Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform KeywordPeopleUser.com, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and then how to optimise your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO from online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to SEO Is Not That Hard. It's me here at Dawson as usual. And today I'm going to be talking about something that I've probably quite neglected over all the podcast episodes I've done so far. It's a theme that I have mentioned in some podcasts, but I've never done a dedicated podcast to it. And in fact, there's so much about this theme that I'm actually going to do quite a few podcasts on this. It's going to be like a little mini-season on this theme. And that is entities. Now, if you've been in marketing or SEO world for any length of time, most people end up being trained to think in just one language, and that's the language of keywords. And people obsess over them, they research them, they track them, they stuff them in their content. And for a very long time, keywords were the fundamental building blocks of the internet as we knew. But the ground has shifted over time. And the web evolves, search engines evolve, and the way they map things have evolved into something far more sophisticated. They no longer just read words, they understand concepts. And that's why today we're going to talk about what someone might you might call it the new language of SEO, but we're going to talk about entities. So let's start with the most important question. What on earth is an entity? The simplest way to remember this is that an entity is a thing, not a string. You know, a keyword is a string of text. It's like a literal sequence of letters that you type into a search bar and it has no inherent meaning on its own. It's just characters. An entity, on the other hand, is a real-world concept. It's the actual thing that the string of text is trying to represent. So the classic example that you may have heard elsewhere if you've come across entities is the the keyword Apple. You know, it's a string of five letters. It's completely ambiguous. If you type Apple into a search bar, what do you actually mean? Are you looking for the fruit, the Apple? Are you looking for the multi-trillion dollar technology company, Apple? Are you looking for Apple Records, the label that if you're a Beatles fan, you know that's the label that Beatles founded to put their music out on? Or are you looking for Gwyneth Paultras' daughter, Apple? An old school search engine, one that only thinks in keywords will get confused. Try to solve the puzzle by matching the string Apple to web pages that contain the string Apple many times, you know, how they used to do, and the results would be a pretty mixed bag. But the search engine would only be guessing at your intent. But a modern search engine like Google thinks in entities. It understands there is a well defined, unique entity called Apple Inc. And this entity is a thing, and it has specific attributes and even more importantly, relationships to other things. It's an organization, its founder is the entity Steve Jobs, a key product of theirs is the entity iPhone, and a major competitor of theirs is the entity Google. And there is also a completely separate and distinct entity, Apple, the fruit, which has its own set of attributes and relationships. So it's a type of food, it grows on trees, it's related to other entities like pie and cider. An entity resolves the ambiguity that keywords create. It gives you a contextual layer that machines need to deliver truly relevant and really accurate results. And it's not just limited to people, places or companies. An entity can be almost anything that is a single sort of unique and distinguishable concept. So it could be a product like an iPhone 15, or a historical event like World War II, or even like an abstract concept like climate change or happiness. As long as it's a well-defined concept, a machine can understand it as an entity. So the question that comes up is why did this shift happen? Why did search engines move away from keyword models that worked for so long? The answer is that the technology behind them got just smarter. This wasn't an overnight change, but a gradual evolution driven by all the advancements in AI. And these are and that's not just like the the AI of LLMs. AI goes back, people have been researching AI a long way back. I mean, I remember back when I was studying computer science back in the late 90s, AI was something that we talked about at university then. It was an area of study. So Google and the other search engines have been putting a lot of AI and machine learning into their algorithms over the past few years before the whole new AI revolution that OpenII and ChatGPT ushered in. And this gradual evolution included things, a field called natural language processing, otherwise known as NLP for short. And LP is what allows computers to comprehend and understand and interact with human language. There's a few landmarks in this evolution, and you might even have heard of some of them. The first was a Google algorithm update back in 2013 called Hummingbird. Now, Hummingbird was revolutionary because it was designed to understand the meaning behind an entire query, not just individual words. And it was a big change at the time. It was the first major step towards understanding user intent. Then the next probably big update that related to it was BERT in 2019. Now, BERT was a massive leap forward and it allowed Google to understand the nuance and the context of words in a sentence in a way that they couldn't be for. It could figure out how prepositions like four and two could completely change the meaning of a query. And these sort of technological leaps made the old way of doing SEO more and more obsolete. The tactic of keyword stuff and you're just repeating your target keyword over and over again on a page suddenly became useless. In fact, it becomes a negative signal because it starts to look unnatural. And search engines are they're no longer indexing just keywords, they're trying to understand the world. And this represents a complete philosophical change in how machines view information. The old view was the web was a collection of documents, and the search engine's job was to rank those documents. The new entity-based view sees the web differently. The primary sort of unit of information is no longer the document itself, but the real thing that the document is about. Now this has implications for us as website owners and SEOs. Your website is no longer just a collection of pages to be ranked for keywords. It's now like an information hub that provides data points about the entities that it represents. So your organization, your people, your products, your expertise, the subject matter that you talk about. And the role evolves from being like page optimizer to becoming more of a data curator. So your job is to provide the clearest, most authoritative and most consistent data about your specific corner of the world so that machines, the search engine LLMs can understand it without any confusion. So thinking about it practically, imagine you run a website dedicated to speciality coffee, say. And in the old keyword world, you would create a page, optimise for the keyword pour over coffee. You'd make that sure that phrase appeared in your title, your headings, and throw out the text. But in this new entity-based world, you think bigger. Do you want to create a comprehensive resource about the entity of pour-over coffee? You don't just mention the keyword, you need to explain its relationship to other entities. You might talk about different products that produce coffee, like the Harryo V60 or the ChemX, the Bloom, which is a concept entity, the Gooseneck Kettle, another product entity, and maybe even a link to an article about the entity. James Hoffman, who's a person who's famous in the coffee world. By doing this, you're demonstrating to Google you you're not just demonstrating them that you know about a keyword, you're proving to Google that you have a deep authoritative understanding of the entire topic and the universe of concepts around it. Now, if this is sounding familiar, yes, this is the topical authority concept that I've been speaking about years and years now on the podcast. And explaining about how you need to answer questions and cover a subject in depth. And the covering the entities of a subject are a real key part of this. To wrap up this episode, this brings me back to the core concept, the core idea of the difference of what entities compared to keywords, and that is things not strings. And this is a defining concept and the foundation for everything I'm going to talk about in the rest of this series on entities. We're going to talk about how it's key to unlocking real those sort of powerful knowledge panels you'll see in search results to appearing in AI-generated answers and to how to build durable long-term competitive advantage that can't easily be copied. So before you listen to the next episode, I want you to think about these questions and what the what's important to your business, what th what things are important to your business in terms of what is your main organization entity, your main website entity? What are your main products or your services or your topics? Who are the key people entities in your business or in your website or in your topical sphere? And what are the core concept entities in your industry that you solve problems for? Make a list of these things, even if it's just in your head. Think about what the entities are that you are involved in. If you're if you have a site about music, if it's about guitars, you might be starting to think about the entities within that are important to you. So there's going to be types of guitars, models of guitars, there's going to be guitarists, there's going to be bands, there's going to be songs, all these entities that are really important. So think about this between now and the next episode. Because if you start thinking about what entities are important in your world, then it's going to help you understand the future episodes going forwards. So I hope that's interesting for you. And until next time, remember keep optimising, stay curious. And remember, SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening, it means a lot to me. This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember with all these places where I use my name, the Ed is spelt with 2Ds. You can follow me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky, just search for Ed Dawson on both. You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast, the link is in the show notes. You can try my SEO intelligence platform Keywords People Use at KeywordsPupleUse.com where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people asking online. Post those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority, and finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content. Find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimise and continually refine your content.eddawson.com. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SU is not a hammered.