Search has changed dramatically, including local search. Search engines and AI systems now incorporate semantic understanding to generate citations and results. To gain semantic understanding, they need to know which topics appear in the content and how they relate to one another so that they can identify your areas of authority.
For brands with multiple locations, this shift can create challenges. Search engines often misinterpret place names or the services a location offers, which can lead to the wrong landing page appearing for a near-me query. At the same time, it gives local SEOs a new opportunity to add needed semantic clarity.
To support clarity and semantic understanding, SEOs should adopt an entity SEO approach. The topics, also known as entities, are like keywords with multiple dimensions. When defined within your content and with schema markup, entities can bring clarity to AI and search engines.
In Microsoft’s recent article titled “Optimizing Your Content for Inclusion in AI Search Answers,” Krishna Madhavan, Bing’s Principal Product Manager, stated:
“Schema can label your content as a product, review, FAQ, or event, turning plain text into structured data that machines can interpret with confidence.”
This semantic understanding is what adds clarity to AI.
With more than 47 locations, one of our clients, Brightview Senior Living, needed a way to scale SEO across dozens of markets. Entity linking helped them do exactly that. Their strategy shows what SEOs can start doing today to gain clarity, authority, and better local performance.
Why Entity Linking Matters For Local SEO Today
In the world of Entity SEO, search engines now look beyond keywords for:
- What entities are mentioned on a page.
- How those entities relate to the user’s search queries.
- Whether the content provides meaningful context and clarity.
Entities include locations, services, products, people, or anything else with a definable meaning. But identifying an entity is only the first step. Search engines also need to understand the entity’s context, which is where properties in schema markup come in and help disambiguate what the entity actually represents.
When you optimize a page, you describe its main entity. By using the schema.org vocabulary, you can leverage its properties to provide search engines and AI with a structured way to understand the entity.
For example, if you’re describing a location, you’d define the physical location as a LocalBusiness entity, using schema properties to describe the business and its service area, and then define the properties that map to the content on the page to describe it.
Now that you’ve defined the entity using properties, it’s time to add entity linking.
There are two types of entity linking: external entity linking and internal entity linking.
Internal Entity linking is the process of linking to internal entities on your website. External Entity linking is the process of linking entities on your…
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