Why Good Content Is Still King For SEO. What Is E-A-T?

Google processes more than 8 billion searches every day. That’s almost 100,000 searches a second. Why do we search so much? We search for the answer to a problem that needs to be solved. Our Search Intent encompasses a need to find information, go somewhere, purchase something, or make a transaction. By far the largest number of searches we make is for information.

The results we see in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) are the best results for the search query. How Google decides which result is ranked above or below another is a closely guarded secret. We do know that Google has hundreds of ranking factors that it takes into consideration. One of the most important is how likely it is that someone searching will “eat” the content of our page.

“Search intent (or user intent, audience intent) is the term used to describe the purpose of an online search. It’s the reason why someone conducts a specific search. After all, everyone who does an online search is hoping to find something.”

Yoast

What is E-A-T Content?

Expertise, Authority, and Trust stand behind the acronym E-A-T. Google’s quality concept is used as a guide for search evaluators when rating search results, and plays a role in the evaluation of Your Money Your Life (YMYL) pages as well. It’s called this because they will read content and make decisions about their money or health. So Authority is a big deal.

E-A-T was mentioned for the first time in the 2015 Quality Rater Guidelines. The E-A-T concept rates the credibility, expertise, and authority of the source as well as the quality of the content.

Expertise stands for the knowledge and experience that an author or publisher possesses. Expertise refers only to the author or publisher.

Authority stands for the standing of an author, the website, or the content in the respective topic area.

Trust stands for the credibility of the same.

The E-A-T rating considers three aspects of your content: the Main Content, the Supplemental Content, and the author, publisher, or the content’s source. Supplemental content, such as photos, CTAs, and embedded social media material, contributes to the general user experience but doesn’t directly help the page achieve its purpose.

Google created the basis to better understand the content and search queries back in 2013, with the Hummingbird update. It was the cornerstone of the E-A-T evaluation of author and publisher entities. E-A-T is an integral part of Google’s desire to create a semantic search engine.

“High-quality content is important for SEO. For example, when someone searches for the keyword “best protein powders,” the majority of the results are blog posts with a list of different protein powders. They’re not informational articles talking about why protein powders are good for your health.”

rocket.net

How does E-A-T Content Improve my SEO?

Instead of thinking about how E-A-T improves our SEO, we should think about how it improves our overall marketing. We work to improve our search engine optimization to attract customers — and that’s marketing.

Marketing and SEO have the same problem: if a search engine decides that the level of expertise, authority, and/or trustworthiness of your website’s content is not high enough, then SEO the way you’ve been doing it will no longer work.

Websites with a low E-A-T score usually have problems with their content. Sometimes the content is simply not good enough and offers the user too little added value, sometimes it’s written without expertise, and often both are the case.

You can’t improve your E-A-T score overnight. To solve a quality problem on your website, you must create quality, unique content, with added value. That takes time.

You also have to show Google where your information comes from and why your content deserves to be delivered to whoever is looking for it.

SEO Requires Inspiring and Helpful Content

A satisfied search engine and happy visitors are not achieved with fly-by-night content. You can either invest time learning SEO copywriting, or get your website copy written by a professional.

Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines says: “We will consider content to be low quality if it is created without adequate time, effort, expertise or talent/skill.”

Website owners who focus on quantity over quality will always have a problem with their E-A-T score.

It’s not only the quality of your content that matters to Google — it’s also the volume. To provide real value to users, you need to have interesting things to say — and you need to present them in the right format. For Google to perceive you as an expert on your specific topic/niche, you should share your knowledge: And no format is better for that than a blog or other form of useful content.

Don’t have a blog? Then start today. Helpful content is the biggest lever to improve your E-A-T score.

SEO Requires Convincing Expertise

Sometimes Google scores a website’s E-A-T level low even though the content is written by experts. These cases show how important it is to display your expert status or the expertise of your authors on your website in a transparent way. There should be no doubt about who’s responsible for the content on your site.

The Quality Rater Guidelines state: “You commission your texts from platforms? Then you have a problem regarding E-A-T.”

You should clarify who is writing your content and why they are an expert in this field. If you write your main content yourself, it’s usually enough to indicate your expertise in the author box. If different authors write for your website, you should also communicate their credentials.

In order for Google to buy the expertise of you and/or your co-authors, your expert status must be verified. Google searches the web and checks if other sources confirm the expertise of the content creator.

SEO Requires Well-Maintained Websites

Websites that have good content, whose main content is written by expert authors, can still be ranked low by Google if the website is not maintained. In order for your website to stay relevant to Google, you need to continually invest your time and expertise.

How often content is revised, how often new content is added, and how many good backlinks a page has, also play an essential role in the Google E-A-T score. 

Google sees it this way: a website that is obviously not maintained and not continuously optimized for an optimal user experience does not deserve the trust of the users. It’s therefore not trustworthy.

And why should Google be interested in a page that the owner is obviously not even interested in?

“Google’s recent Helpful Content Update shows that they’re serious about user experience. And that the bar for quality is only going to go up. That just means that people that produce the best stuff will eventually win out. The #1 thing I’d focus on is updating your older content. That’s usually the biggest quick win you can get.”

rocket.net

Is there an E-A-T score on Google?

E-A-T isn’t a concrete metric for evaluating websites and individual pieces of content – it is a concept. There is no single aggregated E-A-T score. According to Google, there is no single E-A-T score into which all signals are summarized or added up. However, even an evaluation  concept can offer us guidelines to follow.

So, Is E-A-T a Ranking Factor?

Technically, E-A-T is not a ranking factor. However, various factors of E-A-T optimization can have an effect on the ranking in Google search.

E-A-T is a part of Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. The search engine uses these guidelines to determine which content published on the Internet is classified as particularly high quality. Fun fact: E-A-T is mentioned 130 times in the Guidelines – YMYL is mentioned 105 times.

If Google Quality Raters classify a certain content as high quality, it is very likely that similar content from the same website will also be ranked higher.

Google has over 200 ranking factors. From Domain Factors to User Interaction, to Brand Signals. Check out all the Google ranking factors on Backlinko.com

Why is Google E-A-T Important?

In order to evaluate your content, it must be able to be read by a machine or an algorithm. Whether this content is “helpful” is ultimately decided by the person who found it.

The answer depends on the perspective from which the term pair is defined. Most importantly, it depends on how Google measures how helpful a user finds the content. To speculate about this would be the outdated SEO thinking and this is exactly where the Google Helpful Content update is directed against.

When we sit across from a person, we get an impression of them after a few minutes. We trust them or not. The first positive impression may cloud our judgment, but it’s usually the basis of most of our relationships. Trust is the start of everything.

One focus of our websites is to be found — that’s SEO. Another focus of our websites is to build trust with our visitors. Google helps us in some respect by eliminating many of the websites wit false or misleading information from the SERPs. People are going to learn quickly that the websites appearing in the SERPs are those with useful, authoritative, trustworthy, and expert content. That’s to our advantage.

“The aim of the Helpful Content update is, according to Google in their blog, to show “more content by people, for people in search”. Google’s gold standard of service is relevance. Relevant results for your queries. People use Google because they usually find what they want on page one or two. A lot of the pages you find on Google have no immediate relevance to solving our problem. A lot of pages are there so you click on them, see the ads, stay on the page and look around — everything other than find the solution you seek.”

rocket.net

How do E-A-T and YMYL Work Together?

The most important aspect of how E-A-T and YMYL should work together is set out in Section 2.2 of the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines:

What is the Purpose of a Web Page? “Websites and pages should be created to help users.”

Content is king — or queen — but only if it also meets Google’s standards for outstanding content. That’s why it’s especially important to address topics like E-A-T and YMYL.

YMYL offers are described by Google as “Pages that impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users.”

Google sets its content requirements higher in the subject areas of medicine, law, and finance than in other areas. This means that if you publish instructions for bathroom plumbing or fixing a roof as your content, then the requirements aren’t as stringent as it would be for investment advice or medical treatments.

Let Rocket.net help you every step of the way!

When it comes to effective SEO strategies, there’s much more to it than just the words on your pages. However, as a new website owner, you must take it one step at a time and focus on the basics before moving on to more advanced strategies.

If you are an old hand and have your E-A-T and YMYL covered, then maybe your Tech SEO could benefit from a faster, more secure website.

SEO means getting your name in front of people who haven’t heard of you. Google loves unique content AND websites that load cleanly and quickly! Let us show you how all your Content Craftsmanship needn’t be lost to a heavy website.

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