Become a real entity by feeding the machine the right information

Sara says: “Work to become an entity and feed the machine the correct information. You need to understand your identity, your offering, and your target audience.

You want to remove any uncertainty. You want Google, Bing, or any other search engine to understand you. In the case of Google, you want to apply your EEAT signals. If they understand you, they can better apply those signals. If you are an author and an entity, and they know who the website owner is, it’s much easier to apply all those signals.

That’s why it’s very important to focus on becoming an entity and feed all the correct information to the machine – especially with generative AI.”

What kind of content will help you become an entity?

“I recently wrote a white paper with Jason Barnard about how to adapt to generative AI. You can apply the same logic in this case: when you produce your content, you have to think about the buyer decision journey and what type of content will make sense for your company.

If you work for a development agency, it will make sense that your content has a product element because that is what you sell. However, you also have to show how fantastic your developers are – in your blog, for example. Your developers could write directly on your blog, demonstrating their experience, which is just a small part of the buyer decision journey. You have to think bigger as well, but those are a couple of examples.”

What initial content will give you the best chance of a search engine understanding exactly who you are and what you represent?

“These are your key pages. The homepage and About Us page are clearly key pages, as are product pages.

Start by directly stating who you are and what you do, and that will probably be on your homepage. You want to start putting data into that page. If you can say that you’ve been in business for 20 years, that already helps. Then you go to the About Us page. The About Us page is fantastic because it’s where you can go deep into explaining your history. There is so much data and factual information that you can put inside that page.

On the About Us page, you can speak about your structure. You can write about the owner of the company or, if you are owned by another company, you write that. Give all the information about who you really are. You obviously also need to explain what you do and your history, which is also fantastic because it gives extra information.

One of the advantages of using those pages is that you can really create the logic and structure of the website. You can explain what the brand is, who it is owned by, etc.”

How do you decide what schema to use, and can you use ChatGPT to produce the schema on your behalf?

“I never use ChatGPT to produce schema because I work in a development company. I tell them what my requirements are and they produce it for me.

In terms of how to ensure that you’re using the right schema, that is difficult to answer. What you can do is identify the minimum requirements that you want to have. For example, you know that you want to have ‘organisation’. Maybe you can go a little bit further and be more precise about the type of organisation. Then, you create a list of things that you think you need to have.

Another option is to copy people who are currently doing it better than you. Take a look at your competition and see what they are doing. Then, you know what kind of information you may want to add. You can just go through the library, or you can check the Google documentation for their minimum requirements.”

What other key places should you be present in to enhance what you do on your site, and how do you go about doing that?

“If you have a page on your website that is full of comments saying how fantastic you are and how incredible your product is, that is just on your website. Nothing outside of your site is saying how fantastic you are.

Trustpilot, for example, can be great for software companies. If you appear on Trustpilot, you have an external element confirming that you are fantastic, which is great. Those external spaces are very helpful for building your credibility. I’m not necessarily talking about backlinks, but everything that can confirm the information you are providing internally.

Making sure that your Google Business Profile has reviews on it is another example of an external source. There are tons of different sources you can utilise and, provided they are valuable, they will confirm what you are saying on your site, which builds your credibility.”

Should you link to those external sources from your own website, and can you use schema to point search engines toward them?

“You can always link to somewhere like Trustpilot from your website. Why not? There’s nothing wrong with that. Also, you can use schema for those external sources. If there is a Wikipedia page that confirms what you do, for example, you can use the sameAs tag in your About Us page to let search engines know that this information is the same as what the Wikipedia page that you link to is saying. There are always ways that you can use schema to show that there is a connection with an external source.”

How much does interacting on social media assist search engines in understanding what you do and enhance your brand’s identity?

“Social media definitely has an influence. Whenever someone searches for you, there will be references to your social media profiles on the SERP, which will make a difference.

If you are a person, you will probably have a Twitter/X and LinkedIn profile showing who you are. If you are a company, you might have a TikTok or something else. Social media certainly plays a role in the sense that it is showing up in your SERP, which the search engines will pass through and try to understand you through that.”

What social platforms give you the best presence on the SERP?

“At the moment, the knowledge panel for individuals is often being taken from LinkedIn – and I’ve also seen information being taken directly from the About section on LinkedIn.

People sometimes write their About section in the third person, and that may help as well. Either way, that information is definitely being taken from Linkedin, so there is something to be gained there.”

In terms of ChatGPT and AI, what is the future of schema? Will AI become so clever that search engines won’t need schema anymore because they’ll be able to understand the entity without any markup code?

“That is a big discussion. To sum it up, the first thing that comes to my mind is that generative AI has a big problem with hallucination. It needs to have something to give it structure. The technology is fantastic, but it needs confirmation.

At the moment, the only thing that can confirm what AI is seeing, and help it remove the problem of hallucination, is the knowledge graph. Everything that is structured can prevent generative AI from hallucinating – and schema clearly creates structure.

AI can understand an entity, but it can understand that entity wrong, and it can invent the story completely. Everything that helps with that understanding has to stay, at least for the moment. In two years, maybe it will be perfect and there will be no more problems but, right now, everything that gives structure is still important.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“If you have limited time, then spend less of it working on Core Web Vitals. That’s never a very popular sentiment but, when your time is limited, then you should use it on something else.”

Sara Moccand-Sayegh is an SEO Specialist, and you can find her over at MoccandSayeghSara.ch.