If you’re looking to draw traffic to your website and increase rankings, SEO is an absolute must. But search engines need to understand your website’s content, helping prospective visitors find your information — and commit to visiting your site (and not a competitor).
Google has Search Quality Rater Guidelines, helping to determine the quality of a user’s search results. These guidelines occasionally change, with updates made. This means that businesses need to keep on top of these changes, working within Google’s parameters to help the search engine better understand the relevance and quality of various web pages.
Part of creating content designed to rank high in a Google search engine results page (SERP) is understanding what Google looks for in web content. Regardless of whether you’ve heard of Google E-E-A-T, it’s important to understand what it is and how it affects your website’s SEO.
What Is Google E-E-A-T?
Google E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) isn’t a ranking factor. It is, however, part of Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (SQEG). By implementing E-E-A-T, Google can more effectively and efficiently understand your website’s relevance and page quality.
This framework is used by the people who review Google’s content, assessing it for quality. These human reviewers are also known as Quality Raters. But before you can implement Google E-E-A-T into your existing content, it’s important to understand what it all means.
Experience
When we say “experience,” we’re talking about any type of first-hand information, knowledge, or experience you have about a certain topic which you’re responsible for creating. If your website has a parenting blog, for example, your experience with professional copywriting matters. This means that, no matter what you write about, you need to demonstrate experience in your content.
Since Google released multiple updates to its Product Review algorithm, it’s now attempting to separate genuine and honest reviews from repeats of posted reviews. This is because it’s not uncommon for websites to use reviews of their products or services, grabbing them from other posts and applying them strictly for ranking purposes. Unfortunately, this proved to be disingenuous and put consumers at a disadvantage. These basic reviews didn’t offer any real insight into a company’s ability to perform, leaving customers in the dark when shopping.
More than reviews, businesses are tasked with demonstrating experience via first-hand knowledge or involvement. This helps search engines locate content created by AI.
Although you can take steps to implement experience on your website, you should consider working with a professional marketing agency to help create human-generated content, focusing on a myriad of website services designed to help your website draw traffic.
How to Demonstrate Experience
If you’re unsure of how to demonstrate experience, there are several ways to begin.
First, create a detailed bio for authors on your website. No matter who’s contributing to your site, create content that showcases their experience and why they’re the best content creators for your product or service.
Next, write several (if not more) articles dedicated to one specific topic instead of a stand-alone piece. Take real estate, for example. A realtor would want to show expertise in their field, and creating a blog with expertly written content is an ideal way of showing mastery of a subject. But instead of writing one blog entry about curb appeal, create multiple articles focusing on the topic to demonstrate expertise in the area.
Aside from content and strong author bios, you can demonstrate experience by sharing images, videos, and other authoritative content with potential site viewers.
Expertise
The next part of Google E-E-A-T is “expertise.” When working with professional marketing services, they understand that expertise is arguably one of the most important parts of creative services. Part of this is because expertise means that your business has a greater skill set (or level of expertise) than the competition, setting you apart from others in your field.
When site visitors understand that your website’s expertise demonstrates unparalleled subject matter understanding, visitors can feel confident about working with you.
It’s worth noting that Google isn’t looking for expertise across your entire website. Instead, they’re looking for it on a page level. This is largely in part why it’s important to work with professional writers who understand the ins and outs of curating expert-level content creation. This works to showcase your expertise in a specific area while implementing Google E-E-A-T best practices.
Yes, you can effortlessly incorporate expertise with professionally written author bios, but you can also create employee profiles, showcasing their qualities and abilities. Whatever professional marketing agency you work with should ensure your content ticks all the boxes for trustworthiness and accuracy.
Authoritativeness
Authoritativeness is crucial for your business as it represents your reputation. This might be as an industry professional or as an expert on a specific subject matter. The goal is to showcase that you’re a primary source of information and that others go to your website for expert-level facts and figures about a specific subject.
You also want to showcase if your website is referenced by or backlinked to other sites, showcasing your site’s authority. Your website — and its content — should be a source of information for others to reference on their site.
Take the Environmental Working Group (EWG), for example. They look to keep consumers abreast about non-toxic products so they can make healthy choices for themselves and their families. When a home blogger backlinks to the EWG, citing information about organic children’s products, it’s one more feather in the EWG’s cap, showcasing their authoritativeness.
No matter what product or services you offer, it’s important to create well-written, expertly-researched content that shows readers your mastery of a specific area or subject. When they feel confident in your assessment, they’ll create new content based on your research, referencing you via backlinks (and further proving your site’s authority).
Once you demonstrate expertise and experience on your website, you’ll be well on your way to building authoritativeness. From there, you’ll create a reputation in your industry as a trustworthy, knowledgeable source worthy of backlinks and referencing.
Regardless of what industry you’re in, you can conduct tests and studies, sharing this information (and your testing methods) with readers. Curate well-researched, expertly-documented publications to share with other industry experts. If possible, speak at conferences to share your findings or offer webinars. The more you showcase your knowledge base, the more authoritative your site is.
Additionally, keep in mind that website crawlers AKA “spiders” look for connections between your website and other authoritative sites. The more associations between the two, whether by direct mentions or quality backlinks, the better your site looks.
Trustworthiness
Trustworthiness is one of the most important parts of Google E-E-A-T. If a website is deemed untrustworthy, its E-E-A-T is low. But you can ensure your website is trustworthy by maintaining accurate information that’s deemed safe and reliable. Keep information factual and work to create a feeling of honesty with page visitors and search engines.
This isn’t only achieved through content. If, for example, you sell online products, then your page should offer some type of secure system for processing online payments. Additionally, you need to provide clients with customer service they can rely on.
No matter what type of product you offer, keep all reviews well-written and honest. This means that a review should focus on why a consumer chose to purchase it and not just offer spammy information designed just to sell more of the product. If an item legitimately helped a consumer, then their rationale for purchasing it should be showcased.
In addition to reviews, be sure to include information pages. Consider Your Money Your Life (YMYL) pages, for example. These pages are designed to help people learn more about a variety of topics that can have real-world implications.
When these topics are fraudulently covered or contain false or even outdated information, the consequences can negatively impact those who trust the information to be accurate. This impact can extend to a person’s safety, financial stability, health, general well-being, overall happiness, and more. If your website has a YMYL page, you must take all precautions to ensure it’s accurate, to prevent anyone from experiencing the effects of harmful content.
How to Implement Trustworthiness
For trustworthiness, you can demonstrate it in several ways. For starters, look for honest reviews online. Share these reviews with website visitors, but look for reviews that add value for prospective clients and not just to sell a product or service.
With reviews, don’t worry about one or two negative ones. However, numerous negative reviews can start to impact how your website ranks in a SERP, making it more difficult for prospective customers to find your business on Google.
Work to gather authentic positive reviews whenever possible, helping new customers understand how your business can benefit them.
Aside from reviews, website security works to build trustworthiness. If your website isn’t secure, work to correct the issue. This means it needs HTTPS at the beginning of your URL, showing site visitors your website is trustworthy.
You can also do the following:
- Create up-to-date, accurate content with factual information
- Have readily available contact information
- Provide site visitors with exceptional customer service
- When creating content, ensure you cite and link to other trustworthy websites with plenty of authority
- If your website contains a Privacy Policy or outlines specific Conditions, keep it easily accessible for others to access, including “spiders”
- If your page isn’t easy to navigate with concise information about returns, shipping, and more, be sure to add this information
Implementing Google E-E-A-T Standards With Backlinks
As mentioned, one of the best ways to build credibility on your website is with quality backlinks. Since these backlinks let customers know that your website is trusted by others in the industry (or something similar that references your information), look to obtain as many as possible.
There are three main ways of gaining backlinks:
- Garnering editorial backlinks
- Guest posting for backlinks
- Creating relationships for backlinks
When looking for editorial backlinks — one of the best types of backlinks you can get — work to get other trustworthy sites to reference your site’s information on theirs.
You can also look into guest posting. This is when you create well-researched, expertly-written articles for other reputable websites. Included in these types of articles would be a backlink to your website.
Just be sure you’re not a direct competitor or else a website might not let you guest post. Instead, pick a website that can benefit from your expertise without stepping on each other’s toes with customers.
Should you want to network, consider building relationships with social media influencers or other industry leaders. From there, you might find ways of gathering backlinks. Ask if there’s a way you can work in tandem to mutually support one another’s products or services.
Implement a Strong User Experience
Outside of backlinks, you can improve Google E-E-A-T best practices with user experience (UX). When users effortlessly access your website, it works to decrease bounce rates, something that negatively affects how search engines rank your website.
This means you should look to implement extremely fast load speeds to your website, keep everything mobile-friendly, and look for intuitive interactions with website visitors.
If you’re unsure of where to begin, a trusted marketing agency with experience in digital marketing can help.
Don’t Forget About On-Page SEO
Each page should adhere to prospective search queries. This means including keyword optimization and researching to determine what prospective site visitors might type into their search engine.
You’ll want these targeted keywords to be organically dispersed. Don’t cram countless keywords into one paragraph. Instead, naturally work them into your article whenever they look and feel appropriate.
Additionally, incorporate meta tags to help search engines find your website, especially if you use images. Meta tags also work to accurately display your website on a variety of screens and devices.
When someone with a disability is visiting your site, for example, these meta tags play an important role. Incorporate relevant information to help your meta description be as accurate as possible.
The Importance of Google E-E-A-T
Google E-E-A-T might sound initially confusing, but once you understand the guidelines Google’s Quality Raters are searching for, you can work to update your content to drive new traffic to your website. On top of all that, Google E-E-A-T contains many moving parts. This is why you should work with a trusted professional to update your website and keep future content up to speed with new and emerging guidelines.
Let’s B Media can help. We offer unparalleled website design services, including SEO-rich content writing that adheres to Google E-E-A-T’s best practices. Contact us today to get started with a professional marketing agency you can trust.