Google EAT

When it comes to SEO, Google E-A-T (or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) plays a big part in how your content is viewed by Google today. While it’s an essential aspect of content creation and affects how your website is seen by Google’s algorithm, it’s crucial to see it as a concept instead of a direct ranking factor.

Still, it’s vital to understand what Google E-A-T is all about and how you can harness the concept to improve your website for Google, other search engines, and your website visitors.

What is Google E-A-T?

Google E-A-T is an acronym that stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It works in tandem with SEO to determine how content should be ranked within a search query.

The quality of a page’s content has the largest influence on the organic search results of a query. While Google has never released the exact standards that it follows and how it chooses to rank results, Google E-A-T does revolve around certain factors when determining the quality of a page or its content:

• The purpose and benefit of the page
• The main content and its quality
• Information about the website and the creator of the main content
• The reputation of the said website and content creator

Basically, Google E-A-T involves the expertise of the creator, the authoritativeness of their content, and the trustworthiness of it.

E-A-T is one of the most important factors of SEO today, even according to Google. Without E-A-T, a website and the content are unlikely to be considered high quality or worthy of a high organic ranking.

Why is Google E-A-T Important?

Every website owner has likely heard of SEO and knows how important it is in terms of your website’s organic rank. However, every SEO professional knows that it isn’t just SEO that’s important to pay attention to. The best SEO experts know that E-A-T is also a crucial factor.

It’s important to realize that no SEO professional knows exactly what Google considers when ranking content. The search algorithm has never been released. While many people have made their educated guesses and figured out ways to utilize SEO to their benefit, they still don’t know what is included in Google’s list of what makes something SEO-friendly.

However, when it comes to Google’s E-A-T, we do know. And this is an advantage any business should leverage.

E-A-T gives content creators clear insight into what Google thinks makes high-quality content. Thanks to Google’s E-A-T criteria, content creators have a better idea of what to include and focus on to create content that Google will, at the very least, consider high quality.

Google E-A-T provides creators with guidelines on what great content should do:

• Help users
• Be created by an expert
• Be updated regularly
• Be both trustworthy and authoritative

The goal of Google E-A-T is not to punish websites that don’t follow Google’s ideal rules. Instead, it’s put in place to ensure that users have a good experience when online. There’s a lot of information online, and searching for quality content relevant to a user’s search can be difficult.

By relying on E-A-T, Google can provide a better online experience, and users are more satisfied with the Google search results they receive.

Even if Google E-A-T was not a core part of the Google algorithm, it’s still important to follow and meet E-A-T standards so the users that visit your website have an enjoyable experience. The last thing you want is for users to become frustrated or unsatisfied with the content on your website.

E-A-T ensures that credible content is prioritized. When users have access to credible content, they’ll remain on your page longer, trust your business more, and be likely to return in the future. When this occurs, your website’s bounce rate decreases, and Google recognizes your website as more credible and authoritative.

How to Improve Your Website’s E-A-T

Improving your website’s expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness will have a positive effect on your overall rankings and help ensure that your web page is in line with best SEO practices. Fortunately, improving E-A-T does not have to be hard, and much of it will work hand in hand with well-known SEO strategies.

1. Build Backlinks

Backlinks are vital for an effective SEO strategy. However, there are right and wrong ways to go about building backlinks.

To increase your credibility and improve SEO and E-A-T, ensure you’re building backlinks from relevant websites. If you’re an eCommerce website that primarily sells fashion, you want to build backlinks from fashion blogs, not food blogs or medical company sites.

2. Create High Quality Content Regularly

You can have hundreds of high-quality articles on your website, but if the last time you published was 2018, this won’t do anything to improve your E-A-T or SEO ranking.

The importance of content marketing should never be underestimated. Content needs to be published regularly and updated to reflect accurate information. If the content written is no longer factually accurate content, you may be penalized for it. Because content plays an important role in your expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness score and ranking, be sure to keep up to date on news in your industry and publish accurate, high-quality content routinely.

3. Collect Reviews

Reviews are incredibly helpful for your business. As many as 80% of customers will look at reviews before doing business with your company, which means having reviews for them to look through is important.

Reviews aren’t just important for your customers but also for your E-A-T. To Google, trustworthy businesses and high authority websites have a large number of reviews across multiple platforms. Google considers reviews from Facebook, Yelp, Google, Trustpilot, and other similar sites. Having a collection of positive reviews across all of these sites will only improve your authority and trustworthiness in the eyes of Google.

Another important part of collecting reviews is responding to them. Whenever a new review is posted, do your best to respond to it. Even if all you do is thank the commenter for their review, this will help build your credibility as a business. The same is true if a customer has a negative experience with your business and leaves a review.

4. Share Information About You and Your Business

Google wants to know who you are. They want to know about the person who wrote the content, who your team is, and what your business or website is about. Because of this, it’s important to not only have an About Us page and author pages.

When you create web pages dedicated to individual authors and your business as a whole, Google and your visitors can find the information they want. So even if not every user will read an author’s mini-autobiography, it will still help improve your E-A-T.

5. Work With Experts

Expert creators will know exactly how to create content that will benefit your website and meet Google’s standards. So whether you have a dedicated in-house team or hire a trusted author, your page content should reflect the high standards and knowledge of an expert in the field.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re covering fashion or advanced medical practices. Experts will always have access to the most relevant and authoritative information. Ultimately, you’ll get content that is of higher quality (in Google’s eyes and your visitors’) and see an improvement in your website’s E-A-T.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, we have to understand that Google is interested in protecting its users from unhelpful misinformation and in prioritizing high-quality information on its search engine. Therefore, for your website to rank well and bring in a consistent stream of organic visitors, it’s important to understand the various ranking factors and Google E-A-T guidelines so you can create the best content and website for your potential customers.

Want to incorporate E-A-T guidelines into your website and content to rank better organically? Consult our SEO Orlando experts today to see how we can help you create an effective SEO strategy with our proven track record.