Hello and welcome to SEO's Not That Hard. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform KeywordPupeopleEaser.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 of amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to SU It's Not That Hard. It's me here, Ed Dawson, as always. And today we're on to episode 9 of our series on entities. So far we've come quite a long way on this entity journey. We started by defining entities and understanding how machines read our content. We've explored Google's knowledge graph and insight how LLMs work. And in the last two episodes, we got practical. We conducted an internal audit to map our own entity landscape, and then we used that map to perform an analysis on our competition, identifying the strategic entity gaps in our market, in our topic area. So now you should have a specific entity written down. That concept that's crucial to your audience, but it's one that either you or your competitors are either ignoring or covering poorly. This is your opportunity. But how do we pick up on this opportunity? It's not enough just to write an article about that topic. The old way of doing SEO, sprinkling a keyword into a 500-word blog post, that's dead. It's just too simplistic and it doesn't really help Google or the LMs understand what you're about. To win nowadays in the world of entities and AI, we need to do more. We need to build authority. So today we're going to learn how to create content that signals deep expertise and really undeniable authority to both your users and to the machines that guide them. We'll cover the strategic models and principles that are going to transform a simple website into a trusted go-to resource in its niche. So the first and most important shift we need to think is to stop thinking in terms of individual pages and start thinking in terms of interconnected topics. So for years, the standard SEO advice was to create one page for one keyword, and this just led to websites that were essentially a collection of disconnected siloed articles. You'd have a page on running shoes, another on marathon training, the third on injury prevention, and they might not even link to each other. And this structure just doesn't demonstrate deep expertise, it just shows you've targeted a few keywords. The new entity first model is called the topic cluster, or sometimes the hub and spoke model, you might hear it called also. So you've got to imagine you're building a small focused library on your website for each of your core entities. Instead of just writing like a single sort of short pamphlet, you're essentially going to create a little library around that topic cluster area. This model has got two key components. First of all, you might have heard me mention these before on the podcast. You have the pillar page. This is the hub around this topic cluster. It's going to be a broad, comprehensive, long-form piece of content that will provide a complete overview of your core entity. So if your entity is content marketing, your pillar page will be the ultimate goal. It'd cover the definition, the history, the key strategies, the metrics, everything from a high level. It's really like a foundational resource that introduces a user to the entire topic. Secondly, we then have cluster pages. Now these are like the individual books in a library. So if our if the pillar page is our library with a welcome area that's got the signpost to all the different topic areas within that cluster, the cluster pages are like the individual books. Or if you're linking in terms of Hub and Spoke, they're the spokes of your wheel. And these are more specific, in-depth articles that will explore subtopics or the sub-entities related to your pillar. So for example, with our content marketing pillar, the cluster pages might be how to create a content calendar, beginner's guide to SEO for blog posts, or 10 ways to repurpose your existing content, or measuring content ROI. Now here's the crucial part. It's going to be the linking structure. So the pillar page links out to every single one of its cluster pages. And just as importantly, every single cluster page links back up to the pillar page. This is going to create a tight, logical, antiqually rich web of internal links. And what this does is it signals to a search engine, it signals that you haven't just written one article about content marketing, but you've created a comprehensive, organized and interconnected resource that demonstrates a true mastery of the subject area. You're not just an expert on a keyword, you're an authority on a topic. And this is one of the most powerful ways to build topical authority today. Okay. So we have our structure. But what do we put in that content to make it truly properly authoritative? Simply mentioning an entity or entities is not enough. The internet's, you know it yourself, is drowning in repetitive, rehashed content, especially now people churning up more and more AI content that again is just rehashing and repeating what others are saying. To really stand out, you've got to provide what's called information gain. Now I've done a podcast on this before, you can just search and go back to learn more about information gain. But basically, it's a concept from information theory. But in SEO, it means simply means this. Does your content add new, unique value to the web that goes beyond what's already available? When Google crawls and analyses your pages, they're effectively the saying, does this page teach me something new about this entity? Or is it just repeating what a hundred other pages have already said? Content that provides genuine information gain is going to be seen as a more valuable resource and it's more likely to be rewarded. So how can we achieve information gain? One of the most powerful and simple ways is with original research and data. So instead of citing someone else's statistics, conduct your own survey. Analyse your internal data, publish the findings. When you do this, you become the primary source. You become a linkable asset, a piece of content that other experts, bloggers, and journalists will want to cite and link to, which is that is the ultimate authority signal. Another way is by publishing detailed case studies. Show, don't just tell. A case study with real data, stories, and results demonstrates how you solve the problems your audience is facing. It's a really powerful form of proof and it builds immense trust and authority. You can also add your own unique spin or commentary. If everyone in your industry is reporting on a piece of news, don't just repeat the facts. Analyse them. What does this news mean for your audience? What's your expert take? Your unique perspective is a form of information gain. And finally, you can simply be more comprehensive. This is the idea behind, you might have heard it called the skyscraper technique. You've just find the best piece of content that currently exists on your topic and then create something that is significantly better, more in-depth, more up to date, with better examples, better visuals, and a clearer structure. So when you focus on information gain, you stop competing on keywords and you start competing on value. This goes back to everything I've been saying for the past few years on this podcast. So this brings us to the framework that ties all of this together. And you've gonna have heard of it before. It's Google's set of quality guidelines encapsulated in that acronym EEAT, which stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Now, EEAT is not a direct ranking factor, but it is the way that Google looks and evaluates content quality. And a strong entity-based content strategy like the one we've been discussing will directly support every single letter in that philosophy of theirs. So let's look at each one. Expertise and experience. How does Google know content is written by an expert with real-world experience through your people entities? That's why it's so critical to have those detailed author bios, clearly attribute content to people and showcase their credentials and affiliations. You're not just publishing anonymous articles, you're presenting the work of a credible expert. Authoritativeness. How do you build authority? You build it through your topic clusters and your linkable assets. When you cover a topic more comprehensive than anyone else does, and when other authoritative websites start linking to your original research and case studies, then you are going to build undeniable authority and trustworthiness. How do you build trust? By being factually accurate and consistent, by supporting your claims with data, citing reputable sources and updating content regularly to keep it fresh and ensuring the information is verifiable. You're going to build trust with both your users and the search engines. So now hopefully you've seen how it all fits together. An entity first approach isn't about chasing algorithm tricks, it's about building high-quality, trustworthy and expert-driven resources. A well-defined entity profile gives Google greater confidence in your website as a properly reliable source of information, which is nowadays a crucial factor in how it's going to rank. So this brings us to the next steps, what I'd like you to do for this episode. It's now time, we've been doing a lot of analysis, we need now start to get to that point of creation. So I want you to take that single entity gap that you identified in the last episode, and instead of just planning one article, I want you to plan a small topic cluster around it. So first you need to outline your main pillar page. What would a broad, comprehensive overview of this entity look like? What are the main sections you need to cover? Secondly, brainstorm three to four specific cluster pages. What are the deep dive questions or subtopics or related entities that deserve their own dedicated article? And thirdly, pick and finally pick one of those cluster page ideas and think about information gain. What unique angle can you bring to it? Is there a small server you could run? Is there a case study you could write? Is there data you've got that you could be using? Is there a unique perspective you have that no one else is talking about? Now you don't need to write this content yet. The goal really is just to practice the strategic thinking behind building authority and about designing a structure that's going to match the entities that you've got and how to demonstrate that typical authority. Because now we've had this plan for creating amazing authoritative content. We'll need to make sure that machines can understand it perfectly without any ambiguity. So in our next episode, we'll get technical, but I promise it's not going to be super technical. But we're going to dive into the world of schema markup and learn how to speak the language of machines. Until next time, keep optimising, stay curious, and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basic. 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 two Ds. You can find 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 KeywordsPupleUse at keywordspupleuse.com where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people asking online. Post the list questions and keywords into related groups so you can what content you need to build public 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.com. My for now and see you in the next episode of SUA is not a hammer.