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 It's Not That Hard, it's me here Dawson as usual and this is part three of our entity series and today we are going to be looking at the knowledge graph. So just looking back at our last episode, there we looked at how machines learn to read, we walked through that three-step process of information extraction. First, identifying potential entities on a page, secondly, using context to disambiguate them, and thirdly, linking them to a universal library of knowledge like Wikipedia. And this brings us to the next part of the question. Once Google's done all that work, once it's read your content, identified your entities, and linked them to a global understanding of the world, where does all that information go? And the answer to that is it goes into probably one of the most powerful and inf influential databases on the planet if you are looking at things from an SEO perspective. That's it into I think you might call it a digital brain. We're going to explore the knowledge graph. So what is the knowledge graph? The simplest way to think of it is Google's massive interconnected encyclopedia of the world. Where instead of pages, it's made up of facts, billions and billions of facts about people, places, things, and most importantly, the relationships that connect them. And its purpose is to help Google move beyond just matching keywords to a genuine understanding of real-world concepts. But this is what allows Google to answer factual questions directly in search results. So when you ask it like how tall is the Eiffel Tower, or where were the 2016 Summer Olympics held, the answer that pops up instantly comes directly from the knowledge graph. But how is this incredible knowledge graph actually built? And it's not from a single source. The knowledge graph is a dynamic system that constantly aggregates information from a huge variety of inputs. First of all, there's the public web. This is where we're interested. This is our websites. This is Google's crawlers constantly processing unstructured information from billions of web pages, just like we discussed in part two. And crawling through all that data and pulling out the information and understanding the information within it. Secondly, Google licenses data for really timely, highly structured information, so things like stock prices, sports results, weather forecasts. Google pays specialised providers for this clean, reliable, authoritative data. Third, and this is a crucial point, it relies on human edited knowledge bases. And then we touched on them last time. These are the authoritative sources like Wikipedia and Wikidata. These are foundational pillars of the knowledge graph. And they provide a structured, verified set of facts about notable entities that Google deeply trusts. And fourthly, finally, Google gets information through direct feeds from content owners. So that's you. That's businesses and individuals who provide factual information directly by using structured data markup on their websites or by claiming the knowledge panel and suggesting edits. Now here we come to like the most important concept to understand about how the knowledge graph works. Google doesn't just blindly accept information from these sources, it performs a constant process of authority validation. So if you think of the knowledge graph less like a static encyclopedia and more like a dynamic kind of trust ledger, every fact about an entity has a confidence score. So when numerous trusted sources consistently report the same fact, Google's confidence in that fact increases. It's like a credit to the ledger. The opposite, when sources report conflicting information that acts like a debit and Google's confidence goes down. So if you think of an example, so say Google wants to know who the CEO of your company is, and you want Google to know that the CEO of a company is called, say, Jane Doe. If your website's about page says the CEO is Jane Doe, that's one signal. If your company's official LinkedIn profile also lists Jane Doe as CEO, that's another strong signal. If a major industry publications, say like Forbes, writes an article and mentions Jane Doe, CEO of your company, that's a very powerful third-party signal. And if your company has a Wikidata entry that lists Jane Doe as CEO, that's another foundational signal. And when all those trusted sources align, Google's confidence score for that fact becomes extremely high and it'll consider that to be the verified truth. But imagine a different scenario where your website says Jane Doe is the CEO, but your LinkedIn profile is outdated and still lists the old CEO, John Smith. That creates a conflict. Google's seeing two different sets of facts from two sources it considers relatively authoritative, and its confidence will drop because it becomes unsure of the truth. It might display the incorrect information or no information at all. And this has big implications. It means you can't simply declare facts about your business on your website and expect them to be accepted as the canonical truth. You must cultivate a consistent and verifiable paper trail across the entire sort of digital world. And this elevates the role of digital PR and online reputation management to core components of technical SEO, ensuring the consistency of your entities' core attributes, like your name, address, your phone number, your key personnel across all digital places where it might be found. It's no longer just good practice, it's critical to build high trust, authoritative entry about you, about your entities in that global knowledge graph. So how does your website sit into this ecosystem? What's its specific role? Your website serves as the primary and highly influential data source for the entities you directly represent, your company, your products, your people. The most direct way you can communicate with the knowledge graph is by implementing structured data using a vocabulary called schema.org. Now I have spoken about this in other podcasts previously, but this should show you how it fits into the big picture. And I'm going to do a whole episode specifically on structured data and entities later in this series. But for now, you think of it as like a set of special tags you can add to your website's code that explicitly define your entities in a machine readable format. It's like adding a label to your content that says, hey Google, just to be clear, this page is about an organization, its legal name is this, its logo is this, and it dramatically reduces ambiguity for the search engines. And also by linking from your own content out to external or authoritative databases like Wikipedia, you can help Google further disambiguate your entities and firmly connect them to sort of this broader global graph. So this brings me to what I'd like you to go away and do after this episode, and that's to go and look at the knowledge panel. The inner workings of the knowledge graph are a black box, but its outputs are publicly visible on every search results page. And the most direct view of this that we have is the knowledge panel. So the knowledge panel is that box of information that typically appears on the right hand side of a desktop search. When you search for a specific unambiguous entity, it'll always display a curated summary of the facts, images, and related information pulled directly from the knowledge graph. So go to Google, search for your own brand name. If your brand name doesn't trigger a knowledge panel, then look for a well-known brand name to get an example of how it works. And you'll see how it shows a whole bunch of information about your brand. Now, if you don't have one, that's a sign that Google doesn't yet have enough consistent authoritative information about you to be confident in who you are. And if you do have one, I want you to look at it. Is every single piece of information 100% accurate? Is it the current logo? Is the founding date correct? Your CEO listed correctly, all those kind of things. Any inaccuracy, no matter how small it is, that's a red flag. It's a signal that somewhere out there on the web, Google is finally conflicting the information about your brand. And that panel is like your diagnostic tool. It gives you your first clue about where you need to go and start cleaning up data about your entities to make sure that you've got a consistent, trustworthy entity. Now, next time, we'll explore how a strong and accurate entity profile doesn't just get you a knowledge panel, it also makes you eligible for a wide array of other high visibility features that can help you really dominate the search result pages. So, 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 spelled 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 KeywordsPopleUse.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.