Entity Alignment? Surchability Understood the Assignment

What happens when you properly align an oral surgeon’s brand entity with their topical and geographic entities?

• You drastically expand their Google My Business geographic reach
• You triple their lead volume
• Most importantly you also triple their revenue from Google

The before represents how our target shows up on Google Maps search results 25 square miles from their location.

The after represents how our target shows up on Google Maps search results in a 121 square mile radius from their location.

Now if you aren’t on TikTok you probably aren’t familiar with the title of this case study.

I sort of feel like Marty McFly when he’s playing guitar at the Enchantment Under The Sea Dance…

Anywhose – you aren’t reading this case study to talk about absolutely amazing 80’s movies.

You may even be saying to yourself – “I don’t even know what an entity is let alone how to align one”.

We were brought in to help this oral surgery office via a private equity firm that we work with a lot.

They were a new addition to a growing network of oral surgeons nationwide. The principal oral surgeon understood the power that Google had to transform their business, but he also understood they were grossly behind their competitors.

Oral surgery is clearly an extremely competitive niche.

Luckily, working with addiction treatment clients for the past 10+ years, we are more than comfortable working in extremely competitive niches. That’s where we thrive.

Our original idea was to deploy our Join or Die Method, which leverages the power of multi-location businesses under one website.

But unfortunately we were told they didn’t intend on putting all practices under one website. Each practice would retain their own website presence.

We came to the conclusion that the fastest way to have this specific practice surpass their competitors was to properly align their brand entity with their topical entities as well as their geographic entities.

Drinking Game Idea: Take a drink every time I mention the word entity or entities for the remainder of this case study.

Before we get into how we aligned entities, it would probably make sense to briefly explain what an entity even is.

Entities are a way for Google to index and categorize the bajillion various elements that are online.

Sort of like how a card catalog worked at the library when we were kids.

At their most basic form entities can be a person, place, or thing (with various nuances sprinkled in).

Again, check out the Join or Die case study for a more in depth explanation OR you can enroll in our Intro to Entities Masterclass via the button below.

For the sake of this case study – what we did was force Google to align the brand’s entity, all of their service entities (teeth whitening, dental implants, etc) and the entities of each of their surrounding geographic entities.

Essentially, making Google think all of those items are one thing.

It was an Entity Hat Trick!

So how did we score this entity hat trick?

We focused on three main areas:

1. Topical and Geographical website changes
2. Advanced schema
3. GMB optimization

Their website was like most other local businesses – lacking any real in depth content, not geographically optimized, etc.

This website is actually shared by two different offices in different physical locations but they shared the same local landing page.

That is the equivalent of making a parent (Google) choose which kid they love more (the two locations).

So, the first thing we did was create a landing page for each office location.

Creating an individual landing page for each location accomplished the following things:

• Allowed us to optimize a page for only one geographic radius (versus two drastically different locations)
• Allowed us to connect that newly optimized page to their corresponding Google My Business listing

If you read our Google Concierge Strategy case study you will know that the easier we make Google’s life, the more it rewards us with rankings and traffic.

Having congruency between a Google My Business listing and the corresponding landing page is a huge way to help Google understand your entity and how it relates to other entities, etc – without working too hard to figure it out.

Like I mentioned before, the website was full of thin content and lacked a blog.

Content is critical in getting Google to understand what your business is about (what you do, your service, etc) as well as the main way it can tell if you are an authority in your niche or not.

So by having thin content on their service pages and not having a blog (forget about a well thought out content publishing strategy) – they were basically telling Google “eh we’re not that big of a deal, move along”.

So the first thing we did was create dedicated pages for each of their core services and really flesh them out as topical hubs.

These hubs will be jumping off points for more in depth content about various sub-topics of each service, which will be written about on the…newly created blog!!!

A blog is also an incredible way to align the brand with topical entities. Trying to optimize for entities in content is both easy and “trifficult”.

It’s easy because you can basically just write content naturally, focusing on the reader and not Google. Back in the day you had to worry about stuffing keywords here and there – not anymore.

It’s difficult now because you have to be on your toes about the details. Something as easy as spelling a word in a way that Google doesn’t register could mean the difference between entity recognition and just a regular boring word.

For example:

So, it’s important to make a list of ALL relevant entities in your niche and have them at the ready so you can include the proper versions of them in your content.

By flexing their “topical muscle” via engaging and thorough content – this oral surgeon practice was able to change the way Google associates with them. They went from Zero to Hero.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with schema (let alone advanced schema)…

Schema markup is basically code that you can put on the pages of your site that helps Google quickly identify what that page is about and what it’s related to, etc.

Think of it like the Cliff Notes of that page (Again, making Google’s life a LOT easier).

Now there are a million different website plugins that “do” schema for you automatically…but they are all garbage.

Besides the fact that plugins just include the most basic information and are very limited in the scope of what they can do – they also aren’t built to align entities.

To do that you need to create advanced schema by hand (or build a custom tool to do it like we did).

This allows us to leverage items like “additionalType” as well as “areaServed” (which helps align the brand with topical and geographical entities).

There are a number of other strategies we employ but unfortunately this is a case study and not a course on advanced schema 😉

All you need to do to optimize a Google My Business listing is to take the main concepts from the previous points and incorporate them into the listing.

Topically, you want to make sure you include all relevant GMB categories and incorporate your main category into your landing page on the website (Meta Title or H1 Tag or at the very least in the content).

You also want to make sure you leverage every single section of a GMB listing that allows for content.

For example, if your business has products and/or services, make sure you fully build out those sections – REMEMBER ENTITIES! For example, if you do dental implants, make sure you are ALWAYS referring to that as “Dental implants”.

The holy grail of GMB content opportunities is the GMB Website.

To save some confusion – a GMB website is different from your actual website (which is also connected to your GMB listing).

A GMB website is sort of like a mini one page blog within a GMB listing.

It incorporates other elements of the GMB listing, like reviews, images, hours, etc. but it also gives you a gigantic section to post whatever content you would like.

Absolutely use this section to boost your topical and geographical relevance….using ENTITIES!

So that’s it, hopefully you learned something new today (via memes).

The moral of the story is once you understand how Google works and what it’s ultimately looking for, you can create your own strategy to control your own destiny in this wild wild world we call the internet.

Yes it’s nerdy, and yes I’m sure the oral surgeons couldn’t give a rip about entities or if they are aligned with them – but they DO care that their leads and revenue basically tripled in 2 months (and still increasing).

If you are interested in generating these kinds of results for your business or getting up close and personal with your relevant entities, please feel free to contact us and schedule an informal call.

Surchability isn’t for everyone. You need to:

• Be already running an established business
• Believe in the process and the Surchability philosophy
• Be willing to invest in your success (we aren’t the cheapest)
• Be prepared for an increase in leads with an effective sales process and qualified staff