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Explore the role of content knowledge graphs in enhancing your marketing strategy and improving information retrieval with structured data.
Knowledge graphs have existed for a long time and have proven valuable across social media sites, cultural heritage institutions, and other enterprises.
A knowledge graph is a collection of relationships between entities defined using a standardized vocabulary.
It structures data in a meaningful way, enabling greater efficiencies and accuracies in retrieving information.
LinkedIn, for example, uses a knowledge graph to structure and interconnect data about its members, jobs, titles, and other entities. It uses its knowledge graph to enhance its recommendation systems, search features, and other products.
Google’s knowledge graph is another well-known knowledge graph that powers knowledge panels and our modern-day search experience.
In recent years, content knowledge graphs, in particular, have become increasingly popular within the marketing industry due to the rise of semantic SEO and AI-driven search experiences.
A content knowledge graph is a specialized type of knowledge graph.
It is a structured, reusable data layer of the entities on your website, their attributes, and their relationship with other entities on your website and beyond.
In a content knowledge graph, the entities on your website and their relationships can be defined using a standardized vocabulary like Schema.org and expressed as Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples.
RDF triples are represented as “subject-predicate-object” statements, and they illustrate how an entity (subject) is related to another entity or a simple value (object) through a specific property (predicate).
For example, I, Martha van Berkel, work for Schema App. This is stated in plain text on our website, and we can use Schema.org to express this in JSON-LD, which allows machines to understand RDF statements about entities.
Your website content is filled with entities that are related to each other.
When you use Schema Markup to describe the entities on your site and their relationships to other entities, you essentially express them as RDF triples that form your content knowledge graph.
Sure, we might be simplifying the process a little, as there are a few more steps to creating a content knowledge graph.
But before you start building a content knowledge graph, you should understand why you’re building one and how your team can benefit from it.
Over the past few years, search engines have shifted from lexical to semantic search. This means less matching of keywords and more matching of relevant entities.
This semantic understanding is even more beneficial in the age of AI-driven search engines like Gemini, SearchGPT, and others.
Your content knowledge graph showcases all the relationships between the entities on your website and across the web, which provides search engines with greater context and understanding of topics and entities mentioned on your website.
You can also connect the entities within your content knowledge graph with known entities found in external authoritative knowledge bases like Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Google’s Knowledge Graph.
This is known as entity linking, and it can add even more context to the entities mentioned on your site, further disambiguating them.
Your content knowledge graph ultimately enables search engines to explicitly understand the relevance of your content to a user’s search query, leading to more precise and useful search results for users and qualified traffic for your organization.
Beyond SEO, content knowledge graphs are also crucial for improving AI performance. As businesses adopt more AI technologies like AI chatbots, combatting AI hallucination is now a key factor to success.
While large language models (LLMs) can use patterns and probabilities to generate answers, they lack the ability to fact-check, resulting in erroneous or speculative answers.
Content knowledge graphs, on the other hand, are built from reliable data sources like your website, ensuring the credibility and accuracy of the information.
This means that the content knowledge graph you’ve built to drive SEO can also be reused to ground LLMs in structured, verified, domain-specific knowledge, reducing the risk of hallucinations.
Content knowledge graphs are rooted in factual information about entities related to your organization, making them a great data source for content insights.
High-quality content is one of the cornerstones of great SEO. However, content marketers are often challenged with figuring out where the gaps are in their existing content about the entities and topics they want to drive traffic for.
Content knowledge graphs have the ability to provide content teams with a holistic view of their entities to get useful insights to inform their content strategy. Let’s dive deeper.
Traditionally, content marketing teams would manually audit or use a spreadsheet or relational database (tables, rows, and columns) to manage their content. The issue with a relational database is its lack of semantic meaning.
For example, a table could capture the title, URL, author, meta description, word count, and topic of an article. However, it cannot capture entities mentioned in a plain-text article.
If you want to know which pages on your website currently mention an old product you no longer provide, identifying these pages is hard and very manual.
Content knowledge graphs, on the other hand, provide a multi-dimensional categorization system for your content.
When built using the Schema.org vocabulary, the detailed types and properties enable you to capture the connections between different content pieces based on entities and taxonomy.
For example, a blog post on your website would likely show up on your content knowledge graph as a BlogPosting with properties like author, publisher, mentions, datePublished, dateModified, audience, citations, and more.
These properties connect your blog article (an entity) to other entities you’ve defined on your site. The author of a specific article is a Person who you might have defined on an Author page.
Your article might mention a product or service that you’ve defined on other pages on your site.
For marketing teams that have to manage large volumes of content, structuring your content into a content knowledge graph can give you a more holistic view of your content and entities.
You can easily perform a content audit to find out what exists on your website without manually auditing the site or updating a spreadsheet.
This, in return, enables you to perform content analysis with ease and get deeper insights into your content.
With a holistic view provided by your content knowledge graph, you can easily audit your content and entities to identify gaps and opportunities to improve your content strategy.
Example 1: You want to strengthen your E-E-A-T for specific authors on your site. Your content knowledge graph will showcase:
This unified view can provide your team with a broad overview of this author and identify content opportunities to improve the author’s topical authority on your site.
Example 2: Your organization wants to remove all mentions of COVID-19 protocols from your website.
You can query your content knowledge graph to identify past content that mentions the topic “COVID-19” and assess the relevance and necessity of each mention before removing it from your content.
This targeted approach can enable your team to refine their content without investing too much time in manual reviews.
Since content knowledge graphs built using Schema.org are expressed as RDF triples, you can use the query language SPARQL to find out which pages a specific entity is mentioned in or how much content you have on a specific entity or topic.
This will help your team answer strategic questions such as:
Beyond its SEO and AI benefits, content knowledge graphs have the potential to help content marketing teams perform content analysis with greater efficiency and accuracy.
Today, content knowledge graphs represent a shift from thinking of creating content as a content manager’s job to the opportunity for SEO professionals to create an interconnected content data source that answers questions and identifies opportunities for the content team.
It is a crucial technology for organizations looking to differentiate themselves in an increasingly complex digital landscape.
Investing in content knowledge graphs now positions your organization at the forefront of SEO and content optimization, giving you the tools to navigate tomorrow’s challenges.
And it all starts with implementing semantic schema markup on your site.
More resources:
Featured Image: optimarc/Shutterstock
Martha van Berkel is the CEO and co-founder of Schema App, an end-to-end Schema Markup solution provider. She focuses on …
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