ENTITY MATCH – GOOGLE RANKING FACTOR?

Entities might sound similar to keywords, but in fact, they are very different.

Search engines like Google are emphasizing entities over keywords to allow more accuracy in their results. But, search engines need more information to figure out the entity for which you search.

For example: A search for the word “orange” could result in pages about the fruit or pages about the color. As interesting as both topics are, if you’re searching for information about whether orange seeds can grow an orange tree, reading about the color shades are orange probably won’t help. You must add some more keywords to tell the search engine which entity you mean.

Entities enable Google to categorise web pages to improve their search results. You can use these tools to discover which categories the top-ranking web pages for a keyword being categorised.

The Google NLP tool shows us which category Google categorises your page as, what level of confidence it has that this page belongs in this category, and which entities make up the page.

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

If an entity that you want to reference, (aka: your company or yourself), is not available in Google’s Knowledge Graph, you can influence it manually. You can create your own entity and take steps to get it picked up by Google. Word Lift has created a “How to” on making your own SEO-friendly Machine-Readable Entity IDs. Start by setting up an account on wikidata.org and create the desired “item”.

Wikidata’s meta description reads as:

“Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data”.