Entity and topic clarity

What entity and topic clarity is

Entity and topic clarity is the work of making three things unmistakable wherever your business appears: what you are, where you are, and what you do. One spelling of the name. One address and one phone number, written identically everywhere. One plain sentence of description, used on the site, on the listing and in every directory. And one name per thing you sell, instead of the five that accumulate when five people write the copy.

An entity, in this context, is simply a specific thing a machine can recognise without guessing: a named business in a named place. Most small firms are ambiguous by accident. The name appears four ways, the address appears three, the home page never says what trade they are in, and somewhere in another province a firm with a similar name is being confidently described as them.

It is not positioning. What you stand for against the alternatives is a positioning statement, and it is a different question from whether anyone can tell who you are. It is also not technical work: I write the words and tell your developer which of them belong in the structured data on each page, but I do not build the markup, and I do not add markup describing things the page does not visibly say.

Said plainly: no amount of this guarantees that an assistant will mention you, and there is no trick in it. All it amounts to is saying who you are, where you are and what you do, consistently, in the places people and machines look.

When you need it

The clearest sign is being confused with somebody else. A similarly named business in another city, a former partnership you split from, or a franchise whose name yours resembles. Customers arrive having read someone else’s reviews, or fail to arrive at all.

The second sign is a rebrand, a merger, a move, or a change of legal name, after which the old details survive in a hundred places nobody has a list of.

The third is a home page that describes a feeling rather than a trade. If a stranger cannot tell from your first paragraph whether you are an accountant or a software company, neither can anything else.

You do not need this as a separate job if you are simply short of a description to reuse. That is boilerplate, it is quick, and it solves most of the problem for a business with one location and one name.

What gets fixed

• The name, exactly. Legal name against trading name, the ampersand against the word, the abbreviation, the punctuation. One version is chosen, and every other version is recorded as wrong.
• Name, address and phone. Spelled identically on the site, the listing and every directory. Unit numbers, street abbreviations and postal code spacing all count, because machines treat two spellings as two businesses.
• The statement of what you are. One sentence naming the trade, the place and the customers, appearing on the home page, the about page and the footer, not buried in a brochure.
• The boundary. What you do not do, which places you do not serve, and where useful, a plain line distinguishing you from the business you keep being mistaken for.
• The subject names. One name for each service, used on every page. A firm calling the same work three things across its own site is telling a machine it does three unrelated jobs badly.
• The people. Named, with their role, licence or credential, and a page each where it is warranted.

What you get

The entity sheet. One page: the approved name, address, phone, the description at three lengths, the service names, the people and their credentials. It is the reference anybody in the business uses before writing anything, and it ends the argument about which version is right.

The corrections list. Every place the details are currently wrong, with the wrong version, the right version, and who can change it. Directories, profiles, listings, invoices, email signatures, the site itself.

The page changes. Rewritten opening paragraphs, about page and footer, delivered as editable documents, plus a short note for your developer saying which facts on which pages should be reflected in the structured data.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. An electrical contractor trading as Maple Ridge Electric operates in Maple Ridge, British Columbia. An unrelated firm with almost the same name operates in Ontario. The contractor’s own site uses three spellings of the name, two addresses from before a move four years ago, and a home page opening with a line about reliability that never mentions electrical work or the province.

The entity sheet fixes the name as the registered trading name with no abbreviation, fixes the current address and phone, and sets the description: a family-run electrical contractor in Maple Ridge, BC, doing residential and light commercial work across the Fraser Valley. That sentence goes on the home page, the about page, the footer and the business listing. The service names are cut from eleven to six. A line on the about page names the province and the year the business was founded, which is enough to separate it from the Ontario firm. The corrections list runs to thirty-one entries across nine directories and four social profiles, and twelve of them are the old address.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the business is called, where it operates, what has changed recently, and who you keep being mistaken for. No charge.
2. The sweep. I find every place the business is described: your site, your listing, directories, social profiles, supplier pages, anything you send me. You add the ones only you know about.
3. The decisions. One call to settle the name, the description and the service names. This is short and occasionally contested, which is why it is done live rather than by email.
4. The work. Five to eight working days: the entity sheet, the corrections list and the rewritten pages.
5. Delivery. Everything handed over together. The corrections are made by your team, or by me as website updates where access allows.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call and agreed in writing before anything starts. It depends on how many locations and trading names exist and how many places the business is already described in, since the sweep is the bulk of the hours. A single-location business with one name is one of the smaller jobs on this site. The pricing page shows the four ways of working and the published bands.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The approved description gets expanded into a proper company profile for the places that want more than a sentence. The listing gets rewritten to match, as Google Business Profile copy. And where the business serves several towns, the clarified description becomes the basis of local SEO pages that no longer contradict each other. None of it is assumed. This work is complete on its own: one name, one address, one description, and nobody left wondering which business they are reading about.