Hello and welcome to SEO Is Not That Hard. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform KeywordPupeopleUser.com, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and then how to optimise your content to build traffic and authority. I've been in SEO for 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, Ed Tawson, as always, and today this is the final episode in our special series all about entities. So we've reached the end of our journey and it's been quite a journey. This is the first time we've done such a long series on a single subject. But we started by fundamentally redefining our approach to SEO, moving away from the old world of keywords to the new world of entities. We've audited our business, we've audited our competition, we've built a complete on-page strategy from the ground up, and we now have a plan for creating deeply authoritative content, structuring it with schema markup so that the machines can understand it, and optimizing it for the LLMs, the AI answer engines of tomorrow. If you followed along, your website will now be poised to be a real castle of authority, but like a castle, no matter how strong it can feel isolated up there all by yourself. To truly establish your brand as a leader, you need to build bridges. You need to project your authority beyond the borders of your own domain and across the entire web. So today in our final episode, we're going to look beyond our websites and we're going to explore the world of modern off-page SEO. We'll learn how to build powerful signals of trust and authority that tell the whole world and every search engine, at a lemma or otherwise, that you are a credible, important, and trustworthy entity. So for decades, off-page SEO meant one thing, link building. And the goal was to get as many links as possible from other websites to yours, where each link being seen as a vote, and the more votes you had, the higher you would rank. That's the simple version. I know it's more complex than that, but while links is then incredibly important, the thinking behind why they're important has evolved. The new goal is not just to acquire links in and of their own right, but to build entity association. And this is kind of a crucial shift in mindset. The objective is no longer to just pass page rank or link juice. The broader, more strategic objective is to create a web of contextual signals that consistently associate your brand's identities with other established authoritative entities within your niche, within your topic area. Think of it like building a reputation in the real world. You can tell everyone you're an expert. Your reputation is truly built when other respected experts start talking about you, when or other organizations, the more prestigious the better, invite you to speak, and when your name consistently appears alongside theirs in important conversations. This is what we're trying to achieve online. We want Google and other AI systems to see that our brand entity is mentioned in the same context as other trusted entities in our industry. This pattern of association or co-occurrence teaches the AI to semantically connect you to that world of authority, effectively allowing you to borrow credibility and reinforce your topical relevance and authority. So, how do we do this? There's four key strategies. So, strategy one is digital PR and your linkable assets. This is the main strategy for building authority in the modern link building area. So let's can we can connect this back to episode nine where we talked about creating linkable assets. This is the cornerstone of your content strategy, okay? Your original research, your data-rich case studies, your definitive industry guides. A linkable asset is a piece of content that's so valuable that other people will want to cite it. But creating it is only half the battle. The other half is promoting it through digital PR. Now, there's whole episodes on digital PR that I've done, so if I'm more depth, go and listen to them, but for now, we'll cover it just in a nutshell. So digital PR is the process of doing outreach to journalists, bloggers, industry publications, and other content creators to make them aware of your valuable resources. The goal is to get them to reference your work in their own content, and this achieves two goals at once. First of all, it earns you a high-quality bat link, which is still a powerful ranking signal in its own right. Secondly, it generates valuable unlinked brand mentions from authoritative domains. Even if they don't link to you, just having your brand name mentioned in an article on a major industry site is a powerful entity association signal, just being mentioned, that co-occurrence. Google sees your name next to a topic you want to be known for on a site that already trusts, it's going to strengthen that connection. Strategy two, that's digital foundational consistency. Now, this next strategy is about building a really solid, trustworthy foundation for your brand across the web. Now you may have heard of the concept of NAP consistency. That's name, address, phone number. And for local businesses like a coffee shop or plumber, anyone who's local is really critical, big in local SEO. But for many of us, like SaaS companies, informational science, e-commerce, brands, consultants, a physical address or a phone number isn't necessarily a core part of our identity. So we need to think about the digital equivalent. And this is what we can call digital foundational consistency. The principle is it's the same. It's ensuring your core identity is perfectly consistent across every platform you're on. So this is going to create a web of signals that validates your entity's existence and legitimacy for search engines. So what are the core assets for a digital first business? Your official company name, is it MySAS or MySAS Inc. Pick one, stick with it everywhere. Your website URL, always link the same canonical version. Your logo will use the same high-resolution file on all platforms. Your core messaging, like the one sentence description of what you do. It should be consistent across your social media bios, your directory listings, and your website. And where do you need to be consistent? On your core social profiles, so if you use LinkedIn or X, on any other major business reference sites that are relevant to you, like Crunch Base or sites like G2, Captera or Trustpilot, comprehensive brand audit across these areas to make sure that you're being consistent across them all is a powerful trust building exercise. And then strategy three, strategic partnerships and co-occurrence. Now this is slightly more advanced and it's about actively building entity associations. So it involves seeking out other people and other businesses to collaborate with who are non-competing but are highly authoritative entities in your industry. So this could take many forms. So co-authored research, I see this a lot in the SEO world. Partner with another company or an academic institution to produce a joint industry report, joint webinars, host a webinar featuring an expert from your company and an expert from a respected partner company that might have a product that complements the one you're trying to sell well, so you can complement each other. And then integration of partnerships. So for example, if you're a software company integrating your product with another well-known tool which allows integrations, such as say with Screaming Frog in the SEO world, and then co-market integration with that company that you've integrated with. And the strategic goal here is to create this co-occurrence, the repeated appearance of your brand entity alongside another trusted entity in relevant high-quality contents. Then when Google scrollers repeatedly see your brand and your trusted partner brand mentioned together in the same context of your industry topic, its algorithm is going to learn to associate the two. It's like being repeatedly seen with the most respected person at a party. Their authority and relevance begin to rub off on you. Then strategy four is becoming an expert source on modern platforms. This is our final strategy, and it brings us all back to your people entities. This is where we what we want to do is to relate people, your experts, to your topic area in mainly news platforms. So this is where journalists will be looking to have experts on a topic complement the story they're writing about. You'll see in most journalistic articles that they will always try and cite experts as third party people to give credibility to their articles, but but also being mentioned in the article gives credibility to the expert. That used to be for years, for years and years, the go-to tool for connecting experts with journalists was a service called Harrow. Now this landscape has evolved quite a bit, and there's a whole different world that you now have to work in because Harrow was taken over, got shut down, launched again, might have been shut down again, but it's all got a bit messy. So what you need to do is discover which platform the journalists in your topic area are using to make these requests. Places that they might be are quoted, they might be on featured.com, they might be on source of sources, they might be on Facebook groups. Wherever the these journalists are, you need to find them. And the easiest way to do this in many cases is just to look at what journalists and which publications are writing about your topic area or covering news stories in your topic area, and then reverse engineer from them the journalists that are being quoted, and you'll find the places where they are. It could be worth building a list of the particular journalists if there are some specific journalists in your area and make contact with them and make sure that you're available. But it's better if you can find them in these marketplaces where they are pitching, asking people to be experts, provide expert quotes on news articles they're working on. Now, if you can crack this, it is a really powerful way of getting your entities, your people entities, and also often your organization entities mentioned in these high pro profile news sources and powering that co-occurrence and that entity trust authority signals that you're looking for. Now and with that, we have now reached the end of our action plan and the end of our series. So let's take a moment to look back on where we've been. We started by fundamentally shifting our perspective from keywords to entities, things not strings. We learn to see the web as a network of concepts, not just a collection of pages. We've built a complete on-page strategy from auditing our entity landscape and creating authority topic clusters to structuring a data with schema and optimizing our writing for AI answer engines. And today we've completed the picture by learning how to build our authority beyond our website through entity association. And this transition from a web of keywords to a world of entities is not a temporary trend. This is permanent and it's only accelerating now with the rise of AI and LLMs, which are the entity concept is core to them. And by embracing this entity-first framework, you're doing so much more than optimizing for today's search algorithms, you're future-proofing your digital presence. You're transforming your website from a simple marketing tool into a strategic data asset, and you're going to position your brand to be a trusted go-to source of information for the LLM AI-powered answer engines of tomorrow. So the future of search is semantic, and the language it speaks is the language of entities. And now, hopefully, you're a bit more fluent than you were at the start of this series. So thank you for joining me on this special series. Go put these strategies into action and build the authority that you deserve. Now, until next time, keep optimizing, 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 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, 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 hard.