The Knowledge Panel Course: Building Your Entity Home
Script from the lesson The Knowledge Panel Course
Jason Barnard speaking: Hi and welcome.
Jason Barnard speaking: What is an Entity Home? Simply put, an Entity Home is one single point of reference for Google to cross-check all the information about you that it finds around the web. It’s important to remember that the information about you around the web that Google finds is fragmented. Google talks about reconciliation of that information, and the Entity Home is therefore the point of reconciliation. When Google talks about reconciliation, they simply mean that they need to bring all that fragmented information together to form a full and clear picture of the facts.
Jason Barnard speaking: A nice analogy here is that Google has a broken plate, and it has to put all the pieces together to make the completed plate puzzle. The algorithms do that quite effectively. It might seem counterintuitive, but Google is looking for the version of the completed plate puzzle from the entity itself. The Entity Home contains that completed plate puzzle, and Google can use this to compare its version to yours and double check it has its facts correct.
Jason Barnard speaking: The Entity Home is 100% the single most important thing about controlling your Knowledge Panel, influencing your Entity Identity, and ultimately ensuring Google’s representation of you within all of its SERPs is accurate, where you represents a person, a company, a music group, a film, a podcast, or any other entity. Now, obviously, the Entity Home should ideally be on a website that is owned and a hundred percent controlled by the entity itself. You want to control the web page that Google uses as a reference for that entity.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you have a Knowledge Panel, then Google has probably guessed which website represents the entity. If you have the little world icon in your Knowledge Panel, that is the Entity Home Google has chosen for you, and that page is your focus for educating Google. The Entity Home doesn’t always show in a Knowledge Panel however. This depends on many factors including language, geolocation, and the ranking of the web page itself for the search that triggered the Knowledge Panel.
Jason Barnard speaking: You can also look in Google’s Knowledge Graph using the Kalicube Pro Knowledge Graph Explorer. That might also indicate an Entity Home. In all other cases, you’ll need to choose the Entity Home and work to convince Google to accept your choice. Ideally, you would choose a dedicated About page. By doing that, you’re in a position to really dedicate the purpose of that page to educating Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you choose the homepage, then you are in a position where you will be constantly trying to balance the needs of educating Google against the needs of your users. If Google has already identified the Entity Home, then do not try to change it.
Jason Barnard speaking: In other cases, the process of getting Google to accept your Entity Home is simply to have a clear description of the entity with the name as the title as the page. Then if possible, Schema Markup, which I talk about in another lesson, and then links to
the sources of corroboration and back to the Entity Home from those sources wherever possible.
Jason Barnard speaking: The eternal self corroborating loop that I talked about in the previous lesson is absolutely key. Generally speaking, because most people link back to the homepage of a website, that will be the easiest and bring results the fastest. But as I mentioned, using the homepage as the Entity Home has disadvantages.
Jason Barnard speaking: The first and most important question is what should the Entity Home contain? On an Entity Home, there are two different types of content. There is the content that is visible to your user and to Google and content that is invisible to your user but visible to Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: Visible content is the text in the page, the images, and the links. The text is a simple, factual explanation of who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve. Make sure it’s clear and also attractive to a human audience. Include the images you want in your Knowledge Panel, plus links to the corroborative sources that support what you are saying in the Entity Home. Everything visible on that page should be helpful and valuable to your audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: The invisible content that Google sees, but your users don’t, is Schema Markup, which is essentially Google’s native language. In that code, you restate what you have in the page and add some extra details and information to help Google. The importance of Schema Markup is that Google and other bots, such as Bing or Apple, can confidently digest information in this structured format. Schema clarifies and joins the dots for Google in a manner it natively understands. There’s a whole lesson on that in this course.
Jason Barnard speaking: Obviously, we want to educate this child that is Google. We want to make sure it understands a) that this is the Entity Home, b) that we are being honest about ourselves, and c) where it can find trustworthy corroboration on other websites. Importantly, if Google has already chosen the homepage as the Entity Home, you can really focus on the user. It already has a strong understanding of you, who you are and what you do.
Jason Barnard speaking: And joining the dots behind the scenes using Schema Markup is going to be enough. If you’re trying to convince Google to use the homepage as the Entity Home, you will need to make some concessions and adapt. Use a visible description, images, and links that are a little bit less user friendly, but they will help Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you are willing to be more patient and focused on getting Google to recognise the dedicated About page is the Entity Home, then you have the advantage of being able to focus more on the machine, which will give you more flexibility long term, since the page is dedicated to educating Google and not a web page with dual functionality. You can tweak the text, the content, the links, and the images to educate the machine rather than to attract and please your audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: But don’t fight Google. Go with the flow. If it has chosen the homepage, accept it and build on that. In a few years, I’ll have figured out how to move an Entity Home reliably, and then we’ll be able to move it to a dedicated page, which will make life better for absolutely everyone, you, your users, and Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: A couple of tips here. Be very wary of using social profiles as Entity Homes. Google sometimes defaults to Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn as the Entity Home, especially for people. This is not acceptable, since you have limited control and do not own the page. If Google has chosen a social profile as the Entity Home, you should choose another on a website you own and work hard to change Google’s mind.
Jason Barnard speaking: For a person, it’s better not to use their profile on the company website as the Entity Home, since they may leave the company or sell, if they’re the owner. It is well worth buying a domain and setting up a one page website for a person. Having a dedicated website can also work well for music groups, podcasts, and books.
Jason Barnard speaking: That said, with all the domain extensions available, you can probably get one that makes sense such as jasonbarnard.xyz or jasonbarnard.me. If your target is purely local, a town, or country, then a geo TLD is appropriate, for example, jasonbarnard.fr or jasonbarnard.london, because this sends a clear message to Google and your audience about your geo relevancy. For that reason, if you have an international ambitions, a geo TLD is a bad idea.
Jason Barnard speaking: It bears repeating, the Entity Home is 100% the most important aspect of Entity Identity, Knowledge Panels, and your ability to influence Google’s understanding of who you are, what you do, and which audience you serve. If you don’t have a solid Entity Home, then you have zero control of how Google presents you to its users.
Jason Barnard speaking: With a solid Entity Home, you can ensure that Google projects your carefully crafted brand message accurately to your audience. The huge point here is that you need to own your own Entity Home.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you very much, and I’ll see you soon.
