If you want to maintain a strong online presence, you need to understand how Google determines its search rankings. And if you have any familiarity with SEO already, you know that Google algorithms are constantly evolving. To keep your content strategy up to date, you also need to keep track of Google’s changes.
Here’s one that you should definitely be aware of: in December of 2022, Google added an extra “E” to its E-A-T guidelines. So what does that mean for your SEO strategy? In this article, we explain everything you need to know about the current E-E-A-T guidelines and how you can use them to rank higher in search results.
What Does E-E-A-T Stand for, and Why Is It Important for SEO?
When people turn to Google for answers, they expect high-quality, relevant content from trustworthy sources. So, that’s exactly what Google looks for when generating result rankings. Their ranking criteria is E-E-A-T—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. And you should absolutely be using the same criteria when you’re creating content for your website.
Regularly publishing content that exemplifies the E-E-A-T standards proves to Google and its users that your website is reliable and valuable. This is crucial for your SEO strategy because the more trustworthy and useful Google deems your website, the higher it will rank your pages in relevant queries.
But SEO is about much more than simply tailoring your content to please an algorithm. Meeting the E-E-A-T guidelines also helps you deliver high quality content that people will actually want to click on and read. In short, creating authoritative and useful content leads to more conversions.
Breaking Down Google’s E-E-A-T Guidelines
Experience
The most recent addition to the guidelines, Experience is what sets authentic, valuable content apart from generic, AI-written content. While AI tools can help you brainstorm ideas and provide a good starting point for your writing, your content needs the first-hand tone of a human voice to sound unique and reliable.
One way you can showcase your experience is with a well-written, optimized “About Us” page on your website. Photos of your team along with brief biographies that detail their experience and achievements will give your site more authenticity. Videos and images of your team or products in action can also prove your experience in the field.
Expertise
Although they are similar, experience and expertise are not interchangeable terms when it comes to SEO. Experience means you’ve done the things you’ve written about—a manufacturer has developed a product, a lawyer has won cases, a dentist has whitened teeth, etc. Expertise, however, refers to the knowledge and skill you have to be able to do these things effectively.
Displaying the author’s name and credentials at the bottom of a blog post is a good way to showcase expertise, but it isn’t the only way. Any content that shows you’ve researched the topic thoroughly and includes links to credible sources that support your claims will help to highlight your expertise.
Authoritativeness
Having both experience and expertise makes you an authority in your field. The goal is to make your website a go-to source of information for certain topics. With enough authority, people will begin seeking your website out specifically when they need answers to relevant questions or require certain products and services. Sites with high authority also rank better in Google search results.
You can demonstrate authority to Google by earning backlinks from high-authority websites. The more trusted and well-known a company, the higher authority its web pages have. Using pillar pages to create a strong internal linking structure that connects related content also helps establish authority to search engines.
Trustworthiness
Becoming an authoritative source helps improve your reputation, making your business more trustworthy. And trust is fundamental to Google search rankings. Because the search engine itself wants to be trustworthy, it strives to deliver trustworthy sources.
When it comes to E-E-A-T guidelines, you can’t pick and choose the qualities you want to highlight. You must prove your experience, expertise, and authority in order to get search engines to trust your website. However, there are many additional ways you can prove your legitimacy and trustworthiness online.
You can improve your website’s trustworthiness by:
- Building a secure site that loads instantly
- Citing your sources
- Clearly displaying your location and contact information
- Providing reliable customer support
- Updating your content on a regular basis
- Earning positive reviews
Content Marketing Services for Small Businesses
Keeping up with Google’s ever-evolving guidelines and maintaining high rankings is a time-consuming task. And building a successful online marketing strategy takes a great deal of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The team at New Wine Digital has all of those qualities in abundance! We can help you deliver fresh content and keep up with all of Google’s SEO updates.
With optimized landing pages, blog posts, social media content, and more, New Wine Digital can help you improve your search rankings and drive more traffic to your website. Give us a call at 480-516-1819 to learn more about our content marketing services.
Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (11/20/2023). Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels