Google E-A-T and Its Role in Creating a Healthy Website

From a high-level, Google E-A-T is an SEO guideline based on Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines which are used by people to assign quality scores to search results. Google’s algorithm updates will certainly impact your website’s organic rankings. Before diving into what this means for your website, let’s take a closer look at E-A-T.

What is Google E-A-T?

The E-A-T acronym stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are key factors in evaluating the quality of a website and its pages. SEO practitioners and marketers should be paying attention to Google E-A-T when It comes to content creation.

• Expertise– Whoever is creating the content needs to be qualified and knowledgeable in the subject or field they are writing about. Another key part of expertise is knowing how to communicate this knowledge to your audience and understanding what they need.
• Authoritativeness- You must show that you are the authority and have a certain level of credibility. From an SEO standpoint, link building will be a big piece of the authoritative pillar. Another example of authoritativeness might be having content that is shared a lot on social media.
• Trustworthiness– Whether people are visiting your website to gain information or look at a specific product or service, the content must be trusted. Users have to be able to trust your company or organization to be successful. Starting with items as simple as the look of a page to the actual content, all information and data should be accurate. Some examples of trustworthiness are things as simple as associating the website with a location or offering an address.

Tips for Creating E-A-T Worthy Content

When it comes down to content writing, the main goal is to create content that is engaging and meaningful to your specific audience. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Make sure there is a balance between being digestible and keeping it simple. You do not want to rush through points, but it is also important not to use too much jargon.
• Think about formatting. Organize copy in a way that makes sense and flows logically.
• Use photos, video, or audio where appropriate.
• Think about what users might be searching for and create content around those topics. The goal is to be a resource for users and have answers they are looking for.

Why Should I Care?

The E-A-T guidelines reinforce the importance of quality content in any SEO strategy. The Google Evaluator Guidelines are used by the search engine’s employed evaluators. They’re representing people who would visit your website and would expect to find trustworthy and useful information. From there, they will judge how helpful or unhelpful your website is.

The quality scores of content are directly related to the algorithm. So, website pages that would have great quality ratings are website pages that Google wants to rank well.

If you’re struggling with SEO ranking, you can keep the E-A-T acronym in mind to make some website optimizations. One important thing to note is that content lacking E-A-T on one page won’t impact the E-A-T of other website pages yet, it might be hurting your site as a whole. The best thing you can do is rework pages with poor E-A-T and try to improve their value to users.

The bottom line is that following Google E-A-T will massively help your SEO strategy. Creating content that follows the E-A-T guidelines might take some time, but it’s supposed to. Content that is engaging, informational, concise, and credible takes thought. However, you’ll see results that better support your goals by thinking of users first and making sure their experience on your webpage is providing them with value.

If you need help getting started, we offer a free Digital Marketing Audit, that includes a look at your website’s SEO and could give you some valuable insight into improving your E-A-T efforts.