Get to know Google E-A-T and assess your content

What is Google E-A-T?

In a nutshell, E-A-T describes characteristics that indicate whether a website or a specific web page is high-quality, reliable, trusted, and authoritative. With this in mind, Google can then determine whether the website and the content is helpful and gives value to Google’s users.

What does E-A-T stand for?

E-A-T stands for the Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness of the content, the author or creator, and the website in general.

Is E-A-T important?

Google says it is and, of course, we would have to agree and comply.

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E-A-T is super important to a lot of websites because Google uses E-A-T to determine whether its content is high quality, accurate, and reliable, and, therefore, trust-worthy.

Characteristics of a high quality page

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Characteristics of a low quality page

Its important to note that the first characteristic of a low quality page is the lack of E-A-T.

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SEO’s should be using E-A-T guidelines to better produce and structure content that Google is likely to rank and make more visible. It’s an unwritten rule that anything mentioned in the quality guidelines is already being measured by Google as a ranking factor. Therefore, you wouldn’t want to ignore E-A-T.

The concept of E-A-T encompasses many ranking factors, one being external authoritative and reliable backlinks which is something most websites are lacking. To rank well on Google, your website needs to be linked in or mentioned by authoritative sources or websites, especially those that relate to your market or industry.

Google is quite smart at determining whether a business has good online reputation, and whether they have expertise in their field, mentioned in authoritative sources and, ultimately, whether they are a trustworthy business.

Is E-A-T a ranking factor?

E-A-T is not an algorithm or a direct ranking factor. It is well-known that Google has numerous algorithms and spiders that work tirelessly to generate a website rank score, and these spiders look for signals in content like E-A-T. So, E-A-T is more of a sign or signal, rather than a ranking factor.

Focusing on E-A-T is not a replacement for technical SEO. Ensuring that your website has the correct on-page SEO signals far outweigh whether the website is reliable, especially with the build of a brand new website with no previous Google trust.

How to improve E-A-T

E-A-T can definitely be improved upon. There are many different signals that Google uses across the web to determine good or bad E-A-T.

Get good reviews

What people say about your business online matters.

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Get mentions on authoritative sites

This is probably the most important signal of Google E-A-T. Authoritativeness is likely determined by your authoritative mentions on the web, forums, directories, and other reliable websites.

We believe E-A-T is all about an attempt to determine trust, so do your best to build trustworthiness.

Do all that you can to demonstrate your E-A-T on your website! If you need help auditing your website content, links, and overall website E-A-T, get in touch with Goop Digital today.