Add a technical layer to your branding and start thinking of branding as a technical practice

Ulrika says: “Start thinking about branding with a technical layer. That means having a technical layer on your website, around your brand, so that AI understands who you are, what you do, and what your business does on the internet.

It’s going to make it much easier for them to understand what your business is about and who you are. Start thinking of branding as a technical practice.”

Is this technical layer going to include more than just schema?

“Schema is a part of it; that’s a way of implementing it. We’re talking mostly about entities – specifically, the entities that you and your brand are connected to or associated with. You have to start thinking about that.

Think about the kind of entities and relevant topics that you talk about and surround your name with. Here, it is very important to think about EEAT and how you become the expert to build trust and authority around you and your brand.

This also applies more broadly to wherever your brand exists online. That includes social channels and other websites as well. I’m building my brand right now, by doing this interview.

The large language models need to verify that you are who you say you are, and that the content you put online is indeed accurate. As we have seen, they can spit out all kinds of stuff. The AI models hallucinate when you talk to them, so they don’t have everything covered yet, but they’re working on it. One way that they are working on it is to verify the things they find on the internet for a generative answer by checking the EEAT of the entity that they’re talking about.”

Could SEOs be responsible for AI hallucinations if their entity information isn’t consistent online?

“Yes. Up until now, we’ve been focusing on creating all kinds of content – and content that doesn’t really relate to each other. We focus on content that is sprung out of one keyword, on one landing page, and we optimize it the way we are used to doing that. We build links between our content and links to our content, and that’s how we optimize it.

Now, we have to connect everything, and make sure that it is connected, so it is relevant to our brand and our person. That way, the machines can understand exactly what it is that you want to be recognised as and what you want to be associated with so that they can see your expertise or experience.”

Can an SEO influence other departments to try and ensure that they don’t talk about content that doesn’t immediately relate to what the brand’s about?

“That’s going to be tricky; we all know that. Hopefully, the company or brand has an overall digital strategy where you talk about the topics that are important and relevant to your brand. Then, you don’t talk about all the other things because that would be diluting your brand anyway. It’s not just for your technical branding online, but also for how you are seen in general.

As well as determining what your brand is about and how the content you write about relates to your brand, you should also be aware of the content that isn’t relevant to your brand.

Typically, brands want to be seen as big and they talk about everything and do everything, especially when they’re starting up. After a while, when you are rebranding, you consolidate everything that you’re doing and what you’re good at. You don’t talk about the other stuff because it is actually not very helpful.”

Are there ways of structuring, choosing, and marking up content to make life easier for AI to understand what you’re about?

“There is a thing called ‘entity juice’, and it’s about all of the entities that are connected to each other and also your entity. That juice is gained through structured data, but also nested structured data – this entity is the same as X, this person has also done X, this brand is also mentioned here, or this brand is also doing X and Y, for example.

I work with a large e-commerce for books online, where we can nest all kinds of data together, with the author, the books, the categories, etc. You can go bananas with this and try to do it as much as possible.

Structured data is a blunt tool in itself because there are not that many types to use, but use it as much as you can and nest it to other topics – where it is appropriate and where it makes sense.”

Will structured data eventually be ignored or less necessary because AI will become better at determining what content is on a web page?

“I don’t think it’s going to be ignored, but it’s going to be evolved. I’m guessing here because I have no actual insights, but that would be the logical progression.

It makes it easier for the machines to read content if it is tagged with some structured data or some language that the machines understand much better. Human language is not that easy to understand, from a machine’s point of view. Around 95% of it is relatively easy, but then come elements like context. We use the same words for completely different things, for example, and the machines misunderstand us.

Structured data makes it so much easier to understand what kind of context we are in and what are we actually talking about. It makes it easier for them to understand the full text if we just point them in the right direction. I don’t think it’s going be ever ignored, it’s just going to be evolved.”

Can you automate the insertion of schema?

“Yes. I automate it with my developers. I add what kinds of schema are going to be needed into a template, in a JSON-LD file, and then they populate it with the actual content taken from different places on the page.

For example, an article is always going to be an article. The type is always going to be the type. Then you put in the author, the content, or the abstracts from the content on-page. There’s an initial workload to be done, but then it’s automated.”

Do we need to better structure our content to make it more easily understood by machines?

“The format is, of course, important here as well. However, that is already important. That is basic SEO, so it’s already part of the deal. We have to do that – or we should do that.”

Best practice hasn’t changed. You should do the same things to make your web page easy to understand for AI as you would for the search engine – which is to think about the user. Always have the user in front of you and always prioritise the user.

You can’t go wrong when you do that. Then you put a technical layer on top of that to make it easier for the machines to understand what the brand represents.”

If you were starting a new line of products, would it be sensible to start up a new website if they’re not directly related to what you currently offer?

“That’s a million-dollar question, and I think the SEO community is a bit divided on it. You would want to have the large website behind you – the age of it, its domain authority, and everything else that makes it easier for the new product line to evolve and develop on the SERP. On the other hand, you don’t want to dilute the brand name and the products too much.

If it’s something very different, maybe you should create a new brand and a new website. That would make sense. Then you connect them through the actual company behind both brands. For example, I’m from Sweden, so I live and breathe H&M. However, there’s also COS, ARKET, and all the other different stores. They have different names, different stores, and different strategies, but they’re all connected back to the mother company: H&M.

If you’re launching a new suite of products aimed at a new target market, you could launch a new domain name and have an overarching central brand that both belong to. Then, in terms of the website user experience, they’re not together. However, this is only relevant if the products differ significantly. If they don’t differ a lot, that no longer makes sense.

You might have significantly different products that appeal to the same target market, which you may want to unite under a single domain. It depends on the products, the market, and the overall business strategy. You need to consider how you want to be perceived by your users and by the machines as well.”

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?

“Stop doing SEO in isolation. Stop working on one keyword and one landing page, and building lots of links to those landing pages. Start doing semantic clusters instead and connect them with each other. Start building entity juice between yourself, your brand, your products, and your services.

Go out there and create instances where you or your brand are being talked about on other pages, and in topics that are relevant to you, so that you also can start building your thought leadership. That is super important.”

Ulrika Viberg is CEO and Senior SEO at Unikorn, and you can find her over at Unikorn.se.