James Dooley Podcast

James Dooley: Hi, today I'm joined with Luis Salazar Jurado and today's topic is about entity brand SEO in 2026. Is it important? Is it not important? What different kind of benefits are you going to get with now trying to make certain that you're concentrating on your entity and your brand as part of your SEO strategy? So, Luis Salazar Jurado, take it away.

Luis Salazar Jurado: First of all, thank you for having me. And second of all, it's not something new that brand searches are getting more and more important. You have to connect your brand with the entity and then communicate that across the internet, so Google understands what you are, what you do, what your audience is, and what you sell.

Luis Salazar Jurado: In order to connect the entity, or in order to make clear what your entity or your brand is about, you have to provide all the attributes related to your brand. You have to communicate that across the internet with third party sources, social media profiles, press releases, and so on, in order to connect all the dots and create the relationships. At the end of the day, you are feeding a bot in order to understand all the information about your brand, which is gathered in the knowledge graph.

Luis Salazar Jurado: The better you structure, communicate, and organise the information, not only on your site but across the whole internet, and the better you create a strategy about how to communicate your brand values, brand awareness, brand recognition, and third party source validation, the better it is going to do for you. Because if nobody knows you as a brand and nobody searches for you, how is Google going to rank you? How is Google going to understand what you do, what you sell, and who your customers are? If you do not show up anywhere on the internet, how important can you be?

Luis Salazar Jurado: You are not popular. Nobody knows about you. Nobody searches about you. That is the key nowadays in order to rank better, rank faster, and rank higher. On top of that, you have to compete in way more verticals because AI is now everywhere. You have to show up in AI Overviews and all the AI interfaces. If you are not in the model, you are not in the game.

Luis Salazar Jurado: If Google does not have information about you, and does not compare and contrast that information in third party sources, there is no corroboration, no consensus, and no validation. You are not in the game because you are not in the LLM. If you are not in the LLM, you are not in the AI Overviews. You are not in the AI answers.

Luis Salazar Jurado: Having said that, your brand should be the primary focus. You have to get all the pieces of the puzzle together, put the pillars, and grow from there. To do that, you have to have your knowledge graph. You have to get your KG MID and you have to organise information to fit the bot, so all that information is accurate.

Luis Salazar Jurado: I'm going to give you an example. Imagine James Dooley. James Dooley is an entrepreneur, among other things. All the information on the internet has to validate that James Dooley is an entrepreneur. I'm going to use an analogy that you want to buy a business. The business is the entity. The name of the business is the entity. Then you, as an entrepreneur, are going to do the due diligence.

Luis Salazar Jurado: The due diligence is the bots coming to your site, crawling your site, and getting all the information. From a business perspective, you are going to analyse debt, cash flow, margins, assets, liabilities, and so on. All those variables are the attributes about the entity, and the entity is the business you want to buy.

Luis Salazar Jurado: Using that analogy, if you want to rank for your brand, your brand has a name, it is an entity, and you have to provide all the attributes, which are all the variables that are going to have the information about your brand. The due diligence is the analogy for the bot coming to your site and crawling you.

Luis Salazar Jurado: Only studying and researching the financial statements is not enough. You need to do research. You need to contact people. If you do proper research, you have to talk to former employees, you have to talk to the banks, you have to talk to lawyers, and so on. That is the third party validation.

Luis Salazar Jurado: On top of that, to use the SEO analogy, when bots come and get all the information about the brand, Google also has to visit your social media profiles, analyse your reviews, citations, press releases, and so on. When you get all that data, if Google trusts you enough, it is going to rank you.

Luis Salazar Jurado: In the same analogy, if you are a business owner and you want to buy a new business, if all that data is trustworthy enough, you are going to buy that business. So, to rank with your brand, you have to be trustworthy. People have to search for your brand. Your data has to be accurate and consistent across the whole internet. That is going to give you trust, and people are going to search for you and buy your products or services.

James Dooley: I want to stop you on this because that was a brilliant analogy and I love everything you went into. I've got a million questions now to expand upon that. What I love about that analogy is if some of the numbers I was looking to buy that business with were not correct, my lack of confidence would be, if they do not know their numbers, what else do they not know? What else could be lacking? Therefore, I might not end up investing in that company. Google’s confidence score needs to be high to trust you to rank you. So I love that analogy.

James Dooley: Within entity brand SEO in 2026, we are in 2026 now. A lot of people in the SEO communities understand that branding is very important, and it has been important for a long time. Branded clicks, branded mentions, branded anchor text, brand for the win. Everyone talks about brand and branding and says this is what you need to do.

James Dooley: But entities, not many people talk about entity SEO, and you expanded upon that with the knowledge graph. You spoke about what Jason Barnard talks about, the algorithmic trinity. That is making certain that you've got a knowledge panel and that knowledge panel has got a high confidence score within the knowledge graph. That is one part. The second part is Google rankings, traditional website rankings. The third one is artificial intelligence, so ranking in Claude, Perplexity, Gemini Overviews and getting into those LLMs. That is what Jason Barnard calls the algorithmic trinity.

James Dooley: On the knowledge graph specifically, you spoke about a KG MID. For anyone that does not know what that stands for, it stands for knowledge graph machine ID. Am I right in saying that if your website or your brand does not have a KG MID, Google does not even know you as an entity? You are only an entity when you are assigned a KG MID. Is that correct?

Luis Salazar Jurado: Absolutely. You are totally right. I'm going to use an analogy. Think about an offline example. Each one of us has a number, a phone number. The phone number is the ID. We all have a passport number. The passport number is the ID. Each one in each country has an identity card which is a number. If you think about it, all those numbers are IDs about ourselves.

Luis Salazar Jurado: We are the same entity, in this case person entity, but we have three different identifiers. The phone number, the identity card, and the passport number. All those three numbers are connected to the same entity, which is the person. Each brand, each entity on the internet has an identifier, and as you mentioned, it is the KG MID.

Luis Salazar Jurado: If you launch a site, if you launch a brand, but Google does not have that KG MID, it does not know who you are. Google creates an identifier for each entity on the internet, and if you do not know your own identifier you cannot connect with Google. Google knows who you are but you do not know your own number.

Luis Salazar Jurado: It is like if someone asks you for your phone number and you do not know what your phone number is. How are they going to connect? How are they going to contact you? In technical terms, you have to create a way to connect with the knowledge graph API, which is nothing more than a number and an identifier. So you are connected to the universal data, which is the internet. Because if not, you are an isolated entity. If you are an isolated entity, how is Google going to know about you?

James Dooley: Anyone watching this, we're going to do a whole podcast series around entities and branding and KG MIDs. We're going to dig deeper into how you trigger a KG MID, how you improve the confidence score, how you identify what your KG MID is, and how you make certain you do not have two or three. Google can create multiple KG MIDs if it is not certain. I had three different KG MIDs because I had my podcasts, my books, and enough information on digital PR that I was an entrepreneur. It created three different identifiers, like three different phone numbers, and I had to sort it out. I did not even know I had that problem until I understood how important the knowledge graph is for my personal entity.

James Dooley: I want to expand on schema. I have seen videos saying schema is not a ranking factor and you do not need schema. I used to think that years ago and now I'm laughing at the people saying schema is not important, because I now understand how important it is to tell Google that this James Dooley is this KG MID, that this James Dooley is this Facebook page, that this James Dooley is this Twitter account, because there is more than one James Dooley. I need to differentiate myself and say this is who I am, this is what I do. I'm not the musician, I'm the entrepreneur that invests in companies and does lead generation in the UK.

James Dooley: Can you explain the importance of JSON LD and schema for those connections and for confidence score? In my opinion, schema is the glue that connects everything together properly.

Luis Salazar Jurado: It is very important. First, schema is a standard created in 2011, if I remember correctly, by Google, Bing, and other search engines. It is something the biggest search engines agreed upon long ago. Second, it is machine readable information, which is the fastest, cheapest, and most efficient way to communicate with a machine. Third, it is a standard that, the more people use it, and the more efficiently they design the JSON and programme it, the more granular and accurate the information is going to be.

Luis Salazar Jurado: As you mentioned, there are a lot of James Dooleys in the world. The only way you can disambiguate who you are is with the KG MID plus accurate unique information about yourself. There is no other way.

Luis Salazar Jurado: The fastest, cheapest, and most efficient way to communicate is with JSON LD. Why? Because the bot does not have to crawl the whole site. It just comes to the site, checks if there is JSON, gets the JSON, and leaves. All that information is structured properly. The more granular and better organised, the better, because it is the fastest way to understand who you are.

Luis Salazar Jurado: You provide your ID, in this case the KG MID, and you provide all the information to disambiguate James Dooley entrepreneur from another James Dooley on the internet. You control the message. You control the data. You control the connections. That way you have the power.

Luis Salazar Jurado: JSON LD is the glue that puts all the pieces together and communicates with a machine. At the end of the day, they are machines gathering data and checking information to make sure the data is accurate. There is no human checking if the information is correct or not. Everything is semi automated. So you have the chance to design your own message with JSON LD based on unique information. You have the power and the way to communicate that information. The better it is designed, structured, and granular, the better.

Luis Salazar Jurado: If someone comes to it from a reputation management perspective, you have control. Nobody can fake that information. They can try, but if you give the information to Google first, and it is in the historical data, you are first. You win the race.

James Dooley: I was writing some notes down. There are some great terms there. You mentioned corroboration, getting it on third party websites and repeating who you are and what you do.

James Dooley: The three terms I take away are disambiguation, clarity, and confidence. If you get clarity right, and Google is confident they understand who you are and what you do, then they can trust you. A lot of what people call trust comes down to clarity and confidence.

James Dooley: When it is on third party sources, what some people call backlinks, backlinks have evolved in 2026. It is more than page rank and link juice. It is about extending your semantic content network on third party sources, repeating who you are and what you do, and building that confidence score.

James Dooley: Is there anything else you can expand on with schema before I move on to entities and branding?

Luis Salazar Jurado: Yes. Disambiguation is very expensive for Google. The bigger the internet, the more entities they have to crawl, understand, and digest. The more expensive it is for the algorithm to process, organise, and connect all that data.

Luis Salazar Jurado: The more granular and accurate you are with JSON LD, the cheaper, faster, and easier it is for them to understand you. It is a competitive advantage because every day there are new brands, new sites, and more information to crawl.

Luis Salazar Jurado: There is a report people can search, the messy middle. It was a study that Google launched years ago. Disambiguation is costly. When Google is not sure, because it is an algorithm deciding between options, it needs extra context.

Luis Salazar Jurado: I'll use an example, John Smith. John Smith is a very common name. If you type John Smith, Google does not know which John Smith you want. You need another word before or after to provide an attribute to narrow down the universe of data. That logic can be done with JSON. You design JSON LD with your KG MID, provide all the data in a granular and detailed way, and you feed the bot. The bot comes, gets the JSON LD, and disambiguates quickly.

Luis Salazar Jurado: With third party corroboration and backlinks, you make it sticky. You cannot trust another human with one interaction. Trust needs time and needs multiple signals. Before the internet, the only way you trusted the butcher, mechanic, or electrician was recommendation. Online, it is faster because of algorithms, but the principle is the same. The algorithm will not trust one source. It needs many sources. The more accurate and granular it is, and the cheaper it is for them to understand, the better.

James Dooley: I love how the semantic SEO community gets pigeonholed as just attributes and predicates and topical maps, but you guys understand the whole game. You understand branding, backlinks, branded searches, and being omnichannel. There is way more to it than what people think.

James Dooley: How important are brand and entities if someone just builds a topical map and a semantic content network and tries to build topical authority? How much easier does content rank when you add collaboration, branding, and backlinks? How important is it that it is not just a topical map?

Luis Salazar Jurado: Yes. I'm going to use an analogy. Let’s say you want to solve a puzzle. You need all the pieces and you need to organise them in the right order. A topical map alone is not going to solve the puzzle. Backlinks alone are not going to solve it. JSON LD alone is not going to solve it.

Luis Salazar Jurado: The puzzle, which means ranking your brand and getting query augmentation, is the whole puzzle put together in the proper order with the right strategy. It is like a war plan properly designed and executed.

Luis Salazar Jurado: You are competing with brands in the same way. It is a comparison of data. You have to tick all the boxes because one variable alone is not going to move the needle. One football team with one player is not going to win the match.

Luis Salazar Jurado: The game on the internet is 24/7, 365. You cannot stop because the moment you stop, you lose. The updates are like the referee. Google evaluates and decides who is on top. You have to make sure you deserve to be in the top league, the second league, or even in the competition.

Luis Salazar Jurado: The summary is a holistic approach. Execute the plan strategically and intelligently, balance the resources, win the match, and win the competition.

James Dooley: For anyone watching this, this is the first part in a series on branding SEO in 2026, entity SEO in 2026, and KG MID SEO in 2026. Leave a comment in the comment section. What questions do you want me to ask Luis Salazar Jurado? Do you want us to dig deeper into triggering KG MIDs, improving the knowledge graph score, or advanced schema strategies? Let us know in the comments what you want us to talk about on entity brand SEO in 2026.

James Dooley: Luis Salazar Jurado, it's been an absolute pleasure and we'll see you again soon. Right back.