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Entity HQ: Harnessing High Impact Profile Pages for SEO

Updated: Feb 10, 2023

This presentation was initially shared at Women in Tech SEO Fest 2022



Optimizing Team Profile Pages for SEO Wins


Using case study data and examples, this talk gives actionable insight and tips to improve the SEO value of profile pages for clients in professional service verticals like law, accountancy, recruitment, and more.

Profile pages for teams offer high conversion, high intent, and, potentially, high SEO value for many businesses. And as the web becomes more reliant on structured data, the relationships between individuals and organizations can be articulated to great effect. This talk discusses the strategic and technical optimizations to manage the people as entities for SEO gains.


Why Team Profile Pages Are Important for SEO?


Simply put, these pages offer incredible keyword value with low competition.

For clients in professional services, it is not uncommon for many of the top-ranking keywords on the domain to be based on the names of people on the team and be attributed to the team profile pages themselves. In the instance of one client, I have seen team profile pages account for 44% of ranking keywords. Though this was an unusual case, it was indicative of a wider trend for professional services sites where, on average, 13% of ranking keywords point to team profile pages.

Statistics on the SEO value profile pages

Looking more closely at these pages we see additional trends across professional service sites where these pages are outperforming the site average on a number of metrics. So on average, team profile pages:

  • Receive 5.8% of LP traffic

  • Attain 55% Higher CTR Than Site the Site Avg

  • Rank 24% Better Than Site Avg

All this to say that though these pages are often left unattended with regards to SEO, they are clearly of value to users and can offer great performance for businesses.


Why are Profile Pages So Effective for SEO?


As well as being, low competition and high intent, team profile pages are highly template-able. Further, they offer a natural destination for high-impact SEO tactics and optimizations. Even further they work well for multiple content surfacing methods in the SERP.


Which SEO Optimisations Should Team Profile Pages Have?

Strong profile pages should include the following:

  1. Using the Person's Full Name as the Core Keyword Focus

  2. Unique Image

  3. Relevant Internal Links

  4. Relevant social links

  5. Automated Related Content Feed

  6. Conversion points

  7. Person Schema MarkUp

Example team profile page


How are team profile pages displayed in the SERP?


Images, links, and copy from team pages can surface in multiple ways on Google's SERP including in:

Each of these enhancements helps with site visibility, authority, and click-through rates.

SERP display for profile page content

15 Ways to Optimise Team Profile Pages

Since everyone loves a checklist, here is a list of 15 optimizations to meet the team style profile pages that will add user value and help you to get some low competition, high-ranking terms.


  1. Use Person’s Full Name as Core Keyword, Image File Name, Image Alt text, & H1

  2. Use Job Role as H2

  3. Name & Job Role in Title Tag

  4. Include relevant internal links in the biography copy

  5. A feed of internal links to the Latest Onsite Content

  6. Links to Relevant Social Profiles

  7. Build-in Conversion Points

  8. Automate Structured Data Creation

  9. Dig into bespoke Person Schema Properties like alumniOf, hasCredential, or memberOf

  10. Nest Structured Data to add relevant parent organization information

  11. Link to Socials with ‘SameAs’ markup

  12. Demonstrate expertise with robust biographies & links to relevant content.

  13. Show authority with Awards and Accreditations.

  14. Build Trust with links to client review pages.

  15. Claim Profiles like Google Scholar


This is a tactic that I have implemented many times, to great effect and the thing that I love about it is that anyone can do it with any tech configuration.


 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Crystal Carter is an SEO Consultant and Head of SEO Communications at Wix, with over 15 years experience working with SEO and Marketing clients around the world like Disney, McDonalds, Tomy and more. She has contributed to events, webinars, and publications from Google Search Central, Moz, Whitespark Local Search Summit, Semrush, SMX, Search Engine Land, DeepCrawl, Women in Tech SEO, and more. LinkedIn | Twitter


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