Search engines and AI assistants try to understand things, not just match words: which company this is, what it does, where it operates, who runs it and how it relates to other people, places and products. You help them by writing sentences that name those things and state the relationships between them outright. Repeating a target phrase a set number of times does not do this, and Google's own spam policies treat unnatural repetition as a problem rather than a technique.
What is an entity?
An entity is a distinct, nameable thing. For a business, the entities that matter usually include:
- the company itself, under its full official name
- its founders and senior people
- its brands, products and services
- its locations and the areas it serves
- its industry or category
- its partners, customers and suppliers, where these are public
- its awards, reports and events
A keyword is a string someone might type; an entity is the thing it refers to. "Northwind" could be a clinic group or a shipping line, and the text you publish is part of the evidence search engines use to tell them apart.
Why do relationships matter as much as names?
Naming entities is half the job. The other half is saying how they connect. "Northwind Clinics" and "Leeds" appearing on the same page tells a reader very little. "Northwind Clinics opened its second Leeds physiotherapy clinic on 3 March 2026" tells them that one is located in the other, what kind of business it is, and when that became true.
Weak and strong sentences, side by side
Each weak sentence below is typical of release copy. Each strong version names the entities and states the relationship.
| Weak | Strong |
|---|---|
| We've expanded again and are bringing our expertise to a new market. | Acme Plumbing LLC opened its first Abu Dhabi service operation on 15 September 2026, extending the Dubai-based company's emergency repair and leak-detection services into the emirate. |
| Our team is growing, with a big new appointment. | Fernhill Bakery Ltd appointed Priya Shah as Head of Wholesale on 1 October 2026. She leads supply to the company's 40 café and hotel accounts across Bristol. |
| Built for modern businesses everywhere. | ExamplePay is a UAE-based payments software company that provides invoicing and online payment tools to small businesses in the UAE and the United Kingdom. |
| We're pleased to be working with a great new partner. | Northwind Clinics will refer post-surgery patients to Harbour Physio, which will provide home rehabilitation visits in Leeds from November 2026. |
The strong versions are longer, but every added word carries a fact: a full name, a category, a place, a date, a person, a role, a direction of relationship. All four companies and people are fictional.
Why is keyword density the wrong goal?
Keyword density is the old idea that a page should contain its target phrase at some fixed percentage. It fails for three reasons.
First, it optimises for strings when the systems reading your page are trying to resolve things. A page that repeats "Leeds physiotherapy" twelve times but never says who provides it, where, or since when, gives a search engine lots of one phrase and little understanding.
Second, it makes writing worse. Forced repetition reads badly to people, and people are the ones who contact you.
Third, it can count against you. Google's spam policies describe keyword stuffing as filling a page with keywords or numbers to manipulate rankings, and give examples including blocks of city names a page is trying to rank for and phrases repeated so often they sound unnatural.
Words still matter. Use the terms your customers and industry actually use, where they naturally belong: the headline, the first paragraph, headings and link text. Then stop counting.
How do you write so entities are clear?
A few habits cover most of it.
- Use the full official name on first mention. "Acme Plumbing LLC", then "Acme" afterwards. This is the name that should match your website and profiles.
- Define the company in one sentence. Name, type, location and what it offers. The first 100 words of a release are the place for this.
- Name people with their titles. "Jane Smith, Operations Director at Acme Plumbing", not "our ops lead".
- Give dates as dates. "15 September 2026", not "recently" or "this month".
- State direction. Who acquired whom, who supplies whom, who awarded what to whom.
- Keep the facts consistent everywhere. If your website says founded in 2018 and a directory says 2019, you have created two competing versions of the same entity. The post on consistent company information covers the audit.
The boilerplate paragraph at the end of a release is the most concentrated statement of your entity. Write it as a plain definition, not a slogan.
Where does structured data fit?
Structured data is machine-readable markup that describes the same facts your page already shows. Google's documentation on Organization structured data says adding it to your home page, or a single page that describes your organisation, can help Google understand your administrative details and disambiguate your organisation in search results. It lists properties such as name, alternate name, URL, logo, address, telephone and sameAs links to your official profiles, and it notes that none is strictly required.
Two limits apply. The markup should match what visitors can see; it describes the page, it does not replace it. And Google does not guarantee that any feature using structured data will appear. Clear sentences on the page come first.
What does this change about a press release?
A release written with entities in mind reads more like a record than an advert. It names the company, people, place and date in its opening lines, says what changed, and links to the full details on your own site. That helps a journalist skimming a feed and any system working out whether this Acme is the one a user means.
It does not guarantee rankings or mentions in AI answers. Nothing does. What it removes is one avoidable reason to be misunderstood. For how assistants go on to retrieve and cite pages, read how AI assistants find and cite companies.
Frequently asked questions
Do I still need keywords at all?
Yes, in the plain sense of using the words people search with. If customers say "boiler repair" and you only say "heating solutions", you are harder to find. The change is in the goal: describe the business and the news accurately in the language your audience uses, rather than hitting a repetition target.
Does my company need a Wikipedia page to be an entity?
No. Any business with a consistent name, website, address and description across the places it appears is something search engines can try to identify. Consistency and clarity across your own site, profiles and releases are within your control.
Should I use the same wording in every release?
Keep the facts identical: name, founding year, location, category. The wording around the news should change, because each release should add new information rather than repeat the last one.
media:on Editorial. Written and reviewed by the media:on editorial team, who edit every release before it files.