Brand Entity SEO – Whiteboard Friday

The first step to befriend Google is to define an entity bio, essentially who you are as a brand, which sounds ridiculously easy, but let’s just start with your name. I have a challenge for each of you. When you next go to your office, grab a pen and paper, walk over to each department and ask them to write down the brand name, some will write it as you expect, some with different spacing or capitalization. Others, the website URL, others, legal entity name. And this is a problem, because Google’s natural language processing is sensitive to spelling and casing, so each of these can be interpreted as different entities. And that’s just the name. You also need to align the brand positioning. And this can’t be some corporatized mash of this year’s buzzwords or subjective claim that you’re number one or some fluffy marketing tagline that lacks substance. Summarize the brand in a way that humans will read as authentic and Google can confidently understand, so that it can extract the connection between your brand entity and your key topic. To do this, describe your brand with a semantic triple of subject, predicate, object.

You can also think of this as writing the brand entity’s relationship to the industry entity. And then add in the unique selling proposition, the one most persuasive reason why people should choose you. This gives you outcomes like brand is Seattle’s family-friendly gym, or brand is a landing page builder for marketers, or brand is an easy-to-use accounting software. Then elaborate on the brand bio to address your target audience, core offerings, awards and membership, key people or partners, history, contact details, and where relevant, editorial or ethics policies, and there is your Knowledge Graph-optimized about us page copy.