For this week’s Ask An SEO, the question asked was:
“From a technical standpoint, what does ‘entity optimization’ actually mean beyond adding schema?”
To answer this, first of all, let’s establish, in information retrieval, that an entity is a uniquely identifiable “thing” that exists independently of the words used to describe it. Entity optimization is about building connections and relationships between those concepts and “things” using an ecosystem called the Knowledge Graph, and ensuring your digital footprint is aligning with your brand and products in a way that removes any ambiguity from the search engines or large language models.
This is increasingly important now LLMs are trying to build a picture of your company. Remember, LLMs likely rely on language modeling and relationships between concepts to generate responses. By strengthening your brands’ entities, you are increasing the likelihood of those responses being about your related products or services.
The Goal Of Entity Optimization
Entity optimization is critical for improving online discovery in our modern search world. To make sure you are optimizing your brands for bots and algorithms to understand them, you need to keep in mind the goals of entity optimization.
To Create A Stable, Unambiguous Identity
The primary goal of entity optimization is to create certainty around what an entity is and how it relates to other entities. It is important that when a website refers to a brand, and so does an online directory, the bots can tell they are definitely the same entity. This means keeping references to brands and their products consistent across the internet.
To Strengthen Machine-Readable Identity Across The Internet
Whereas it might be easy for humans to infer that a website referencing a brand but spelling the name wrong doesn’t refer to a completely different entity, that isn’t necessarily the case for search engines. Equally, a company only updating their address on their website after a move, but leaving the old address on their suppliers’ websites, might be enough for the bots to consider them two different businesses, or with two offices concurrently.
The goal of entity optimization is to make it easy for the bots to determine a brand’s identity online.
So When Someone Searches For Your Brand, They Receive Info About Your Whole Brand, Or What Is Linked To It
Entity optimization raises the likelihood that searchers of your brand will be given a full and complete picture of your organization. It will help the bots know that an “iPad” is a product of “Apple.” So when searchers look for [Apple products], the search engines and LLMs are confident that an iPad fits that criteria.
It Creates A Graph Of Data Points Where Everything Connects To Each Other And To The Main Brand
Essentially, entity optimization at its heart is about creating a graph of data points that are related to each other. Each of the “nodes” is a facet of your brand, i.e. the owners, the products, the office address, the blog authors. Entity optimization is about creating a spider web of all of the critical entities that are involved in your brand, connecting them to each other and to the main node that is your brand entity.
Why Schema Is Often The First Thought When Looking At Technical Entity Optimization Improvements
Given what we’ve identified entity optimization to be about, it’s easy to see why schema is often the first thought. Schema.org structured data markup is essentially a machine-readable labeling system. It gives context and meaning to words and media on a page. It shows what type of entity they refer to and can show what other entities they are linked to.
It’s also easy to implement. There are many guides online, or even CMS plug-ins that help with applying schema markup to websites and tests to show if it has been implemented properly.
On the face of it, it is a critical way of strengthening an entity’s identity. However, it might not be pulling the weight you think it is. Google doesn’t simply trust schema declarations; it cross-verifies them against off-site signals.
Schema Should Be Used To Reinforce Identity And Relationships
Schema markup is very helpful in entity optimization, but the key to utilizing it effectively for this is in the relationships it portrays.
Many schema types allow you to show how an entity is related to another. For example, “Thing” schema has a property called “sameAs” which is the “URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item’s identity, e.g., the URL of the item’s Wikipedia page, Wikidata entry, or official website.” For example, if you are trying to communicate that an author “Jessica Smith” on your blog post and the “Jessica Smith” of a LinkedIn profile are, in fact, the same person. You could use the sameAs property to link to Jessica Smith’s LinkedIn profile. You could also do this to reference her biography page on another website, or write up in a journal.
For entity optimization, the key is to use schema to mirror a real knowledge graph. The purpose of it is to show connections and alternatives between entities. Yes, schema is helpful for generating rich results, but for entities, the purpose needs to be demonstrating relationships.
What You Can Do To Optimize Your Entities
So, if schema isn’t the be-all of entity optimization, what else can you do to help? Modern search systems attempt to reconcile multiple references into a single canonical entity. Whereas a lot of entity optimization happens external to your website, like through social profiles and third-party mentions, we’re going to look at what you can do specifically through the technical implementation of your site.
Technical Identifiers
Consistency is key both on- and off-site. From a tech standpoint, this can mean consistency in how objects or elements are referred to in the code, especially if they relate to the same entity. For example, always referring to the things your ecommerce site sells as “products” – whether in content or code – reinforces that they are, in fact, products and are referencing the same entity.
For example, using identifying codes like SKUs, ISBNs, and GTINs can help the search engines see the uniqueness of your different products. Using them consistently across your site, wherever your product is referenced, can aid in disambiguating products. Codes like these are unique to each product, whereas the words you use to describe them might not be.
Co-Occurrence Patterns
Search engines are trying to identify if multiple references across the web are referring to the same entity. They compare signals such as names, addresses, social profiles, topical context, and co-occurrence patterns to verify identity.
In entity optimization, co-occurrence refers to the repeated appearance of two or more entities within the same contextual environment. Modern search engines and LLMs are understood to rely on “embeddings” to understand relationships between entities. Instead of looking only for exact keyword matches, they map concepts into “vector spaces” where related topics naturally sit closely together. If a website consistently discusses phones alongside memory, camera specs, and battery life, the search engines will begin to link those entities semantically.
Consider how often related entities occur near each other in your content or site architecture. Place entities in contexts that clearly describe their relationship. For example, “Samsung is a well-respected phone manufacturer, and its newest model, the Samsung Galaxy S26 series, is the flagship line-up for 2026.”
Also, place highly related entity names within the same pages, tables, and lists. By showing that these two subjects are often referred to together, it denotes a relationship between the two. For example, if you always refer to two of your products together, the yellow version and the blue version, it can help cement the idea that they are the same product just in different colorways.
Although it may sound a bit like SEO 101, the hierarchy of page content can be useful for the bots to understand relationships between concepts. The heading hierarchy signals relationships between entities and topics. For example, something being referenced in the <h1> could indicate that it is key to the other entities that are nested under the <h2> or <h3>.
Entity-First Website Architecture
When looking at optimizing your website to aid with entity recognition, look at the foundation of how the site is structured.
Taxonomy
The structural hierarchy of a website can really reinforce the relationships between entities. Introducing a taxonomy to your site – essentially classifying elements like products or blog posts in their relationship to each other – can be a good method of showing the discrete entities in your site and their topical hierarchy.
A taxonomy replaces keyword targeting with a more comprehensive topical framework. By systematically linking subtopics back to a main category, you signal to search engines that your website possesses deep, structured expertise on a specific entity.
Internal Linking
Having a taxonomy in place makes internal linking a lot easier to plan. It enables you to reinforce relationships between entities by linking their pages together.
For example, a clothing store may have a taxonomy that lists all T-shirts under “clothing” and all dresses under “clothing.” By linking both the “Clothing” homepage to the “T-shirts” and “Dresses” pages, you are showing that they are both children of “Clothing” and siblings of each other.
Breadcrumbs
This structural hierarchy can also be reinforced through breadcrumb links and schema. This clearly defines the hierarchy between parent and children entities.
Feeds
Feeds, such as a Google Merchant Feed, structure information about your products in an easily machine-readable format. As long as the information for a product contained in the feed matches the information for that product on the site, and elsewhere, it is another way of encouraging certainty. The feeds are a known quantity. They are structured data that the search engines are primed to receive and digest. As with everything SEO, entity optimization is about small, impactful signals. For ecommerce sites, a feed containing your product data is another nudge towards understanding the products as entities.
Entity homes
Search engines often look for a canonical “entity home” that acts as the primary source of truth for a specific entity. A final way to technically aid in entity optimization is by creating these entity homes for your core entities on your site. Set up pages full of information about these entities, whether they are products, brands, or people. This shows they are important in their own right and enables the structural linking we mentioned earlier.
For example, author pages can help to demonstrate that each writer for the blog is a real, separate person. Linking up their articles to their author page can show the relationship between them and their works. Equally, linking their page to items on the site that speak to their area of expertise can help reinforce their specialisms – think linking your sports writer to the sports section of the site. Similarly, linking them to their external profile on social media or other journalism sites can show what else they have written.
Make It Easy To Crawl And Render
Remember, the key to ensuring your technical SEO aids entity optimization lies in whether the bots can access the content you need them to find.
This includes choosing Server-Side Rendering (SSR) for your important content to ensure LLMs can easily access your content. Although Googlebot can render JavaScript, it can be good practice to keep content easily accessible and not use JavaScript.
By keeping content easily accessible, it also means faster server response times so AI search bots can fully crawl and map your entire entity ecosystem.
Where Do You Start With Entity Optimization?
Entity optimization isn’t a single tactic. It’s an ongoing process of making it easier for search engines and LLMs to understand who you are, what you offer, and how everything connects.
Schema is a good starting point, but it’s only one piece. The real work is in consistency across your code, your content, your site architecture, and your presence across the web. The more coherent and verifiable your entity signals are, the less ambiguity the bots have to deal with.
Start with the basics: consistent identifiers, clear taxonomy, entity homes for your core pages. Then look at how your content places related entities in context with each other. Small, deliberate signals add up.
More Resources:
- Entities In SEO: What Are They And Why Do They Matter?
- Merging SEO And Content Using Your Knowledge Graph To AI-Proof Content
- Key Patterns Reveal The Future Of AI Discovery [Data Study]
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
