In the dynamic, fast-paced world of SEO, it’s critical to keep your digital marketing strategy aligned with the direction Google takes. The world’s biggest search engine increasingly emphasizes the importance of web pages that demonstrate Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-A-T). This article provides key insights, tips, and strategies for showing E-A-T in your content and moving up the search results. These insights were inspired by our recent webinar hosted by Jason Barnard with guests Loren Baker and Lily Ray.
As a brief overview, you can understand the three E-A-T components as:
2021 was a year marked by increased search result volatility in Google. Search engine results pages (SERPs) changed far more often compared to previous years as a result of several major updates made by Google to how its algorithms work.
While these updates have addressed different aspects of how Google wants to rank content, it’s interesting to note that mentions of E-A-T run through most core Google update announcements as a common thread.
Direct mentions of E-A-T appeared in the April 2021 Product Reviews update. This update affected sites that review products and use affiliate links in their review content. Any review content will be held to a higher stand of expertise, which means the people writing reviews need to provide additional information beyond what users can easily find in product or service descriptions elsewhere.
From a product reviews perspective, some of the key points Google wants to see are:
With the Product Reviews update, Google is becoming more discerning in demoting websites that appear to be simply taking other sites’ content and re-wording or reproducing it in order to make affiliate income. If there’s any takeaway here for writing product reviews, it’s to perform solid research, write valuable articles, and be transparent about who wrote the article.
E-A-T also appears in a 2021 FAQ answer about what websites need to do to make sure their stories show up in Google News. In fact, Google’s Danny Sullivan went as far as saying E-A-T is the most important ranking factor for Google News.
Top publications are starting to write extensive author biographies for every staff/team member who writes articles. These biographies provide one way to demonstrate particular pieces of content are written from a position of expertise while conveying trust.
Another clear indicator of E-A-T’s importance is the fact that it appears 129 times in Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines. This document is over 170 pages long, and it spells out how Quality Rates hired by Google should assess the quality of websites, pages, and search results.
It’s easy to get caught up in the slightly myopic view that E-A-T only really matters from an SEO perspective. It’s not just a matter of improving your page-level and site-wide E-A-T and your content will rank higher in search results.
A broader perspective is that potential customers want to see expertise, authority, and trustworthiness signals in the web content they consume on other site pages, such as product pages. Perhaps an expert quote can make the difference between a prospective customer converting or not.
Getting authoritative links pointing to specific pages remains the most vital factor behind successful off-site SEO. One aspect worth remembering about the relationship between backlinks and E-A-T is that Google evaluates a site’s authority by looking at its backlink profile. Often, the sites appearing prominently for competitive search queries have strong backlink profiles with many different domains linking to them.
A caveat here is that Google sometimes detects patterns in backlink profiles that indicate a degree of “gaming” the system. In these cases, the backlink profile of a site or its particular pages can end up harming E-A-T. The solution is that you need to be careful with your link-building tactics and stick to white-hat methods if you want any longevity in your perceived authority.
An interesting and almost philosophical dilemma emerges for websites considering today’s increasingly powerful AI-powered content platforms. These platforms automatically write content about certain topics based on keywords or topics provided to the platform. As the technology advances, AI-powered writing will continue to better approximate what human content writers can do.
The dilemma is whether in a potential future online content landscape heavily powered by AI content, that content can demonstrate E-A-T? After all, you can’t put a byline on these articles, and they won’t be written by experts or trusted sources.
Ultimately, even the more grammatically correct, well-structured, and factual content will still miss out on the unique perspectives and angles human writers bring to the table. If E-A-T retains its importance in the eyes of Google, it will always be worth having a team of expert writers to contribute to or write full articles and demonstrate their subject matter expertise.
If author biographies are essential to prove to Google (and visitors) that the person who wrote a web page knows what they’re talking about, it’s worth examining what a well-structured bio should look like:
When displaying author boxes on specific web pages, make them two or three-sentence summaries of the full author biography page. Leave a link to the full author bio page within that author box for anyone who wants to read the person’s full biography.
If your business hires experts in specific subjects to write or contribute to articles, it can be useful to leverage that expertise in another way — content idea generation. Most websites find lists of keywords and then try to get their experts to weave their knowledge into articles on those keywords.
An alternative strategy is actually to start from a person’s expertise and work your way back to finding topics to write about and keywords that support those topics. This proves useful because experts have genuinely unique and diverse insights about the subject areas on which they are experts.
A combination of E-A-T on your web pages and unique, insightful content is the way forward if you want to improve your SEO results. The days of anonymously published content ranking for competitive search terms without the page indicating any E-A-T are long gone.
