Entity SEO: teaching engines who you are
Search and assistant systems do not store your company as a keyword. They store it as an entity with attributes, assembled from everywhere you appear. Entity work is making those appearances agree with each other and with your own site.
Ask an assistant about a mid-sized company and it answers with attributes: what they do, where they are, roughly how large, who runs them, who they serve. It did not read that from one page. It assembled it from every place the company appears and settled on the most consistent version.
Which means the lever is consistency, and the failure is contradiction. A company described three different ways in three places gets described the way the majority of sources say, and the majority is frequently the oldest material rather than the truest.
The attributes worth getting right
| Attribute | Where it must agree |
|---|---|
| Legal and trading name | Your site, your register entry, your profiles, your invoices |
| What you do, in one sentence | Home page, about page, every profile, every directory |
| Where you are | Site footer, register, maps entry, profiles |
| Who you serve | Home page, sector pages, profiles |
| Key people and their roles | Team page, personal profiles, conference bios |
| Founding date and size band | About page, register entry, profiles |
A model repeats the most consistent account of you, not the most recent one.
The work, in order
One sentence saying what you do, for whom, where. Everybody uses it. It goes in the Organization markup, the about page, every profile, every bio.
Registers, directories, association listings, partner pages, old profiles, conference sites, previous names. List the ones that disagree.
Prioritise anything that ranks for your name, because those are the sources most likely to be read.
One Organization graph with a stable identifier, referenced everywhere, including the identifiers that link you outward to registers and profiles.
Named authors with real roles and real experience, on pages that exist. A company whose knowledge is published by nobody in particular is a weaker entity.
Your method, your sectors, your numbers, your position on the contested questions in your field. This is what distinguishes your entity from the twelve others in your category.
For companies that have renamed or merged
This is where entity work pays most and is most neglected. Old names persist in models and in directories for years. The remedy is to state the relationship explicitly and repeatedly: the former name, the date, the continuity. Put it on your own site in plain language, in your markup, and in every listing you can reach. A model that cannot connect the old entity to the new one keeps answering about a company that no longer exists.
Questions this settles
No. It helps where it is warranted, and most companies do not qualify. Consistent, verifiable presence across registers, your own site and your own people does the same job more slowly.
Months rather than weeks for the composed-answer effects, because it depends on sources being re-read. Changes to your own markup and site are read much sooner.
Find the sources that say it. It is almost always repeating something published. Correct what you control, get what you can reached corrected, and publish a clear current account on your own domain.