What does E-A-T stand for?
E – Expertise
A – Authoritativeness
T – Trustworthiness
The saying may sound like random marketing jargon, but it is pivotal when it comes to Google ranking factors.
Where is E-A-T used?
As mentioned above, EAT is used as a guide for content that ranks with Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Highest ‘quality’ pages and sites are determined by three factors from Google - high expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Content creators need to understand the importance of these three areas, if they want their content to perform well. When it comes to industries like finance and health, E-A-T is hugely significant.
What are Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines?
According to Google - "Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines dictate a three-factor process it uses to rate a page’s quality from low to high:
Does the website serve a beneficial purpose? Does it aim to help and inform, or mislead and even cause harm?
Does the web page’s topic have a direct impact on someone’s physical, mental, or financial health/safety?
For pages with a beneficial purpose, is the creator of high expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)?"
What does YMYL mean and why is it relevant to E-A-T?
While EAT matters for all industries and websites, it is especially critical for YMYL pages.
It stands for ‘Your Money or Your Life’ and Google has used it to describe webpages that have a serious impact on your safety, stability, or security.
Google takes its EAT guidelines seriously when it comes to YMYL sites in industries like:
- Medical advice
- News and current events
- Scientific topics
- Financial advice
- Government business
- Car repairs
- Parenting
How much you need to rely on EAT depends on the purpose of your website. Below, we have outlined what EAT stands for, and what you can do to make sure your website complies with it.
what does ‘Expertise’ mean in E-A-T?
Expertise means to possess exceptional knowledge or skill in a particular field. To be good at the ‘expertise’ part of EAT, you need to consistently create content that delivers your knowledge in a way that your target audience finds useful.
- Understand your target audience, and understand what they want to read, watch, listen to, and follow
- Conduct keyword research to find out what exactly your audience is searching for
- Create content that aligns with your audiences’ search intent.
what does ‘Authoritativeness’ mean in E-A-T?
Authority often means your reputation. This is built when other bloggers, and experts in your field cite your articles/website as a source of information.
- Gain backlinks from authoritative websites in your niche, you can do this with various digital PR techniques
- Whilst mentions from authorities’ websites are not as good as backlinks, they still help
- Build your brand so that people are searching for it regularly, you can do this by conducting advertising campaigns.
what does ‘Trustworthiness’ mean in E-A-T?
Trustworthiness is the reliability and credibility of the content, the website, and the main content creator. Demonstrate who is responsible for your site content; you could do this by having an email address on your page. If you have an eCommerce website, you need to have enough customer service information and contact information to help resolve customer queries.
- You need to make sure the facts, stats, and claims in your content can be backed up by credible sources. Making a mistake with this can hurt your credibility to your audience.
- Make sure you have an up-to-date SSL certificate
- Mention your address in the contact information of your website, and optimise your Google My Business listing
- Create privacy and T&C pages
- Feature your author biography
- Link to external sources when quoting or mentioning statistics, to back your claims.
It can be hard to understand where your website stands with quality content, and how you can implement a content strategy that fits around the Google Algorithm. Our SEO team has a wealth of experience in improving rankings for businesses like yours. Take a look at our work or get in touch with our team for a no-obligation chat about help with SEO.
