Entities Part 8: Your Competitors Entities

The prompt mentioned in the episode is:

You are an expert SEO analyst specializing in Natural Language Processing and entity-based optimization. I will provide you with the text from a competitor's webpage. Your task is to perform a Named Entity Recognition (NER) analysis on this text.

Please identify all the significant entities mentioned in the text. For each entity, classify it into one of the following categories: Person, Organization, Location, Product, Event, or Concept (for abstract ideas, theories, or topics).

Please present your findings in a simple list or table format, with one column for the entity and one for its category.

Please sort the entities in order of importance

Here is the text:

[Paste the competitor's text here]

Every rival looks unbeatable until you see what Google actually sees: the network of entities that frames their authority. We pull back the curtain on a simple, repeatable method to map competitor concepts, spot gaps, and build content hubs that earn durable rankings.

We start by recapping the four-pillar entity audit that anchors your strategy: brand and products, people, core concepts, and audience topics. Then we turn that blueprint outward. Instead of chasing keyword lists, we show how to identify true SERP competitors for your core ideas, pick a representative high-ranking page, and extract its entities using a clean, copy-paste prompt with your favourite LLM. No specialist software, no guesswork — just a structured list of people, organisations, products, locations, events, and concepts that shape the page’s topical focus.

From there, we translate data into decisions. You’ll learn to compare entity saturation against your own audit, find the missing concepts and influential names you should reference, and read structural clues in URLs, headings, and internal links that reveal how competitors build content hubs. We also touch on brand signals and knowledge panels to understand how well Google recognises a site as an entity. The result is a pragmatic roadmap: pick one high-value gap, create a cornerstone guide and supporting pieces, interlink with consistent anchors, and align metadata and naming to signal clear relevance.

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"Werq" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
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Chapters

• 1:45 Welcome And Series Context
• 2:11 Recap Of The Entity Audit
• 3:02 Why Entities Beat Keywords
• 4:14 The Four-Step Competitive Process
• 5:15 Step 1: Find True SERP Competitors
• 6:03 Step 2: Gather Competitor Page Text
• 6:43 Step 3: Extract Entities With LLMs
• 8:09 Step 4: Analyse Gaps And Structure
• 11:38 Action Plan And Next Steps
• 11:52 Closing Notes And Ways To Connect

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:53

Hello and welcome to SEO Is Not That Hard. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform KeywordPupeopleUser.com, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and then how to optimise your content to build traffic and authority. I've been in SEO for online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15

Hello, welcome back to SEO. It's not the pod, it's you, Ed Dawson, as always. And today we're on episode 8 of our special series of entities. And then today we are going to look at businesses. But let's just look back. So last week what we did was they try the first foundational work around sleep using entities. We conducted an internal audit. We wrapped out your business's unique entity landscape across four key pillars: your brand and products, your people, your core concepts, and the topics your audience cares about. So you now should have that blueprint, a strategic map, the concepts that define you all, you versus and important to your business, to your topics, to your website. So if you haven't done that exercise yet, I'll go to the referendum. Pause here, go back to episode seven, and list your traits there as an essential tool in early mission. Today we're going to turn outwards and we're going to look at your competition. And take that blueprint to really dive into what's going on with your competition. So we're gonna we're gonna go through analysis on your sort of like espionager, expanding on your competitors is what we're looking at. And this is entity-based competitive analysis. It's how you find the hidden gaps in your market and the precise opportunities to maneuver outline your rivals. For many years, competitive analysis and SC meant just one thing, and that was like running a tool to see what keywords you're surrounding for. It was useful, but also very one-dimensional. Keyword analysis shows you what the individual bricks you have good competitors are using to build a wall. But an entity-based analysis shows you like the entire building. It gives you a higher level strategic view of the subject matter your competitor compass. It also reveals kind of their entire semantic network, the web of concept of build them, the areas where they've established their topical authority in the eyes of Google and for so in the essentially LLMs. Now this way of looking at entities really is a game changer because it helps you answer much deeper questions, such as what is their true topical strength beyond just a few poor rocky articles, what are the precise topical gaps that enforce an entities that you've missed were only covered sufficiently? And also how do they structure their content and internal links around their core entities to signal that authority to the search engines? The answer to these questions provide proper data-driven roadmap for creating more code content that can help you leapfrog out in the search results, which is what you want. How do you actually do this? It might sound complex, but I'm going to walk you through a simple four-step process that you can follow. All you need is your entity audit from last week. URL of a key competitor has access to your favourite AI LMs, be that German R, ChatGPT, Clause, etc. Step one. Identify your true competitors. Well this might sound obvious, and you might think yeah, they are already your competitors, but this is the crucial first step. Don't just think about your direct business competitors, always think about your CERP competitors. The Swede. Go to Gable and search for all of your most important concept entities from your audit. So whatever that most important concept entity was, that's what we're going to search for. And then we're going to see the websites that arrived for your first page for the two. And these are your direct competitors. Even if they don't sell the same products as you, these are your competitors. So for today's exercise, just pick one. It could be your main business arrival, or it could be a blog that really dominates the search results for the topic you want to learn. We need to go to the search, find that one main business. Then step two, we need to gather the data. And this again, it's very simple, just go to your Convestor's Church website, pick one of the most important pages, could be the home page, it could be a major service page, or it could be a popular blog post. Whichever one they really wrote and wrote for from that core concept of yours. And I simply just copy the main body of textual page. You want to get at least the main heading, page one, subheading, page twos, history progress content. The more you can get really the better. And this is the core information that a search can join or animal analyze to understand this page's primary. And you want to paste that into where the document ready on your clipboard. And in step three, we're going to extract the entities. Now, this is where the kind of the real magic behind the scenes happens. We're going to take the text that you've just gathered and we're going to use a large language model like ChatGPT, Germany, or Claude, see it the way a machine does. Now in the past you had to point around the specialized tools to do this kind of entity extraction, which could be helpful message. Today, yeah, the LLMs, they're actually really careful natural language of processing tools just in themselves. And it's probably a tool. I mean ways that matter you'd be with the VWS. It's first really the simplest way of doing it. LLMs are really good at main density recognition because it's a whole part of how they were trained from the standard language. Open up whichever one is your favourite. And then you're specific props you can use and you can copy and paste this directly. I will I'm going to read it out, but I will also click in the show notes copy out of this. Here's the prompt. You are an experienced expert SEO analyst specializing in natural language processing and entity-based authorization. I will provide you the texture of the competitor's web page. Your text is to perform a named entity recognition. NEO analysis on this text. These object identify all the significant entities mentioned in the text. Each entity has waves one of the following categories Person, organization, location, product, event, or concept. Abstract ideas, the original topic. These could only be findings in a simple list of tables for workers, one colour of the entity or for the first category, and please sort them by their semantic relevance. Here is the text. And now we're then paste it with this text in it. So after you've pasted in the competitors to AI and process it, I'll give you a really clearly structured list of the entities it's found in SkiffQuest and what you've done is you've just performed a really sophisticated entity extraction without any special software. And then we come to step four. Analyzing the results, finding the story that's in the data. Now an entity list, it's just data. Our job is now to emit it to entice. So with your competitive empty list on one side and your own entity audit from last week or the other, it's time to find the story that's in this data. Here's what you're looking for. So first, entity saturation. What are the top three to five entities? With the LLM, I don't have quite a few of them. This will tell you what the AI believes is the main type of that page. How does their focus compare to your own? Or the emphasising entity you hadn't considered. Secondly, and most importantly, the topical gaps. This is where you're going to find a real goal, essentially, in this data. You compare the list of entities, make a methods page against your own four pillar orders. Or they're mentioning the key concept of the digital industry that you haven't read about. Or the referencing influential people entities like photographs that you can also be citing or partnering with. Or they addressing audience-centric entities of those pain points of interest that you've overlooked. Every entity that appears in their list, but not on yours. But represents tangible content gap. Strategic opportunity there for you to create a more cognitive authoritative resource. Thirdly, look for structural clues. Look back at the pages URL and main heading. How do they structure them around the main entities? Are they creating clear content hubs? For example, is the URL something like www.com.com slash services slash entity SEO? Where you can see within that they have their services, and all of their services as pages or the main services URL. And this gives you a really good clue just about your own site to make it clear. Search engines. Finally, do a quick Google search for their brand name. Do they have the knowledge point on the right side of the results? If so, what information relates then does Google display then? This is like really a direct public-facing report card of sure well Google understands them as an entity. So, with all that said, this brings us towards the end of the episode. And what I want you to think about between now and the next episode is how to put your detective pattern and conduct your own competitive choice. First of all, choose one key competitor. Secondly, select one of the most important pages, whether it's the home page or top service page, copy to main text. Use your favorite LLM. The prompt I give you in to extract from that text, which is also in the show notes. And fourthly, to finally clear that list of entities to your own audit from episode seven and identify one specific entity gap, one important concept may told you that you are not. And right there, this is going to be the seed for our next project. So, in lect episode, we're going to take the gap that you've uncovered, and we'll have had to build deeply authority. But level content. That's not only going to fill those gaps, but also going to help us establish you as a new leader on that topic. So that's it for today. Until next time, keep optimizing. Stay curious. You can remember S is not that broad when you understand basics.

SPEAKER_00: 10:58

Thanks for listening, it means a lot to me. This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, the Ed is spelt with two Ds. You can follow me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky, just search for Ed Dawson on both. You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try my SEO intelligence platform KeywordsPupleUse at keywordspupleuse.com where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people asking online. Post questions and keywords into related groups so you can above the content you need to build topical authority and finally connect your Google Search Consult account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit www.eddawson.com. My Philadelphia, and see you in the next episode.