For 15 years, SEO basically boiled down to one question: which keywords do you want to target? You picked a list, dropped them into your pages, spread them across titles, H1s, URLs, content and internal links, and Google put you where you belonged. That model is still what most consultants and tools sell, but it has become a comfortable illusion. The reality is that Google no longer ranks exclusively by keywords; it ranks by who you are as an entity before deciding whether your content deserves to appear for the keyword you're chasing. Switching your thinking on this is what separates projects that keep growing from those that have spent the last year saying, "the keywords still show up in the tools, but they don't convert anymore".
What an entity is in SEO (and why Google has been talking about this for years)
In Google's vocabulary, an entity is any "thing" with its own identity: a person, a company, a product, a place, a concept. Google has been building an entity graph (the famous Knowledge Graph) since 2012 and has since steadily increased that graph's weight in its ranking decisions. What used to be an extra for very well-known sites is now the backbone of the system.
The practical difference is radical. Under a keyword-based model, Google sees a URL with "SEO agency Ibiza" in the title, H1, meta and URL, and considers it a candidate to rank for that search. Under an entity-based model, Google sees a URL that claims to talk about SEO in Ibiza and asks: who is the business behind this URL? Do they have a presence beyond their own site? Are the articles signed by identifiable people? Is there consistency between what the page says and what other sources say about it? If there aren't clear answers to these questions, the page isn't treated as an authority, no matter how well optimised it is.
The 6 entity signals that matter in 2026 rankings
Entity signals Google already uses (and that most people ignore)
They aren't theoretical or secret: they're very specific signals that can be observed, measured and strengthened. The problem is that almost no agency works on them systematically because they're slower and less sellable than "I'll rank these keywords".
1. Structured presence outside your own site
Google isn't going to take your word for it just because you say so. If your site claims you're the most experienced digital marketing agency in the Balearics and there isn't a single external mention backing that up, the system treats that claim as noise. On the other hand, if you're mentioned in local media, professional directories, interviews, sector listings, LinkedIn and specialised forums, each of those mentions strengthens your entity profile. Volume matters less than source diversity and data consistency (same name, same services, same location).
2. Personal branding of the people behind the company
This is probably the most underrated factor. Google looks more and more at who signs the content. If the author has their own bio, linked profile, a history on other sites and external mentions, that content inherits part of that personal authority. If the author is "Editorial Team" or there's no author at all, there's nothing to inherit. This isn't a hypothesis: Anthropic and OpenAI have admitted in public documentation that their models give much more weight to content signed by people with a verifiable footprint on the open web.
3. Total consistency across basic data
If your address, phone number, trading name, description and category vary across your site, your GBP, your LinkedIn, your Facebook and the directories you're listed in, Google doesn't know which version is the real one and loses confidence in you as an entity. This is one of the cheapest things to fix and one of the highest-returning over the medium term.
4. Structured data done well (and maintained)
Schema.org isn't a checkbox you tick once and forget. It's how you speak to Google in its own language to say: "I'm this entity, these are my services, these are my authors, this is my identity". An Organization schema with sameAs pointing to your external profiles, Person for your authors, Service for each service, LocalBusiness if applicable, FAQ where it makes sense. Done well, it changes how Google understands your site.
5. Stable semantic co-occurrence
This one is subtler. If your site talks about "SEO", "technical audit", "Core Web Vitals", "on-page optimisation" and "Google Search Console" consistently across many pages, Google builds a coherent semantic profile. If you mix topics without a common thread (SEO today, a cooking recipe post tomorrow, investments the day after), the entity profile is diluted. That's why generic corporate blogs with "content for everything" rank worse than specialised ones.
From the keyword model to the entity model: how your strategy changes
If you accept that Google evaluates you as an entity before evaluating you as a collection of optimised URLs, there are things that stop making sense and new things that start to. This mindset shift matters more than any specific tactic.
What stops working the same
- Producing content by the ton to target specific keywords. If every article targets a keyword and none of them reinforces a central theme, you miss the chance to build entity and only accumulate noise. Four very complete articles a month beat 20 mediocre ones.
- Copying the structure of the competitor who ranks. They ranking doesn't mean they rank because of the structure; they may rank because their entity has been built over 8 years and you're just starting out. Replicating the tactic without the foundation gets you nowhere.
- Paying for links from irrelevant publications. A link from a publication that has nothing to do with your sector doesn't build entity — it dirties your profile. Old-model links count less and less; highly topically relevant ones count more.
- Trying to cover every search intent in your sector. A site that covers everything stands out at nothing. A site that covers one specific angle very well becomes a reference and grows.
What starts working more
- Specialising in a sub-niche you own. Being the best resource for "something specific" is worth more than being third for something broad. Google clearly rewards specialists over generalists.
- Building biographies for the people on your team. Publishing under their name, taking those profiles to LinkedIn, media outlets, podcasts, communities. Personal reputation flows back to the site.
- Generating content only you can generate. Your own data, surveys of your customer base, internal benchmarks, real cases with permission. This kind of content is hard to replicate, and that gives it entity weight.
- Taking part in conversations where authority is built. Answering technical questions in specialised forums, writing guest posts in sector media, giving webinars, joining podcasts. All of this generates mentions and reinforces entity without paying for it.
Why your keyword dashboard is lying to you and you don't know it
This is one of the most uncomfortable things for those of us who've been using SEMrush, Ahrefs and similar tools for years. These tools still report positions and traffic estimates based on the keyword model: you're in position 3 for "SEO agency Balearics", your estimated traffic is X, everything looks fine. But what you see in those dashboards is a partial snapshot. They don't tell you:
- That this keyword is already being answered in an AI Overview and your real CTR is half the theoretical CTR for position 3.
- That users searching for that phrase increasingly consult a conversational assistant first and only go to Google to validate.
- That part of the market has migrated to new, more conversational queries that tools still don't track well because they have low individual volume but relevant aggregate.
- That your top competitor's entity has grown a lot and, even if you're still in position 3, your relative weight has dropped.
The consequence is that you can have a dashboard telling you "all fine" while your real traffic drops month after month. It's one of the most common symptoms we see when a client shows up saying "my positions are intact but business isn't coming in". The question isn't "which keyword have you lost"; it's "how does your entity compare to your main competitors'".
How to audit your entity in 60 minutes
You don't need to hire anything to get a first honest diagnosis of your entity. With an hour's work and a few browser tabs, you can get a pretty clear picture. Here's the mini-process we apply when a new client comes in, even before proposing a plan:
- Search your exact brand name in Google and look at the first 3 pages. Is only your site showing up, or are there external mentions in media, directories, LinkedIn, profiles? If only you show up, your entity is weak.
- Search your name in the Knowledge Graph. Some businesses appear with a panel on the right, some don't. If you don't show up, you can request the panel (it's free) as long as you have enough external signals. If you show up with outdated data, correct it: the panel is your calling card to Google.
- Search for your founder(s) by full name. Do their profiles, signed articles, mentions appear? Or just contact pages from your site? Your team's personal branding matters.
- Review the schema on your home and 2 important internal pages. Use Google's rich results tool. If your site doesn't have Organization, Person, WebSite or BreadcrumbList, basic pieces are missing.
- Audit NAP consistency across 5 relevant directories in your sector. Google Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, LinkedIn, your main local directory. Any inconsistency is a crack.
- Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity "which is the best [your sector] in [your area]". Do you show up? With correct data? If you don't, it's a direct sign of weak entity.
- Look at which of your pages have received links in the last 6 months. Sector media links are a good sign. Random affiliate blog links are a bad sign.
In 60 minutes you know where your entity stands: solid, medium, fragile or non-existent. That diagnosis is what should guide your plan, not a list of 200 keywords.
The two conceptual mistakes that ruin entity work
In the interest of honesty, these need flagging because we see projects lose months on them:
Mistake 1: confusing entity with fame. A strong entity isn't the same as a famous brand. An Ibiza SME can have a stronger entity than a multinational with half-abandoned sites, if that SME has cared for its signals over years and built a presence in its niche. Generic fame barely matters; what matters is being unmistakably identifiable as "the reference for X in Y".
Mistake 2: thinking entity is a project that "ends". Building entity is continuous work. It's not a 3-month sprint or a separate workstream. It's more like maintaining a reputation than executing a project. Every content, branding, PR, community and technical SEO action should contribute to strengthening it.
When to hire help and when to do it yourself
Many entity actions are cheap and can be done in-house. NAP consistency you do yourself. Your team's bios you write yourself. A deep technical guide on your speciality is written by someone on your team who actually knows the subject. That's why we never recommend outsourcing 100% of the entity work: it has to come from real knowledge of the business.
Where external help does make sense is two specific things: the initial diagnosis (seeing where you actually stand and what signals are missing, without internal bias) and the technical schema markup (because if it's done badly it's worse than not doing it). That's what we cover in our 60-point SEO audits: 8 of those points are specifically about entity signals, technical markup and external presence. Not because we want to sell you more, but because that's where we've seen clients get the highest returns over the last two years.
How to start entity SEO work today without reinventing your strategy
You don't need to throw out your current SEO plan to start working on entity SEO. What you do need is to accept that the next 12 weeks have to devote a share of the effort to reinforcing signals that don't show up in any keyword dashboard: verifiable authorship with real bios and linked external profiles, NAP consistency across every source you appear on, Organization and Person schema done well, mentions in sector media, semantic co-occurrence across your content, and visible specialisation in a specific sub-niche. These are the levers that move the needle right now.
The most useful practical decision you can make this week is to look at your main competitor and compare yourself on entity, not keywords. Run the searches your common customer would run on ChatGPT and Perplexity. If the model talks plenty about them and barely knows you, there's your 90-day plan. If you come out level, you have an edge and need to accelerate. And if you're ahead, use it to consolidate before they notice. Everything else the traditional SEO tools do is still useful, but it's no longer enough: the entity layer is what decides who grows and who's left watching their positions fail to turn into business.
