The acronym E-A-T isn’t new. In fact, it’s been around a good few years now, but if you’re not in the SEO industry, you’d be forgiven for not knowing what it stands for or what it means for search engine rankings.
In 2018, Google released a new algorithm update which appeared to impact a lot of websites in the healthcare sector and was targeted at low quality and potentially harmful sites. Dubbed the ‘Medic Update’ by Barry Schwartz, this algorithm update focused on removing and de-ranking websites that provided medical information and advice that was low quality, from organisations that weren’t seen as an authority or information that could negatively impact the health (or wealth) of their users.
There’s lots of information on the web around EAT (and another abbreviation, YMYL, but we’ll leave that for another post), so here we’ll try to simplify what EAT is and how you can use it to improve your content marketing efforts and SEO.
What does EAT stand for?
EAT stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness.
These are the three things Google is evaluating when it’s looking at your content and they make up a lot of the guidelines in their Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (summarised nicely here by Jennifer Slegg on the Moz blog).
Expertise
Google is looking for content that demonstrates the author’s expertise on their chosen topic. This doesn’t just mean the information you provide needs to be top notch, it also means you need to be able to communicate your expertise in an accessible and coherent way.
Authority
Not only does Google want to see content from creators who are experts in their field, but they also want to see content from those who are seen as an authority in their field. To be seen as an authority, Google will be assessing whether others in your field of expertise cite your content, mention you and linking back to content you have published.
All these are signals to Google that your work is respected among your peers and is seen as an authority.
Trustworthiness
How does Google know when to trust a source of content? It’s going to look at external factors such as the sentiment surrounding your business. This could be reviews on various platforms including Google reviews, Trust Pilot, Trip Advisor, etc. Make sure you’re proactively focusing on getting positive reviews from happy customers and prioritising customer service to avoid any negative reviews.
It’s also going to consider on-site factors such as whether you’re transparent in how you use customer data (i.e. having an easy to locate Privacy Policy), whether you have a physical address (this adds credibility for your audience too). Google will also look at whether you make it easy to contact you, the site owner and (if you’re selling products online) they’ll want to see your returns and refund policy as well as any Terms and Conditions.
These are all considered good practice when creating your website, so most businesses should have them, but make sure yours are all present and correct, up-to-date and easy to access.
EAT not only applies to your content, but also applies to your content creators too. Adding author bios to your blog posts is a great way to reference more information about the author, their credentials, qualifications, experience, etc, which can improve Google’s perceived quality of your content and website.
Although the EAT principle has been primarily focused on the health sector, it can be applied to all sectors and websites that produce content. We should all be striving to create content that demonstrates our expertise, authority and trustworthiness and avoid creating low quality content for the sake of it.
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