What is E-A-T?
Well, E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trust. This term actually comes from Google's Search Quality Guidelines. This is a document that Google gives to its Search Quality Raters, and these are people around the world who rate the quality of Google Search results so that Google can check what sort of sites its algorithm is rewarding.
How does the E-A-T work ?
Well, expertise is all about the quality of the content on your site and how reliable and authoritative it is. If your content's low quality or it's being written by someone who has absolutely no expertise in the sort of topic that you're writing about, then that's usually not a good sign and not the sort of site that Google would like to reward. Authority can be measured by how valued your website is and how popular it is amongst other sites in your space.
Are you getting a good number of links?
Then finally, trust is measured by how well people speak of your business or your website. So, for example, do you have lots of positive reviews? When people talk about your business, is there a positive sentiment there? If people trust and they like your business, then that's good news to Google, and Google can be fairly sure that your business is reliable.
Why E-A-T important in SEO?
Well, E-A-T is important because as Google has evolved it's gone from being just a search engine to being more an answers engine. And this has become more of a thing with Voice Search and Google Home devices.
For example, we've got a Google Home in our kitchen and we had a baby in 2018 and we would ask Google Home all sorts of questions like, what temperature should a baby's bedroom be at night? And when we ask Google Home this question, it gives us an answer based on the websites that it's ranking in the search results. And luckily for us it gives us an answer from a website with high expertise, high authority and high trust.
If Google gave an incorrect answer to a question like that, there's a potential danger. If you ask Google what temperature should a baby's room be overnight and Google says, "According to the website SpamMedicalSite.biz, "a baby's room should be five degrees overnight," then bad stuff is gonna happen. And when bad stuff happens, Google's gonna be all over the news for these bad things that have happened as a result of wrong information being shared.
So we can see that this isn't Google trying to be all benevolent and lovely and kind. Google is simply trying to make sure that the information, the answers it gives to its users are correct or as likely to be correct as possible. So that's why E-A-T is really important because actually, it's Google looking at what sort of information are we giving in search results and how can we make sure that that information is as likely to be correct as possible.
Which industries does E-A-t impact ?
Well, Google uses an acronym, YMYL, which stands for "Your Money or Your Life". Sounds a bit threatening. It's really not. Sounds a bit threatening. Well, "Your Money or Your Life" means any website that has an implication for people's financial situation or their life or their health. So for example, health-related sites, medical-related sites, would come under the L section for Your Life.
Whereas financial sites or e-commerce sites that are selling products or taking credit card information from you will be money sites. So, any site that has either a purchase element or a health-related element is susceptible to E-A-T. But really E-A-T applies to any website in any market. Google is now looking at the quality and the reliability of the information that you're sharing, with a particular focus on health or financial sites.
Why is E-A-T such a big thing at the moment?
Well, in August 2018, Google released a big algorithm update that had a massive impact on a lot of websites' rankings, and one of the most publicized changes in the Search Quality Rating Guidelines which seemed to have an impact on the ranking was this E-A-T thing.
The most affected sites during this update were things around health, medical, and wellness. Also, a lot of diet-related sites saw their ranking absolutely tanked if the content on those sites wasn't written by qualified medical experts. So, it really started to get a lot of people's attention in the SCO community because this now suddenly felt like something that we should all really be careful about.
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It's one of those updates a little bit like Panda and Penguin which caused a real shift in how the industry thinks, and I think it's a sort of good opportunity for everyone across the Internet to look at, okay, is the content on our site actually written by an expert or is it just written by someone who's just filling a page with content? So, along those lines, becoming E-A-T compliant and thinking more about how we present our businesses online is just a great opportunity to build more credibility with our customers as well as comply with any past or future Google algorithm updates.
How you make sure that your website is optimized for E-A-T.
Number one, audit your brand. Is there a reliable face for the business?
Are people in the business willing to attach their face and their name to the website or is it completely generic and nobody's willing to attach their name or their face at all? That's not usually a good sign to Google or customers that this business is reliable. So, particularly if you're in the financial space or health or wellness, it's a good idea to make sure that there is some kind of profile, some kind of person or people behind the business.
We saw on a lot of sites that saw ranking improvements during these E-A-T updates that they had author pictures and author bios behind any content that was written about medical or financial topics, including information about that person's credibility and qualifications. And these sites tended to see ranking improvements whereas sites that posted more generically tended to see ranking drops. Other things that you can do is mention any awards, qualifications or prizes which your business has won and that should be showcased. And again this is great for visitor credibility as well as helping Google to understand that you are compliant with E-A-T.
Step two is to audit the content on your site. So, does your content highlight your expertise? Is it in sufficient depth to give a really good background on whatever topic you're writing about? And is that content best in class? Is it better than what's on competitor's sites?
Step three is to create better content in the future. create a framework to make sure that people writing on your site have the relevant expertise to write about those topics. Websites like Kolabtree allow you to hire outside experts in science or medicine in order to give really authoritative and well-written content by a genuine expert in that space. if you don't have the in-house expertise to be writing on those topics, you can always hire someone in to do so.
Step four is to make sure that you're promoting your authority on other websites as well.
So, if you can get featured in other highly-authoritative publications in your industry, that's a really good sign. If you want further help with E-A-T, we've actually published a really handy E-A-T Checklist with a blog post all about how to comply in more detail. if you click on the link in the description you'll be able to find that blog post and download that E-A-T Checklist. E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trust. It's being particularly important for medical and financial sites, so "Your Money or Your Life" sites. We've seen diet sites in particular hit very hard since the August 2018 Google update which focused on E-A-T.
The term E-A-T actually comes from Google's own guidelines and they're very specific in their Search Quality Rater document about what constitutes a site with high E-A-T. So, it's the sort of thing that we all wanna think about moving forward, whether or not we're in a medical or financial space. And it's also something that can be a great tool to build credibility with your audience as well.
So, the top tips for making sure you're compliant with E-A-T is to make sure that the people writing about those topics on your site have relevant qualifications and relevant expertise. If you can attach a face and a name with qualifications to each of those posts, then that will show visitors that this person who's written this is a genuine expert, and that's also more likely to fit in and comply with Google's Search Quality E-A-T guidelines.
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