Are you hungry for more visitors to your website? Square up to the table and E-E-A-T. Google’s automated ranking systems tend to pull users to websites that demonstrate the qualities of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This four-pronged approach ensures that Google serves its users more relevant results—and E-E-A-T provides a guideline for how to improve SEO and rank higher in search results so you can get a bigger slice of the pie.
What Is E-E-A-T?
E-E-A-T is Google’s acronym for the four qualities defining what it considers to be a quality website. Google added experience to the original E-A-T in December 2022 as it goes hand-in-hand with the core principles of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. While E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor, the four elements help Google’s algorithms determine if a website is helpful for users. The more helpful a website is, the more likely it is to appear near the top of SERPs (search engine results pages) when someone is looking for products or services that you offer.
Google is clear that trustworthiness is the most important part of E-E-A-T. If your business and website aren’t trustworthy, it ultimately won’t matter what credentials or experience you have. This ties into another concept: Your Money or Your Life, or YMYL. If content on your website could indirectly cause damage to a user or anyone they interact with, you need to have a particularly high quality of E-E-A-T. YMYL is particularly relevant for businesses that focus on health and financial services as they can severely impact an individual’s quality of life.
How to Improve E-E-A-T & Boost SEO
Improving E-E-A-T means taking several steps to improve SEO. Once you know what to prioritize and how to follow through, you can be more confident that your website has what it needs to attract more visitors.
Because trustworthiness is most critical, transparency and security are crucial. If you’re looking to build a new website or improve your current one, secure hosting, transaction encryption, protection of customer data, and regular security updates are important best practices. You can also establish trust by building About Us and Contact Us pages that show who you are and how to get in touch with you. And you can continue to build trust away from your website by ensuring your Google Business Profile is accurate and up to date.
Once you’ve established that you’re trustworthy, you can work toward establishing Experience, Expertise, and Authority. You can improve these interconnected elements of E-E-A-T by:
- Soliciting honest, authentic reviews from customers on platforms like Google and Yelp.
- Responding to all reviews—including negative ones.
- Creating unique content that’s informative, accurate, and written for your audience.
- Obtaining backlinks to your content from reputable, trusted websites.
- Collaborating with other businesses and industry experts via guest posting.
When creating content with E-E-A-T in mind, Google recommends asking “Who, How, and Why.” Do readers know who created the content and what their experience/expertise is? Do they know how it was created, whether by a person using reliable sources or via generative AI? And do they know why the content was created?
To answer the question of why, one of the best ways to improve E-E-A-T and SEO is to shift your focus to the person, not the system. Your goal should always be to provide helpful information to people. If you take steps to demonstrate your experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to customers through on-page and off-page SEO, the results should speak for themselves.
Turn to Page One Digital for Better E-E-A-T & SEO
If you want to better understand what E-E-A-T is and how you can improve it through SEO, Page One Digital is here to help. Our team of experts can ensure that you’re following best practices and reaching your target audience with services like our SEO Audit. Contact us to get started!
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