If you are someone who does SEO optimisation and if you want to understand what will make your Search Engine Optimisation the most relevant then this blog is for you.
This is going to be a guide to understanding EEAT SEO. You might be familiar with E-E-A-T or this might be something completely new for you.
We will help you understand Google E-E-A-T. We will tell you what is E-E-A-T and why it is so important and should be included in every SEO guide.
Well, to start E-E-A-T is not something new because Google already had a thing called E-A-T. These were just a few guidelines as part of the Search Quality Rater Guidelines and there were certain E-A-T factors involved.
If you maintained these factors then you could expect your content to perform better. Here are a bit more details.
So, What Is EAT Exactly?
Before we begin explaining and demonstrating Google E-E-A-T, we would like to make it clear that this is not something directly used by Google when it comes to ranking.
This does not factor into rankings directly but it does in a very important way. Google works on feedback because it is that feedback that helps Google understand what visitors actually want.
That is where we come to Quality Raters. They are not a Google algorithm but actual people who are given guidelines so that they can rank websites according to multiple factors.
The guidelines that they get are called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
E-A-T was in existence as far back as 2014 but the extra E was added in 2022. This made it E-E-A-T.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. We will dive deep into each of them later on, these are principles that help the raters evaluate a website.
If a website has more of these SEO ranking factors, then that website would get better feedback and have better trust signals. This would ultimately mean quality content.
Here Is Why It Was Changed To E-E-A-T
Expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness are good and they should always be an important part of any list of SEO best practices. They are a simple way to understand if the content has quality.
However, the raters were facing a problem because with E-A-T, there was a lot of manipulation going on and the current rating system was not able to detect them.
A person could easily claim expertise on something and create a genuine atmosphere of trustworthiness and the raters would deem the content better feedback.
But this is something that lacked a very important factor that was not taken into account until 2022. We are talking about the additional E in E-E-A-T.
The Case of The Additional E in E-E-A-T
The additional E stands for Experience. This is because while it is easy to replicate expertise on something but it is very different from experience.
Someone can simply copy something and claim to be an expert but they simply will not be able to talk in depth about something without experience. Experience in the form of anecdotes etc.
That is why we come to the latest iteration of the Search Quality Rater Guidelines which has E-E-A-T.
This makes it difficult for manipulative content to get a higher rank because you can replicate everything about the content and make it seem high quality but you cannot replicate experience.
This was the missing link that raters complained about because they could understand that a website might not have relevant content but it matched E-A-T guidelines and had to be given better feedback.
Take A Look at What E-E-A-T Means
Experience
One of the metrics for good content is judged through experience. This means according to Google guidelines if the author mentions their experience and brings in their own flavour into the content then that will be much more relevant.
This means if you want your content to be relevant then you need to bring in experts that actually have experience with that kind of contact.
For example, if you own a brand that makes candy then you should hire a retired candy maker for all your content because they will write and mention things that only people with experience can know.
And we are won’t even have to mention why this is so important when it comes to Your Money Your Life (YMYL) content.
This is the missing link to the already existing E-E-A-T guideline because this brings in a factor such as experience which cannot be replicated by content writers.
And the fact that actual humans rate it makes it even more hard to manipulate.
Expertise
The second factor that you should always consider for your SEO strategies is to have experts write your content.
This means you should not just hire anyone to write the content because they are a good writer but you should only get experts that understand the topic.
This is very apparent because the E-E-A-T guidelines are not for any algorithm but for humans and expertise easy to spot.
For example, if you are the owner of a glass-making brand and you want your online content to be relevant and have a good rank then that content should be written by a glass-making expert.
This ensures how information-rich the content can be because there might be certain terminologies and certain principles in glass-making that only experts understand.
And if an expert does not write the content, then it will just be an opinion blog and not information-rich relevant content.
That is why expertise is so high on the list when comes to content relevance. It should also be among the top SEO tips that you should have expert language within the content that makes it information-rich.
When it comes to expertise, everything is judged from the qualification of the author to the track record of that author and much more.
Authoritativeness
You can bring in experts to write about something and you can even bring in experienced experts to write about that topic.
That alone will not make your website the leading source of information for that topic. There is a certain legitimacy that determines the ranking of any website or content.
We are talking about authoritativeness or topical authority. It is when a certain website is associated with a certain topic of expertise.
This is probably the hardest thing to do when it comes to all the factors of E-E-A-T because it can take a lot of time to create a certain reputation and authority online.
You can even call it brand value because it is quite compatible with that. For example, if you need quick information on anything then Wikipedia would be your primary choice. This means Wikipedia has the authority for it.
Now if you want to create a website similar to Wikipedia and let’s say you replicate everything from the content to bringing in experts to write about it all. That will not mean your website is going to rank before Wikipedia.
This is why authority is such an important part of SEO.
Trustworthiness
And the last but one of the most important factors is going to be trust. There are several areas of trust by which raters determine whether a website or content is trustworthy.
If you want to establish the trustworthiness of a website then you need to work on everything and by everything, we mean taking into consideration everything.
You should have the best kind of encryption on the website and you should only site trusted sources of information along with factual data.
If you do everything by the books that Google prescribes and never indulge in malpractices especially when it comes to an eCommerce website then you can gain trust.
A lot of it also has to do with visual trust and how the website looks and whether it looks shady. This is because the websites will be rated by actual human beings and sometimes it is difficult to quantify all the parameters they are looking into.
In order to establish trust, you can do so many things which include avoiding clickbaites and also having good customer support in place. It also means staying clean when it comes to financial transactions.
Even your contact information will determine the trustworthiness of your website.
The entire point of E-E-A-T is to ensure that people have a good search experience. The more your website complies with this the better you can expect feedback from raters.
Why Should You Care About E-E-A-T?
You should care about E-E-A-T because it has the power to get you to rank one in the search results and it also has the power to completely destroy your rank.
E-E-A-T will help you convince search engines and algorithms that you have valuable content and it is important that you understand this.
The Google algorithm is responsible for ranking your content but that algorithm is constantly trained and tested and feedback is given through the help of raters.
They are actual humans who have been trained to follow a guideline which is the guideline of E-E-A-T. They rate the quality of search rankings and that can result in changes to those rankings.
That means even if you have managed to convince the search engine algorithm to give you a good rank and you did not follow E-E-A-T then your rank might fall in the future if it gets reviewed by a rater.
That is why you should always make sure your content is not just optimised for SEO but actually follows the principles of E-E-A-T.
Here Are the Different Levels Of E-E-A-T Ratings
Highest E-E-A-T
The pages with the highest E-E-A-T rating are the most credible authority when it comes to a certain topic.
The pages with the highest E-E-A-T have the best kind of content but they have been producing the best kind of content for years and people actually rely on them.
They do not have intrusive ads and people can expect to get exactly what they are looking for when they visit those pages.
High E-E-A-T
When a page gets a high ranking, it means that the website follows all the factors mentioned in E-E-A-T.
It means that the page is not trying to scam people and that the title of the page is not misleading. It also means that the page just does what it is supposed to do and is not hiding behind false promises.
Low E-E-A-T
These are the pages that are not actually ideal and there are different levels to how low your E-E-A-T can get.
Pages that have intrusive clickbaites and spam web pages fall into this category. They do not feel trustworthy and they might even be harmful to the visitors.
This kind of rating is mostly given to misleading web pages that do not deliver on what they promise.
No E-E-A-T
There is also a specific category of pages that simply do not have a rating because they fail to comply with all the factors that contribute to E-E-A-T.
For example, if a cooking and food page does not have any food recipes and only has affiliate marketing links to products then it is not going to have a rating.
Sometimes the page can get no rating even if it is not trying to scam people because the content might just not be very high quality.
Sometimes this kind of no rating is given to pages with content that have been copied or written with AI.
It is mostly to do with content that is of very bad quality and the author might not be an expert in that topic.
The page might get no rating if it has a past record of trying to scam people.
Simple Tips to Improve Your E-E-A-T
Keep Your Content Updated
One of the best ways to improve your E-E-A-T is to simply have updated content and you can update your content in multiple ways.
This is easy with blogs on your website because you can update them periodically with new information.
For example, if you have a blog about “The Best Kids Toys In 2023” then you can update that next year with new information and change the year and date.
This will simply mean that you pay attention to your content and that you make an effort to keep new and fresh relevant information.
Person Schema Markup
The other thing you must keep in mind is what is the actual reason for E-E-A-T. it is for the benefit of the visitors.
That is why you should always think from the perspective of the visitors and make sure your content is as helpful as possible.
One of the best ways to do this is to have your data structured properly. This means you should not use a paragraph when you can use a line and you must also make sure that that data is easily identifiable.
Let’s say for example someone is trying to find out the price of bubble gum over the years. You could technically write a paragraph but if you want to improve your E-E-A-T then you should write in bullet points.
You should write each date and the price of bubble gum next to it. It is even better if you have photos of the different kinds of bubble gum over the years in history.
Use Creativity
You should never follow a rigid path by only using text because that is an assured way of not having unique content.
You should use any kind of media you like from images to graphics and even videos and audio and everything else you want to.
The more you try out new things and go out of your way to prove a point the better it is for the content ratings.
Even if you do not want to use a lot of media you should try out new kinds of content such as podcasts and opinion pieces and even videos.
You should not just have paragraphs of text without any images because that is not very helpful for the visitors.
Always Add Something New
No matter how good your intention is of providing new information and content, whatever you write has probably been written before.
That is why the best thing you can do is to choose a topic that is relevant but hasn’t been written before and even if you cannot find that kind of a topic there is something else you can do.
You can do market research about the same topic and find out what other people have missed out on. That can be current data and that can be a different kind of information.
Or even better that can be a personal anecdote that can only be written by someone with experience.
If you write on topics that are relevant with new and fresh information that nobody has written then you can expect amazing E-E-A-T ratings.
Link All Your Content
Your content should be information rich but your content should also have supporting content. That is one of the best ways to improve your E-E-A-T.
This is because it is not just enough to have backlinks to important websites but you should also have semantic content linking.
You should link older content to new content but at the same time, you should never force it and only link relevant content that can actually help the readers.
Don’t Let Amateurs Write for You
If you never want your content to get a good E-E-A-T rating then all you need to do is to only hire amateurs who have no idea about the content and are studying the content right before writing it.
One of the main principles of E-E-A-T is expertise and experience. We have talked about both of them and what they actually mean but it is important to implement them.
It might be difficult for you to actually get experts sometimes who are also good content writers but there is a way out.
You should get excellent content writers and bring in experts and let them collaborate so that you get the best of both worlds.
You get the expertise of the expert packaged in the best way possible and written professionally by a professional content writer.
We hope this blog will help you understand why E-E-A-T is so important when it comes to SEO if you ever want your page to rank among the top search results.
But at the same time, we also understand how difficult it can be to understand and practically use all the principles and guidelines of E-E-A-T.
But you do not have to worry because we are here for you. We are Think To Share IT Solutions and we are one of the pioneers of implementing E-E-A-T into everything that we create.
We are one of the leading web designers and developers in India and along with that we also have one of the most reputed digital marketing and SEO divisions.
We will make sure that your content is not just high quality but is also consistently getting the highest ratings and the best rankings.
We welcome you to visit our website and check out everything that we do.
Common E-E-A-T FAQs
What are the principles of E-E-A-T?
The four principles of E-E-A-T are Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. They are part of the Search Quality Rater Guidelines by Google.
E-E-A-T helps Google’s raters give ratings to webpages based on their legitimacy and genuineness.
These ratings can greatly affect what kind of rank your page gets when it comes to search results as these ratings evaluate a page on multiple fronts.
There is experience where the page is evaluated on how experienced the author is and then there is trustworthiness and expertise. Then there is authoritativeness.
What does E-E-A-T stand for in SEO?
You need to understand why these guidelines have been created in the first place and it is to help users only get quality content that is helpful to them and are of trusted credentials.
This means that if you comply with E-E-A-T principles you can expect to get amazing ratings which will help you get a better rank.
This is a core principle of search engine optimization because without improving your E-E-A-T, you cannot expect search engine optimisation and you cannot expect good rankings.
How do you demonstrate E-E-A-T?
If you want to demonstrate E-E-A-T to the raters then all you need to do is to have quality content that has been written by an expert with a lot of information along with other credible backlinking.
Along with that, you need to make sure to update that content on a regular basis and also avoid any kind of malpractice such as clickbait.
Along with that, you must also mention if you have sponsored content and also try to keep the content original and avoid artificial intelligence (AI) at all costs. You can use AI for web design, for streamlining your content process but never use AI for content generation.
Additionally, if you can bring in guest authors that already have a good reputation in the industry then it can also work wonders for your content.
You must understand that the more you make your content helpful and the more your content is scannable, the better will be your E-E-A-T ratings.