SEO Hot Take: It's all about "Entity" Now

SEO is not looking at GSC, Google Analytics, SEMrush.
SEO is not looking at Ahrefs, Semrush.
SEO is not running Screaming frog, Botify.
SEO is the APPLICATION of data, processed through EXPERIENCE and INDUSTRY KNOWLEDGE, to take action that adds new ENTITY INFORMATION for ALGORITHMS to process.

I am thinking about ENTITY in a board sense, that encompases both the site itself (it's crawled pages and user signals), as well as branded mentions, branded links, unbranded links, business citations, knowledge graph entries. Onsite and offsite but both connected to ENTITY.

How you benefit by considering SEO as a process of improving your ENTITY

When you step back, stop obsessing over deciphering the outcomes of JUST Google when it comes to ranking and visibility. But instead think about your client or your own site in terms of an ENTITY, then it opens a lot more options to pursue. You can work to refine, expand and improve your ENTITY in a “bigger picture” process, that should include the signals that could come from branded searches occurring because someone received an email, saw your name on a billboard, heard about an event you’re running on the radio.

The days of just writing blogs, and building links is over.

What is known about your entity? How quickly are events understood?

I was SHOCKED when I idly checked chat.gpt to see if it knew about the beach cleanup that I’d just posted 2 hours before on Reddit.

So then I checked Perplexity, Gemini, and Grok. They ALL knew about the beach cleanup event I’d organized as a clean link building exercise.

The point is that SEOs need to consider all of their marketing channels, how they might impact your ENTITY. The ranking algorithm is not the only result we need to consider now. There’s reinforcing, and secondary search tools, using different processes to surface your business to people who are asking about your services, or events nearby.

1. Branded searches resulting from social media not optimized for links: Reels, Tiktoks, etc

2. Branded searches resulting from word of mouth mentions, email references, radio ads

3. Digital exposure at webinars, or following up after seeing your SEO as a guest on a podcast.

So think about the value of improving your crawlability of your site, ensuring that all bots and agents can access and understand your content and site as fully as possible, and for users to have swiftly loading pages so any user signals they might be measuring are positive.