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Google Brand Entity Research

Google Brand Entity Research: Learn Your Brand Trust Factor

Research lets you know how people and Google recognize your brand and how to improve your brand’s trust factor.

Google’s algorithm quickly computes thousands of signals to select which search results to display per query. One is an entity’s “trustworthiness” factor. This is drawn from a combination of signals that establish a page’s or business’s credibility.

In Google Entity Search, visibility identifies your brand touchpoints to increase changes in reaching your audience.

How to Become a Well-known, Highly-Rated, Trusted Brand Entity

First, you need to understand the scope of this research, the terms involved, and the tasks to be done. We’ll cover a few concepts and terms to make reading this article more helpful.

What is Brand Entity Research?

Also known as “brand research” and “brand market research”, brand entity research provides you with vital answers that impact your future growth. Gain answers to questions like “Does my target audience know about my brand? How did they hear about my brand? Do they trust my brand? Are others eager to partner with my brand?

While the term “entity” is new to some, Google has used it for a long time. Additionally, its Search Central portal uses the word “trust” nearly 1,600 times. Meaning, it certainly is looking at your trust factor alongside other similar sources it may display in its search engine result pages (SERPs).

Trust is the critical element in brand success

One of the best ways to understand Google’s metrics to measure or assess “trust”, is to become very familiar with its Quality Rater Guidelines. This eases the challenge to optimize for “trust” and improve your brand’s Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust (E-E-A-T) factors.

If you know how to study the SERPs, you can learn a lot about how Google Search works for your entity. With the right insights and skills to access, a search expert may explain why one page outperforms another regardless of having fewer ranking keywords or backlinks.

What is a Brand SERP?

A Brand SERP is the result that Google that Google chooses to display when queried for your exact match brand name. Before it does so, it wants to be confident that what it displays is indeed correct. A well-known, highly-rated, and trusted brand entity is the cornerstone of organic visibility.

To help search engines trust that they correctly understand your business’s core definition, services, expertise, and location, etc., your local business schema or organization structure data can specify basic details.

A brand SERP may be recognizable by the following:

  1. Company or site name.
  2. Legal name.
  3. AlternateName.
  4. Logo.
  5. NAP: Name, address, and phone number.
  6. Tagline.
  7. Website URL.
  8. Social profiles.
  9. Awards.
  10. Copyright holder or entity @id.
  11. Owned media, for example imagery, YouTube videos.
  12. Tone of voice.
  13. Mentions or “about”.
  14. SameAs.

This applies to service-based business entities as well.

How do you calculate brand trust?

This is a study conducted by a marking research professional who will measure, compare and analyze your brand’s recognition level, loyalty, trust, and consumer perception factors. Again, schema markup can help you provide clarity amidst uncertainty. For example, aggregated review structured data highlights what people say about your business entity and can let buyers move forward with confidence.

Search marketers measure brand trust by:

  • Establish brand benchmarking to monitoring brand trust elements.
  • Set goals for brand marketing campaigns.
  • Using customer surveys to measure progress towards brand goals.
  • Acting on areas of opportunity, such as to speak or write about your brand story

Brand builders are people who work with business entities to create an approach that permeates their company, and stimulates how employees think, write, and talk. It helps to inspire them in ways that have a unified positive impact on their company brand reach. It also may help hesitant brand entities considering investing in a new marketing channel become convinced of some return on investment (ROI).

Brand Entity Details

You need to supply the correct details to establish your brand identity. Entity Identity is how search engines understand who you are, what you do best, and who your audience is. Entity Identity Information Management (EIIM) is the collection and management of identity information with the goal of sustaining entity integrity and clarity. With proper research and management, people’s and search engines’ understanding of you will be congruent with your perception.

Your entity identity consists of:

  • Your brand tone.
  • Marketing messaging.
  • Where/how people can find you.
  • What your values are.
  • How you communicate your product or services.
  • The types of relationships you inspire when people interact with your company.

Essentially, your brand entity identity is the personality of your business and what you promise your customers.

In the proliferation of online content, search engines seek to prioritize surfacing trusted brands. This has prompted a surge in brand marketing services to provide valuable guidance on how to build brand trust.

If you are in a highly competitive market niche, linking your brands to other entities will improve your brand equity. Understanding this leveraging process requires knowledge of how consumer brand knowledge works. Entity node relationships of people, places, things, or other brands through schema markup help validate brand entity details and associations.

Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Before you can grow your brand entity, your brand must be recognized as a known entity.

NER has become a critical SEO skill. It is the ability to recognize entities within text. Google relies on it, and we do best when we employ the same entity extraction and recognition strategies. Using Python, SEOs can learn which entities are the most common on individual pages. This leads to knowledge of where and what to include in which HTML text. Both spaCy and Google NLP API are excellent tools for this.

Named entity recognition makes it easier for AI tools to identify and extract key information from online ans social listening data for brand insights.

What is a Google Brand Account?

As Google products have diversified, your Google Brand Account needs to be established on multiple platforms. Start with your Google Business Profile (GBP) account and then establish YouTube Channel Account, as well as others. Ofen, your GBP is known as your Google Brand Account. Each one of your Google product and service accounts can assist.

And now for the “big” question. You must grasp what Google entity search is before you can effectively research your own brand entity.

What is Google Entity Search?

Semantic search engines view an entity as a meaningful unit for cataloging information. This is because Google needs to recognize the search query and match it correctly to node content. Google must understand what entity the query intent points to and how it relates to other entities.

Businesses may establish composite entities that function on annotated terms. Similar to a dictionary, composite entities define entities. However, they enable the search appliance to find more complex terms. In a composite entity, we like to customize an entity with a sequence of terms. since composite entities function on annotated terms, all sequenced phrases must be tagged with an entity and so rely on dictionary sources.

There is a consequence to not supplying your own entity data. When Google crawlers determine there is “missing or poor metadata”, the tech giant may store brand entity details in its Google Search Index that it (not you) deems relevant.

“Entity recognition enables the Google Search Appliance to discover interesting entities in documents with missing or poor metadata and store these entities in the search index. For example, suppose that your search appliance crawls and indexes multiple content sources, but only one of these sources has robust metadata.” – Google Index Entity Recognition

To become trusted, the “facts” about your entity need to be established. A similar process occurs in the SERPs to generate rich results or related searches for a business entity.

Brand equity helps digital marketers to gain a higher price point for the product or service. You can increase your competitive advantage (especially in a commodity market); and make new product or service launches easier. Brand equity is another term for brand trust or value. As you build it, you can gain attention from bloggers, press, and industry leaders, as wella s possibliy convince investors that you’re worth investing in.

Now, for the work of discovering how your brand entity can be displayed right on the SERP.

Google SERPs That Indicate Trusted Sites and Content

Google has stated that it will broaden the scope of its SGE “About this result” function to include links to the sites it has sourced. It is looking for trusted entities with helpful information where its searchers can gain correct answers. In the SGE, trusted sites are sources in the “Ask a follow up” feature.

Google will decide whether you or your brand is worthy of a Brand SERP or knowledge panel or graph. Once you or your brand have sufficient authority and Google can trust it knows you, a panel will appear. The Knowledge Graph is a database of facts that Google uses to answer questions. The Knowledge Panel is a visual representation of data from the Knowledge Graph. Once you are a trusted entity, you can show up in both.

Rich snippets displayed in SERPs generally come from structured information. With some level of domain trust, they are easy to earn. However, the Search Central weblog reports that going forward Google FAQ snippets will be displayed just for “well-known, authoritative government, and health websites”. For you to be “well-known”, you must build your trust factor.

What is the difference between “brand research”, “reputation research”, and “audience research”?

Brand entity recognition is basically defined by a narrow set of stakeholders – current customers or interested consumers. Reputation research is unique in that it is formed from combined opinions of these groups as well, in addition to all employees, shareholders, vendors, partners, and clients – former, current and future – and many others relational node connections.

The main difference between brand research and is that audience research is conducted on specific audience segments (people) to obtain information about them. On the other hand, brand research is conducted to gather information about how the brand name performs within its market niche.

Your data-driven insights will be broadest and most useful if you approach it from these various aspects.

Google Tools to Research How Your Brand Entity Performs

  1. Google’s Entity Lookup Tool
  2. Search Console Reports
  3. Google Index Entity Recognition Table
  4. Google Ads “Search Term Reports”
  5. Google Analytics 4
  6. Google Spreadsheets
  7. Google Knowledge Graph Search API
  8. Entity Recognition – Google Search Appliance

1. Google’s Entity Lookup Tool:

Google also provides an Entity Lookup Tool for researching the status of a specified entity in its most recent feed ingestion. [1] I like it for understanding the status history of an entity. It returns feed data for the past 30 days regardless of an entity being present or absent within its recent ingestion, as long as the entity existed in an ingestion in the past 30 days.

2. Google Search Console Reports:

Research the number of times your brand name is searched for and display within Google signals. Your performance query reports help us learn that you’re a genuine brand that people search for. One can view all your branded keywords and see how many impressions and clicks that they gain.

Every digital marketing strategy significantly benefits from regular reviews of the business entity performance reports. The provide key metrics concerning webpage rankings and traffic, two crucial measures for your brand or business.

3. Google Index Entity Recognition Table:

The tech company provides this table to assist in Index > Entity Recognition tasks.

Tab Tasks
Simple Entities tab
  • Enabling and disabling entity recognition
  • Adding new simple entities or updating existing entities
  • Deleting entities
  • Downloading dictionaries
  • Editing dictionaries
Composite Entities tab
  • Adding new composite entities
  • Updating composite entities
  • Deleting composite entities
  • Downloading the composite entities definition file
  • Uploading a composite entities definition file
Blacklist tab
  • Downloading the entity blacklist file
  • Deleting the entity blacklist file
  • Uploading the entity blacklist file
Entity Diagnostics tab
  • Testing Entity Recognition
Adjustments tab
  • Adjusting Parameters

You’ll find helpful reports if you bid on your brand keyword in Google Ads. We often rely on the “Search Term Reports”. It helps us identify which brand-related phrases that your target audience uses when searching for you on Google.

This platform is radically evolving. We’re thankful we saved several keyword terms reports before they were gone. Today, there are new ways to pull similar insights. They are even more useful when combined with your organic search engine optimization.

This helps us review if what we promote as a brand value is believable, and that we can back up with evidence. It is easy to make a sweeping statement when promoting your brand. However, it needs to be real. Back up your claims with facts whenever you can. Refine and adhere to your values; you’ll attract customers who feel strongly about your brand.

5. Google Analytics 4:

This now offers new reports as part of the Google Marketing Platform. We can pull data about website traffic and reports that provide information about who is searching for a brand entity.

Check out the “Life Cycle” report”. This lets you know your audience across Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, and Retention. We learn how to create better content that expresses the brand the way we want to, test different brand offers, and CRO strategies brands should adopt.

The best customers are long-term customers. Set and meet (or surpass) their expectations by delivering and following through in the way you’ve said you would. Any failure or lack of consistency can become a hard-to-repair negative mark against your brand and will affect your brand trust.

6. Google Spreadsheets:

Identify the column that lists your brand impressions. To determine the total impressions over a specified time, use the following formula: =SUMIF(A2:A1996, “*yourbrandname*”,C2:C1996). Now you can know where your brand queries are, as well as searches for “yourbrandname”. If present, the sum can be gained. Asterisks near “yourbrandname” signal a wildcard in spreadsheet formula language, meaning the word can display combined with other words. When the query is for “yourbrandname inc” it will be included. However, misspellings of your name are not included.

7. Google Knowledge Graph Search API:

It is insufficient to attempt assessing your brand entity presence by just looking at the number of your branded search queries. It is also not determined by the number of indexed web pages you have gained. It is best to query your brand name in the Google Knowledge Graph Search API daily. You can enlist the help of skilled search marketer who knows how to maintain a record of your returned KG Search API result details.

8. Entity Recognition – Google Search Appliance

You can uncover entity syntax differences with Google Search Appliance (SBA). Martin Splitt from Google’s Search Relations team recently kicked off a new SEO series by explaining how sites can customize their brand name in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

Learn how to structure your website so that Google Search knows what your website is about. Or hire someone who already knows how to establish your Google entity recognition.

We use Google Cloud Entity Analysis to inspect a given text for known entities (proper nouns such as public figures, landmarks, brands etc.). It returns information about those queried entities. Entity analysis is performed with the analyzeEntities method to find information about the types of entities Natural Language identifies. [2]

Google Patents Possibly Use for Brand Recognition

Data about how popular a brand identity has become may assist in attracting brand entities.

The growth of AI technology leads to a rapid increase in the generation of text data. You and/or search engines can learn where your brand entity name surfaces in the form of news, press releases, regulatory writings, across social networks, directories and more. Each one presents a valuable resource for analysts and researchers to better determine your brand trust recognition levels. By following Google patents we gain glimpses on how the tech giant may recognize a brand and assess its trust factors.

July 2022, Google gained formal approval to move ahead with its information gain patent. This patent aids its search engine’s ranking system to leverage AI information gain to provide better, more competitive brand search results.

“Techniques are described herein for determining an information gain score for one or more documents of interest to the user and present information from the documents based on the information gain score. An information gain score for a given document is indicative of additional information that is included in the document beyond information contained in documents that were previously viewed by the user. In some implementations, the information gain score may be determined for one or more documents by applying data from the documents across a machine learning model to generate an information gain score. Based on the information gain scores of a set of documents, the documents can be provided to the user in a manner that reflects the likely information gain that can be attained by the user if the user were to view the documents” – Google Patent WO2020081082 Contextual Estimation OF Link Information Gain [3]

“Simultaneous reservation of brand identity is disclosed. In one embodiment a method to simultaneous reserve online brand identity includes initiating a simultaneous search responsive to a single criteria, creating a uniform search result of available internet property such as trademark names, domain names, and/or social media names, searching availability of the internet property related to single search criteria, retaining ownership of matching internet property, registering the internet property, presenting opportunity to users to challenge ownership of the internet property. In another embodiment, a method may include abandoned trademarks responsive to a single search criteria are automatically registered and semantic analysis is performed on search results from the single search criteria.” – Simultaneous reservation of brand identity; Patent US20110066648A1 [4]

We may assume that Google treats specific entities in brand queries and search results as being special. Since a brand is an entity, that this occurs to them. “Build a brand, and Google may treat your business as a unique entity and provide you with a knowledge panel, and other indications that they recognize the uniqueness of your brand,” stated Bill Slawski. [5]

“Consumer community products such as online social networks and online forums often face a challenge in onboarding known entities such as celebrities, retailers and manufacturers. These brand entities are often great sources of content and great proxies for new member’s lifestyle choices because of their popularity, making them critical for adoption and expansion of the community product. For many community products, failure to attract well-established brand entities early results in the “empty room” problem because new members do not know or trust other members enough to subscribe to their content and are unwilling to do the work to get to know others. This is triggered by low content consumption, low subscription rates, and results in low creation from de-motivated content creators.” – US20140250192A1 Crowdsourcing user-provided identifiers and associating them with brand identities [6]

We’ve progressed from subtle technological shifts to rapid improvements surrounding semantic search that enables search engines to better understand the intent behind voice searches for a particular brand. Even if someone mispronounces your brand name or confuses with with a similar brand, your data insights can help you sort that out.

While most web sites are generally designed to have some strong brand identity at the top of each web page, a lot more can be done to promote your brand entity. The following statement by Franke Fiorella is so good, I’m going to quote it.

“Research is an important tool in the brand identity development process. It’s the only thing resembling an insurance policy in this industry—and in the scheme of things, a relatively inexpensive one. We understand there are a number of reasons why research might be cut from a project—timing, budget, etc. But, we’ve seen how it can impact a project’s success. So be bold, be different and use research to guide you in the process.” – The Importance of Research in Brand Identity Development

What is the Role of Brand Entity in Google’s New SERPs?

With the face of search engine result pages changing daily, it can be challenging to keep up with how Brand Entity plays a role Google’s Generative AI Answers and Search Generative Experience (SGE). Both improve on the rigidity of ranking URLs and provide the flexibility to make visibility possible to entities based on relationships in the Knowledge Graph.

This is how it ties together and contextualizes everything: organizations, products, places, people, events, and brands. Just how and if a brand is recommended to your target audience in search (Google Gemini, Bard, and SGE) as well as new organic shopping SERPs. How your brand entity scores also influences how you show up in Google Discover, Top Stories or news, maps, or any other Google service based on the facts it’s confident of about your brand entity. How strongly your brand correlates to the topic and the user’s query is also a factor.

Google Local Services Ads now allow us to choose if we want your LSA ad to show when someone does a brand search. This is a new, helpful way to manage your brand entity online and drive paid clicks.

CONCLUSION: Know Your Brand’s Share of Voice on SERPs

The above methods apply only to how users are searching for your brand on Google. Your true “share of voice” on world at large includes other search engines and entities. Since most organic search comes from Google, we find this to be a helpful part of your online brand metrics.

Call 651-206-2410 to partner for your personal Brand Entity SERP Analysis

 

Resources:

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/10432298

[2] https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/docs/analyzing-entities

[3] https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2020081082

[4] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20110066648

[5] https://www.seobythesea.com/2015/05/brands-entities-in-social-network/

[6] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140250192A1/ and Geo-spatially constrained private neighborhood social network https://insight.rpxcorp.com/patent/US8775328B1

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