Why entity SEO matters so much!

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're putting out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO Brand here at Wix. I'm joined by the amazing, fabulous, incredible, the unequivocal, the always awesome head of SEO Communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, internet people. Hello to everyone who is in a place doing a thing with a person and/or being.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or to people who are not with anybody and not doing anything.

Crystal Carter:

Not doing anything who are just existing in the world.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or my heroes really.

Crystal Carter:

But maybe are distinct individual.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, I see what you're doing.

Crystal Carter:

Do you see?

Mordy Oberstein:

I see what you're doing. Wow. Okay. That's a novel concept, which is also an example of what you're doing. And the audience has no idea what we're doing. But the audience is also another example of what we're talking about themselves.

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. The concept and idea-

Mordy Oberstein:

Some places, things.

Crystal Carter:

Something that's distinct and maybe has a geolocation. Maybe people have lots of knowledge about it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, oh. Maybe we should break a panel about this.

Crystal Carter:

Maybe. Maybe, maybe.

Mordy Oberstein:

We could show a graph.

Crystal Carter:

Right. We could make a graph. People could claim the panel. Maybe that can be a thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

I'll claim to it. Me. It's my panel.

Mordy Oberstein:

I have no claims to anything. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by enigmas everywhere. The SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you cannot only subscribe to our SEO newsletter Searchlight each month over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter where you can download checklists, cheat sheets, one-pagers and more at our resource center.

And where you can also integrate your clients' sites with Microsoft Clarity, with our native app built with the Microsoft Team. It's CRO for all. All as in all the people, all the places, all the things, all the concept, which is also a thing. All the entities from this world and beyond as this week, we're chatting the practical value of understanding entities for SEO, which now our jokes from beforehand make sense, I think.

Jokes are also an entity. We're looking at how entities play a role in SEO, how far-reaching entities are when thinking about SEO, and actual cases where entities factor into practical SEO decisions. And Indeed's own Gus Pelogia chimes in on how to decide what entities to target on your clients' sites. Plus, we take a look at some entity understanding as seen on YouTube and what that might mean for SEO.

And of course, we have your snap piece of SEO news. So, you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So, join us as we help you get your things in order on this the 79th episode of the SERP's Up podcast. Okay, so entities. Entities, one of the more complicated areas of SEO, certainly one of the more abstract ones once you start thinking about it.

And when you start thinking about it, it's one of the more important areas of SEO. So, let's break this down into its simpler parts. Google wants to have a semantic understanding of things and wants to know how all of the things are connected and the relationships that one thing have with another thing, how they impact other things. Context. It's called context.

And context helps us understand things in a non-linear way. For example, as a teacher, when I taught in the fourth grade, one of the ways you build vocabulary is something called the context clues. You say, "Hey, here's a sentence with a hard word." What does the context teach you about what this word might mean?

So, it's super important for understanding things and it's super important for getting even basic facts right. Context is super important to Google. It wants to understand how things relate to one another. And it's been a major focus of Google since circa 2012. Why? Because I can search for something like Yankee Stadium and Google can take that quite literally and give me info just on the stadium.

But if Google understood its context and connections, it might be able to offer me information about the stadium as being a landmark in New York or as a revolutionary example of early stadium construction as I probably meant it. It can give me something in connection to the actual team that plays in the stadium. When I search for Yankee Stadium, I don't care.

But yeah, when it was built, I care about it in connection to the team, which the only way to understand that is through contextual connections. To do this, Google created something called the Knowledge Graph. Insert audio awesomeness. So, some kind of ominous sound of knowledge. Yeah, thank you. It's basically a collection of data points or objects and how closely they sit to each other.

Sounds abstract? Sort of. Eighty percent of all mentions of the word "dining room" table reference the word "chair." I don't know if that's actually true, but I'm making that. Let's just say that 80% of all mention of the word "dining room" table reference the word "chair." Google can say, "Okay, we have two entities here, two objects, a table and a chair," and they are related because we see them being connected so often in content out there.

So, they'll say... well, Google will say, "There's a strong connection between a table and," get this, "chairs." Amazing. With that however, with that collection of information, Google can do a lot of things with that association. You can understand how closely a table and chair are connected. And those are things that might be easy for us to understand, but for a bot, that's not, and that rhymes I'm Dr. Seuss, which he says-

Crystal Carter:

A different entity.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right. Google can store these objects and relationships in a database, which again, we call the Knowledge Graph. Cue sound effect. And then, show us all sorts of cool stuff. So, for example, let's actually get into this, if I search for Michael Jordan, not only do I get a knowledge graph that shows me a link to his stats and his age. By the way, he's 60, Crystal.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, man. I feel that.

Mordy Oberstein:

We are so old.

Crystal Carter:

I want to be like Mike, maybe I guess. I don't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just seeing that he's 60 makes my knees hurt.

Crystal Carter:

That's ouch.

Mordy Oberstein:

Anyway, it also gives me an option to look at the movies he's in like Space Jam because Google knows a big part of Michael Jordan's identity is that particular movie. It also shows me a list of Bulls coaches. Bulls being the team he played on in case you don't know. Because Michael Jordan and the coach he played for, Phil Jackson, are a big part of the Michael Jordan narrative.

So, this knowledge graph or this knowledge panel makes that connection between Michael Jordan and the coach because it knows that they are very closely related. But there are far more implications but beyond cool stuff that Google can show you on the result page itself. Entities are here, entities are there, entities are everywhere. For example, concepts are entities.

So, for example, contextualizing concepts on a page can help Google understand if your content hits the mark. So, let's say you're running about your kids' first trip to the doctor's office. There are all sorts of different concepts that you can go into within your content from having your kids feel comfortable on their first doctor trip to questions about insurance, to when to first take the kid for their first doctor appointment.

And ensuring you have all these topics or concepts and that they're addressed on the page can, A, help Google to better understand that your content, it semantically relates to the topic and they can help it build confidence that you address the core topic well. It can also mean, for example, that you can pretty much naturally focus on phraseology.

Not a particular keyword because Google semantically understands that they're all kind of related to each other so you don't have the keyword over and over and over again. You can use interchangeably related similar phraseology and terms that are all semantically related because Google gets that all of these terms are the same concept or the same entity.

So, that's where I think there are a lot of SEO implications that can help you factor into your day-to-day SEO decisions because entities are concepts and concepts are reflected in language, and Google is semantically looking at language.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. And I think that there's so many things to unpack there. The biographical entity about using the example of Michael Jordan, that one's really interesting because Google has lots of things to go on. And with a biographical entity, there's very often a Wikipedia page, there's an individual person page. You have things like even for people who are less famous than Michael Jordan.

You'll have things like your LinkedIn and there'll be... a person will have a digital trail and digital things that they've done. They went to college, or they worked at a job, or they did this, that or the other. And all of those entities, if you went to a certain college, then that college will also have an entity online. So, they can connect that. A good example that Barry Adams often shows is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And he's somebody who's interesting because as an entity, he was the world's strongest man sort of thing. He was a bodybuilder for ages. He was also a governor. He was also an action star.

Mordy Oberstein:

Of California.

Crystal Carter:

Governor of California. He's also an action star. His biographical entity includes Maria Shriver, but it also kind of includes JFK because she's related to JFK. It also includes other people who are in the bodybuilding space, that sort of thing. So, that's really interesting. And you also talked about Google making lots of connections, but Google also does a lot of disambiguation with that context that you were talking about.

So, if I said Chicago or Asia or Texas, those are all places. Those are also all bands. So, if I said-

Mordy Oberstein:

I like what you did there.

Crystal Carter:

Right. So, if I said Chicago latest album, they wouldn't give me information about the city and that they'd probably be confused about Chicago's latest album because I don't think they've made an album in ages. But for instance, Google will disambiguate. So, for sometimes if you just enter the word "Chicago" for instance, it'll say, "Do you mean the city or do you mean the band?"

And they understand that those two things are different entities. And there's context around the different words that will help them to do that. You also mentioned how you don't always need certain keywords. A really good example of this is I put a... there's a great tool I've referenced a lot called TextRazor, which pulls out entities and helps you understand how machines understand entities.

And I put in the description for the Barbie movie and it says, "Barbie and Ken go on an adventure, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." It never says anything about Barbie being a toy. It doesn't even say anything about Mattel in the description for the movie. But when I put it into this tool that was pulling out of the entities, it was like, yes, this is Barbie.

She's a fashion doll made by Mattel, et cetera, et cetera. And it understands that those things are related. Why? Because it's not just the word "Barbie," but it's also Barbie and Ken. So, the proximity of the word "Barbie" to the word "Ken" makes it very clear that that is that entity rather than just a person whose name Barbie because there are other people called Barbie.

So, I think that the context is really important as well. And I think that entities, it can seems very complex as a thing. But a good way to get an idea of entities is to start digging around in Wikipedia. That's a really good place to get an idea of what things are entities and how things are related there. Carl, he has a great tool about the knowledge panel as well that you can look up.

And also another one is in photos, for instance, Google Photos can pull out entities from your photos. And you talked about some of the concepts. So, in your photos, they can pull out dog, they can pull out cat for instance, but they can also pull out things that are a bit more ephemeral like sunsets or fog or mountains or outside, things like that.

So, you can see the kinds of entities that they can do there. But it's a really fascinating space. And it seems a little bit complex, but actually, it's Google trying to make sense of the actual world. Another good example is, in England, there's something called a ladybird. And in America, they refer to that as a ladybug. If I am looking for information on ladybirds, a really good question is why are ladybirds different colors?

Because if you've ever been to Ohio, they have orange ladybugs and they bite you and they're not very nice. They come out in autumn and there's a swarm of them.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's it. I'm never going back to Cleveland.

Crystal Carter:

So, if you're wondering why are they different colors, there's a reason why they're different colors and it has something to do with something else. But if I looked up why are ladybirds different colors, if the best information is an article about ladybugs, then Google will give me that because they understand that those two things are the same thing.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, basically, when you're talking about it, it's complicated, but it's not complicated. If you look at... there's basically two ways I think about entities. One is there's how you parse out the entity. So, for example, if I search for SEO, in the knowledge panel, I get tabs that say techniques, examples, basic requirements.

So, Google's able to parse out topics and you can see that in the results themselves. Sometimes you'll see results for what is SEO or you might see results for SEO services. So, Google's looking at that entity of SEO and possibly meaning is it services, is it an area of understanding, and relating to it differently. And you see that very clearly sometimes.

If you're in the US and you search for bears, you're going to get the Chicago Bears. If you search for dolphins, you're going to get the Miami Dolphins because it realizes that people don't care about animals as much as they do about sports teams.

Crystal Carter:

But what if they're looking for flippers, flipper on the dolphins these days? No?

Mordy Oberstein:

No. No one cares about flipper. No one cares about the lion. People care about the Lions.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. Here's my question. Do they have lions in the Detroit Zoo? Does Detroit have a zoo with lions?

Mordy Oberstein:

The zoo is the football field and the lions are the players.

Crystal Carter:

Do the Detroit Lions sponsor the lions at the Detroit Zoo? Because I feel like if they're not, they should.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't know. Is there a Detroit Zoo? There has to be, right?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know, but I feel like there should, and I feel like they should have lions.

Mordy Oberstein:

I hope they would sponsor the lions. Maybe the lions should sponsor the team. The lions should actually get together. The animals get together and say, "Hey, you know what? We're having an image problem here. The football team is outshining us. We should sponsor them to outshine them in their own platform." Own the narrative kind of thing.

Crystal Carter:

See, here's the other thing about that is that sometimes, that can be a real challenge if there's an entity that is the same-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. So, that's a real problem, but that's an actual example. If you're talking about lions, you need to realize the only place you're showing up here is in the image box.

Crystal Carter:

Right, right. And if you were the Detroit Zoo and you had lions-

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, big problem.

Crystal Carter:

Another great example is Taylor Swift and the Jets. So, Taylor Swift jets, she went to the Jets game, and I think Brittany Miller was talking about this online. She's like, "Is this her working the entity that people have been talking about Taylor Swift jets and that whole situation?" And also that's another idea. News items can become entities.

So, if there's been an occurrence or something and there's lots of information about it and lots of things related to that, that can essentially become an entity. So, essentially, there's a theory that she went to Jets games so that people could stop talking about Taylor Swift's private jets that she has.

Mordy Oberstein:

If she did, that's like three-dimensional chess. We're all just playing checkers here, and Taylor Swift, three-dimensional chess. There's two ways to really relate to entities. One is disambiguating between multiple entities. If you Google Rangers, there's a Rangers hockey team, there's a Rangers baseball team. I think there's a soccer team in England, which you all call football.

So, disambiguate, which one do you mean? And if you're searching in New York, you're going to get the New York Rangers hockey team. If you're searching in Texas, you'll probably get the baseball team and so forth. And then, there's breaking down concepts. So, if I'm talking about hiking, what is included within the concept of hiking?

And I think that's where a lot of your content-based SEO work really comes in, and to see how Google is advancing and how it's able to break down those concepts and parse them out so that you can align to those concepts and include them in your own content or your own website. Now, I will say that disambiguating entities is far more specific than, oh, bears. So, I mean the animal or the Chicago Bears.

And ironically, it's the reason we're doing this podcast because one of our own listeners brought a question to us about this. The case was, I think they talk about drug names in a blog post. And there's multiple names for the drug. Now, Google's dealt with this in the past. They've actually used an algorithm or a machine learning-based property called MUM to disambiguate COVID vaccine names early on in the COVID pandemic because the Pfizer vaccine was called all sorts of names all over the world.

They're like, "Which vaccine is it?" Whatever random name you're using in whatever random country, is that the Pfizer vaccine? Is it the Johnson & Johnson vaccine? And they had to disambiguate that. And the question that this person had was, which drug name do I use? And the answer is, it depends. In that case, I recommended they go to Google and Google the drug name and see if both names show up, if Google uses them interchangeably.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also in a situation like that, sometimes I think of entity is very similar to scientific taxonomy. If you think about the scientific name for, I think it's Quercus × hispanica is the scientific name for the London plane. People who are into trees, please correct me if I'm wrong. But for instance, that's the Latin name for a London plane tree.

And I might call it a London plane here. Some people might call it something else in another place. People might call it other things, but at the root of it, it's not. So, for instance, if you were talking about a particular thing, let's say you were talking about paracetamol and that is the chemical name for that, for instance, then I would say use that.

Don't use necessarily the brand names that are associated with that, but make sure that somewhere in the blog, you declare the formal scientific name.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, exactly. And I think you can take advantage of this. For example, I think Google understands that eggplant, and what do you all call it in England? Aubergine?

Crystal Carter:

Aubergine. They call it aubergine here.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, whatever. It is the same thing because it's such a common association. I think Google would understand if you're in the US and you searched aubergine, you would get eggplant results. And if you're in the UK, it might send you something UK results to be used, that aubergine word, whatever. But I think Google fundamentally gets it.

In the case we were talking about with a drug name, it kind of all depends. If it's a newer drug, it's not very well associated yet, there might be gaps in the knowledge graph. So, it might not understand that they're interchangeable. But you could also bank on the fact, theoretically, that Google will at some point understand they're interchangeable and create content in mind for that scenario. So, you could be the first one to ring for that kind of stuff.

Crystal Carter:

Right. And I think this also goes back to where information from the knowledge graph comes from. So, for instance, if you were developing a new product, a new drug, whichever, whichever, and Google did not know that you existed as a thing because it was new, for instance, there are going to be some of the things, some of the component parts that you can bank on so that some of the entities that are related to some of the component parts, for instance.

You can also think about your link building. So, for instance, if you know that there are entities that are ranking well for some of the things that you're doing or that are related to some of the things that you're doing, that's where you should concentrate your link building efforts. Not just with regards to domain authority or things like that, but with regards to their proximity to the entity for instance.

So, for instance, if I was writing about the Detroit Lions, for instance, me getting a link on the food network isn't necessarily going to help me. I might get some traffic or whatever. I guess it won't hurt, but it's not necessarily going to make it clear that my content is about the Detroit Lions football team. However, if I got a link from ESPN, which is something who regularly writes about football, then Google knows, okay, these two things are related to the Detroit Lions, et cetera, et cetera.

That's in the same ballpark area. So, think about elements like blogs and websites and digital entities that are related to your content so that you can draw those things on the knowledge graph. And also, think about people who are already on the knowledge graph. If there's somebody who is an expert who has a knowledge panel, then that's somebody that's worth getting involved in your project to advocate for your product, that sort of thing. So, think about that as well.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Look, I think fundamentally, just to sort of sum up here before we head over to Gus, when you start thinking about entity like you're talking about here with links, when you start thinking about entities, you start thinking about SEO far more conceptually. And I think that's a great place to be and it's a great mindset.

It's a great way to approach SEO from an entity-based perspective because it's just a much more conceptual way of approaching SEO overall, which I just love anyway. Because we're talking about entities and because we're talking about how it plays a role in the content you're producing, we asked Indeed's own SEO product manager. So, here's Gus Pelogia on how do you create a targeted entity association on your website.

Gus Pelogia:

Hi, everyone. I'm Gus Pelogia, SEO product manager at Indeed. And I'm here to talk to you on how do you choose the entities for your website. A few months ago, I wrote a blog post on the Wix SEO Hub about how to get a knowledge panel for your name or for your brand. And entities are quite essential part of this because on something like this, you want to transform your name into an entity, your personal name or your company name.

And you can do this by having an About Us page or an alter page where you explain who you are. And you also use structured data to validate the elements that exist on the page. So, things like, of course, you're going to have your name, but as part of that, you should have your social media channels linked on your structured data, let's say using same as, or you have a picture of yourself that is also used on different websites, where you studied, different areas of knowledge that you may have.

They should exist both on your page and on your structured data. And I think for a case like this, it's ideal to have a lot of the same information on different websites as well. So, let's say if you write for a lot of websites, Google will try to find some consistency on all that information. If you are just saying yourself, "I'm a doctor and I know about this," that's not really enough for Google to understand you as an attorney.

And I think a lot of people just get this as, "Oh, let's just create a bunch of fake profiles." But you need to expand those profiles across different websites. So, Google will look for that same name and those same credentials on different places in order to actually build that entity and say, "Okay, this is a real person. This knowledge is real. I can see validation across a lot of different places about it."

But of course, your own about page or your own alter page is the starting point of that. But as any other marketing activity, you need to promote and develop yourself beyond just you on your own page, say how great you are.

Mordy Oberstein:

Well, thank you so much, Gus. Make sure you give Gus a follow over at Pelogia, P-E-L-O-G-I-A on X, Twitter or whatever, and always check out Gus. He's always speaking at BrightonSEO. So, if you're at BrightonSEO, make sure you attend Gus's sessions. I think he's speaking in April also in the UK. So, check that out. And he's right, by the way, about entities.

So, you want to make sure you're creating consistency across all of the platforms. And it could be for your own personal name or personal branding or for your business at the same time. Same rules.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. I think also he mentioned structured data. Structured data is really important for helping Google to understand what's going on with the knowledge graph and for helping to connect things. So, one of the things that's really important, particularly for about pages and for personal about pages and profile pages, which are now on Google Search Console, do check those out.

I love those. You can have your section that's the same as, which helps Google to connect some of the dots. So, you can say, same as this LinkedIn page, same as this Facebook page, same as this X page, same as this, et cetera. And it really, really helps. So, yeah, structured data is absolutely key to your entity approach.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, again, give Gus a follow. Tell him that we sent you and make sure you check out Gus's article on the SEO Learning Hub, all about entities in SEO. Okay. Let me tell you a story. I was stumbling around YouTube, which I tend to do, watching basically useless sports videos and Billy Joel music. And yeah, I stumbled on a new little feature that it was new by the way at the time, but it's no longer new because that was a while ago.

But it is still really interesting. It's still really interesting to talk about because it relates to how Google understands entities. So, we're going to pretend like it's new so that we can put it under the label of our fun little segment that we call Is It New? So, here's an Is It New version of useless YouTube watching impacting how we understand entities. Is it new? Take it away.

Dixon Jones:

Oh, I'm sorry.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. So, I was stumbling around YouTube and looking at useless videos by the NFL, and there was a little bit of a scandal back in the day. When I say back in the day, back in the smack in the middle of the NFL season, which is a while ago at this point, where a NFL coach referenced 9/11. He thought it was a good idea to reference 9/11 in a speech he was giving to his team to rile them up. Not a good idea.

And it became a hot topic for the talking heads to talk about sports to talk about... that was stupid. And when I was watching a video about this thing, YouTube, which is Google, showed me a little box within the YouTube result that said a context and it gave me information about 9/11 itself. Google said, "Hey, it's really important that you understand what you're talking about here or the topic here because we're talking about something serious like 9/11."

"So, we're going to give you some context right here, right now about that so that you can make sure that these talking heads are steering you the right way." And I thought it was fascinating.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And this is something that's around YouTube in a couple of different ways. So, for instance, this is an example I use a lot because I used to have a client in this space. But for instance, if you were to look up AIDS test, HIV test, for instance, on YouTube, you get a big box in blue and it says context from the CDC. Here's more information. The HIV virus affects the human body's immune system, et cetera, et cetera.

So, it tells you things about that. So, this is something that it falls into that category of YMYL, and this is something that... and if people aren't familiar with that, I'm sure we've covered this before. There's definitely an article on the Wix SEO Hub written by George Nguyen, which talks about YMYL content, which is your money, your life content. And this essentially is Google explaining that this is a delicate topic.

This is something that people should consider with a bit of care because there can be... and it's also a good sign that there's probably a lot of disinformation about that topic, for instance. So, if you see one of these, I think it's a signal to sort of take what you're seeing online with a little bit of a pinch of salt, or at least give it more vetting than you would, say, I don't know, some information about Beyonce's latest country music album.

Mordy Oberstein:

Exactly. So, looking at this from a purely SEO point of view. If I'm watching this YouTube video about some useless sports thing and I happen to have a client that talks about 9/11 for whatever reason or something like that, something YMYL, something really important, if it's not directly related to that topic, I'm going to go back to that content and I'm going to contextualize it.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I think also this is a sign. So, I think I had a client who was once working with... they were doing something with people who had babies and they were generally talking about people who had babies. And the product that they sold was nothing to do with it, but they decided to have an article about car seats on their estate. And I was like, "You all don't sell car seats?"

And they were like, "Yeah, but for SEO." And I was like, "I don't think this is good for your SEO because this is a delicate topic with safety requirements, et cetera, et cetera." So, if you're finding that you're straying into something that isn't actually your forte, then back away is what I would recommend. So, for instance, if this thing is showing up with this thing about 9/11 or whatever it may be, that's a sign that, hey, you've gone off piece there.

That's not really something that you are in your camp and that Google expects you to have very, very robust information about that before you start speaking on that, which is fine. I think there's plenty of people who do have that information. But I think that, I don't know, I'm not sure if that goes as far as to say stay in your lane.

But I think if you want to go into a new lane, I think that you need to make sure that you're very qualified for it and that you have the chops, I guess I would say.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. So, look, looking at things... look, the knowledge graph, Google has integrated into YouTube a lot over the past couple of years as people also search for kind of stuff inside of YouTube. And you can get an idea of how Google's relating to the entity, not just by looking at the Google SERP, but by looking at what Google's doing on YouTube.

If you look up on musical artists on YouTube, there's going to be a carousel of their albums right underneath it. So, there's that strong association from an audio point of view that you can leverage with your own content for the SERP. There's a lot of things you can do. Don't just look at the Google SERP, look at all of the Google properties to understand how Google is understanding things because we care about Google.

We don't care about the result page per se when it comes to entities. I think it's a hot take, but I'm going to go with that.

Crystal Carter:

I think also in terms of those contextual things, we're starting to see that on other properties as well. So, for instance, within Twitter, you're starting to see people flagging like, "This has been seen as disinformation or this topic has been... this video has been seen as not authentic" or something like that.

So, I think that the idea of having feedback on the content that people are creating is also something that we should be thinking about going forward, that Google is managing these entities to a certain extent and that some other properties are managing these as well. And I think if you're not speaking correctly about them, then you may very well get called up on it.

So, I think it's worth actually doing due diligence on anything that you're writing for lots of reasons, not just because of getting called by Google.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, last point on this, this is a great way to actually use things like Gemini, in my opinion, from an SEO point of view. You Google... you'd prompt in what are entities related to the NFL, you're going to get teams, players, league officials come up, very high coaches and staff. It's under league officials. Why? By the way, I'll tell you why.

Because a big part of the narrative this year from the NFL has been how bad the officiating has been. So, you can see how Google is relating to entities in terms of prominence and in terms of the related entities by using Gemini. Why not?

Crystal Carter:

And I think that these are important because I think that also, for instance, if you're in an ambiguous entity, if you're working in a space where there's lots of... for instance, let's say you're Chicago the band. And you need to make sure that it's very clear that everybody knows that you are Chicago the band and not Chicago the place or whatever it may be.

Then, going through that exercise, what are the things... what entities are associated with Chicago the band, for instance, would be important for you to do, and making sure that you're hitting those, not necessarily in a keyword sort of way, but more in a topical sort of way across your website, on your homepage, on your about page, on things like that.

Mordy Oberstein:

100%. You know what's an entity that's really related to SEO?

Crystal Carter:

What's that?

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry.

Crystal Carter:

Barry.

Mordy Oberstein:

Barry Schwartz is an entity related to SEO.

Crystal Carter:

And I think the Latin name is Rustius Brickius.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ah, yes. The Rustius Brickius is what they call him in England, right? Like an aubergine.

Crystal Carter:

You've said that word so many ways.

Mordy Oberstein:

For the life of me.

Crystal Carter:

You know Gene Wilder? O Er Gene.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Right. Good enough. By the way, when you go to Gemini and you put in entities related to Barry Schwartz, SEO, he's the founder of RustyBrick, you get an image of a different Barry Schwartz, which I think is for the better, really. Search Engine Roundtable. He's an author and speaker, websites and publications, similar.

Search Engine Land. Makes sense. Industry figures, Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan. Search engine algorithms is an entity related to Barry because Barry controls them. And SEO techniques and strategies like link building is related to Barry.

Crystal Carter:

There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's earning back links from websites, other websites, to improve a website's authority and ranking, a practice Barry Schwartz analyzes and advises on. Boy, does AI hallucinate sometimes?

Crystal Carter:

What does it say about berry and butter sandwiches?

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't think it knows. I think that's just for people.

Crystal Carter:

Just for people?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah, that's for people. But it says, overall, Barry Schwartz is the highly respected figure in the SEO industry, known for his insightful analysis, commentary and contributions to the field. That's correct.

Crystal Carter:

And butter sandwiches.

Mordy Oberstein:

And butter sandwiches. AI's not going to get it all right. You have to have a human touch, and for that you have butter sandwichness. That's human touch all the way.

Crystal Carter:

It's also my understanding that he's got a pretty good sports card collection.

Mordy Oberstein:

He does like Michael Jordan cards.

Crystal Carter:

There you go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Which again, you wouldn't know from the AI. You'd have to actually watch Barry's vlog and suffer through that.

Crystal Carter:

Is this going to be on his entity now? Will we finally get butter sandwiches on his entity?

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm trying. That'd be my next... I have a website that ranks for Barry Schwartz, SEO. It's called BarrySEOmemes.com. The next best thing would be to have in his knowledge graph butter sandwiches. For those of you who are not familiar with all these inside jokes about Barry and SEO, let's get right to the news. Here's this week's Snappy SEO News.

Snappy News. Snappy News. Snappy News got some vital information for you about Core Web Vitals. Per Matt Southern over at Search Engine Journal, Google Search Console adds INP metric in Core Web Vitals report. That's because INP, Interaction to Next Paint, has officially as of March 12th replaced FID, first input delay, as being one of the three Core Web Vitals.

So, now, INP, CLS and LCP, but not FID, are part of CWV. OMG. You got all of that. This is why Matt's saying you're going to now see the INP metric being reported in the Search Console Core Web Vitals report because INP replaced FID. Very, very general difference between FID and INP. FID, like the name says, first input delays, measuring that first interaction.

INP is a more holistic measurement of interactions on the page. And if there's any delay, so for example, someone clicks on something, a button or open up a carousel or open up an accordion or something like that, is there a delay or how wide is the delay across all of the interactions on the page, not just the first one? George Nguyen has a great article about what INP is and what it means for SEO on the Wix SEO Learning Hub.

And we'll link to that in the show note. So, INP is in, FID is out. And the confusion reigns supreme as Barry Schwartz reports on Search Engine Roundtable, Google clarifies page experience and Core Web Vitals related to search rankings. There was a bit of a back and forth, I'm terrible with time, I'm going to say a year or so ago.

We actually did a podcast episode about this where Google kind of scaled this language back about whether or not Core Web Vitals was an official ranking factor or a system or whatever. Basically saying it's not. Well, if it was out, it's back in. Google clarified or redid its documentation, saying, "Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems. We recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with search and to ensure a great user experience."

Generally, keep in mind that getting good results in reports like Search Console's Core Web Vitals report or third party tools doesn't guarantee that your pages will rank at the top of the Google search results. There's more to great page experience than Core Web Vitals scores alone. These scores are meant to help you to improve your site for your users overall.

And trying, listen to this, and trying to get a perfect score just for SEO reasons may not be the best use of your time. I would take out the word "may" and I would say are not the best use of your time. That's my personal opinion again, but Google's John Mueller took the LinkedIn where he basically said that. He's wrote that Core Web Vitals, "It's not going to make your site's rankings jump up. That's not what they're for."

I think it's a tiebreaker scenario kind of thing. In general, I wouldn't get too lost as Barry talks about in this article and as Barry talks about in many articles. Barry does talk about things in many, many articles, but he has talked about in many articles the idea that don't obsess over Core Web Vitals. That's not what this is all about, and that's not the type of ranking factor that it is now that it's back in as a ranking factor.

I still look at performance in Core Web Vitals as a user first metric so that you don't have users bouncing or abandoning their cards and that sort of thing. However, it is officially back in. Now, this does go to a lot of confusion. As I mentioned earlier, Barry writes, "There has been a lot of flipping back and forth on this messaging from Google."

Google said in February, "We don't confirm any of these things," meaning page experiential Core Web Vitals as a direct ranking factor. Barry continues to write, "Now, they confirm Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. This goes back to the confusion, which is still there, despite Google not wanting to believe it," says Barry. That's not my words.

That's Barry's words around how the changes to get helpful content guidance and page experience documentation from a year or so ago. Okay, so I was right. It was a year ago. Barry continues to write, "Google shortly, after that confusion, told us page experience is a ranking signal, but not a ranking system and so forth and so forth and so forth."

Barry then says, "Anyway, now Google added more clarification around these signals or systems or not systems." I see what you did there, Barry, being a little bit salty. I like that. So, the point is Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor officially again, I guess, but I would not get obsessed over them. As John Mueller himself said on LinkedIn, if you are a Wix user and you're wondering, where do you stand with INP?

If you're in the US on mobile, 92% of Wix size pass INP. So, you are in good hands. And that is this week's snappy news. By the way, just an Allstate's slogan, "You're in good hands." Anyway, I didn't mean to do that. Anyway, that's this week's snappy news.

Crystal Carter:

Things were new. New things happened. Some old things evolved.

Mordy Oberstein:

A lot of things announced.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And there were some new entities and some other things.

Mordy Oberstein:

I hope we made some new entity connections for Barry while we were doing this.

Crystal Carter:

There we go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Now, when we're talking about entities and people who are experts in entities, I definitely think of one person. I think of multiple people, but I think of Dixon Jones, who is the founder of InLinks. He used to be over at Majestic. He's @Dixon_Jones on X, and that person, that entity knows all about entities.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, Dixon is a great resource on this. He's been working in this space for a very long time. He is speaking at BrightonSEO, and he speaks at lots of events and has a great tool for helping people to understand entities and how they all work. So, yeah, big shout out to Dixon.

Mordy Oberstein:

He literally wrote a book about it called Entity SEO.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, he's one of the dudes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. So, if you're looking to understand more about entities and SEO, start with Dixon. That's a great place to start. We'll link to his Twitter... X, sorry, I can't stop, profile in the show notes. And make sure you check out InLinks as well. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. And check out Entity SEO: Moving from Strings to Things over on Amazon.

You can get on your Kindle for $0. Read for free. What's wrong with that? I don't like reading on Kindles, by the way. I buy the book for $14.

Crystal Carter:

I like a Kindle sometimes.

Mordy Oberstein:

I am an old-school person on this. I need pages when I read.

Crystal Carter:

The thing is my eyesight has deteriorated and I've recently started wearing glasses, but I still don't admit that I need glasses. And on the Kindle, I can pretend I don't need them and just expand the-

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I don't have that problem. I can't see squat. I don't know. If someone put on an SEO magazine, I would subscribe and read that over, let's say, a blog. I am so old school. I like pages. I have to feel the pages when I turn them, and I feel like I've accomplished something. Let me ask you, okay. When you scroll down an article, do you feel like, "Yeah, look how many pages I... look how many scrolls I've read?" No.

Crystal Carter:

I like the internet, Mordy. I don't know if you've noticed.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like the internet too, but I want to read a book. I want to feel like, "Hey, look at all these pages I read." Hold on.

Crystal Carter:

Where are we going?

Mordy Oberstein:

Can you see my screen? Can you see me on the camera right now?

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

You see this book? You see how thick it is?

Crystal Carter:

A big book.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. When you finish that, you're like, "Yeah, look at all that book I read."

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. You remember lugging around those books at school?

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, it's the worst.

Crystal Carter:

You remember the backache?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. No, I'm not saying it's good for school. It's good for my ego.

Crystal Carter:

Okay. I can see. I know people who are like, "I like the trophy." I get that. But also I don't like the backache and I also like that it picks up where you started reading, and you don't have to find the page.

Mordy Oberstein:

It was called a bookmark. You just fold the corner down. That's not complicated.

Crystal Carter:

Fold the corner?

Mordy Oberstein:

Come on. If I told you that I read Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to after the Boss and there was an article, it was a blog post or whatever, you'd be like, "All right." If I told you I read this book about the New York Yankees and you looked at the thickness of the number of pages, you'd be like, "Wow, that guy knows a lot about the Yankees."

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, but I'd also question why you want to know that much about.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't like you and my wife. This book is 650 pages and it's one of many books I've read about the New York Yankees.

Crystal Carter:

I feel like that's a lot of time that could have been spent doing other things.

Mordy Oberstein:

Doing what? Watching Netflix. Yeah, that's true-

Crystal Carter:

No.

Mordy Oberstein:

... on Netflix. No, you're right.

Crystal Carter:

Anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

You were commiserating with my wife. "What? Another book about the Yankees?"

Crystal Carter:

Well, people know what to get you for your birthday. There we go.

Mordy Oberstein:

Books about the Yankees and scotch. I'm a pretty easy shot for my birthday.

Crystal Carter:

On that note.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, sorry. On that note, we have digressed way too long. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry, we're back next week with the new episodes we dive into, Does Google rank AI content? Look for it wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO Learning Hub or wix.com/SEO/learn.

Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars and resources on the Wix SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love and SEO.