Google is hungry for content but that’s not the reason for the E-E-A-T abbreviation, it stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Google very much favours and in turn, rewards websites that produce high quality content, which is why when we’re advising on SEO we’re not just interested in cramming in those keywords and search phrases.
In Google’s own words, “Google’s automated ranking systems are designed to present helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings, in the top Search results.”
It’s the E-E-A-T guidelines we like to follow with our clients on creating content and SEO friendly content. Regardless of the size or at what point your business is at, you’re the expert in your business and its getting that authority across in your content that highlights the experience, expertise and trustworthiness. Informative and accurate websites engage users and keep them on your site longer, leads to more engagement, be that filling a contact form in or making a purchase on your website.
Lets take a bit more of a look at each part:
Experience
Any simple search you make on the net, be that in Google, YouTube (Don’t forget that YouTube is the second largest search engine out there! We’ll discuss that elsewhere) or one of the other multitude of search engines, its highly likely that its content that’s going to have been crafted by people. So from an SEO point of view articulating your experience can be a real winner. Whether that’s describing how your service solves a problem, reviews, answering questions but importantly not writing content like a machine produced it.
- Is the information trustworthy and genuine
- Have you offered some kind of practical advice and insight to your industry, product or service
- Can you offer some kind of other angle on the usual content that’s out there, a deeper understanding
There’s no hard and fast rules and writing great content is all part of SEO. Google factors in topics, niches and results can vary dramatically depending on your market and the competition in your market place. Longevity can play its role, have you been a business for a long time, has you web domain been registered for a long time.
Expertise
Proving you’re an expert in your field isn’t always immediately easy and Google will analyse the background information from your site as well as your content. From an SEO point of view this is where backlinks can really help from relevant sources. Do other sites, directories or published information look at your website as an ‘expert’ or ‘trustworthy’ source of information?
Google’s own rating teams and algorithms assess all the time if information is appropriate and trustworthy.
Authoritativeness
It’s something that overlaps with expertise. Does content on your site fit with what your home page or whatever the main content is for your website. It gets tricky if you’re a jack of all trades, as articulating multiple subjects and getting a great ranking position on line can be more challenging. Backlinks from other relevant sites to yours and it should be remembered that not all backlinks offer a benefit. From a technical SEO perspective we have to weed out some backlinks. Some can be viewed badly from spam sites and its possible to ask Google to unlink or disavow links to your website.
Trustworthiness
All of the information really should be trustworthy on your site. Lets face it, we’re not looking to mislead anyone; well I guess it depends on what niche you’re in!
If you’ve followed the E-E-A-T guidelines then the information you’re providing on your site is already well on the way to being seen as trustworthy. Have you got any awards to back up the information on your site, testimonials, product ratings.
When it comes to some industries offering financial service/advice, healthcare and legal information, trustworthiness becomes of even more importance and there are stricter guidelines on what should or shouldn’t be presented and more stringent checks when it comes to advertising on platforms such as Google Ads or Meta.
How does E-E-A-T actually affect my websites page rank?
Page quality scores are almost certainly affected by Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines and how you’ve tailored your SEO. However for the moment it’s not a sole ranking factor but its likely its importance is going to grow and may well be turned into an more considered factor as AI grows and more people use systems such as Chat GPT or their favoured AI for content creating.
AI content and E-E-A-T
Not everyone is a natural born writer and coming up with ideas can sometimes be tricky to help keep your content fresh, neaten up a new web page or update your companies blog. And there’s not problem with using AI generated content, BUT make sure you’re not using what’s generated word for word, read through, amend and check sources if you’re relying on data. E-E-A-T and Google’s own AI will generally always work out what’s written naturally by a person and what’s machine generated and for the moment at least, that person created content is always going to have the upper hand.
AI content and E-E-A-T
In conclusion from an SEO point of view E-E-A-T offers a great structure for you to consider what your content offers to those you want to attract to your side. Research keyword ideas, take a look at your competition and certainly for those ranking better, try to understand what it is that’s making their website appeal more to Google than yours.
There’s always some easy wins with SEO and some that take more time and those that are less obvious which is where an SEO agency and expert at Amagence can help with.
Contact us on 07710 181812 to discuss how we could assist with your business’s SEO needs or click here to fill in a contact form and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.