The Knowledge Panel Course: Writing Your Entity Description
Script from the lesson The Knowledge Panel Course
Jason Barnard speaking: Hi and welcome. After the Entity Home, the second most important thing is the entity description. This might seem surprising. Most people think that Schema Markup is the most important thing, but it is actually only fourth on the list.
Jason Barnard speaking: Since the very beginning back in 1998, Google has been text based. It used to simply count words. Today, it uses NLP, natural language processing, to understand the text. So, you need to write a description about your entity that Google can understand. And since this is a description that you’ll be using across all of your profiles, as well as on the Entity Home, it needs to be done to be attractive to your human audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: In our “Google as a child” analogy, the child needs a solid foundational explanation from the parent before going to get corroboration from the grandmother, sister, brother, baker, history teacher, or whoever. If it doesn’t have a foundational understanding of the basic facts, it will be much more difficult for the child to learn.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, take the time to write a clear, compelling entity description. This description will be visible online in multiple places, so your audience will also read it. You need to find that balance between being clear for Google by speaking in simple language with simple sentence structure, whilst also ensuring that the content and the way you write is attractive and appealing to your audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: The child needs a simple, clear lesson. So, your copy needs to be well structured and set out in a way that each topic is covered in a dedicated specific paragraph or a modular fashion, where each paragraph covers one aspect of the entity and explains it.
Jason Barnard speaking: The heading needs to be the entity name or about entity name or who is entity name. The heading can be a little bit more adventurous than that but not very much. The next sentence must be a semantic triple that describes the principal activity of the entity. Semantic triple sounds complicated, but it is just a fancy way of saying subject-verb-object. The rest of that first sentence should expand on the specific topicality the entity is known for.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, “Kalicube is a digital marketing agency that is pioneering Brand SERP optimisation and Knowledge Panel management” is a helpful start to an entity description. Kalicube – subject, is – verb, a digital marketing agency – object. So, “Jason Barnard is an author, a digital marketer, a musician, and a cartoon blue dog” is also a helpful start to an entity description. Jason – subject, is – verb, an author – object.
Jason Barnard speaking: Importantly, the object must be the subtitle you want to see in the Knowledge Panel. So, “Jason Barnard is an author, a digital marketer, a musician, and a cartoon blue dog” would suggest to Google that author is the correct subtitle. “Jason Barnard is a musician, a digital marketer, an author, and a cartoon blue dog” would suggest to Google that musician is the correct subtitle to use.
Jason Barnard speaking: Using this starting phrase on every relevant first, second, and third party source of corroboration will reassure the child and build its confidence in the understanding of the very basics.
Jason Barnard speaking: Pay attention to proper nouns. Capitalisation of a word or a set of words will suggest to Google that they are proper nouns. Since proper nouns are, in effect, entities and a huge amount of the analysis Google does to understand a text is based on entities and relationships, aka proper nouns and verbs, Google is very sensitive to capitalisation of words within a text.
Jason Barnard: An example I use in the Brand SERPs course is yellow door. If it is all lowercase, it means a door that is yellow. If we capitalise the Y and the D, it becomes a named entity, a company or a brand name, a name of a rock group, a song, or perhaps a café in New York.
Jason Barnard speaking: Write the description in multiple modules. Each module should focus on one aspect of the facts about the entity. This has two advantages: it is easier for Google to understand when things are clearly segmented, and it creates a modular system whereby, when you are adding the description to other web pages about the entity, you can reorder or remove chunks that are not relevant for that audience.
Jason Barnard speaking: Each module needs to have a title that you can use as a heading when formatting the text is possible, but becomes a pseudo-heading where formatting is not possible, on Crunchbase, for example. Repeating the entity name and using semantic triples in the pseudo-headings is helpful for Google, but becomes annoying for the user. You need to find the balance that makes sense.
Jason Barnard speaking: The order of the modules on your Entity Home is important. Start with the important aspects today and end with the history, when the company was founded, when the person was born or grew up, or the date the music group played their first gig. Google reads from top to bottom and understands that what comes first is most important and relevant today, and that what comes last is least important today. Same thing for your audience, if they really want to know where you were born, they will read to the bottom. But generally speaking, people want to know what you do today.
Jason Barnard: Think of it as the life of an entity split into chapters and told backwards. Google and most human beings are most interested in what we are doing today. And it is the same thing for a person. I was born in 1966 in the north of Yorkshire, then I was a musician in a punk folk band, then a cartoon blue dog, and I am now a digital marketer. And that, of course, is the wrong way around.
Jason Barnard speaking: For Kalicube’s description, the first chapter focuses on our products and services. Then we have a module dedicated to the Kalicube Pro SaaS platform. Then we describe the audiences we serve and our clientele with some mentions of our success stories. Then we have our free resources. Then we have the key people. Then we have the date and place founded, and finally segueing into why I founded the company and our mission statement.
Jason Barnard speaking: Using this description or parts of it on every single page dedicated to the entity helps Google enormously. In order to become confident in its understanding, it needs to see the message over and over and over again, like a child. Understanding is one thing. Confidence in that understanding is another. This repetition builds confidence. Forget any doubts you have about duplicate content and Google’s Panda update. This is an exception for Google. Also, think about your brand message and your human audience. You want to project a consistent brand message, and your audience expects to see a similar or the same message on multiple platforms.
Jason Barnard speaking: The modularity of the description overcomes the problem of different audiences on different platforms and specific limitations of the different platforms. LinkedIn uses a short description, then a timeline, and then the audience is B2B, so you would place the business modules at the top. IMDb is all about films, actors, podcasts, and entertainment, so you would lead with TV shows and podcasts. Twitter or Instagram are more B2C and human-to-human, so you would adapt that first presentation phrase to something more attractive to users.
Jason Barnard speaking: Use your good judgement. Google doesn’t need to see exactly the same message everywhere. It doesn’t need to see all the facts everywhere every time, but it does need consistency in the information you provide. Think back to the broken plate analogy from the previous lesson. The plate will still be broken, but all the pieces will fit perfectly. And the fully completed plate puzzle on the Entity Home is the point of reference and they will match.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, how do you know Google can understand your text once it is written? Kalicube Pro has a tool that analyses the text in depth using Google’s own NLP. Here is a screenshot. That allows us to formulate the descriptions very, very precisely. Here we can see that Google clearly understands the context. It has categorised correctly, and it is confident. And it has also recognised the dominant entity and several highly relevant entities too.
Jason Barnard speaking: You can use any other natural language processing to analyse your description, but here we see Google’s understanding. Whereas if we use another NLP, the understanding that we would see reflected from that analysis would be less relevant to Google’s results.
Jason Barnard speaking: It is important not to obsess about making sure that Google’s own NLP understands every word in your description, as Google’s understanding of the world is evolving all the time. You should focus on writing a clear, consistent, factual, and modular description that Google will understand itself over time by corroboration and putting the broken pieces of the plate back together.
Jason Barnard speaking: One last point is that if the Entity Home is a dedicated About page, then adding the entire description makes sense to your audience and to Google. If the Entity Home is the homepage, you would probably not want to add the entire description to your page. You need to be pragmatic here. Your homepage is there to charm your users and guide them to the place on the website they want to get to.
Jason Barnard speaking: Having this very long text on that page is not going to be good for your users. What you can do is use only the first phrase or just the most relevant modules, or you could summarise the text in one short unique paragraph. Just be sure that the facts are consistent with the description you place on the About page and the profile pages for the entity, wherever they are on the web.
Jason Barnard speaking: Importantly, even if your homepage is the Entity Home, you must still create a dedicated About page with the full description. You should also link to that About page from the menu or the footer.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you are using Schema Markup, which I strongly recommend, the fact that the Schema Markup description does not exactly match the description on the page itself does not matter because Google understands that this is the situation. It will see the full version on the About page and then repeat it around the web. And the summarised version on the homepage makes total sense.
Jason Barnard speaking: In conclusion, the entity description is phenomenally important and often vastly underrated. The full entity description is the foundation of Google’s understanding. It is the completed plate puzzle Google uses as a reference. It is the parent’s explanation of the facts, but your explanation alone isn’t enough. Google needs corroboration. We’ll look at that next.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you and see you soon.
