Staying up to date with Google’s ever-evolving guidelines is crucial to maintaining and improving your website’s search engine rankings.
One of most significant updates introduced by Google is E-E-A-T. Understanding and implementing E-E-A-T can significantly enhance your content’s quality and credibility, leading to better visibility and higher rankings on search engine results pages.
Let’s delve into what E-E-A-T entails and how you can demonstrate these principles when writing your website content.
What is E-E-A-T?
Firstly, we need to understand what E-E-A-T stands for, and how it relates to content.
1. Experience
Experience refers to the personal or practical involvement in the subject matter by the content creator. This emphasises first-hand knowledge or direct interaction with the topic. Content that showcases real-world experience or insight is more credible, and likely more interesting to the reader.
2. Expertise
Expertise is about the knowledge and skills of the content author. It’s vital to ensure that your content is crafted by people who are genuinely knowledgeable in the subject area. This can be demonstrated through qualifications, credentials, and a thorough understanding of the topic.
3. Authoritativeness
Authoritativeness relates to the credibility and influence of the writer, the content itself, and the website. This can be established by earning recognition from other experts, authoritative websites, and through the quality of information provided.
4. Trustworthiness
Trustworthiness is the degree to which your content is reliable and accurate. Building trust involves transparency, honesty, and ensuring the security and privacy of user data. Trustworthy content is well-sourced, cited, and free from misleading information.
How to demonstrate E-E-A-T in your content
Experience
Share personal stories and case studies:
Sharing anecdotes, testimonials, case studies and examples of your work demonstrates real-life experience and application of the topic you’re writing about. Highlight practical insights gained from your experiences, talk about any issues you’ve overcome or share results and data to back up your ideas.
User-generated content:
Use-generated content is a great way to build trust with your readers. Encourage reviews, comments and feedback to showcase a wide range of experiences related to your products or services. Recently, we’ve seen Google surfacing user generated content from forums like Reddit, probably because these threads are likely to have been written by genuine people with first-hand experience.
Expertise
Credentials and qualifications:
Clearly displaying the qualifications and skills of your content writers can help signal expertise to Google. We’d recommend including author bios on your blogs where they can share their professional and educational backgrounds, certifications and relevant experience that makes them equipped to write on certain topics.
High-quality content:
Should go without saying, but in order to write content that displays a high level of expertise, you need to ensure it’s well-researched, comprehensive and up-to-date. Only use reliable sources and reference them where appropriate to back up your claims.
Authoritativeness
Build your online reputation:
Getting mentioned or cited by other respected websites with high domain authority within your industry signals to Google that your content is trustworthy and useful to readers. Engage in guest blogging, interviews, and collaborations with recognised experts in your field.
Showcase awards and recognitions:
Highlight any industry awards, recognitions, or memberships in professional organisations. You can also display logos and links to authoritative sites that acknowledge your expertise.
Trustworthiness
Transparency:
When earning trust from your readers, it’s important to be transparent about who you are, your mission and your values. Provide clear contact information and make sure your customer support options are easy to find on your website.
Secure and ethical practices:
Don’t use clickbait titles or misleading information of any kind in your content. While it can be tempting to boost click through rates and to make your content stands out, it’s only going to damage your conversion rates, search engine rankings and brand image.
Ensure your website uses HTTPS to secure user data, have a clear privacy policy and terms of service in place and adhere to all GDPR laws for your country.
Cite sources and avoid plagiarism:
Don’t try to mislead readers by claiming information or data from other sources as your own. Always attribute information to credible sources, and avoid taking content from other sites without proper credit.
Additional Tips
Regular updates:
Trends change and information will become outdated after a certain amount of time. It’s important to regularly update your content to reflect the latest trends and most accurate information in your industry, and to remove or replace outdated statistics or statements that could mislead readers.
When devising a content plan for our clients, we always make content updates a key part of their content marketing strategy by regularly reviewing and refreshing older blog posts to ensure they remain up-to-date and trustworthy. This can be just as important as creating new content, but make sure you’re actually adding value, not simply making minimal changes or amending the publish date to try and trick search engines.
Google E-E-A-T guidelines & signals
Provide a great page experience
Google’s core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience. Google states that site owners seeking to be successful with their systems should not focus on only one or two aspects or page experience, but instead provide an overall great page experience across many aspects. Things like mobile responsiveness, using an excessive amount of ads and loading speed can all impact page experience.
Write for people, not search engines
E-E-A-T, at its core, is about creating people-first content. People-first means that the content is designed primarily for the benefit of users, rather than to manipulate search engine rankings. So how do we evaluate whether we’re writing for people rather than search engines?
To ensure you’re on the right track, your content should serve an existing or intended audience, demonstrate genuine expertise, have a clear purpose, and leave readers feeling informed. Consider the intent behind search terms, and ensure your content meets this intent. If your content is primarily designed to attract search engine traffic, covers numerous unrelated topics, or misleads readers with irrelevant or inaccurate information, it’s a sign you should reconsider your approach. The days of keyword stuffing and generic or vague content are long gone – it’s all about quality, details and authenticity. Prioritising quality and relevance for your audience is key to better search visibility, and ultimately, conversions.
Ask “who”, “how” and “why”
To ensure your content aligns with Google’s E-E-A-T principles and core ranking systems, evaluate it using the “Who, How, and Why” framework.
Who created the content should be clear, with bylines and author details that enhance credibility. How the content was created should be transparent, especially if automation or AI is involved; disclosing the processes and reasons behind using such tools builds trust. Why the content was created is crucial—content should primarily aim to help and inform visitors, rather than just attract search engine traffic.
This doesn’t mean you should forgo SEO best practices of course, but consider how every piece of content will benefit the user, rather than writing something purely because you want to rank for a certain keyword. You can utilise the blog section of your website to create a hub of useful and informative content for your target audience, whilst capitalising on keywords and commonly Googled questions related to the topic you’re writing about. For example, a menswear brand may craft a detailed gift guide for Father’s Day, or a skincare brand may publish a guide to the best skincare products for dry skin, with information and advice backed up by credible, scientific sources.
Don’t rely too heavily on AI
AI offers many benefits when it comes to creating content, and many people see it as a fast-track to better SEO rankings, but the reality of AI generated content is that you could end up seeing your website penalised by the Google algorithm. While Google isn’t against the use of AI content full stop, it has advised against publishing AI-generated content without any human input. The search engine has rolled out several significant updates over the past couple of years, aiming to filter out low-quality, generic and spam content – three categories that AI content can very easily fall into if left unchecked.
Think about the user’s intent
Intent matching is more important than ever, and serving the right kind of content is key.
User intent can be broken down into four main categories:
Navigational: the user wants to find a specific page, for example “Facebook login”
Informational: the user wants to learn more about something, for example “What is SEO?”
Commercial: the user wants to do research before making a purchase decision, for example “best coffee maker”
Transactional: the user wants to complete a specific action, usually a purchase, for example “buy coffee beans”
Make sure your content is meeting the needs of the user, whether that be by answering questions or providing the products they’re searching for.
Google E-E-A-T checklist
When it comes to making sure your content meets Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines, Google provides a set of 30 questions you can ask to check that you’re creating reliable, people-first content in their guidelines.
Content & quality questions:
- Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?
- Does the content provide a substantial, complete, or comprehensive description of the topic?
- Does the content provide insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond the obvious?
- If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources, and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
- Does the main heading or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the content?
- Does the main heading or page title avoid exaggerating or being shocking in nature?
- Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Would you expect to see this content in or referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopaedia, or book?
- Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
- Does the content have any spelling or stylistic issues?
- Is the content produced well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
- Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
Expertise questions:
- Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?
- If someone researched the site producing the content, would they come away with an impression that it is well-trusted or widely-recognized as an authority on its topic?
- Is this content written or reviewed by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well?
- Does the content have any easily-verified factual errors?
Struggling to get your website content to rank in the SERPs? Our SEO experts can help you devise a content strategy that demonstrates E-E-A-T. Send us a message to get started.
