With an increased focus and growing competition to reach the top spot on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), it seems some websites lost their way. Instead of creating helpful content designed to answer a searcher’s questions, they provide pages stuffed with keywords crafted to drive the most traffic to their website.
Google is now focusing its efforts on weeding out this keyword stuffed content, instead looking for articles and pages which better serve their users by containing much more trustworthy content. That’s where E-E-A-T comes in.
Read on to find out more about E-E-A-T, how Google qualifies your content, and how you can better optimise your web pages for search.
What is E-E-A-T?
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It is a part of Google’s algorithm and determines which websites rank higher in the search results based on how valuable and useful their content is.
Google first introduced E-A-T in 2014 in its Search Quality Rater Guidelines (SQRG) before adding an extra ‘E’ for Experience to its framework in December 2022.
The Search Quality Rater Guidelines are a kind of handbook that real people use to evaluate the quality of Google’s search results – basically, a quality control test to check how successful the algorithm updates have been.
It’s worth noting that E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor itself. However, Google aims to provide results which have a good E-E-A-T rating for its users.
It therefore follows that optimising for these qualities can help to improve your rankings, CTR, user trust, and even conversions.
What is YMYL?
Closely related to E-E-A-T and another feature from the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines is YMYL.
YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life and refers to topics which could significantly impact health, financial stability, safety, or wellbeing. YMYL topics include finance, healthcare, and news.
YMYL is ranked slightly differently to other content with even more weight given to authoritativeness, expertise, and trustworthiness (source: Google). Google upholds very strict standards with this type of content, and it is monitored for accuracy and quality.
This can make it more difficult to rank for search terms in this field.
Improving your website’s E-E-A-T
So, let’s break this down and find out more about what the letters E-E-A-T actually mean in practice.
Experience
Google wanted to add more trustworthiness to its algorithm and therefore introduced an additional ‘E’ for experience. This means knowledge demonstrated by the content creator and first-hand experience from subject matter experts.
The thinking here is that experience is what makes a piece of content unique. Experience is also something of a pushback against AI-generated content as it’s one thing that can’t be created by the likes of ChatGPT.
‘Experience’ is also something of a pushback against AI-generated content as it’s one thing that can’t be created by the likes of ChatGPT
How to optimise for experience:
- If your blog is already written in the first person then, great, you’re already halfway there! Be sure to keep your personality and add your first-hand experiences to your content
- Create content that sounds human and real. One way to do this is to ensure your content is created by real people and not just copy and pasted from an AI generator
- Add a section to your website which introduces your team members
Expertise
Expertise is exactly what it says on the tin. It refers to how much knowledge the content creator has about a particular topic and how accurate the information in the content is.
Content should be high-quality without any factual errors and created by someone with expertise in that topic.
Experience and expertise sound quite similar and they are related, but they aren’t the same thing. Expertise for example, might be advice on buying a house from a mortgage lender, whereas experience might be real-life case studies of buying a house from other people.
How to optimise for expertise:
- Include testimonials on your site from people you’ve worked with
- Fact-check your content to ensure that it is accurate
- Keep your content up to date. When content gets older, some of the information in it may change and become out of date or inaccurate
- Use subject matter experts. You could interview them, feature a guest post from them, or ask them for a quote for an article you’re working on. This helps to improve the credibility of your content
- Include short author bios in all of your blog posts and include qualifications and accomplishments that show they’re an expert in the subject matter
Authoritativeness
Authoritativeness is nothing new, we’ve been talking about website authority in SEO for many years. It refers to how trustworthy the website and the content is.
Things such as external links and citations from other authoritative websites, the quality of the content, and the content creator’s credentials are included in this.
How to optimise for authoritativeness:
- Build links with other websites. Hopefully these will start to come naturally as your content provides value but there are also some link building strategies you can use
- If you’re creating content that you are not an expert on, ask an expert to check it over for you to correct any inaccuracies
Trust
Trust really encompasses the whole of the E-E-A-T framework. Trust comes down to how reliable and credible your content is. Anyone accessing your content should feel confident that it is accurate.
Trust isn’t just about the content you produce. The site’s security and user experience is also covered under trust.
How to optimise for trust:
- Ensure that your site’s security is always kept up to date. This is especially important for transactional pages. You could also add a message to your checkout pages to let your customer know that transactions are secure, giving them peace of mind
- Provide contact information such as a phone number and email address on your website. These can be popped into your footer and added to a dedicated “contact” page
- If you have an ecommerce store, make sure things like your returns policy and customer service information are easy to find, rather than hiding them somewhere on your site
- When you provide quotes or research in your content, be sure to credit your sources. This shows that you’re using other industry knowledge
- Write for humans and not for Google’s algorithm
