Optimize your website's ranking by mastering E-A-T principles and creating content that earns Google's trust.
When you hear people talk about SEO, you may listen to them talk about E-A-T.
Although this acronym is only three letters long, it is extremely important if you want your website content to rank highly in Google.
In this article, we will take a look at what E-A-T stands for and how you can use it to create high-quality content for your site.
E-A-T stands for ‘expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness’. These are three attributes that Google highly values when it comes to page content on websites.
Bear in mind that E-A-T doesn’t just apply to the page content. It applies to the person who wrote the content too. More on that later.
E-A-T has always been important to Google and has been referred to in documents going as far back as 2013. However, the acronym came to prominence in the summer of 2018 in an update SEO expert Barry Schwartz referred to as the ‘medic update’.
In this update, Google wanted to ensure people were finding information that was accurate. After all, if people found medical, political or financial information that was not correct and ended up getting hurt or getting in trouble, Google could be found liable.
As a result of the update, many medical websites found that their ratings tanked in Google as their content was not seen as trustworthy enough.
E-A-T is essential to all websites, but more so to those that specialise in what Google refers to as ‘Your Money or Your Life’ (YMYL) topics. These include (but are not limited to) medical advice, legal advice, news articles and parenting information.
Essentially, any information that could have a critical effect on someone’s health or wellbeing if it is wrong is seen as YMYL.
Google has several thousand search quality raters across the world who evaluate search results. These people are given a guidelines booklet and rate the pages that appear in the top results.
Not all links contribute equally to E-E-A-T signals — dofollow links that build genuine authority from credible, relevant sources carry far more weight than nofollow mentions, even from high-profile publications. Understanding which of your external links are actually passing equity is essential for assessing your E-E-A-T link profile accurately.
While E-E-A-T is assessed qualitatively by Google's raters, domain authority gives a useful quantitative proxy for how much trust your site has earned through its backlink profile. It takes seconds to check your website's authority score — worth doing regularly as your content and links grow.
This information is then passed to Google, which uses it to improve its regularly updated search algorithms.
Get quoted by journalists and featured as an expert in high-authority publications.
If you want to take steps to improve E-A-T on your website, the good news is that there are a number of steps you can take.
Here are our top tips.
If you need health advice, who are you more likely to trust? A doctor, or someone with no experience in the medical industry? The same logic applies to your web content.
If you work in an industry that Google deems as a YMYL industry, get an expert to create your content.
We’d also recommend giving your author a by-line on your site. List their qualifications, social media profiles and links to previous articles they have written. This will help provide proof of their knowledge and credentials.
You want to give your web visitors reason to trust the content you put out. Take the time to write well-researched content, and fact-check your sources.
Regularly go back to your content to see if it needs to be updated. Up to date content is more likely to be trusted than old, out of date information.
If you have existing content that you don’t think stands up to E-A-T, take the time to audit it.
Remove any inaccurate or thin content or ask an expert in the field to review it.
From an E-A-T perspective, it is better to have a small number of high-quality authoritative pages than lots of poor-quality ones.
Showcase the reasons why your visitors should trust your authority in your chosen field.
For example:
If other authoritative sites link back to your page, it’s a sign that your content can be trusted.
For example, if you write an SEO blog and several other SEO experts mention or recommend your blog – this is a positive ranking signal. If one of your articles is linked to from a trustworthy news source or is featured on Wikipedia, this will help too.
Although improving E-A-T on your website may sound challenging, making changes will not only help improve your Google ranking but enhance the user experience on your site too.
What changes will you make today to make your site more authoritative and trustworthy?
Ready To Get Started?
Join thousands of agencies who trust iNet Ventures for their link building needs.
Create AccountRelated Articles
Continue exploring our latest insights and strategies for digital marketing success.
