How To: Report on External Entity Linking

This support document describes the process of using Entity Reports and Schema Performance Analytics to investigate and report on the impact of targeted entity linking.  This information can be used to demonstrate ROI, and inform future content strategies and optimizations. Optimizing content for GEO is a one-team initiative. Schema App, SEOs, content teams, and other teams will collaborate to create content that is rich with relevant entities. 

Note: If isolating ROI is a key priority, consider experimental designs that involve A/B testing changes. 

How To Identify and Report on URLs with Entity Linking

This section outlines the process of identifying URLs that have been targeted by entity linking. 

Navigate to Entity Hub > Entity Reports 

Entity Reports is a comprehensive report on all the entities that have been identified across the pagesets targeted by External Entity Linking.   

Identify your entity or entities of interest

You can analyze the impact of one or more entities. If you are reporting on more than one entity, the entities should be topically related. Review this support article to learn more about entities, keywords and topics.

Capture the URLs where the entity has been deployed

1. Select Actions > Show URLs     
2. Copy URLs
3. Paste URLs into Spreadsheet
4. Repeat for additional entities if required

Open SPA Page Level Report and Navigate to the Time Period Comparison Tab

There are different ways to structure a time-period comparison study on entity SEO. One option is to 

If you have recently implemented EEL, a before and after time period comparison is recommended. If you've had entities linking applied for more than quarter, it may be more appropriate to report on Q/Q and Y/Y metrics.  

Configure the Controls 

1. Adjust your time period
2. Paste in your URLs
3. Optional: Omit data with 0 impressions in either period

Review the report and assess the information.

Here are some suggestions and starting points for how to assess and analyze the data.

Compare clicks, impressions, CTR for URLS period over period

1. Look at overall metrics
2. Isolate specific URLs or groups of URLs to look at the performance of specific subsets of pages. Consider where the customer may be in the client journey, their query intent, and users might be interacting with the SERPs (exploring within the SERP vs clicking through).

Compare queries period over period

1. Are the pages ranking for net new queries?
2. Are any high value or high volume queries seeing significant growth or changes? 

Note: Google only reports on a subset of queries. It omits queries with personal information, and very long tail queries. Note that this may include more conversational queries (as is common when users are enaging with LLMs or voice search).  

Analyze the behaviour of queries and URLs

Your CSM will often report on this during business reviews. Talk to your CSM about identifying a process for more in-depth analysis.