Make use of relevant entities to improve your visibility as a brand

Ulrika says: “Utilise entities – not only for content creation, as we have been doing for quite some time, but also for brand optimization.

You can make your brand properly stand out in the search results by optimizing the entities around the brand.”

How are SEOs currently using entities for content creation?

“We’ve been working with entities for some time. Most of us now understand that it’s about the things that exist or that we can conceptualise in our minds. Those are entities, and Google and LLMs use them all the time to understand language and the concepts of language and content.

In content, we use entities to connect things around the topic we’re talking about – to make sure that LLMs understand it, but also to create semantic clusters around the topic.

It helps brands be seen as topical authorities, and it helps connect things together. For example, you can connect outdoor products with sustainability. If you are writing about scuba diving, you would talk about scuba gear, but you may also want to connect scuba diving with the Red Sea or saving coral reefs.

You’re connecting the two entities with each other and then they can share some understanding between them. That’s how you work with entities, and there is a significant overlap with SEO because you create a greater understanding of what it is you’re talking about by connecting these things together.”

When do you know the right time to approach different entities and push the boundaries with the content your brand talks about?

“Let’s take it back to keywords because this is where entities play a bigger role, which means it is also where they play a bigger role for you as a brand.

Take a ski brand like Peak Performance, which sells ski clothes and fashion. They are associated with outdoor sports, but they also want to connect themselves with being sustainable, taking care of nature, and being environmentally friendly and considerate. They want to be seen as that kind of brand.

Therefore, they want to connect their products with softer, more vague entities that are not naturally connected to their brand, so they talk about those concepts and make statements.

To do this yourself, you talk about those ideas in places that connect your brand with these topics, but you also optimize your website with a technical layer – using things like structured data and JSON-LD.

You are talking about the story behind the brand, and ensuring that users and search engines understand that story and what it relates to, but you’re also putting something extra on top of that. You are considering which entities you’re describing your brand with, and whether or not they are being understood as a part of your brand.

Instead of keyword research, you do entity research. How is your brand understood around these entities? Is whatever you want to communicate actually connected to your brand?”

Are you using schema to mark up entities that you don’t own as a brand, but that you would like to demonstrate a relationship with?

“Definitely. You can weave that into the description of your brand and in your schema.

Schema is also important for EEAT, which is key for brand optimization using entities. You need to make sure that you are a trusted brand with the authority to speak about a topic or entity cluster. These things all weave into each other, and you have to take care of all of it.

Schema is part of it because you can use so many different kinds of schema. You can use nested schema together with all of the organisational types of structured data.

You can invite people who have a reason to speak about the topic you want to evolve as an entity, feature them on your website talking about it, and use different schemas like sameAs, person, CreativeWork, etc. to connect all of them together.”

How do you identify the additional entities that you want to be associated with?

“I do a Google search. Start by Googling yourself or the brand and see what other entities pop up. You will see them as small bubbles just below the search result. Those are keyword suggestions or suggestions of the kinds of directions that you would like to go into and research further.

If you don’t see them as text, you can see them in the Image search bubbles that ask whether this is the type of thing that you’re looking for.

You can also go to the AlsoAsked tool. There, you can see what people are looking for. What are they connecting your brand with? That will show you what people think about you today. If there’s a gap between what that is and what you want to be seen as, voila! You do that. Start talking about it.

There is also a very nice tool in Kalicube, from Jason Barnard, where you can search for your entities directly and see how well-connected they are. You can see whether an entity is connected to you, whether you are connected to that entity, and which entities you are connected with in general.”

What are some other ways of enhancing the connection between you and other entities?

“You can create articles about those entities and speak about them as part of what you produce on your website, or you can reach out to an authority within that topic area and feature them on your website – or be featured by them.

I’m building the ‘Ulrika Viberg’ entity with this interview right now. Being mentioned is a very strong indicator that you have authority within the subject area, or that you are a trusted person/brand talking about something. Through the video, audio, and transcript of this interview, Google will strongly associate ‘Ulrika Viberg’ with ‘Majestic’.

If you also put schema on the web page that features this transcript, you can put my name in there, the organisation I work for, and use sameAs schema to point to my Twitter handle, LinkedIn, etc. That also gives a stronger connection.

It sounds simple, but you can’t just do it in one place. You have to do it consistently. Consistency is very important. You need to make sure that you are described in more or less the same way in multiple places, with the same types of entities and, preferably, the exact same wording. That creates the strongest connection.

It’s also a great way to do outreach and determine who you want to build relationships with online. In this case, it’s not the actual link that creates that connection. It does give some link equity, but it’s the mention and being associated with the action itself that is strong.”

Do you attempt to evaluate the entities that you would like to build a relationship with, to determine which could be the most useful?

“I do. It’s even more important now (although, if you are a YMYL brand then this has always been important) that you consider brand entity optimization.

You have to be saying things and be trusted in other trustworthy places that give you backlinks, but also give you more mentions from trusted sources.”

Does this make it more likely that you’re going to appear in AI overviews and other AI-generated results?

“Exactly. It also helps you have a strong brand entity in the knowledge graph so that your knowledge panel looks the way you want it to, is really visible, and is well-connected.

The end result is that you, as a brand, have a really nice knowledge panel, but you are also surfacing in the search results when someone is looking for the entity that you want to be connected to.

You’ll start to pop up when people search for other brands, and for the things that you want to be connected to.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Basic SEO is always going to be super important, but stop writing meta descriptions and alt tags manually. It doesn’t offer much.

I use AI to produce them, but I create scripts and rules so that they are done properly. If you don’t have meta descriptions, and you don’t have the time to create them or the budget for AI, just skip it.

Make sure that you have proper content on the website and proper internal linking instead.”

Ulrika Viberg is CEO at Unikorn, and you can find her over at Unikorn.se.