Become an entity or an expert on an entity

Your first strategic decision is whether you want to try to BE a fully defined entity in your own right. There has been a move in recent years away from optimizing for keywords and instead simply trying to make your brand stand out from the crowd online. One reason this works well is that your brand can become an entity that you more or less can control (although not always). Once you have an entity on Google’s knowledge graph, what that entity gets up to will be continuously updated in the knowledge graph. If you are a band, for example, then marketing your new album organically becomes MUCH easier than it would be for a record store to market the same album. The knowledge base will simply update, showing the new album. This immediately creates a short vector between the album and the band. The relationship is defined… but the record shop may have a harder time and will need an edge strategy.

Strategies covered in more detail

Below are several competing ideas for semantic SEO. The SEO industry rarely agrees on anything and tends to use the phrase “it depends” way too often for C-suites to take SEOs seriously. In the end, you will need to weigh up the merits and risks associated with each approach and act accordingly.

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