No, we are not giving you tips for healthy eating in the new year. When those in the marketing world talk about how to E-A-T, we are talking about how to introduce Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness into your content. These aspects are what Google considers to be a part of page quality and are often mentioned in the Quality Rater’s Guidelines for humans who evaluate the quality of search results. When you are working on a digital marketing strategy you should keep these guidelines in mind when creating content.
Having expertise, authority, and trustworthiness in your content will ensure that it has an improved search engine ranking and that your consumers engage more with your brand. Not sure how to start E-A-T-ing? Below are some of our top tips.Â
But First…How Is E-A-T evaluated?
Before we dive into how you can improve your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness in your digital marketing strategy, we first need to understand how Google evaluates E-A-T. Raters are asked to explore the information on the page itself, as well as the information elsewhere on the website. They will then make a final judgement on the E-A-T score.Â
Expertise
To judge the expertise of a piece of content, the raters look for content that was written by an expert in the field or who has a high level of education in a certain area. This will help to show them that it has been created for educational purposes and not for simple marketing purposes. However, not all content requires this form of expertise; life experience is sufficient for certain types of content, such as forum answers.Â
The raters often will look for an author biography on these posts, the number of articles written on a similar subject, as well as whether the author has written similar articles on different websites. Expertise can also be established through the company website itself through the “About Us†page of the company.Â
Authority
For content in your digital marketing strategy to have authority, the expertise of the author has to be recognised by others in the same field and the industry as a whole. In order to ascertain this authority, raters will look beyond the website where the content can be found. Raters will research the author or the organisation while excluding anything written by both.Â
The results of this search will tell them if the content that has been created is created by an authoritative and legitimate source. The signals that these raters look for include awards, reviews, ratings, and mentions or links from other organisations. The source of information will also need to be credible in order to maintain this authority.Â
Trustworthiness
An important factor of the E-A-T ranking system is the “T†from trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is a complex concept which includes the factual accuracy of the information in the content and the transparency of the organisation or person who has written it. This is vital for Google and other search engines, as they are more likely to show this content in search engine results.Â
The raters are encouraged to look at aspects such as the company description, the terms and conditions page, the privacy policy, and other important information. They will then confirm this information by searching for it on search engines and noting if the same information is shown or if it is incorrect.Â
How Do I E-A-T in 2020?
Now that you understand a little more about what E-A-T entails, you can dive right into how to implement it for your digital marketing strategy in 2020. The steps are simple but can make a significant difference to your search engine results, as we outline below.Â
All About Author Names And Biographies
As we mentioned above, building expertise and authority involves being transparent, which can easily be achieved by including author names and biographies on blog posts and guest posts that your business creates. For landing pages, this means that having customer support contact information readily available is key, and for a blog page with multiple authors, there should be a biography for each author.Â
Build Brand Interaction
Not having a brand interaction online can hurt your E-A-T scores, especially when raters are looking for ways to verify your trustworthiness. Be sure to fill out all details on your social media profiles, create content that places you as a thought leader, and tell your story through your digital marketing strategy. This will help with building your trustworthiness.Â
Examine User Generated Content
If you make use of user-generated content, to maintain your E-A-T score, you will need to moderate all user-generated content to be sure it fits with the goals of your digital marketing strategy, that all links are from reputable and not spammy resources, and that content is created and added by those with expertise or knowledge of a topic.Â
Keep Your Digital Marketing Diet Healthy
E-A-T-ing is about being transparent with your content and ensuring that it is created for your target audience and not simply as a sales technique. Expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are important to improve and maintain your search engine rankings, so be sure to include them in your digital marketing strategy.Â
If you would like to improve your online presence, speak to NetMechanic today to find out how we can help you.
