Originally published in October 2023, Jes Scholz's Whiteboard Friday episode covers the concept of brand entities and how Google understands them. We're republishing it to resurface the importance of becoming a well-connected brand entity, as brand salience becomes increasingly important in the world of digital marketing.

Good day, Moz fans. Today, I want to talk to you about how you can establish a strong, well-connected brand entity in the Knowledge Graph.

Why is this important, you might ask. It's because Google has broken away from the rigidity of ranking URLs to the flexibility to grant visibility to entities based on relationships in the Knowledge Graph. This is what connects and contextualizes all things, products, places, people, events, and brands. This is what heavily influences if and how a brand is recommended to your audience in search including SGE as well as Bard, shopping, discover, news, maps, or any other Google service based on the facts it knows about the brand entity and the strength of the connection to the topic and the user.

So ask yourself, does Google know who your brand is? Are you a stranger, a familiar face, or a friend to Google? 

The best way to track if a brand is an entity, and if so, in what context, is to query the brand name in the Google Knowledge Graph search API daily and keep a record of the return results in your data warehouse. But for a quick check, I find it easier to use a Kalicube Knowledge Graph API Explorer. If no information is returned, then you are a stranger to Google. Your brand is not in the Knowledge Graph. If information is returned, then your brand entity, you can see how good a friend you are to Google and in what context you hang out. But be careful to read the details and confirm that it is your brand entity, because when you're just a familiar face, Google can get you mixed up with somebody else.

And if you're not in the Knowledge Graph or not well-understood, let's talk about three things you can do to, heavily inspired by the work of Jason Barnard and his Kalicube process, to explicitly establish your brand in the Knowledge Graph.

Define a brand entity bio

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 give 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.

Comprehensive organization schema markup

But for Google, you need to go a step further into semantics. Everything you just said about your brand with on-page text, say it again through comprehensive schema markup. This brand-splaining of your entity to Google reconfirms its key attributes and is a critical step to Google accepting that information as facts in the Knowledge Graph.

So don't limit your organization schema to just logo and URL as Google recommends for their rich snippet requirements. Highlight all valuable connections by going beyond the Google recommended fields to use the full scope of organization schema. Make it explicit that people are employees of the company, markup awards you've won, organizations you're a member of, founders or a parent company. Use their popularity to boost yours by association. But organization schema doesn't only help you build relationships on site. It can integrate brand equity earned offsite by disambiguating mentions of the brand in text and in imagery. And through same as markup, consolidate all relevant brand assets under that one clear entity. Same as markup is not only for social media profiles. Add your Google business profile, Wikipedia page, directory listings. This should be a long list, and if it's not, then it's time to arrange more get togethers with Google. On average, an entity needs over 30 meaningful touchpoints to become Google's friend.

Arrange meaningful connections

So let's look at the ways you can orchestrate these encounters under the condition that every connection should consistently corroborate what you've already said about yourself. This gives Google greater confidence that the knowledge about you is accurate. So be sure to support your brand entity bio on all of your social media profiles, your legitimacy with listings in company or industry directories, your notability on Wikipedia or on Wikidata, your positioning on ranking and review sites, your offering with a Google business profile Publisher Center or Merchant Center account. Think of expanding your format coverage with apps, podcasts, and videos. Become an authority in your industry by submitting for awards or joining relevant organizations or hosting physical events or get your CEO interviewed or publish a research report or any brand-building initiative. And none of this is done for backlinks, but to give you the opportunity to make those meaningful connections with Google and with your audience. And as soon as you see that knowledge panel appear for your brand entity in the SERPs, claim it and curate it, and then go to the Knowledge Graph API to see if you have made a friend of Google. Because if Google has a choice between recommending two equal pieces of content, one from a friend who they know is an expert on a topic and one from someone they've just heard of in passing, of course Google will prioritize the source that it trusts.

Only once your brand is an entity can EEAT signals be fully applied. Only once Google understands who your brand entity is and connects it in the Knowledge Graph can topical authority be fully applied. So work to befriend Google and become an explicit well-connected entity in the Knowledge Graph. This makes the brand more likely to be included in Google's consideration set. And since Google acts as the gatekeeper to visibility across their entire Google ecosystem, also the end user's consideration set.