Important Alert:
Summary: Entity SEO, also known as entity-based SEO, uses records from several authoritative online databases and directories to categorise various names or search terms. In this article, we will explore how entity SEO can enhance your ecommerce website’s discoverability on search engines, thus increasing organic traffic, revenue and user engagement.
With the increasing usage of entities over keywords in ecommerce SEO, search engines have been able to provide greater accuracy in their search results. However, search engines need more information to better understand the user’s search intent.
For instance, users searching for ‘apple’ could be looking for the fruit, the phone brand or how-to guide on planting apple. Search engines need more keywords or entities to set the context for the content to show up.
Key Takeaways:-
In many ways, entities and keywords sound quite similar. But are they? Let’s discuss them separately.
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A keyword is a word or set of words users enter into a search bar. It is generally the subject or focus of the term a user is searching for and can be a single word, an entire question or a full sentence.
In the context of SEO, think of an entity as a broader topic that covers several key words and phrases. For a search engine to index an entity, it must fall under the larger umbrella of a specific topic, also called a knowledge graph.
Giving context to each keyword helps define entities more strongly. However, before you can create high-quality keyword-rich content, you must know exactly what your entity is based on. An SEO strategy that recognises both of these factors has a higher likelihood of success.
When it comes to on-page optimisation, you can build entities for internal knowledge graphs that use specific keywords linking different pages on your website. You also have the option of connecting content with high E-A-T knowledge graphs like LinkedIn and Wikipedia. This might not directly or immediately affect your SERP ranking, but it will increase your authority as a knowledge source.
Now that we’ve discussed what entity-based SEO is, let’s take a look at how you can use it to optimize your ecommerce website or platform.
An entity set groups multiple entities based on common features and attributes.
For example, a fast fashion website could categorise product pages into entity sets based on product category, gender, fashion blogs and bestsellers. For an ecommerce platform, acknowledging and structuring entity sets in this manner is critical. This enhances the existing content, streamlines website architecture and sets a strong foundation for entity SEO through structured data implementation across categories.
We’ve talked about knowledge graphs before in this article. A knowledge graph represents an organised structure that you can create while designing your website’s schema. The objective behind creating a knowledge graph is not merely marking up content, but interlinking it intelligently to create a navigable information-rich ecosystem. This advanced graph intricately maps the relationship between entities to provide a semantically rich and comprehensive data web that enhances user experience, searchability and content value overall.
Source: Paradox Marketing
Entity-based SEO, as you know by now, is a highly refined version of traditional keyword SEO. Enhancements over time in automated NLP and new channels for search such as digital assistants and chatbots have made the search process and the queries themselves more complex than ever before. Despite that, most search queries can still be clubbed under a predefined entity.
For example, if a user is searching for ‘Jordan basketball sneakers’ or ‘Jordan jersey’, it is related to the Air Jordan brand by Nike. However, even without mentioning Nike, search engines tailor search results to their audience based on their existing knowledge and the context of past searches.
Benefits for marketers:
Using entity SEO to improve eCommerce provides greater discoverability and visibility. Incorporating keyword research for an eCommerce site and implementing a proper entity catalog (more on this below) will help you identify and include many more popular keywords that have not yet been part of your keyword strategy.
Benefits for ecommerce:
For an ecommerce channel, entity-based SEO clubs all your products under the umbrella of a single entity. For example, if you are selling mobile phones in Dubai, UAE, you can contribute keywords to the Dubai, UAE entity. This will also ensure that you don’t receive orders from areas where your services are not available.
Fundamentally, an entity catalogue is a directory comprising all or several entities. Its main goal is to ensure every entity is unique from the others. A catalogue is especially useful in basic tasks related to data organisation, such as product cataloguing in your ecommerce database. An entity catalogue focuses on disambiguation and identification, which paves the way for more advanced data structures. This understanding ties back to the core principles of what SEO is and why it’s important.
It stands alongside other structures such as a knowledge repository and, as discussed before, a knowledge graph.
Building on an entity catalogue, a knowledge repository adds more depth to every listed entity. A knowledge repository identifies and names entities while categorising them and adding a detailed description. Besides that, it also introduces new relationships among entities even if it’s in a basic untyped form. These entity relationships could indicate association but don’t specify these connections in deep detail. Having a knowledge repository enhances how contextual and interconnected existing data is, ensuring it is more useful for real-world applications that require moderate semantic richness and data interrelation.
A knowledge graph represents the peak of semantic connectivity and entity organisation. It transforms basic data interrelations that come from a knowledge repository into a dense network of well-defined, unique entity relations.
Pointers play a key role in planning a knowledge graph. They aren’t simply links between entities, but structured references that define one entity’s relationship to all others within the schema. This makes the knowledge graph a powerful digital tool that represents real-world, complex relationships. Taking such a structured approach to data organisation doesn’t stop at data categorisation, allowing a nuanced understanding of how an entity interacts within a given domain. This is a highly valued approach when it comes to content discovery and SEO.
Understanding these structures is critical if you wish to enhance the navigability and visibility of your ecommerce website or application in a digital environment that’s increasingly data-oriented and semantically driven.
Google focuses on specific attributes to decide how high your ecommerce website will rank. Entity-based SEO linking is a foundational SEO element that helps drive expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness for your website, popularly abbreviated as E-E-A-T. This becomes especially critical with businesses and content that falls under the Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) category. Let’s take a look at how entity-linking influences each of the 4 factors.
Using entity SEO to optimize your ecommerce site establishes you as a market leader and takes you much further than you would go with simple keyword SEO. Give your business the launchpad it needs with our premium SEO services especially for ecommerce industry.
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