Building Topical Authority and Brand Awareness through Entity Analytics

Table of Contents

• Brand awareness: building memorable brand names and symbols
• What is topical authority SEO anyway?
• Building a connected world of entities
• The WordLift approach
• Go beyond scraping: the benefit of using NLP to find related entities
• Is this the best brand awareness and topical authority SEO solution on the market?

Brand Awareness: Building Memorable Brand Names And Symbols

Building your brand is not easy. Especially when you are just starting out. It is hard to pick the right name or the right logo when you do not have any previous data that you can rely on. In the old times, the process was relatively simple but very questionable: you would go to meetings, you would talk to the management, they would tell you their ideas and then you would form your branding strategy based on wishes and personal opinions, rather than collecting potential customer data in a data-driven way. 

The problem with that approach is that now we have the tools and the science behind to perform brand analysis at scale and even better, to approach this problem in a more scientific way. Why, you might ask?

We have several relevant dimensions in the process of selecting the right brand name and its depiction as a symbol. The buying process requires us to pick something that is easy to understand, that is easy to memorize but also relatable to the industry or the niche that you are operating in. Brand symbols are communication tools and unfortunately a little research was performed on how brand names and brand symbols should be selected in order to achieve certain communication objectives. We were lacking more structured methods on how to approach this at scale or how to make it personalized for our specific use case.

Let’s say that you are an individual or a startup company and that you struggle to position yourself in the market, both from a business and a brand perspective. Your branding strategy should communicate the value and the unique value proposition that you are offering while at the same time, it should be cross-validated with popular search engines like Google and well-known knowledge bases on the Internet.

Let us take an example. You decided that it is time to pick a proper brand name. Should you pick just a company name, like Apple? Or should you pick a company name plus the name of the product, like ProtonMail does for example, in order to communicate your company name but also the offering? You do not know. People did not know how to do this in the past. Luckily, now the game changes.

What Is Topical Authority SEO Anyway?

The same holds true for building topical authority. What is topical authority, how can we define it? Kevin Indig had a fantastic piece of work on this topic where we can learn that there is little agreement in the SEO sphere when it comes to defining this concept. Is it writing comprehensive content for your users? Is it balancing the PageRank between your pages? Is it creating connected worlds of related entities and concepts in a hierarchical way? Or is it being a recognized authority as a writer in your sphere of influence? 

Building A Connected World Of Entities

I will give an example. Let us think about the topic of Novak Djokovic. When you think of Novak, you may also think about the concept of [“tennis player”] but also [“Jelena Djokovic”] (his wife) and [“Wimbledon”]. You could also think about his opponents [“Roger Federer”] and [“Rafael Nadal”] or their own respective countries of origin like [“Serbia”] for Novak, [Switzerland“] and [“Spain”] for Roger and Rafa. What will be your first topic of interest? What do users mostly care about? Which topic will be the best one to start with?

You do not know. Until now. Luckily, as I mentioned before, we now have the tools to approach this in a more scientific way.

The WordLift Approach

We at WordLift regularly invest in tools and processes that make our work and clients’ work easier. Besides this, we always share our approach with the community because we believe that growing together is a lot better approach than growing alone.

We invest in tools that can help us scale our work but that are also very user-friendly and data-driven at the same time. We desperately needed a way to automate entity analytics at scale and we definitely needed an established process which can help us position our clients’ brand strategy in the right way.

Therefore, here is our solution: when not having enough data or established Google search console in the first place, we choose starting keywords. Having in mind that today we are talking about brand awareness and topical authority SEO, we chose these keywords as seed keywords and added two more keywords that are related to them (SEO marketing and brand analysis). Then we go to extensions, choose WordLift and then analyze SERP.

Go Beyond Scraping: The Benefit Of Using NLP To Find Related Entities

The way this works and the competitive advantage of this extension is that there is an established natural language processing process behind it: we take the seed keywords, we scrape search engine result pages in the next step and through natural language processing process we compute the most relevant entity keywords that are related to the initial seed keywords. Once the processing part is ready, we can see all related concepts in the connected concepts tab like in the following picture:

The confidence column shows how close that entity is to the queries provided in the first step. In the label column, we can obtain the entity name while from the same column we can obtain the disambiguated entity description for a given entity.

We already elaborated about the process of entity linking in some of our previous blog posts but in short terms, this process enables us to find the explanation for every given entity that exists in DBPedia (we developed our own NLP model that is specifically trained on DBPedia).

The benefit of this approach is that you will use NLP and knowledge-base techniques to discover the most important entities for your seed keywords. This goes way beyond a typical scraping where we only process SERPs and SERP features like People Also Ask (PAA) questions like most did in the past.

Now, for this particular case we can see that the entity [“The Web”] (referring to the World Wide Web) is definitely an interesting topic to write about. You would not know that this is a case when approaching this task as a human – you might want to proceed with on-page SEO as a first topic of interest. In this case, you would miss the Web topic, even though it is very important in the computer science world and covers how WWW started. Auch.

Is This The Best Brand Awareness And Topical Authority SEO Solution On The Market?

We can also play around with the confidence scores and use them to build your own information tree in order to establish your topical authority for the given keywords. The possibilities are endless, it is up to you how creative you want to be in the entity analysis process.

We invest ourselves 100% in everything that we do and we like to be the visionaries in the SEO industry ever since WorldLift was founded several years ago. In any case, it is important to note that you should use your own expertise and collected data in order to benefit from this tool in the best possible way.

Therefore….Go out. Speak with your potential customers. Talk with your marketing and sales team, they will point you in the right direction to understand customer needs and pain-points. You can be the master of quantitative data but it is also important to exploit qualitative data to make the most of both worlds. Only then can we be sure that machines and humans co-exist together and make this world a better place. Start using data-driven approaches combined with human power in order to solve the most pressing issues in the SEO world. 

The time is now. What are you waiting for?

If you want to learn more about how to build Topical Authority and Brand Awareness through Entity Analytics, you can watch this webinar.