This isn’t your first time reading about the term ‘E-A-T’ if you are an SEO professional or run an online business with a website and social media presence.
E-A-T stands for:
- E – Expertise
- A – Authoritativeness
- T – Trustworthiness
There’s a lot you must understand about E-A-T and its link with search engine optimization (SEO). Today’s blog will discuss this terminology in detail and help clear your confusion.
Whether you are new to SEO or have been practicing it for a while, you’ll get many significant takeaways by reading further.
What is E-A-T?
You already know the full form of E-A-T, so let’s get right to its definition. E-A-T is one of Google’s countless guidelines for figuring out the quality of content. E-A-T is how Google concludes the value your content adds to the readers’ lives and the ranking it deserves.
It uses E-A-T to judge the expertise of the content creator.
Similarly, it’s how Google’s search quality evaluators determine the authoritativeness of your content, website, and creator.
And lastly, you guessed it, E-A-T sums up the trustworthiness of the content, content creator, and website.
An extra ‘E’ for Experience has also been added to the E-A-T guidelines, which means that your content should seem like it was produced by an experienced creator.
So, your content must have these four characteristics if you want it to appear higher in the search engine page results (SERPs).
Also Read: Meta Rolls Out New Facebook Reels Features
Does Google Use E-A-T To Rank Web Pages?
E-A-T is not a ranking factor, but it affects the ranking of your web pages indirectly. As mentioned earlier, E-A-T guidelines judge a content’s quality and how it should be ranked, ultimately impacting the overall search rankings.
So, what’s the importance of E-A-T in SEO?
You must already be familiar with the term ‘high-quality content.’
You’ll always see high-quality content ranked higher in the SERPs, as Google’s human reviewers follow E-A-T guidelines to determine content quality. Therefore, it affects the ranking of your blog posts and web pages indirectly.
According to E-A-T guidelines, great content helps readers and adds value to their lives. Plus, it’s reliable and trustworthy because it was created by an expert. Furthermore, high-quality content is consistently updated and always posted on an authoritative website.
Don’t forget that the best content is the one that reflects the real-life experiences of the creator wherever possible.
All of this means you can no longer ignore E-A-T guidelines while creating a new piece of content if you want it to rank higher than your previous work.
Tips To Follow E-A-T Guidelines
Let’s jump right into discussing how you can follow E-A-T guidelines to make your website and its content more trustworthy and authoritative.
- Stop delegating writing tasks to freelance writers and start hiring experts to develop your content. You can also pay an experienced professional in your niche to guest post on your website or interview them. Google now values content from people who know what they are talking about instead of purely researched-base pieces.
- Make it a part of your SEO strategy to update your content regularly and check backlinks after a while to see which ones are live or dead. This is because the content is now getting outdated as quickly as it is being produced. Keeping up is how you maintain your content’s reliability and quality.
- Don’t write from a single viewpoint. Instead, discuss the topic from different perspectives to cater to the unique needs of all your readers. This is how you can prove your expertise and build trust among your readers.
- Link to official sources to develop a sense of trustworthiness in your readers. Relying on real data and referring to high-quality links is how you can comply with E-A-T guidelines successfully during content creation. It’s the ideal way of backing up everything you write for your readers.
- Make the purpose of your content clear and get straight to the point without any unwanted fluff. Moreover, experts advise content creators to write clearly and concisely with straightforward language. This way, you can reach more readers and widen your audience effectively.
E-A-T is only an internal guideline from Google for reviewers and content creators to be able to differentiate between high-quality and low-quality content.
It is time to embed E-A-T guidelines within your content creation process to optimize your online presence efficiently and reap favourable outcomes.
