What is E-A-T? Why is E-A-T important for SEO?

Google’s Quality Rater guidelines often discuss the concept of E-A-T. A webpage that wants to increase its rank on Google must demonstrate good E-A-T SEO practices. But before that, let us dig deeper to understand what exactly it is and how it can affect SEO.

What is E-A-T?

The E-A-T acronym stands for 'Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness'. Google raters use this framework to assess content creators, webpages, and websites as a whole. E-A-T is an important ranking signal of Google. Google's algorithms are such that they can easily identify those pages that demonstrate high trustworthiness and authoritativeness. If the quality raters feel like a user would be comfortable reading, sharing, and recommending any content, that earns the site a high level of E-A-T. Experts are the people who possess the necessary knowledge and understanding of the specific topic. No website wants to send incorrect information to its users. So make sure that people who create content for your website possess subject matter expertise and knowledge.

Authoritativeness is basically related to link-building. Where experts have certain knowledge, authoritativeness is what happens when others recognize that expertise. That recognition can come in the form of links, mentions, shares, reviews, or other citations. Once you have established yourself as an expert, you need to establish yourself as an authority.

Trustworthiness is to earn trust through years of hard work so that any brand or business is willing to endorse or buy from you. People should feel that they can trust the information they find on the website. If you want to establish yourself then you need to build trust among users and make them believe that your website is a trustworthy source. You can generate trust by paying attention to three key areas- accuracy, accessibility, and reliable sources. If you are trying to optimize an authoritative site, paying attention to these rules becomes a must. Otherwise, there is a high chance that Google or any website quality raters might give your page a 'low quality' rating.

This whole process makes E-A-T an essential strategy required for your website to survive the competition. 7 SEAS Solutions can make the best among your competitors by giving a boost to your SEO practices with E-A-T and other digital marketing tools.

How does YMYL go hand-in-hand with E-A-T?

Those websites that sell products or services, which directly or indirectly impact the happiness, health, financial stability, and safety of the users are known as YMYL (Your Money Your Life) websites. These sites are held in high regard because the stakes are incredibly high when it comes to content published on these websites. If you got a website that provides valuable information to the readers, say about a service, the pages that include some tips on that service can be termed as YMYL pages. When it comes to YMYL, make sure that any content on your website should help people who use your content. Make your users feel safe. For digital marketers, this is vital because Google takes the responsibility quite seriously and presumes that only experts with experience will be authoring YMYL content. Topics that fall under the YMYL category are shopping information, government, legal issues, social services, medical advice, news, and current events, information of people, and such other topics.

YMYL SEO and EAT are often grouped together and go hand in hand, for a good reason. Since Google is so cautious regarding YMYL pages, one of the first things they check to make sure the content is not harmful, is how optimized the page is for E-A-T criteria.

Google's guidelines for high E-A-T

E-A-T SEO has three basic rules that will help Google in looking at their web pages better than before. It will also help in differentiating high-quality content from the low-quality ones.

The websites which are displayed by Google should include high-quality content and a good level of expertise along with authority and trustworthiness. Google has also appointed evaluators that will help the company in analyzing the content along with ranking done from lowest to highest.

Apart from that, special documents are created to deal with the quality of the content. It is one of the best ways which assist in understanding the quality of the content. Stress is laid on quality as only quality content is capable of generating more traffic towards the site.

The other guideline of Google includes E-A-T optimization.There are two main types of expertise according to Google. An idea about these two types has been mentioned:

Formal and professional: According to Google, the enterprise should hire professionals of that field for which they are offering services. This will increase the authenticity factor of the content. Hire a team of SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to deliver valuable content to your users.

Expertise on a daily basis: Apart from professionals, some blogs should be created for such people who like to read information online. Examples of such content include recipes, house cleaning tips, etc.

Some factor related to E-A-T SEO worth considering

Following are some practices to build credibility among your readers:

• You need to keep a watch on how often the site is maintained or updated. While checking your website, if you come across out-of-date articles that most likely will not rank anywhere, it is important to update them by replacing the old keywords with the trendy and most-searched ones. This will ensure the flow of traffic. Also, keep a check on how responsive your social media posts are.
• If someone has questions and wants to get in touch with you, then don't make them wait. Build a 'contact' page and include a link to it in your header and footer. This will help your reader contact you easily.
• If anything on your site that can be considered dubious, it must be removed at once. Google will blacklist your website if you are using unethical SEO practices like keyword stuffing. So, refrain from it. Make sure you keep it honest with your visitors. They will reward your efforts by coming back to your site again and again.
• Always put yourself in the shoes of a typical visitor who visits your website regularly and reads your articles. Make sure that whatever content you put on your website is authentic and authoritative. Ask yourself what you can do and how innovatively it can be done to build a reader’s trust and credibility. Always try to think from a reader’s point of view and then write accordingly.

If you want to know more on how content can be created that is sure to get an approval from Google, you can refer to the guidelines mentioned.

How to improve E-A-T Score?

The content, data, images, and information present on the website is accessible to millions of viewers, which has been made possible with search engine optimization. It increases traffic at your website through the blogs created by you and leads to more monetary benefit and popularity. With the emergence of technical advancement in the IT world, varied concepts are incorporated to expand its utility in browsing the websites. E-A-T (Expertise- Authoritativeness- Trustworthiness) is updated to provide easy and effective search query. It is a major aspect of SEO that brings more organic traffic to your site. So, it is important to improve the E-A-T score for effective results.

Authentic and effective content: E-A-T is all about qualitative content. The authentic content attracts the viewers to visit the site. The appropriate and authentic content is rewarded by the search engine. Characteristics of quality content are:

Detailed headlines give a glimpse of the content you are reflecting upon.

Genuine data and evidence exhibit the feature of reliability of the content uploaded on the site.

Comprehensive content gives insightful connotation to the content.

Well organized and coherent ideas are presented and optimized for mobile so that they are accessible to everyone.

Include credentials: It is significant to give valuable advice or quote some of the recognized people or celebrities so that people can find your thoughts legitimate and relevant in the present scenario.

Expand authority across the web: It helps to improve the E-A-T SEO if a popular site is linked to your content. This makes the content more trustworthy and reliable. There are so many methods to link your blog or site with other reputed links that help you to expand your authority in securing rank on the server.

E-A-T score caters to the needs of your readers and enhances the credibility of the authors. It can only happen when the content and the presentation has been displayed by an expert with a flavor of authority and trust.

Increase traffic with backlinks

Google E-A-T allows the use of backlinks. It is important for a website to have backlinks of high quality. This is also demanded by Google, so they should search for the best option. If backlinks are created then you can generate more links on direct sources and in this way you can get more traffic towards your website.

The E-A-T strategy of SEO followed by our digital marketing experts will help you in designing the content that goes with Google guidelines. They lay stress on making the website popular and that is achieved through online marketing by adopting different digital marketing strategies.

FAQs

What is a Google E-A-T score?

The main goal of Google E-A-T is to give a better experience to the users by promoting their website that they can easily trust. For this, Google has assigned some guidelines known as Search Quality Raters. The main motive of this guideline is to search the quality of the content. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust. It is important for the rating of the website.

How can I improve my E-A-T SEO score?

There are some simple yet effective ways to boost your E-A-T score. It is important to add the author’s name and his/her credentials to a blogpost that will render credibility to the information shared. Along with that, you should also focus on creating a personal branding of your business which in turn will result in more traffic. Informative and brief content should be added to give a clear picture about the products and services. Avail the facility of social media sites for the promotion of your products and services for reaching a large audience.

Is E-A-T SEO an important ranking factor?

Yes, E-A-T SEO is a very important ranking factor of the websites. Complying with the E-A-T guidelines can uplift the low quality content to a higher stature and automatically your webpages will start featuring in Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).