Practical: How to use the Entity Relationship Planning Workbook

This practical lesson walks you through the Entity Relationship Planning Workbook, a spreadsheet that helps you plan and implement entity relationships with Schema.org markup and persistent IDs. Beatrice Gamba explains how each tab works and why the order matters, so you can produce a complete, interconnected plan for a client site or your own. By the end you have a blueprint for a knowledge graph that search engines and AI systems can follow.

What this lesson covers

• How the workbook is organised and why the tabs should be completed in order
• Creating a consistent ID URL pattern for every entity
• Defining the organisation, people, concepts and products
• Planning articles with authors, concepts and products linked from the start
• Reviewing the relationships map and working through the validation checklist
• Following the implementation guide and a phased rollout

The workbook starts with the organisation, because every other entity connects back to it. You record consistent core details, an address and the social profiles that act as external sameAs references. The people tab defines authors, founders and subject matter experts, with URL-friendly slugs that become part of each person’s ID. Marking founders matters because founder relationships are an authority signal. The concepts tab defines your core topics and links them to Wikidata and Wikipedia, connecting your graph to the wider semantic web. Products are related to concepts, and the article tab brings everything together by linking each planned article to its author, concepts and products before it is written.

The relationships tab then shows every connection, such as people to the organisation and articles to their authors and topics, and checks that each uses an ID reference. The validation tab is a pre-flight checklist covering entity inventory, relationships, ID uniqueness, technical validation, consistency and deployment readiness. The lesson stresses that fixing issues at this stage is far easier than after markup is live. The implementation tab outlines deployment steps and a phased timeline, finishing with monitoring how entities are recognised in search and by AI assistants.

Practical advice runs through the walkthrough. Start with the organisation and people. Keep names and titles identical everywhere. Plan relationships before writing. Choose slugs carefully, because changing them later breaks IDs. Treat the workbook as a living document. The lesson ends with an assignment to complete the workbook for a real or hypothetical organisation.

This lesson is the hands-on companion to Entity Relationship Mapping in Module 2, Brand Entity Development and Recognition. It suits SEOs, consultants and developers who want a structured way to plan a knowledge graph before writing any markup.