As you well know, the focus of digital marketing can change rapidly with the whims of algorithm updates and new product launches. While you’re probably hearing more about entity-focused local SEO with the rise of AI, it’s not a new concept; like listing management, it is fundamental to search. It’s a framework to help you establish clients as trustworthy online. Today, we’re digging into how to implement an optimization strategy built on a foundation of entities.
Top 5 Ways to Establish Entity-Focused Local SEO Strategies
As with most local search strategies, building one that is entity-focused centers around helping Google see, identify and understand your client as a reputable entity. All of your tactics ultimately lead to increased visibility—in search and answer engines, among industry peers and, most importantly, for consumers searching for client products and services.
Intelligible entity signals establish and build the trust necessary for search engines to utilize client information, making their businesses stand out from competitors. Let’s review the top tactics to implement entity-focused SEO programs.
1. Google Business Profiles and Listing Management
It shouldn’t be a surprise that a claimed and verified Google Business Profile (GBP) is an important entity signal. As Google’s own directory, information stored within the GBP has a profound impact. Listings need to be claimed, verified, then monitored for accurate data.
Selecting the correct categories, having consumer-useful data and localized content sets your clients apart. Listing management with GBP tools lets you easily monitor and manage multiple clients and multi-location businesses.
2. Structured Data and Schema Markup
We won’t get technical, but adding the right schema markup to a website makes a big difference for search engines seeking to understand how a business or practice relates to relevant searches. Entity-focused strategies use schema tags that call out local business, industry, types, and so many more. Client industry and locale helps your team further select specific tags to get robot “eyes” on them. Schema markup provides clarity in the entity identification process.
3. Create Content That Answers the Curious
If you’ve heard of semantic SEO, you know how it focuses on search intent, not just keywords, to surface the right business at the right time. This marries perfectly with entity-based SEO. Content on the website, in the GBP and across the web must be created with a focus on building authority, trust, and on providing consistent, useful messaging. Utilizing Google’s EEAT framework is always an excellent tactic. Clients stand out as authoritative, further cementing their legitimacy and improving the likelihood of better ranking and use in AI answers.
4. Linking Still Matters
Links are still an important part of SEO in 2026. Internal linking helps robots understand website set-up, organization and content. More than that, adding links to new pages and blogs shows an active and relevant site. It also helps search engines see product and service pages as more authoritative.
5. Connection Never Goes Out of Style
Speaking of links, those from local news outlets, industry organizations and even influencers, help Google identify and understand your client’s business entity. Clients active within their local communities have more opportunities to get backlinks and publicity. Organized, consistent, accessible data ensures those organizations have the right business too—meaning that citations also remain important.
The Importance of Clean Local Citations in Entity-Focused SEO
There’s a reason I talk so much about listing management and local business citations. Local citations are the keystone, tightly holding multiple parts of your entity-focused local SEO strategy in place. Being found online isn’t a fluke, it simply takes a solid plan and continuous monitoring for your ideas to be as effective as possible.
A citation cleanup service in your listing management ensures the organized business data your agency provides is what Google (and other search engines) see as foundational to the entity. Ensure that the listing management agency you partner with submits to the data aggregators (and other directories) that are trusted by search engines, ChatGPT, and the other answer engines. Also verify that they offer duplicate suppression.
This helps them verify client legitimacy and surface them in the correct queries. The snapshot of what a business is and what it provides lives in these citations and the reliable directories in which they are placed. A trustworthy online presence starts with clean citations.
How to Build an Entity-Focused Local #SEO Strategy by @BernieColeman
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The Best Tools to Monitor Your Entity-Focused SEO Strategy
Advice Local ensures your agency has the best tools and software to implement your local SEO strategy. With listing management, AI visibility, rank tracking, reviews monitoring and more, you can actively ensure your client’s entity data is clean, current and trustworthy. To learn more, request a demo today or call us at (214) 310-1356.
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