The definition
An entity is a distinct thing an engine holds a record of: a business, a person, a place, a product, a concept. It has a name, attributes, and relationships to other entities. Crucially it is the thing the keyword refers to, rather than the keyword itself.
Search moved from matching strings to identifying things some years ago. Answer engines took that further: to name your business in a response, a system first has to be confident about which entity you are.
Why it matters for a local business
Every downstream effort assumes the engine knows who you are. Content, reviews, links and citations all attach to an entity. If the entity is ambiguous, two slightly different names, a stale address, a duplicated profile, the signals attach to nothing in particular, or split across two records.
This is why entity work usually outperforms content work for businesses that have never done it.
The common misunderstanding
That entity optimisation is a schema task. Schema helps an engine read facts you have already made consistent; it cannot make inconsistent facts consistent. Markup that contradicts the visible page is worse than no markup, because it is a machine-readable statement that you disagree with yourself.
Check it yourself
Search your exact business name and see what the engine returns beside the results. A knowledge panel, a profile, or nothing at all tells you roughly how confident it is about you.
Then search your name plus your city and check whether the business it describes matches the business you run, same address, same category, same phone. Where it does not, you have found the contradiction to close first.
See where you actually stand
A free Visibility Check runs twelve real buying questions for your category across three surfaces.
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