SEO

Why Entity-Based SEO is a New Way of Thinking About Optimization

Published

3 years ago

May 1, 2021

why entity based seo is a new way of thinking about optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) used to be defined by the number of keywords and keyword synonyms across your website’s content.

When Google launched its knowledge graph, SEO shifted away from simply relying on keywords, and search engine crawlers began prioritizing rich snippets and entities on search engine results pages (SERPs).

These days, Google has more systems to identify the true meaning of keyword searches and queries. By categorizing ideas into “entities,” Google revolutionized its search proficiency.

While keywords are still important, SEO experts now also use entity-based SEO to further their ranking efforts. Context and relevance are becoming increasingly important in search engine results, and entities can help improve these factors.

In this article, we’ll explain what entities are, how to use them, and what the future of SEO might look like.

What Is Entity-Based SEO?

Entity-based SEO uses context, not just keywords, to help users find the information they seek.

While keywords are an essential part of your SEO strategy, they don’t fully reflect how humans search for information. For example, a person who searches for “Paris” may be looking for Paris Jackson, the city of Paris (in France or Texas), the movie Paris Is Burning, or innumerable other options.

Google offers suggestions for searchers regarding additional context, which serves the dual purpose of speeding up their searches by showing popular options and reminding them to add more context if none of those are what they need.

google search for paris showing entity based seo

Entity-based SEO is helpful for searchers but slightly has made things a bit more complicated for content creators. Three ways entity-based SEO has changed the landscape include:

Better mobile capabilities: Entities allowed SEO to improve mobile results. Entities also improved mobile-first indexing, which is more prevalent than desktop searches.
Translation improvements: Entities can be found regardless of homonyms, synonyms, and foreign language use thanks to context clues. For instance, a search for “red” will include results for “rouge” or “rojo,” if the searcher’s settings allow for this.
Rich snippets: Rich snippets, which include things like photos and customer ratings as part of their results, generally outperform even number one search results.

Keywords Vs. Entities: What’s the Difference?

Entities might sound similar to keywords. In fact, they are quite different. Here’s how they differ and why those differences are so important.

Keywords

Keywords are words or phrases used in searches. They’re often the focal points of terms users search for and can be questions, sentences, or single words.

For example, users looking for makeup tutorials may search for makeup, tutorial, smokey eye, how to do a smokey eye, and so on.

Keywords still matter because they connect your content to queries. Your goal is to drive organic traffic to your site by ranking for keywords that help customers find your brand on search engines.

Keywords have long been the backbone of SEO, mainly because search engine algorithms needed clear, concise direction to populate relevant search results.

In the early days of SEO, keyword stuffing, which involves adding your chosen keyword far too many times or including largely irrelevant, popular keywords, was used constantly. At the time, search algorithms needed to see specific keywords repeatedly to rank content properly.

These days, algorithms have evolved significantly, and many old SEO tactics are, at best, frowned upon.

Google has always maintained that good copy and content are preferred over keyword stuffing and other black-hat SEO tricks.

Entities

As defined by Google, an entity is “A thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable.” This doesn’t need to be a physical object and can include colors, dates, ideas, and so on.

Entities can be people, places, products, companies, or abstract concepts. They should always be distinct and independent of other entities or keywords.

Emphasizing entities over keywords has allowed search engines to be more accurate in their results. However, search engines aren’t psychic—they need more information to figure out which entity you’re searching for.

For example, a search for the word “apple” could result in pages about the fruit or pages about the company. As interesting as both topics are, if you’re searching for information about whether apple seeds are indeed poisonous, reading about iPhones probably won’t be too helpful. You need to add some keywords to tell the search engine which entity you mean.

We can think of entities as large topics keywords live within. For entities to be legitimate, they need to link to a search engine knowledge graph representing linked information and data across the internet. Knowledge graphs allow search engines to scan your website effectively.

Google’s Knowledge Graph used Wikipedia as its primary trusted seed set. An easy way to think about entities is that they are anything that could have a specific Wikipedia page assigned to it.

It’s important to note that not every entity has a Wikipedia page. This could just be a helpful way to think of the concept.

How Do Entities and Keywords Work Together?

Keywords with context help entities become defined, but you need to know precisely what your entity is all about before you can create your keyword-rich and well-written content. An SEO strategy recognizing both factors is your best bet for success.

On-page, you can create entities for an internal knowledge graph that uses keywords to link to different pages on your site. You can also connect your content to high E-A-T knowledge graphs such as Wikipedia or LinkedIn. While this won’t directly affect your page rank, it can improve your page authority in search.

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Benefits of Entity-Based SEO

Entity-based SEO is more relevant, refined, and granular than keyword SEO alone.

Over time, improvements in automated natural language processing and new search methods like chatbots and digital assistants have made search queries longer and more complicated.

Yet, most search queries still relate to an entity. For example, “Things to do in Brussels” or “What to do in Brussels today” relates to Brussels, Belgium. Even without the quantifier of Belgium, search engines can tailor their results based on previous entity knowledge and context.

For marketers, entity-based SEO offers more concrete discoverability. Ensuring your brand is a concrete entity could help you include a large number of keywords that may not have been previously available. Nike, for example, can be searched through running shoes, tennis shoes, workout clothes, Air Jordans, and more, without users getting lost along the way.

In e-commerce, entity-based SEO can connect your products under a single entity. For example, if you sell windows in Paris, France, you may be able to contribute keywords to the Paris, France entity, opening up your business to potential new clients. Also, connecting your window selling business to Paris, France, helps ensure customers living in Paris, Texas, won’t see your content and mistakenly order from you.

How to Shift Your Strategy to Entity-Based SEO

Adding an entity focus to your existing SEO strategies could help you prepare for future algorithm updates.

Understanding which entities your business connects to and establishing your business as an entity in itself will become increasingly important in coming years.

How do you move on from previous, often keyword-focused strategies to an entity-based strategy?

List Your Business on Relevant Directories

One way to leverage entity-based SEO is to list your business on directories across the internet. Google My Business, for example, is used as a data source for the Google Knowledge Graph.

Other listing services, such as Yelp, can also help create strong, domain-rich backlinks for your brand and help you create a known entity. Yelp appears in the top five search results in 92 percent of Google web searches.

Listing sites may change from location to location, so do your research when deciding where to list. Additionally, be sure to choose sites with high domain authority to improve your search engine standing.

Using this strategy, businesses listed here can form entities and begin connecting unique keywords.

Prioritize Brand Building

Brand building is another essential tactic in entity-based SEO. Any offline brand presence measures need to be brought online, and you should always be considering new ways to create a well-defined and unique identity for your brand.

Managing your reputation is also increasingly important, as your reputation may factor into entity creation. Be conscious of the keywords you currently rank for and note—and correct for—any possible PR problems that could arise.

Consider Your Use of Interface Management Tools

Interface management is becoming a factor in entity-based SEO, as a silo approach to collaboration may negatively impact search engine visibility. This may happen despite keyword rankings, which could significantly affect some businesses.

Ultimately, focusing on keywords is not going to be enough going forward. Businesses and marketers need to shift their focus to entity-based SEO and start implementing tactics to ensure their content connects to their entities.

Conclusion

Entity-based SEO can be a great way to communicate the context and relevance of your brand online.

By targeting ideas and context rather than words or phrases alone, entities build a bigger picture of your content, potentially allowing it to out-perform traditional keyword research methods.

We can expect to see more opportunities for marketers to create more depth in their branding strategies by focusing on entity-based SEO.

In what ways have you experimented with entity-based SEO?

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Client-Side Vs. Server-Side Rendering

Published

3 hours ago

September 19, 2024

Max

Faster webpage loading times play a big part in user experience and SEO, with page load speed a key determining factor for Google’s algorithm.

A front-end web developer must decide the best way to render a website so it delivers a fast experience and dynamic content.

Two popular rendering methods include client-side rendering (CSR) and server-side rendering (SSR).

All websites have different requirements, so understanding the difference between client-side and server-side rendering can help you render your website to match your business goals.

Google & JavaScript

Google has extensive documentation on how it handles JavaScript, and Googlers offer insights and answer JavaScript questions regularly through various formats – both official and unofficial.

For example, in a Search Off The Record podcast, it was discussed that Google renders all pages for Search, including JavaScript-heavy ones.

This sparked a substantial conversation on LinkedIn, and another couple of takeaways from both the podcast and proceeding discussions are that:

Google doesn’t track how expensive it is to render specific pages.
Google renders all pages to see content – regardless if it uses JavaScript or not.

The conversation as a whole has helped to dispel many myths and misconceptions about how Google might have approached JavaScript and allocated resources.

Martin Splitt’s full comment on LinkedIn covering this was:

“We don’t keep track of “how expensive was this page for us?” or something. We know that a substantial part of the web uses JavaScript to add, remove, change content on web pages. We just have to render, to see it all. It doesn’t really matter if a page does or does not use JavaScript, because we can only be reasonably sure to see all content once it’s rendered.”

Martin also confirmed a queue and potential delay between crawling and indexing, but not just because something is JavaScript or not, and it’s not an “opaque” issue that the presence of JavaScript is the root cause of URLs not being indexed.

General JavaScript Best Practices

Before we get into the client-side versus server-side debate, it’s important that we also follow general best practices for either of these approaches to work:

Don’t block JavaScript resources through Robots.txt or server rules.
Avoid render blocking.
Avoid injecting JavaScript in the DOM.

What Is Client-Side Rendering, And How Does It Work?

Client-side rendering is a relatively new approach to rendering websites.

It became popular when JavaScript libraries started integrating it, with Angular and React.js being some of the best examples of libraries used in this type of rendering.

It works by rendering a website’s JavaScript in your browser rather than on the server.

The server responds with a bare-bones HTML document containing the JS files instead of getting all the content from the HTML document.

While the initial upload time is a bit slow, the subsequent page loads will be rapid as they aren’t reliant on a different HTML page per route.

From managing logic to retrieving data from an API, client-rendered sites do everything “independently.” The page is available after the code is executed because every page the user visits and its corresponding URL are created dynamically.

The CSR process is as follows:

The user enters the URL they wish to visit in the address bar.
A data request is sent to the server at the specified URL.
On the client’s first request for the site, the server delivers the static files (CSS and HTML) to the client’s browser.
The client browser will download the HTML content first, followed by JavaScript. These HTML files connect the JavaScript, starting the loading process by displaying loading symbols the developer defines to the user. At this stage, the website is still not visible to the user.
After the JavaScript is downloaded, content is dynamically generated on the client’s browser.
The web content becomes visible as the client navigates and interacts with the website.

What Is Server-Side Rendering, And How Does It Work?

Server-side rendering is the more common technique for displaying information on a screen.

The web browser submits a request for information from the server, fetching user-specific data to populate and sending a fully rendered HTML page to the client.

Every time the user visits a new page on the site, the server will repeat the entire process.

Here’s how the SSR process goes step-by-step:

The user enters the URL they wish to visit in the address bar.
The server serves a ready-to-be-rendered HTML response to the browser.
The browser renders the page (now viewable) and downloads JavaScript.
The browser executes React, thus making the page interactable.

What Are The Differences Between Client-Side And Server-Side Rendering?

The main difference between these two rendering approaches is in the algorithms of their operation. CSR shows an empty page before loading, while SSR displays a fully-rendered HTML page on the first load.

This gives server-side rendering a speed advantage over client-side rendering, as the browser doesn’t need to process large JavaScript files. Content is often visible within a couple of milliseconds.

Search engines can crawl the site for better SEO, making it easy to index your webpages. This readability in the form of text is precisely the way SSR sites appear in the browser.

However, client-side rendering is a cheaper option for website owners.

It relieves the load on your servers, passing the responsibility of rendering to the client (the bot or user trying to view your page). It also offers rich site interactions by providing fast website interaction after the initial load.

Fewer HTTP requests are made to the server with CSR, unlike in SSR, where each page is rendered from scratch, resulting in a slower transition between pages.

SSR can also buckle under a high server load if the server receives many simultaneous requests from different users.

The drawback of CSR is the longer initial loading time. This can impact SEO; crawlers might not wait for the content to load and exit the site.

This two-phased approach raises the possibility of seeing empty content on your page by missing JavaScript content after first crawling and indexing the HTML of a page. Remember that, in most cases, CSR requires an external library.

When To Use Server-Side Rendering

If you want to improve your Google visibility and rank high in the search engine results pages (SERPs), server-side rendering is the number one choice.

E-learning websites, online marketplaces, and applications with a straightforward user interface with fewer pages, features, and dynamic data all benefit from this type of rendering.

When To Use Client-Side Rendering

Client-side rendering is usually paired with dynamic web apps like social networks or online messengers. This is because these apps’ information constantly changes and must deal with large and dynamic data to perform fast updates to meet user demand.

The focus here is on a rich site with many users, prioritizing the user experience over SEO.

Which Is Better: Server-Side Or Client-Side Rendering?

When determining which approach is best, you need to not only take into consideration your SEO needs but also how the website works for users and delivers value.

Think about your project and how your chosen rendering will impact your position in the SERPs and your website’s user experience.

Generally, CSR is better for dynamic websites, while SSR is best suited for static websites.

Content Refresh Frequency

Websites that feature highly dynamic information, such as gambling or FOREX websites, update their content every second, meaning you’d likely choose CSR over SSR in this scenario – or choose to use CSR for specific landing pages and not all pages, depending on your user acquisition strategy.

SSR is more effective if your site’s content doesn’t require much user interaction. It positively influences accessibility, page load times, SEO, and social media support.

On the other hand, CSR is excellent for providing cost-effective rendering for web applications, and it’s easier to build and maintain; it’s better for First Input Delay (FID).

Another CSR consideration is that meta tags (description, title), canonical URLs, and Hreflang tags should be rendered server-side or presented in the initial HTML response for the crawlers to identify them as soon as possible, and not only appear in the rendered HTML.

Platform Considerations

CSR technology tends to be more expensive to maintain because the hourly rate for developers skilled in React.js or Node.js is generally higher than that for PHP or WordPress developers.

Additionally, there are fewer ready-made plugins or out-of-the-box solutions available for CSR frameworks compared to the larger plugin ecosystem that WordPress users have access too.

For those considering a headless WordPress setup, such as using Frontity, it’s important to note that you’ll need to hire both React.js developers and PHP developers.

This is because headless WordPress relies on React.js for the front end while still requiring PHP for the back end.

It’s important to remember that not all WordPress plugins are compatible with headless setups, which could limit functionality or require additional custom development.

Website Functionality & Purpose

Sometimes, you don’t have to choose between the two as hybrid solutions are available. Both SSR and CSR can be implemented within a single website or webpage.

For example, in an online marketplace, pages with product descriptions can be rendered on the server, as they are static and need to be easily indexed by search engines.

Staying with ecommerce, if you have high levels of personalization for users on a number of pages, you won’t be able to SSR render the content for bots, so you will need to define some form of default content for Googlebot which crawls cookieless and stateless.

Pages like user accounts don’t need to be ranked in the search engine results pages (SERPs), so a CRS approach might be better for UX.

Both CSR and SSR are popular approaches to rendering websites. You and your team need to make this decision at the initial stage of product development.

More resources:

Featured Image: TippaPatt/Shutterstock

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SEO

HubSpot Rolls Out AI-Powered Marketing Tools

Published

22 hours ago

September 18, 2024

Max

HubSpot Rolls Out AI-Powered Marketing Tools

HubSpot announced a push into AI this week at its annual Inbound marketing conference, launching “Breeze.”

Breeze is an artificial intelligence layer integrated across the company’s marketing, sales, and customer service software.

According to HubSpot, the goal is to provide marketers with easier, faster, and more unified solutions as digital channels become oversaturated.

Karen Ng, VP of Product at HubSpot, tells Search Engine Journal in an interview:

“We’re trying to create really powerful tools for marketers to rise above the noise that’s happening now with a lot of this AI-generated content. We might help you generate titles or a blog content…but we do expect kind of a human there to be a co-assist in that.”

Breeze AI Covers Copilot, Workflow Agents, Data Enrichment

The Breeze layer includes three main components.

Breeze Copilot

An AI assistant that provides personalized recommendations and suggestions based on data in HubSpot’s CRM.

Ng explained:

“It’s a chat-based AI companion that assists with tasks everywhere – in HubSpot, the browser, and mobile.”

Breeze Agents

A set of four agents that can automate entire workflows like content generation, social media campaigns, prospecting, and customer support without human input.

Ng added the following context:

“Agents allow you to automate a lot of those workflows. But it’s still, you know, we might generate for you a content backlog. But taking a look at that content backlog, and knowing what you publish is still a really important key of it right now.”

Breeze Intelligence

Combines HubSpot customer data with third-party sources to build richer profiles.

Ng stated:

“It’s really important that we’re bringing together data that can be trusted. We know your AI is really only as good as the data that it’s actually trained on.”

Addressing AI Content Quality

While prioritizing AI-driven productivity, Ng acknowledged the need for human oversight of AI content:

“We really do need eyes on it still…We think of that content generation as still human-assisted.”

Marketing Hub Updates

Beyond Breeze, HubSpot is updating Marketing Hub with tools like:

Content Remix to repurpose videos into clips, audio, blogs, and more.
AI video creation via integration with HeyGen
YouTube and Instagram Reels publishing
Improved marketing analytics and attribution

The announcements signal HubSpot’s AI-driven vision for unifying customer data.

But as Ng tells us, “We definitely think a lot about the data sources…and then also understand your business.”

HubSpot’s updates are rolling out now, with some in public beta.

Featured Image: Poetra.RH/Shutterstock

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Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]

Published

2 days ago

September 18, 2024

Max

Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]

Brands are seeing success driving quality pipeline and revenue growth. It’s all about building an intentional customer journey, aligning sales + marketing, plus measuring ROI.

Check out this executive panel on-demand, as we show you how we do it.

With Ryann Hogan, senior demand generation manager at CallRail, and our very own Heather Campbell and Jessica Cromwell, we chatted about driving demand, lead gen, revenue, and proper attribution.

This B2B leadership forum provided insights you can use in your strategy tomorrow, like:

The importance of the customer journey, and the keys to matching content to your ideal personas.
How to align marketing and sales efforts to guide leads through an effective journey to conversion.
Methods to measure ROI and determine if your strategies are delivering results.

While the case study is SaaS, these strategies are for any brand.

Watch on-demand and be part of the conversation.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

Navigating SERP Complexity: How to Leverage Search Intent for SEO

Join us live as we break down all of these complexities and reveal how to identify valuable opportunities in your space. We’ll show you how to tap into the searcher’s motivation behind each query (and how Google responds to it in kind).

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