To rank well on Google, you need to nurture your brand by building its expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. This article will cover the three pillars of E-A-T and share tips on how to incorporate each into your content strategy so that you can rank for the best search terms in your industry
But first…
Initially, this “medic” update seemed to have hit loads of websites offering health and medical advice, more than any other vertical.
- It also hit many other websites that could be categorized under what Google calls “YMYL sites”
- YMYL is a quality rating for content that stands for “Your Money or Your Life”.
- Google wants to be as certain as possible that they are recommending sites that display a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness
- E-A-T stands for Google’s way of protecting searchers from low-quality content
Google search quality evaluator guidelines E-A-T and YMYL came from a Google document known as “the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines”.
The document was written for their human rating team, who are performing important searches all day long and evaluating websites which top the Google results for those searches.
- Apparently, there are about 10,000 people employed by Google to carry out these spot-checks.
Trustworthiness
If you don’t reign in negative sentiment around your business, you will suffer on Google
- Ways to promote trustworthiness include: having a clear way to make contact with the website owners, associating the website with a physical location, having a term of business or T&Cs page, making sure your website’s domain is secure, and having a privacy policy
The 2018 update to the guidelines
Google wants to see who the author of a page’s main content is and what their credentials are with regards to the subject matter
- This means that we should now be building up author E-A-T as well as website E-a-T
- Ways to achieve this
- Author boxes
- Links to author profiles elsewhere online
- Structured data that tells Google all about the author
The essential takeaways
If you’re sharing information on a subject, particularly medical, health and financial related matters, you need to have proven expertise, authority, and trustworthiness for Google to recommend your content.
- Covering these three pillars is a smart thing to do, particularly if you want to rank pages on Google for the best search terms in your industry.
Expertise
To be an expert, you need to know how to communicate knowledge in a way that engages people
- Find out what your audience is searching for, then meet and exceed their needs
- Understand the searchers intent behind the terms you discover during keyword research
- Be comprehensive while keeping it simple
Authority
When other experts cite you as a source of information or when your name becomes synonymous with the relevant topics, you are the authority.
- Use the Moz Domain Authority score to understand the authority of a website
- Another reliable gauge of authority and trustworthiness is the Majestic ‘trust ratio’ score
- If you can get a score close to 1.0 you know things are going well
- Building a brand is a good idea for many reasons, including SEO authority
