Implementation and Results of my Entity Mapping Process

Recently I received numerous comments about my Entity Mapping process for internal linking. Almost all of them praised it, but one comment asked a great question about the statistics (having more than a 125% increase in traffic within 60 days) that I shared in that article. So I spent the next day analyzing the data and trying to find the real culprit behind such growth. And this article involves everything about it, right from the implementation to the results and the explanation behind the results.

Table of Contents

• So what was the comment that made me intrigued?
• The Implementation
• The Results
• The Explanation
• Final Thoughts

So what was the comment that made me intrigued?

As you might remember, September 2022 was an insane month regarding SEO updates. First, it was the Helpful Content Update that had everyone comparing it with major updates like Panda, Penguin, etc. Next, it was the Core Update that always added to our stress. And while we thought this would be it for that month, Google announced another Product Reviews Update that made it impossible for most sites to analyze what update led to the drop/increase in their rankings.

And among all this chaos, I also implemented what ideas I got from my Entity Mapping process, completely modifying my website’s architecture. So, the comment that I received mentioned the same thing, which is, how would I know if it was either my implementations or these updates that caused such a boost to my organic traffic? And since I had not done such an analysis before, I wanted to dive into it too.

The Implementation

So when I mapped the entities for each of my blogs, the next thing I did was add those entities (as either the exact entities or with some modifications) as links to the 3 most important sections of my website’s architecture – Primary Menu, Categories, and (for the first time I created) the Tag pages in WordPress.

	No. of Pages	Remaining Pages	Total Pages
One or more links added from new sections in the primary menu	45	36	81
One or more links added from new category pages	57	24	81
One or more links added from new tag pages	27	54	81
Pages with no links added that pointed toward them	11	70	81

Therefore, a total of 70 pages got a new link either from the primary menu, a new category, or a new tag page.

The Results

I had already shown this in my previous article that as I started implementing it on the 5th of Sept 2022, I saw more than a 125% increase within 60 days –

So to find the reason, whether it was the implementation of my Entity Mapping process or Google’s updates that caused the spike, the solution was simple: look at the results for the articles that got new internal links and the articles that didn’t. And here were the results –

	Avg. Increase in Clicks	Avg. Increase in Impressions
Articles that got new internal links	125%	68%
Articles that didn’t get new internal links	68%	39%

Furthermore –

	% of Total Clicks (Earlier)	% of Total Clicks (Later)
Articles that got new internal links	96.60%	97.50%
Articles that didn’t get new internal links	1.71%	1.26%

The Explanation

So all the data from the results point toward one simple conclusion: while Google’s updates may have increased the traffic, Entity Mapping clearly boosted it further and played a major role in improving it. Because the articles that weren’t affected by the implementation of my Entity Mapping process received just half the growth. Plus, they further decreased almost a fourth of their share from the total number of clicks on the website, whereas other articles continued to grow further.

Note: In a general case, checking data for just 81 pages can’t be that reliable because the dataset is too small. But in our case, while yes, the dataset is small, the difference is far more significant to ignore.

Final Thoughts

Now, even before I did this analysis, I was sure that Entity Mapping’s execution was the main reason for the growth. Because improving the site architecture and creating more internal links to your pages would definitely help to improve their rankings. It’s just simple math and unlike the kind of ranking factors where we could only guess whether doing something this/that way would help or not!

Lastly, I want to share that I will continue to add more such case studies and processes as I get to apply this process to more websites. And if you want me to help you out with your website and suggest some changes, please feel free to reach out to me.