Entity SEO: How to Make Your Organisation and Its People Unambiguous to Search Engines

Entity SEO is the practice of making an organisation, person or other real-world thing clearly identifiable to search engines, so that mentions and pages are connected to the right thing rather than a similarly named one. An entity is not a keyword; it is a distinct item that a search engine can recognise as the same item across many pages.

Google described the idea in 2012 when it introduced the Knowledge Graph, framing it as understanding "things, not strings": a search for a name should return the thing the person means, not pages that merely contain the words. For a business the stake is practical. If your name resembles three other companies, a searcher, an AI assistant or a map listing may attach someone else's address, reviews or leadership to you. Entity work reduces that risk.

Google has not published how entities are admitted to the Knowledge Graph or how confidence is scored, so we cannot give you a recipe. What the public documentation does confirm is the inputs that help: structured data on your own pages that states who you are, links to other profiles that describe the same organisation, and consistent facts across the web. Google's documentation describes the Knowledge Graph Search API as a way to look up entities, and it is a useful check on what Google already holds for a name.

Open sources matter too. Wikidata, a free structured database, publishes notability criteria for what it will include, and an entry there with references is a verifiable record. Wikidata's notability policy asks that an item refer to a clearly identifiable entity that can be described using serious, publicly available references (or meet one of its other criteria), so a company that does not meet them should not try. Treat any claim that you can "get into the Knowledge Graph" on demand as unsupported.

Use Organization markup (or a more specific subtype from schema.org) on your home page or a single page that describes the organisation, which is where Google's documentation says it should go; it does not need to be on every page. Include the properties that help disambiguate: name, alternateName for known variants, url, logo, address, telephone or email where public, a description, and sameAs. Google's Organization documentation also lists identifier properties such as iso6523Code, taxID and vatID, which help separate you from namesakes.

Write markup that matches the visible page. Google's structured data policies require that markup represents content users can see, so do not put a founder, an address or an award in the markup that does not appear on the page, and do not invent any of them. Test the markup with Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator, and re-test when the page changes. Google's documentation does not present Organization markup as a ranking lever, and no markup guarantees a visible effect; its job is to state facts cleanly.

The sameAs property, defined on schema.org, holds a URL of a web page that unambiguously identifies the item, such as an official profile or a Wikidata or Wikipedia page. It tells a machine that these profiles all describe one entity. List the ones that exist and are yours: your company page on a professional network, a verified business profile on a map platform, an official social account, a registry entry, a Wikidata item if one exists.

Illustrative example: a consultancy called Northfield Partners shares its name with a law firm and a landscaping company. Its home page carries Organization markup with a precise url, its registered address, and sameAs links to a company page, a verified map listing and one official social account. Its founder's page carries Person markup with worksFor pointing back to the organisation. None of this guarantees a knowledge panel. It does mean a machine reading the pages has fewer ways to confuse the consultancy with its namesakes.

Leave out anything you do not control or that is stale. A dormant profile with an old address is a contradiction waiting to be read. Be equally careful with profiles that belong to namesakes; one wrong link attaches your markup to another organisation. The checklist below keeps the set small and checkable.

Give each author or leader one canonical page on your site with a stable URL, a plain statement of role, and the profiles they hold. Mark it up as schema.org Person with name, jobTitle, url, worksFor pointing at the organisation, and sameAs for their own profiles, which should be ones they run. Google also documents profile page markup for pages whose main subject is one person or organisation. Reuse the same author URL everywhere, and spell the name the same way in bylines, speaker listings and press quotes.

Restraint matters more here than anywhere else. Do not state qualifications, affiliations or experience that you cannot verify, and do not add a person who does not wish to be listed. A thin, accurate profile beats a fuller one containing claims no one can check. Names shared with many people are the hard case: a distinctive page, an employer link and a verifiable profile are what separate your person from the namesakes.

You control your site, your markup, the profiles you own and the consistency between them. Audit the basics once a quarter: is the business name, address and phone the same on the site, the map listing and the main directories; do legal and trading names appear in the right places; do your sameAs links still resolve to active, correct pages. In our view, an inconsistent address is among the cheapest entity problems to fix.

Also check what the open web says. Search your exact name in quotes, then your name plus your city, and read the first two pages with the namesake problem in mind: are any results about another organisation, and does any of it get attached to you in suggestions or summaries? Log the findings, fix what sits on properties you own, and for third-party pages send a polite correction request to the publisher with the facts. Repeat the exercise after any rebrand, move or merger, because those events create the largest gaps between old and new facts.

You do not control whether Google builds a Knowledge Graph entry, shows a knowledge panel, or how an AI assistant describes you. Other publishers decide what they write about you, and a competitor with a similar name may have been indexed first. The honest work is to make correct information easy to find and consistent, earn accurate mentions from independent sources, and check periodically what search engines and assistants say. Who this is not for: a local business with a single location and a verified map listing mostly needs consistency, not a schema project.