services available in each area, while strengthening the information about those locations elsewhere online.
Your website should make logical relationships clear between the business, its people, its services, its locations and the subjects it genuinely knows about.
Internal linking can support this too. An article written by Jane about tax planning could link to her author profile and relevant corporate tax service. Her profile could explain her role at Smith & Co and link to other articles she has contributed to.
The result is a much more connected digital presence.
Why Does Entity SEO Matter for AI Search?
Entity SEO matters for AI search because AI-powered search experiences can synthesise information from different sources to answer a question, rather than simply presenting a traditional list of ten blue links.
For a business to be represented accurately in these environments, it helps for important information surrounding that business to be clear.
That could include:
- Who the organisation is
- What products or services it provides
- Where it operates
- Who works there
- Which people have relevant expertise
- What subjects the company regularly covers
- Whether reliable external sources support those associations
Google has continued to develop generative AI features within Search while maintaining that established SEO best practices remain relevant.
This is important because GEO and SEO should not be treated as two completely disconnected disciplines.
A technically accessible website, useful content, clear site structure, relevant links, strong brand signals and accurate information remain important foundations.
Entity optimisation adds to those foundations by making the organisation behind the content easier to identify and understand.
That does not mean strong Entity SEO guarantees your company will appear in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode or another AI platform. No legitimate SEO strategy can promise that.
It does, however, address an increasingly important question: is there enough clear and supportable information available for machines to understand what your business is and what it is relevant to?
How Does Entity SEO Help AI Platforms Understand Your Business?
Consider someone asking an AI-powered search tool:
“Who are reputable employment law solicitors in Manchester?”
Having a webpage containing the phrase “employment law solicitors Manchester” can establish relevance to that search.
But there is a much bigger picture.
Ideally, information surrounding the firm would repeatedly establish relationships such as:
Brand → solicitors → employment law → Manchester → named solicitors → relevant expertise.
The firm’s website might contain employment law services, solicitor profiles, Manchester location information, case studies and articles written or reviewed by relevant professionals.
Elsewhere online, the business may be listed by appropriate professional organisations, mentioned in local or industry publications or referenced in other trustworthy sources.
This creates corroboration.
In straightforward terms, corroboration means important information about your company is not only being claimed in one place. Other reliable information supports it.
Think about the difference between a company saying “we are experts in X” on its own homepage and a wider online presence that actually demonstrates why that association exists.
For businesses thinking about AI visibility, this distinction matters.
What Business Information Can Strengthen Your Entity?
Start with the information a potential customer would expect to find when deciding whether your company is genuine, relevant and trustworthy.
Important information can include:
- Your official or trading business name
- A detailed About page
- Business locations
- Contact information
- Products and services
- Founders or directors
- Named expert team members
- Author profiles
- Relevant qualifications
- Legitimate memberships and awards
- Case studies
- Company history
- Social and external profile links
Google’s Organisation structured data guidance specifically supports properties including organisation name, address, telephone number, URL and logo, where relevant.
For content-led businesses, author pages can be particularly useful.
If your company publishes expert advice, ask whether visitors can determine who created it and why that person is qualified to discuss the subject.
A useful mini audit is to ask:
Can someone easily determine who we are?
Can they see where we operate?
Can they understand exactly what we provide?
Can they identify the people behind the business?
Can they establish why those people are qualified to discuss the subjects we publish?
Can they find evidence supporting important claims we make about the company?
If several answers are “no”, there may be opportunities to strengthen your entity signals.
How Does Consistency Across the Web Affect Entity Recognition?
Consistency reduces ambiguity.
Imagine your website says Smith & Co Accountants is based in Manchester, LinkedIn lists an old Salford office, an industry directory contains a telephone number that stopped working three years ago and another profile uses an outdated company name.
A person researching the business would have to work out which information is correct.
Machines can encounter the same problem.
Businesses should periodically compare important information across their website and major external profiles, including:
Business name: Are you consistently using the correct registered or trading name?
Address: Are old offices still listed anywhere?
Telephone: Do prominent profiles contain current contact information?
Services: Do external descriptions accurately reflect what you now provide?
Team: Are former employees still presented as current staff?
Social profiles: Are descriptions, links and locations current?
Directories: Are important industry listings accurate and free from unnecessary duplicates?
Perfectly identical wording everywhere is not the goal. Accuracy is.
This is something we regularly encounter during SEO audits at Fly High Media. Some of the most common inconsistencies we find are outdated telephone numbers, old addresses that remain online after a business has moved and, in some cases, an old domain continuing to appear across third-party websites following a website migration.
These issues can easily go unnoticed because the incorrect information may sit on profiles or websites the business hasn’t looked at for years. This is why checking the wider search landscape, rather than only auditing the information on your own website, is an important part of understanding how clearly your business is represented online.
Your LinkedIn description does not have to copy your About page word for word. The core facts should simply agree.
How Do Brand Mentions, Links and Citations Support Entity SEO?
Entity SEO also extends beyond the information you publish yourself.
There are three useful concepts to understand:
A link is when another website directly links to your website.
A brand mention is when another source names or discusses your company, whether or not it includes a link.
A citation or reference is when another source provides or corroborates information about your organisation.
Relevant independent coverage can help provide additional context around a brand.
Examples might include an accountant contributing commentary to an industry publication, a solicitor being interviewed by local press, a manufacturer appearing on an industry association website or a business receiving a legitimate sector award.
This is where digital PR can overlap with Entity SEO.
Rather than focusing solely on acquiring as many backlinks as possible, businesses can look for opportunities to be mentioned in places that genuinely make sense for their expertise, sector and location.
An unlinked brand mention should not automatically be treated as a direct ranking boost. The wider value is that credible third-party sources can add independent context around who a company is and what it is associated with.
What Role Does Structured Data Play in Entity SEO?
Structured data gives machines explicit information about what a webpage contains and the entities represented on it.
Depending on the website and page, relevant schema types can include:
- Organisation
- LocalBusiness
- Person
- Article
- Product
- Service, where appropriate to the implementation
Google states that Organisation structured data can help it understand an organisation’s administrative details and disambiguate it from other organisations.
Properties such as sameAs can also point towards pages on other websites containing additional information about an organisation, such as relevant social or external profiles.
This makes structured data useful for Entity SEO, but it is important not to treat schema as the entire strategy.
Schema describes information. It does not make unsupported claims true.
Adding Person schema to an employee profile and describing somebody as an expert does not create expertise.
Similarly, adding Organisation schema cannot compensate for a website with unclear company information, contradictory details or no meaningful evidence supporting what the company claims to do.
Think of schema as a clearer label attached to information that should already be accurate and supportable.
How Can Expert Content Build Your Brand’s Topical Authority?
Your content helps establish the subjects your business is associated with.
The objective should not be to publish articles across hundreds of unrelated subjects simply because those keywords have search volume.
Instead, build meaningful depth around areas where your company genuinely has knowledge and experience.
For an employment law firm, a relevant content ecosystem might include:
Employment law → unfair dismissal → redundancy → settlement agreements → discrimination → employment contracts
Those topics can then connect back to relevant employment law services, named solicitors, author profiles, case studies and supporting articles.
This creates a logical relationship between who your company is, what it sells and what it knows about.
Building topical authority therefore involves more than producing a high volume of blog posts.
Content should be useful, accurate and genuinely connected to the expertise of the business.
Google’s people-first content guidance continues to emphasise creating content primarily to help people rather than producing material mainly to attract search engine visits.
For Entity SEO, the key question is not “How many articles can we publish?”
It is: “What subjects should our company genuinely be associated with, and do we have the expertise and content to support that association?”
How Can You Improve Your Business’s Entity SEO?
Entity optimisation is not a single technical fix. Treat it as an ongoing audit of how clearly your business is represented online.
A practical process is:
- Audit how your business currently appears online. Search your brand name, key employees and important services. Review your website, social profiles, business listings and prominent third-party references. Look for incorrect or outdated information.
- Standardise your core business information. Check your trading name, address, telephone number, website, business descriptions and important location details across your key online profiles.
- Strengthen your About, team and author pages. Explain who is behind the company. Where relevant, include roles, experience, qualifications, specialisms, professional memberships and links to content that person has created or reviewed.
- Clearly define your services, products and locations. Avoid forcing search engines or customers to guess what you do. Important offerings should have clear, useful pages and logical connections throughout the website.
- Connect related content internally. Link articles to relevant services, authors to their content, locations to appropriate services and supporting resources to the main topics they expand upon.
- Implement appropriate structured data. Use relevant schema to describe genuine information already available on the website. Validate the implementation and avoid marking up claims that the visible content does not support.
- Build expert-led content around genuine areas of expertise. Use search demand to understand what customers want to know, then combine it with the knowledge inside your organisation.
- Earn relevant third-party mentions and links. Look for credible opportunities through industry publications, local media, associations, interviews, expert commentary and Digital PR.
- Maintain important external profiles. Do not create dozens of directory profiles simply for SEO. Prioritise reputable platforms that matter to your business, customers, location or sector and keep them accurate.
- Review your visibility in traditional and AI search. Regularly investigate how your company appears for branded searches, important topics and relevant AI queries. Look for incorrect information, missing associations and new opportunities.
Many of these improvements also overlap with strong on-page SEO, technical SEO, content strategy and off-site authority building.
The aim is not to optimise one isolated “entity signal”. It is to make the wider picture surrounding your business clearer.
How Can You Measure Entity Visibility in Search and AI Results?
There is no single universal “Entity SEO score” that tells you whether your optimisation is complete.
Measurement requires several indicators.
Start with branded search. Search for your company, key people and important branded queries. Look at what Google displays and whether the information is accurate.
Google Search Console can help you monitor branded and non-branded queries, pages associated with important subjects and changes in organic visibility.
You can also monitor:
- Third-party brand mentions
- New referring domains
- Important external profiles
- Visibility for topics closely associated with your expertise
- Search features appearing around your brand
- AI mentions and citations where they can be measured
- Whether AI platforms describe important brand facts accurately
- Whether key people, services and locations are correctly associated with your organisation
AI visibility measurement is still developing, and no tool can provide a perfect picture of how every user sees your company across every AI platform.
This makes manual checks valuable too.
Ask representative questions a customer might use when researching your sector and examine whether your brand appears, how it is described and which sources are referenced.
The objective is to look for patterns over time rather than treating one AI-generated response as definitive evidence of performance.
What Entity SEO Mistakes Should Businesses Avoid?
As interest in AI SEO grows, it is easy for Entity SEO to become another buzzword. Avoid these common mistakes.
| Mistake | Why It Matters | Better Approach |
|---|---|---|
| Assuming schema involves Entity SEO | Schema describes information but cannot create genuine authority or expertise | Use schema alongside strong website content, people, profiles and external signals |
| Inconsistent company information | Conflicting information can create unnecessary ambiguity | Regularly audit important business details across the web |
| Creating false expertise | Unsupported claims do not demonstrate genuine experience | Show real people, qualifications, experience and evidence where appropriate |
| Publishing unrelated content | It can create a disconnected content strategy | Focus on subjects relevant to your actual expertise and services |
| Publishing anonymous expert content | Readers may struggle to establish who is responsible for important advice | Use meaningful author and reviewer information where expertise matters |
| Ignoring team and author pages | Important relationships between people, expertise and content can be unclear | Build useful profiles that connect people with their roles and work |
| Relying only on your own website | Your company is naturally responsible for its own claims | Develop relevant independent mentions and references |
| Chasing low-quality directories | Volume does not automatically create credibility | Prioritise reputable and relevant third-party problems |
| Treating every mention as a ranking factor | It oversimplifies how search works | Think about relevance, corroboration and brand context |
| Abandoning keyword research | Entities do not remove the need to understand search demand | Combine Entity SEO with keyword and intent research |
| Optimising only for AI bots | Search ultimately exists to help people find useful information | Make content clear and useful for customers first |
The biggest mistake is trying to manufacture an entity instead of accurately representing the real business.
Strengthen Your Entity SEO With Fly High Media
Entity SEO brings together several areas of modern search marketing.
Your technical foundations need to make your website accessible and understandable. Your content needs to demonstrate genuine expertise. Structured data can describe important information more explicitly. Digital PR and off-site activity can strengthen the wider context surrounding your brand.
Together, these signals can create a clearer picture of who your business is, what it does and what it should be associated with.
At Fly High Media, our SEO team works across technical SEO, content, structured data, Digital PR, authority building and AI search optimisation to help businesses strengthen their visibility across traditional and AI-driven search.
As an AI SEO agency, we look beyond individual rankings to understand how brands are represented throughout the wider search landscape.
If you’re unsure how clearly search engines and AI platforms understand your business, Fly High Media can audit the signals surrounding your brand and identify opportunities to strengthen your visibility.
