INTRODUCTION
To be at the topmost position in the list of brands, you need to acquire users’ trust in your brand’s expertise.
For this, you need to know everything about google E-A-T.
In this blog let us discuss what E-A-T is, what role it plays in your search engine ranking, how you can measure it.
Also, we will focus on the ways to E-A-T ethically with digital PR.
Keep reading the blog.
What is E-A-T?
E-A-T is the abbreviation for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
It is derived from Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines.
Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines works to improve search experience of users on Google by evaluating the overall quality of a web page.
Using this way Google gets feedback from third party Search Quality Raters which are highly trained.
Most of you might have heard that google gives more preference to the websites that demonstrate E-A-T.
How does Google determine E-A-T?
At a high stage of Google search quality evaluator guidelines, it consider following components:
Creating an effective main content requires expertise
Authoritativeness of the creator of main page, website and the main page itself
Trustworthiness of the creator, main content and the website.
Need of E-A-T
These days anyone can publish whatever they wish to on the search engine. It is not essential that the medical advice we get on a particular website belongs to a medical expert.
To ensure that the information provided is trustworthy for making important decisions concerning life, Google makes sure to focus on expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of the creator, web page and the website itself.
For google blog written by an experienced doctor of a renowned hospital is more valuable than other random medicinal posts.
Significance of E-A-T in SEO
As Google knows the fact that people dedicatedly follow information offered to them online, they try to make search results genuine.
For this, E-A-T score helps Google to ensure that individual pages of your website are credible sources of information offering real value for users in specific subjects.
Google really works hard to configure who everybody is and understand their expertise and credibility.
The more you follow Google E-A-T, the greater will be chances of your organic growth and higher ranking on search engines.
Ways to measure E-A-T?
After knowing the significance of this judgement parameter of Google, You must be wondering how you can measure it.
Google does not give an actual idea about the way of measuring E-A-T score. Therefore, it is not a direct ranking factor.
Understand that unlike page speed or core web vitals you cannot rate E-A-T score directly. You can’t rate it on the scale of 1 to 100.
The only confirmed factors that pay a major contribution to the E-A-T score are links and PageRank.
But there are several ways by which E-A-T plays an essential role in the google algorithms.
These includes:
Google’s expertise patents
There are various patents that signify the role of authoritativeness in search results.
For instance, in 2007 Google registered for a patent that enables it to find information about the author of any content. It helps Google to rank the content according to the authoritativeness.
Also, recently Google applied for patents known as website representation vectors in 2018.
It allows Google to analyze the authoritativeness of a piece of content. It identifies authors concerning their style of writing, tone of voice or accent.
Another patent of Google helps them to analyze which content is unique or something new to convey to the audience.
Google uses entities
Google first considers a particular entity and starts gathering information to build the complete profile of that entity.
To do so, google connects dots with the help of the information acquired through different google products.
Further, it ranks somebody on the basis of gathered information.
Ways to E-A-T Ethically with Digital PR?
All of us must have noticed that brands with real faces get more popular.
It is a trust building factor and in this digital age, trust can make or break your visibility on search engines.
Along with this link building activities with the help of certain free and easy tools can offer you an easy route to links in top level publications.
With the right strategies, digital PR can deliver you outstanding results both in terms of SEO and brand awareness.
Let us illustrate the same with the help of some practical examples.
About Us Page
When it comes to E-A-T, ‘About us’ page evokes many trust signals for content SEO tactics.
You can either use it to introduce a particular subject or whole team but make sure to use headshots.
Also, include a bio that outlines credentials, roles and expertise of your subject.
Never use stock images in the content; it can create an awkward situation if someone reaches out to a person who does not exist in a video chat.
Try to add original content to this page instead of inventing a subject matter expert.
Don’t fake your information.
Google’s expert panel is concerned about every piece of content you share online.
Make sure you do not demonstrate your fake credential or expertise to gain popularity.
Google gives preference to everyday expertise.
Therefore, find an authentic way to represent yourself as real.
Google also considers reviews and opinions of people as valuable in terms of topics that require less formal expertise.
The level of transparency your brand offers is one of the best practices to gain trust of google.
Especially, it play a vital role for fields like finance or medicine that can strongly impact the life of an individual.
Your Money Your Life Pages
Google remains very particular about these pages.
The Search Quality Evaluator guidelines define YMYL pages as any page that can affect the future, happiness, finances, or safety of the user.
Along with the websites of healthcare providers and banks, it is also applied to the wide variety of ecommerce websites which are selling their products.
Google makes it confirm that the content written on these websites is authentic and providing acknowledged information to the users.
Hence, Digital PR plays an important role in getting on-site authors cited elsewhere and establishing them as subject experts.
To publish content in the right way, keep it in mind that Google’s algorithm and a journalist’s instincts are experts to identify content from real experts and forged.
Don’t ignore social media
When it comes to generating trust signals for your website or any other web content, you truly can’t ignore social media.
Social media falls under digital PR’s action.
For instance, if you communicate with a journalist they will make judgment about you by googling or by viewing your social media profiles.
Information provided there will give them positive vibes to include them in an article.
Also, once the PR gets published, the reader will be curious to reach out to you on social media platforms.
Therefore you must ensure your About Us page links with your social media handles.
The Bottom Line
When Google’s Search Quality Raters will analyze your website, they will look for every aspect that deals with expertise and authoritativeness.
It includes even the citations which are not linked.
If you consider important elements as discussed in this blog like your news article with an expert name, and links to an About Us page, it will impact E-A-T positively.
Ultimately, you will get more coverage and authority. Moreover, you will send a green signal to Google to rank you high on search engines.
Started working as a digital marketing expert, Varun Sharma is now also a well-known digital marketing speaker – a speaker on performance development, and a trusted mentor to businesses in the digital world. His keynote expositions are based on the digital marketing theories, which provide a fascinating insight into the secrets of high performance.