After doing a ton of SEO audits for clients in the past several months, I see one thing in common:
The sites that aren't doing any Entity SEO tend to have been hit by the Helpful Content updates. All of them, actually. Large drops in the number of keywords ranking according to
@SEMrush.
An example would be a site ranking for 24k keywords in September 2023 but 14,000 keywords in October 2023, That's a pretty big hit for the site, and it hasn't recovered since.
The sites that were NOT hit were doing Entity SEO. Here's what I wrote in a recent audit:
Entity SEO is where you create content on a page that mentions all of the “entities” that someone would expect to see when they’re looking for certain information at a search engine (such as searching for a particular keyword).
Think of an Entity being a person, place, or thing. An entity would be something like anything that could appear as a page in Wikipedia. A simple example of entities for “home inspector in Dallas” would be real estate, home, house, home buyer, home seller, housing, realtor, Dallas, Texas, inspection, inspector, etc.
So, when it comes to SEO and actual search engine rankings, web pages that mention more of those entities would most likely have a much better chance of ranking than a web page that does not have as many of those entities mentioned.
If you want more info about Entity SEO, see
inlinks.com/help/entity-base….