Unless you are new to SEO, you must have heard something about Google E.A.T. The concept has been around since it was first introduced back in 2014, but it never really became an essential element in SEO until 2018, after Google’s “medic” update.
E.A.T. is the acronym for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is one of the many guidelines adopted by Google to determine a page’s or website’s overall quality, and it affects how a page or a website ranks in SERPs.
Keep reading as we explore what E.A.T. is and its impact on your site’s SEO.
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What to Look For When Hiring an SEO Consultant
The trick for any business to succeed on the internet depends on the efficiency of its SEO strategy. If you ask business owners that have succeeded in getting the most out of the internet, they will tell you that mastering SEO takes a lot, and it is almost impossible for a business to nail it without expert help.
However, you must select an SEO consultant that’ll bring the desired results and a correspondingly high return on investment.
Here are some of the things you should look out for when selecting an SEO expert:
- Experience
- Loyal clientele
- Getting high-quality links for clients in their fold
- Strictly follows white hat SEO tactics
- Realistic propositions
- The reputation of the person or the entity behind the company
- Cost of the service
- Reviews and testimonials
If you are running a business in New York and are struggling to see results from your SEO efforts, you may want to talk to an SEO consultant specialized in the NY area to help you achieve the desired results.
A Breakdown of E.A.T.
E.A.T. stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Below is a brief explanation of what the three elements stand for.
Expertise
Expertise means having deep insight into a particular field based on a content level instead of the organization or website level. Formal expertise is a factor if a website is based around Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics like finance, health, and law.
For other topics, real-life experience is enough to establish expertise. For example, a skateboarding article may not require the content creator to have formal education in skateboarding.
Authority
When determining the authoritativeness of a page or website, Google evaluators look at the number of times other websites have linked to content uploaded to the site. Often sites will link to a website based on who or what organization runs a website.
If other website owners deem a website as being run by experts in a specific field, they are likely to view the site as an authority and thus link to it often.
Trustworthiness
Trustworthiness speaks of how reliable a site is. Some factors used by Google evaluators to determine a page’s reliability are the volume of positive organic reviews, the reachability of the site owners, having a physical location, having a terms and conditions policy, and enhancing the security of the page by implementing HTTPS.
How E.A.T. Can Impact Your SEO
Before delving into how E.A.T. impacts SEO, it is important to understand that E.A.T. is not a ranking factor in itself. However, Google relies on its evaluators’ feedback to determine the value a specific website offers to users.
Based on the rating, Google algorithms can then decide which sites to rank based on their E.A.T.
This means that a website with a seemingly excellent SEO strategy may fail at ranking on SERPs if it scores low on E.A.T.
Why E.A.T. Matters to Google?
E.A.T. matters for all search queries; however, it matters more in some search queries than in others. For example, if a user types cute dog images in the search bar, E.A.T., while applicable, may not matter as much because the search subject is subjective, and results showing one or two scary dogs may not be a big deal.
But if a user types in the search query the proper aspirin dosage for a pregnant woman, E.A.T. matters a lot. If Google were to rank content written by a writer with no pharmaceutical knowledge from an unreliable website on the first page of SERPs, it risks offering misleading information.
Under such circumstances, not only would the results be inconvenient, but they would also be life-threatening if the user went ahead and treated the information as accurate. The same applies to all topics that require expert knowledge on the subject topic.
Improving E.A.T.
You can make some adjustments to boost your E.A.T. and your SERP ranking. Here are the main things that you may want to focus at:
High-Quality Content
Content is the ultimate king, and there is no way around it. Google depends on human evaluators with some expertise in a specific topic to evaluate a site’s E.A.T.
Therefore, it is important to ensure that your content is well researched, accurate, free from grammatical errors, and easy to read. Also, the content should be tailored with a human reader in mind instead of getting past Google bots.
Relevance
It is vital to ensure that all the content you upload to your site is relevant to your field of expertise or brand. For example, if you run a pet-based website, you have no business talking about camping gear. Relevance also applies to your outbound and backlinks.
Create and Maintain a Good Reputation
Reputation is important in boosting your site’s trustworthiness. Therefore ensure you work towards maintaining a good reputation on and off-site.
One way of improving your reputation is by responding to your audience whenever they reach out on the different channels provided on your site.
You may also want to display any relevant awards won in your field of expertise, testimonials received from happy clients, and provide a reviews section where your audience can leave a review of their experience with your site.
Final Words
While E.A.T. is not a ranking factor in Google, it significantly impacts your site’s ranking in SERPs. It is therefore essential to ensure your site has a strong E.A.T.
If success with SEO feels like an unattainable feat, it would be best to let the experts handle your site’s SEO on your behalf.
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