As simplified by Neil Patel (https://neilpatel.com/blog/entity-based-seo/) , entity SEO is “anything that could have a specific wikipedia page about it”.
Now, of course this doesn’t mean:
- go make a wiki page about on your brand (although they may want to do this as an established brand, it’s not part of any viable SEO strategy)
- make wiki pages about other related brand ideas/items.
What doing entity SEO entails in the case of most service-based businesses is:
- brand-association to top level terms/ideas
- doing things like optimizing “______ services” pages will help to strengthen the “service” entity relationship to the brand.
- creating citations strengthens the brand entity to be more closely related to their services entity.
- structured data is the strongest signal and entity relationship builder by providing links and map relationships across content pages that specifically reference agreed-upon categorization in the way of schema.
- creating supportive content for landing pages “strengthens” any “entity” or “idea” or “concept” across all of the linked pages.
- internal linking strengthens relationships between entities e.g. specific services, and more closely related the brand entity to these entities.
- doing things like optimizing “______ services” pages will help to strengthen the “service” entity relationship to the brand.
So, by doing these things we are doing entity-based SEO, but, optimizing for entities is only a part of why this all benefits the site, therefore Search Geeks will rarely reference efforts as “entity SEO”, as building and strengthening entities comes as part of creating all of these patterns and consistencies across client sites.