Proof 1st Tier Branded Entities are More Than NECESSARY

[Savanna]

I've been screaming at people in the local realm that 1st tier branded entities are one of the most impactful things you can do in the local SEO realm right now for going on 2 years now. And I'm not talking these diversity packages you buy here where the seller 99% of the time is going to target a keyword, name your username the keyword, and post articles optimized for that keyword. Totally missing out on the 1st tier branded part of it.

YOU DO NOT WANT THESE DIVERSITY PACKAGES POINTING AT YOUR MONEY SITE UNLESS IT LOOKS LIKE A BRANDED ENTITY.
With a branded entity you can point as many links from it to your money site as you want. But it needs to look like it's owned by your brand and not a third party. A couple steps you can take:

[I'm assuming you've already done your Google drive stacking. Google properties are 1st tier entities. If you're doing local SEO and haven't built out your Google properties.... WHAT IN THE ACTUAL F&*K ARE YOU DOING?!]

1. Make sure the email you use is the same for all of them. I use a gmail. Workspace can get expensive so I don't worry about branded emails. Just using the same gmail has been fine.
2. A problem I run into with clients is us creating their properties for them. The key here is making sure the admin email for their GMB matches everything. Theres some flexibility with the route you take to get this done. Most of my clients just end up giving me temp access to their email as its easier for them and I. It's a requirement.
3. You'll want to make it the same logo file, photos used, and etc as on the website. Make it match. Any properties that sync with Google Drive should sync Google Drive to import the images into the property. You want to use your Google properties as much as possible!!! Bonus tip: You can add a comment to images and make it a link. The link gets crawled.

Well, whats the trick to Google noticing it as a branded entity of the business?

SCHEMA. sameAs schema.

List all of your branded properties in the sameAs schema on your home page. You can also take it a step further and add schema to your branded entites with iframes. Thats a little more technical. But basically you create an html file with your schema and upload that to your public html. Then simply Iframe that page in any property you can. Now, you may need to create a different one for each property because you don't want to have sameAs schema for the property your injecting it into. For instance you don't want sameAs schema showing the URL of your Google site if its being placed on the Google site. You'll want to remove the Google site url form the schema. But if I embed the schema into a press release, I'll want that google site URL in the sameAs schema. SO depending where you're iframing the schema page, you may need to create a new html page.

But don't take my word for it as far as branded entities being the whip for local.

Just look at what Google is doing.

Google Business Profiles to let you manage your social links

While Google showed social media profile links for local listings for a long time, Google Business Profiles may soon let you manage those links.

searchengineland.com

 

[Oran Pollich]

****SOMETHING TO ADD THAT I MISSED IN THE OP

The reason I want to use a Gmail, is because most sites have the "Login with Google" button. I want to use that so these sites show up in the connected apps of the Google account that is attached to the GMB.

 

[Vernie Feest]

Many doubts arise, here just some, I could seriously say that I could not understand almost a word on what you wrote.

Google Drive stacking what is this?

I'm going to dissect it:
Google Drive: Since we are talking about properties, I assume that means sharing docs in Google Drive publicly
Stacking: when you link from one to another on wheel.
So I assume that Google Drive stacking is creating some Google Docs with links, blasting them and stacking a couple of them, linking one from each other?

If this is right, how this can have anything to do with GMB? May I assume that some of this docs are linking to your entity?

Moreover, what means "a branded entity"?

I assume that we call an entity as a unit in Googy knowledge graph
Branded, I assume that means, putting your brand in that unit.
So branded entity, I assume that you mean putting your brand in the GMB name and then, shoot branded anchors?

Which other "branded entities" could you be talking about apart from from the GMB?

Seriously, I love reading GMB ideas that pop everywhere. But for me, they don't make sense most of the times, because I feel that words are randomly created, like a jargon, by those gangsters like Merlino with GMB FB groups which try to popularize them (but I cannot read them anywhere else, forums or other SEO places and in my language they are not used by any means!). I try to read like 2 hours per week on this topic, but I always fall apart with such jargon :weep:

 

[Mariane Bartoletti]

So you basically yo do around 5 branded sameas, and then the typical branded citations and mentions all over the place, which is the usual way to proceed.

But what I was saying, is that I'm not 100% convince that G Stacking by itself, gives authority to other sites, despite it could hold power by itself. I don't know if you understand what I'm suggesting. I feel that since Goog is so aware of linkbuilding strategies, letting them be used for this doesn't make much sense, but letting them rank it's not the same. So I have seen G Drive docs ranking, and obviously Goog sites ranking (in fact I don't remember which, something like "web design in New York", there was a G Site ranking top 5 with an omega-shit site overly stuffed with keywords which was really weird for such extremely competitive keyword.

But who knows, AFAIK I've lived over the last years multiple times, strange situations when suddenly for a couple of months people were doing crazy things that work really well (like ultra-stuffing a site out of sudden and ranking #1 because probably someone noticed that for a short period of time certain types of stuffing were being bypassed by Goog, probably due to a coding issue).

Here we are talking about two things: branded entities and G stacking. Not necessarily correlated although I assume that one of your "branded entities" will always be 100% for sure, a Goog site (in fact, there is a placeholder Goog site when you don't set your website on GMB but still you opt for it), so to some extent Googy suggest that you should be doing such.

By the way, in the last month, I saw those Local SEO gurus (aka gangstas) were obsessed with the branded topics. Like focusing a ton on branded CTR and all that things. So probably your point goes around this, the idea that probably a new "contextual & branded authority" could rise as a major ranking factor (instead of the classic topical authority). Makes a lot of sense to me, but still I have some doubts on the later (G stacking). I definitely need to do further testing on this (luckily is cheap), to see how powerful could it be compared to 2.0 in general (not for rankign by itself, but for throwing authority).