If you’ve had your eye on SEO for a while you’ll probably be aware of the Google Quality Rater Guidelines, which favour content that shows Expertise, Authorativeness and Trust – known in the industry as the anacronym E.A.T. The recent Medic update emphasizes the E.A.T qualities even further, so working to these quality ideals is going to be one of the best ways to ensure your brand minimizes any loss of rankings due to Medic.
How can I optimize my site for E.A.T guidelines?
Google loves to exhibit relevancy in its search results, so any major updates tend to strive to rank only the most relevant content based on a lot of different deciding factors. So, it makes sense that we only fill our website pages and blogs with content that is precisely relevant. It sounds simple, but it can be easy to stray away from relevancy when sales objectives and content calendar discussions take place and creativity sneaks in, so always check new content ideas and audit old content against the E.A.T traits.
Proving Expertise
To prove your brand is an expert in its field you need to firstly show content that explains this, but also have credible 3rd party evidence of this too. A detailed “About Us” page is hugely important, and this should include any and all qualifications, accreditations, award nominations and wins, and some extensive information about your team. As for the 3rd party evidence that you are experts in your field, this can come from press about the company, links from award nominations, and positive user generated reviews from recognized sites such as TrustPilot, Google+ and TripAdvisor.
Proving Authorativeness
Your authorativeness is closely linked to your expertise. If you can prove your brand, team or business are experts, then you’ll gain authority. If you have various contributors to your blog, make sure each writer has their own bio and is posting content more than just once or twice. Include the author’s own qualifications and consider reciprocal links to any other work they have created for other reputable online publications. Continue to work on your social media engagement too.
Creating Trust
Users start to trust a website and its content through positive experiences, recommendations and reviews. When it comes to creating trust UX (user experience) is very important. If a website is slow to load, doesn’t work correctly in certain places, or asks for data without good reason, this creates a negative experience for the user. Google has ways of recognizing this UX and will take it into consideration when deciding how to rank a website.
Trust also applies to the relevance (and authoritativeness) of content. For example, a travel site providing advice on Travel Insurance makes perfectly logical sense. But when the travel site also starts talking about bikini diets, life goals or friendships then it’s heading into a relevancy grey area.
Creating new content for Google E.A.T
To keep Google satisfied with each and every new piece of content that you create, bear in mind the E.A.T traits and create a template of questions for your marketing team.
- WHY are you creating this content? What’s the goal?
- WHO is this content for? Why would they want to see it on your website?
- WHO has written the content and how can you prove that they’re an expert on this topic?
- WHERE is the content likely to be shared so that it gains authority?
- HOW is this content similar to other content that is already on your site or other content that the author has created elsewhere?
If you need support with your SEO strategy planning and ensuring your site meets Google Quality Guidelines, do call our team for a chat about our professional SEO services.