In search engine terminology, E-A-T stands for Expertise – Authority – Trustworthy. Now find out how Google’s emphasis on E-A-T impacts your website. Your site needs to send “expert”, “authority” and “trustworthy” signals to Google for higher ranking positions. Google hesitates to award sites which do not feature these three attributes with high placement in search engine results. Essentially, what you are asking any of the search engines to do is to recommend your website whenever a user types in the specific keywords you have optimized. However, search engines want to qualify that you deserve their top-tier recommendations. No search engines want to give up their best real estate to “junk” and there is a lot of junk on the web.
Pursuing E-A-T isn’t an instantaneous fix to poor SEO. It’s a comprehensive and integrated methodology. But it’s one of the best ways to maintain your site’s overall dominance. Think of E-A-T in a holistic sense. Your entire site needs to reflect excellence in the three specific components of this important aspect of SEO.
Google’s algorithm
Let’s review an example. If your site features text or visual content created by experts or authorities, it’s important to accord them with an author box or artist box including photos and links presenting them as experts or authorities. This is a relatively easy feature to implement on your webpages. Evidently, Google’s algorithm crawls these names and links then awards a factor within their algorithm to your website. But only if you highlight the contributors who have impacted your web presence.
Even if your site does not feature the type of content in the illustration above, one singular way to establish E-A-T is to feature social media links and linked icons to websites and entities where your company has been featured in external events or online media. Giving your business, not just your website, a boost in expertise and authority signals Google that you are trustworthy. Making your core business more dimensional online is crucial to E-A-T.
Expertise, Authority and Trust.
To increase your trustworthiness, there are some relatively simple techniques you can deploy. These key elements are usually found in the footer of most websites. Make sure you have a way for your visitors to contact you or your staff, make sure you list your physical location(s), FAQs, privacy policy as well as terms and conditions. An About Us page is an additional display that can be used to demonstrate Expertise, Authority and Trust.
E-A-T is also a very organic way to improve your SEO positioning. It isn’t based on “smoke and mirrors”. The results of focusing on improvements to your website using these three techniques should be: more links to your site, more time spent on your webpages (low bounce rate), more customer interest, more income, more profit!
Take a moment to consider whether your website meets the concepts of E-A-T. An SEO expert may be exactly what you need to perfect your website’s rankings on the major search engines and especially on the search engine giant – Google.
Image: Pixabay
