Have you heard of Google E-E-A-T? It stands for “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness,” and it’s a system Google uses to assess the quality of content. E-E-A-T is not directly used in Google’s ranking algorithm, but its guidelines can help you produce quality content that is more likely to do well on the search engine.
Let’s take a look at what Google E-E-A-T is, how it’s evaluated, and what you can do to improve your E-E-A-T!
What is Google E-E-A-T?
E-E-A-T is part of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Search quality raters hired by Google use these guidelines to evaluate content, and their feedback helps Google improve their search algorithm. This is all part of Google’s effort to provide users with quality content that understands and meets user needs, so that those users keep coming back.
In other words: E-E-A-T tells us what kind of content Google is trying to prioritize through their algorithms. Following these guidelines can help us produce the kind of content that Google wants.
Let’s look at what each letter means:
· E (Experience): Does the content show first-hand experience of the topic? Example: Someone who camped out using a new sleeping bag would be a good person to review that product.
· E (Expertise): Does the author have relevant training, knowledge, or skill to talk about the topic? Example: A medical doctor would be one possible expert for an article on cough remedies.
· A (Authoritativeness): Is the website or author a trusted authority on the topic? Example: A store’s corporate website would be the trusted authority for someone wanting to know their return policy.
· T (Trustworthiness): Is the content and website trustworthy? This includes factors like content accuracy, site security, proper citations, availability of contact information, and more.
Trustworthiness is the most important part of E-E-A-T. If site trustworthiness is low, content will have a low E-E-A-T score regardless of the other factors.
How is E-E-A-T Evaluated?
Google’s search quality raters use four different E-E-A-T levels to classify a page. These levels are:
· Lowest: The page is spammy or harmful.
· Lacking: The page isn’t harmful, but it lacks experience, expertise, or authority.
· High level: The page has a significant amount of experience, expertise, and authority. It fulfils its purpose well with a high level of effort and originality.
· Very high level: The page stands out as being created with very high effort, originality, knowledge, and skill. This kind of content is usually written by someone with extensive first-hand experience of the topic.
As you can imagine, content with a higher E-E-A-T level tends to be genuinely useful for searchers.
Tips for Improving Your E-E-A-T
If you want to improve your page’s E-E-A-T, we’ve put together a few tips:
· Keep your content fresh! You can update old content using current content marketing trends like adding videos to your content.
· Monitor your brand reputation and make sure you get great customer reviews. How you respond to negative comments is especially important!
· Use a hub-and-spoke content model for internal links. Connect the hubs (main topics your brand talks about) to each other, and connect the spokes (smaller, related topics) to their hub.
· If you use any AI marketing tools to help with writing content, make sure you double check everything and fix any inaccurate information.
· Invite a subject matter expert to collaborate on original content, like a guest blog post or an interview on your blog or podcast. Experts who have a strong online presence will have the biggest impact on your content.
Implementing these tips will give you a jump-start on improving your E-E-A-T!
Get Started Today
If you’d like someone to guide you through improving your E-E-A-T and your search engine ranking, 2XM is here! We stay on top of the ever-changing search algorithms to ensure your website remains updated with the best keywords and always follows website best practices. Contact us for a FREE 60 minute consultation today.