Entity clarity

What an entity is, plainly

An entity is a specific thing in the world rather than a word on a page. Your business is an entity. So is the town you work in, the trade you practice, and the person whose name appears on the about page.

Systems that read the web try to connect the words on a page to the things they name. When that connection is confident, the page can be used to say something about the thing. When it is not, the page tends to be skipped.

The whole discipline reduces to one instruction. Make it easy to tell which thing you mean, every time you mention one, and never rely on a reader inferring it from context.

State the basics somewhere fixed

Your legal name, trading name, address, service area, hours and contact route should exist in one canonical form and appear the same way everywhere. That is the reference point everything else resolves against.

Most small sites fail here through drift rather than through error. A new location page uses a different spelling of the town. A rebrand updates the homepage and not the footer. Each difference is a small doubt.

Our page on consistent business details covers the local version of this problem, including the directories and profiles that carry your details beyond your own site.

Name things instead of pointing at them

Pronouns and vague references are the enemy here. We offer this service across the region tells a machine almost nothing once the sentence is separated from the page it lived on.

Write the name instead. The business name, the town, the county, the service. It reads slightly more formally and it survives being quoted, which is the trade-off worth making on any page meant to be a source.

This matters most in the opening lines, since those are sampled most often. A first paragraph full of we and it is a first paragraph that says nothing identifiable about anyone.

What to make explicit

The list below is what a stranger would need in order to describe your business correctly to somebody else. If any item requires inference from your site, it is worth stating outright somewhere obvious.

• The exact business name, spelled the same way every time
• What the business does, in words a customer would use
• Where it works, named by town and county rather than by region
• Who is behind it, with a real person on the about page
• How long it has operated and under which names
• Which credentials it holds and who issued them
• How to reach it, through a route you actually monitor

Disambiguation when names collide

Common business names cause real confusion. If three businesses share your trading name, a system has to decide which one a page is about, and the wrong answer attaches your reputation to somebody else.

Solve it with pairing. Always place the name next to something that narrows it, such as the town, the trade or the parent company. Consistency in that pairing is what builds the association over time.

Structured markup helps as well, because it states the identity in fields rather than in prose. Our page on schema markup covers the organization type and what belongs in it.

Your about page carries more weight than you think

It is the page most often read when something needs to be established about the business behind a site. An about page that is three sentences of atmosphere leaves every question open at exactly the wrong moment.

Name the people, say what they have done, state when the business started and what it does now. The page on author and about pages covers the shape in more detail.

This is the same material a cautious customer wants before calling. Writing it for an answer engine and writing it for a person turn out to be the same job, which is true more often than not.

Consistency beyond your own site

Your identity is assembled from everywhere you appear. Directory listings, professional bodies, social profiles and old pages you have forgotten about all contribute, and they disagree more often than owners expect.

Audit them once, fix the differences, and keep a record of where you are listed. That record is what makes the next audit take an hour instead of a day, and it will be needed again after any rebrand.

Old listings with dead addresses do real damage. They are the most likely source of a confident wrong answer about your business, and removing them is usually simpler than correcting them.