In the world of SEO, Google E-A-T is on every SEO specialist’s radar and has been a trending subject since August 2018. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness, which was outlined in Google’s official Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. E-A-T looks at the content creation, the content creator, and the website overall to understand whether the content provides valuable and correct information to the user. This guide will explain what E-A-T is, how important it is, and how to optimise towards a SEO friendly website by using Google’s E-A-T as guidance.
Expertise
Creating content that is from an expert and knowledgeable source is paramount for SEO and is the ‘E’ in E-A-T. Understanding how to communicate effectively with your user is another important element of expertise. Effective communication can be achieved by having the correct information displayed, knowing what the audience’s user intent is and delivering the best information to them for their stage in the buyer’s journey.
To create expert content, start by undertaking keyword research to understand what information users are searching for. Being clear on user intent is important because it allows you to understand what kind of content you should be creating relevant to your specific keywords.
Equally key is understanding where the user is in their buyer journey when creating informative content. Considering each stage of the journey, awareness, consideration and decision enables you to create relevant content specific to users at each stage. It also reduces the risk of losing them from your funnel because the information you delivered wasn’t right for their buying stage. For example, if the content is targeting a keyword which is about a specific subject that the users you are targeting have an advanced knowledge in, those users will not want to be presented with a beginner’s guide to the subject.
Authority
The ‘A’ in E-A-T stands for authority. Creating expert content is just the start of the strategy. Authority comes into play when experts or influencers cite your content from their external websites as a source of reliable and useful information. When this starts to happen, you become an expert and authority within the digital space.
Here are some strategies to help you build authoritative presence in the digital space:
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- Backlink building: links from relevant and authoritative websites are a big factor when it comes to rankability and authority. Outreaching to relevant and expert websites, which can use the content you have published as information and citations, is a great way to start building these links.
- Brand mentioning: Monitoring your brand mentions is a strategic way to obtain backlinks from news articles if they have been talking about your brand. This method is easy way to build links whilst also creating further authority for your content and overall website.
- Social media sharing: Sharing through social media will help to create awareness of your content and ultimately help other experts to find your content and link back to it.
- Wikipedia page: Having a Wikipedia page for your brand is a big signal of authority within the marketplace. Although, getting a Wikipedia page can be difficult unless you’re a recognised person or brand.
- Digital PR: Acquiring backlinks through digital PR efforts will increase the authority metric of your website due to influencers and news outlets linking back from press releases and other digital PR tactics.
Trustworthiness
Trustworthiness is the ‘T’ in E-A-T. Expertise and Authority will help your rankings, however, if your website is not seen as trustworthy by Google, your rankings could be rapidly and negatively impacted. Trustworthiness comes from positive customer reviews and via establishing trust signals on your site. For example;
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- offering clear ways to contact your via your site
- identifying physical locations for your business
- making your business terms and conditions pages easy to find and use
- having a HTTPS website demonstrating security
- having a clearly accessible privacy policy
- sharing knowledge through linking to authoritative websites in your content.
While E-A-T is a multi-stranded part of Google’s search quality evaluation, we hope this blog has demonstrated some straightforward ways to improve the way your website performs against the three elements, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. E-A-T is a significant ranking factor for SEO and it’s important that you consider how your site ranks for each part of it.
To find out more or to discuss how Innovation Visual could help you improve your E-A-T position why not get in touch to start a discussion today? Don’t forget to take a look at our SEO services for more information.
