Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vital aspect of digital marketing. A strong SEO strategy ensures your content is visible to more potential customers by increasing its rankings in the Google algorithm.
The principle of E-A-T relates to the pillars of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of your content as laid out in the Google Quality Raters’ Guidelines.
Adopting some simple practices to improving your E-A-T principles can make a huge difference to your company’s visibility. This article outlines how to do that to impress the Google algorithm.
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The Technical Points
Understanding the finer points can help you optimize your content more effectively. Despite reports to the contrary, Google does not label every web page with an E-A-T score. Instead, it uses a range of metrics to score pages, including one called PageRank.
PageRank provides a guide into each page’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. The next part of the challenge is knowing how to improve those important aspects of your content.
Improve Your Street Cred
Your work does not have to become a fully referenced encyclopedia or academic textbook, but adding some context to your content can do wonders for your E-A-T profile.
Adding links to sources from other websites (‘off-site’ sources) to show statistics and research is a great start for this. Adding short biographies for your authors to show off their credentials (authority) also helps.
Further linking to the author’s contact details and online profiles such as LinkedIn adds further credence.
Providing What You Say You Are Providing
Another key aspect of E-A-T is to ensure that your content is actually addressing what the viewer was looking for. To analyze this and tailor your content accordingly, you can analyze the top keywords attracting searchers to your website.
Getting your content to align to these keywords as closely as possible means that your content is matched to what your site visitors are looking for.
This means not stuffing your articles with keywords and other buzz phrases just to get traffic but providing relevant and informative content to your readers.
Another no-no for ensuring positive E-A-T outcomes is to avoid so-called ‘clickbait’ titles and misleading ads. These all contribute to black marks from the Google algorithm.
It Is All About Trust
Google’s search results are its crown jewels, so it is always working to ensure that searchers return the most relevant and trustworthy results. For websites in susceptible sectors such as financial advice, health, and medical and science, Google is especially scrupulous.
Ensuring your pages are optimized for mobile devices and web browsers are also high on Google’s trust spectrum.
With increasing numbers of users searching from phones instead of PCs, delivering mobile-friendly versions of your content is becoming more important.
Building these simple steps into your SEO and content strategy can make a world of difference in attracting the right type of traffic to your website. This is then favorable to your Google listings, and the two support one another.
The best news is that the principles of E-A-T are not difficult or technical – they just need a well-defined SEO strategy and strong, valuable content for your readers.