Your Guide to Google’s E-E-A-T and How it Affects your SEO

Experience

Experience in content is the idea that an author has real-world experience with what they’re writing about. This proves that whatever you’re talking about is authentic and backed up by real-world experience!

Experience in E-E-A-T content can come in a variety of formats, such as:

• Restaurant reviews that an author has actually been to
• Products on an eCommerce website being reviewed by people who have used them
• Testimonials from people who have gone through certain procedures
• Real stories of people who have had certain life experiences
• Articles with video reviews or testimonials
• Stories from those who have lived in certain areas or had certain lifestyles
• “I tried X for 30 days” formatted content, or similar themed pieces.

Expertise

Expertise requires, as the name suggests, expert knowledge of a topic. Google wants to see the author has not only experience, but the appropriate credentials, training, and qualifications for the topic. This is particularly important for YMYL sites (more on that later!), where a high level of expertise is demanded by Google.

Experience and expertise are very closely related concepts but can be mixed up! Experience is evaluating how much real-world experience an author has with the topic, while expertise comes from a combination of education, training, and experience, with a high level of expert knowledge required.

For example, an article about a bride’s experience at her wedding venue would be considered to have a high level of experience, while an article from a wedding planner about how to choose a venue would be considered to have a high level of expertise. Both of these are useful articles but would be judged in different ways by Google.

Authority

Authoritativeness in content aims to determine the reputation of a publisher in their field. This means that authoritativeness is evaluated not just for an individual piece of content, but also for the author and the website as a whole.

Reputable sites, like industry publishers, journalistic publications, industry papers, and other high-authority publications, are considered the most authoritative.

For example, this piece would be considered highly authoritative for the following reasons:

• It comes from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, which is a highly trusted professional association
• It is written by a qualified professional, Dr. Paul Vitneas
• There is also a link to Dr Vitneas’ own surgery, further backing up his authoritativeness as an author

Trustworthiness

When evaluating the trustworthiness of a piece of content, Google uses a variety of its own SEO tools to look for signals that the author is honest in their writing, and that the site is safe for users.

Trustworthiness is arguably the most important part of E-E-A-T and takes the author, the content, and the website into account.

In the words of Content Product Owner, Shona Worsman:

‘Building trust is essential to inspire users to buy from you. EEAT signals are like the online version of your store or office. The more legitimate and trustworthy you seem, the more likely your audience will stroll right in and feel confident about doing business with you!’

In order to be deemed trustworthy, authors must be clear about who has written the content and their credentials, cite a range of trusted sources, ensure the content is factually correct, avoid plagiarism, and avoid having too many ads on the page.

Trustworthiness covers more than just content marketing – it will also look at the design of the site for mobile and desktop, additional trust cues such as reviews and ratings on-site, the security of the site (Google itself has mentioned that an insecure shopping checkout is seen as untrustworthy), and a range of other wider technical SEO factors all contribute to the trustworthiness of a piece of content.

1. Build High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are arguably one of the most important SEO tactics you can employ, regardless of E-E-A-T. They increase your chances of being crawled and portray your site as a reliable source on the web.

In terms of E-E-A-T, a high number of relevant, industry-specific backlinks tell search engines that your site is a source of high-quality content, and is, therefore, a trustworthy publisher.

When building backlinks, take into account not just how many you can get, but where you can get them from. In terms of E-E-A-T, a few backlinks from reputable and relevant industry sources are worth much more than many links of lower quality and relevance.

2. Review and Update Content

This is one of the most important things you can do to improve your E-E-A-T! Take a look at your existing content and identify areas for improvement – this could be:

• Expanding existing content to go into more depth about a subject
• Identifying opportunities to add reviews and testimonials
• Create case studies showing your industry experience
• Create blog posts based on the questions your customers are asking
• Build relationships with industry experts and include their comments in your copy

By updating and optimising your content in line with these guidelines, you can increase not just your rankings, but your site useability too.

3. Showcase Positive User Reviews and Testimonials

Testimonials and customer reviews are great for building trust with your users, so it makes sense that they would be great for your E-E-A-T as well! Testimonials provide proof of experience and trust signals to Google, while also being a great help for users working through the deliberation stage of the messy middle.

There are lots of ways to automate reviews using APIs and platforms like TrustPilot or TripAdvisor, but if that’s not possible, displaying any kind of review or testimonial will help to make your business more appealing and user-friendly.

4. Collaborate with Experts

Expertise is often one of the hardest things for businesses to get right when it comes to E-E-A-T.

If you have experts within your business, they need to be willing to offer commentary, contribute to content, and put their names to copy on your website. If the experts aren’t in your business, work with external outreach to build partnerships with them and invite them to work with you.

5. Include Author & Business Credentials

This is one of the easiest ways to boost your E-E-A-T profile. Whenever you’re posting new, informative content, make sure that the author is named and has their credentials easily visible.

You’ll also want to back this up with author profiles or links to their personal site/other work.

This signals to Google that you’re working with experts and so have all of those expert, authoritative elements on your side as a business.

You can also backdate this approach for existing content.

6. Show Support & Contact Information

Showing support and contact information clearly and easily is something all users want. Whatever your business model, being accessible and available to help if something has gone wrong is something that customers (and therefore search engines) find valuable.

If you don’t have easy ways for your customers to contact you, chances are that you’re missing trust signals, and that’s something that both users and search engines will pick up on.