Entities Are The Foundation Of Modern SEO
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Harry Clarkson-Bennett September 2, 2026 ⋅ 15 min read Harry Clarkson-Bennett SEO Director at Telegraph Bio Follow 1.2K READS I wrote an article about auditing publisher websites last week, and it took a little piece of my soul. Like a Horcrux, but without me being a spectacularly evil wizard hellbent on world domination. Allegedly. I argued that SEO auditing should be broken down into four parts: I think almost every concept required for modern information retrieval is included within the above four themes. Outside of wider marketing (which is arguably the most important facet of “optimizing” for large language models, thanks to its impact on training data), everything you should be doing as an SEO should align with discoverability. And Entity SEO is not a new concept. Google has a long history with understanding and disambiguating entities (people, places, organizations, et al.). Google’s Knowledge Graph has been around for 15 years and is quite literally a database of entities. The content around the entity became more important than ever. Things, not strings. Old school. “Search engines and AI systems have to build a picture of who you are from fragmented evidence across the web. Your job is to make that picture as clear, consistent and well-supported as possible.” As always now, if you’d like to listen to my dulcet tones rather than read, that is your want and right: Entity SEO is the practice of reducing ambiguity around the people, places, organizations, products, events and topics that really matter to your business. Google’s Knowledge Graph is the most obvious and accessible example of a system that represents entities and their relationships. The on-page content, the internal and external links, the navigation and your owned and earned consistency (and scale) are of critical importance. Everything you say about your brand needs to be accurate. What other people say about your brand needs to corroborate this. You are trying to control the controllables, and ensure the right entities are talking about your brand. That second part is more marketing specific and something that sits outside of most SEOs remits. I like the idea of having a Director of Marketing in control of the inputs and outputs here. If Google and LLMs can’t confidently “understand” who you are, it’s harder for its systems to correctly interpret and connect the signals around your brand. You need on-site consistency and third-party presence to provide real clarity. Metrics like branded search volume have always been important to track. Direct traffic to specific sections of your site too. You want to understand and establish where you have real user demand. The closer you are to The NYT, the more resilient you are (Image Credit: Harry Clarkson-Bennett) You should really understand what types of places or events you have real authority in in the eyes of our machinated overlords. And yes, while AI systems are not exactly world-leading when it comes to filtering out spam (see ChatGPT using site: search modifiers for brands it ‘trusts’), this isn’t going to be the case forever. So stop pissing about. When users search for the news, they search with short-tail entities. They hear about a story and search for the person, event or place associated with it. It’s short-tail and relatively lazy. Top Stories – a news SEO’s primary signifier of success – is dominated by entities. Headlines, opening paragraphs, images and the wider makeup of the page needs, nay demands, an entity. A focal point. You’re trying to establish what this story is about as quickly and efficiently as possible for a crawler that may crawl your news article once and then only again once the spike in demand has passed. It’s why it’s so important to be accurate on first pass. Google’s news crawling system may give you one chance. The content and mentions publishers generate is what positions you as a brand. If you keep creating horse racing content for betting-specific purposes (I’m not pointing any fingers here), you should think about whether that relationship may be doing more harm than good. I don’t mean in the sense of “even someone like you can follow this.” Although this should be simple. I mean it from a more tactical perspective. You can audit your own entity presence across owned and earned properties and try to take action. This is particularly important for smaller brands and publishers. It’s not like the BBC or NYT have to worry about whether someone spells their brand name wrong. But if you are (or have) a less established brand – personal or organization – then this type of consistency matters. We work from owning and owned consistency to earned platforms and competitor monitoring (Image Credit: Harry Clarkson-Bennett) Everything we classify under Own, Describe, and Prove fall under your control. They are all editable properties. If you remember working in SEO as a junior 10 years ago or more, you’ll remember the long list of mentions someone would send you to turn into backlinks. In my experience and humble opinion, this was a completely fruitless exercise and a complete waste of time. In the spirit of that, I suggest you focus almost all of your time on your owned properties. The part of your digital presence you can fix without sending guaranteed to be ignored emails. You can, of course, build an entity audit and framework based on this article. Should you wish, you could absolutely build this spreadsheet from the article. And make sure your description of your brand, NAP (Name Address Phone Number, shout out old school local SEO), leaders, contributors – everything that should be consistent should be consistent. Your links all point to the right endpoints. Before starting any grandiose plan for world domination, make sure your owned properties and the information on them are consistent and accurate. We could colloquially call this entity hygiene. Look, it’s unlikely to make a dramatic improvement, but you’ve got to start somewhere. All of it is ambiguity. Ambiguity isn’t just something you prevent. It’s something you clean up. It removes entity drift.
Source: Search Engine Journal
This article has been carefully curated and reformatted for educational and informational purposes. Full credit goes to the original publisher.
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