Is it a virtuous circle the dance we do to create content that Google wants and will award coveted high ranking which then helps to establish us as a trustworthy authority on our topic of choice, which in turn increases our search engine ranking and rankability?
Mix up your E-A-T elements
We’ve written before about the tight relationship between SEO and content, and how the much-discussed E-A-T (expertise – authoritativeness – trustworthiness) principles underpin Google search engine rankings. A high-quality page, or high-quality content, will embody these three characteristics. These concepts aren’t new but remain surprisingly absent in many companies’ content and SEO strategies, despite their importance and contributory weight in terms of overall page quality.
Expertise
For most businesses, a certain measure of expertise is established almost by default. If you’re not trying to game the system, but are creating content that conveys verifiable, factual expertise in a subject area germane to your business, you are displaying expertise. Does this mean you will achieve a favorable page ranking? No. Not by expertise alone. But the fact that the content already organically reflects the expertise aspect of the E-A-T trifecta means that with some basic search engine optimization techniques, and probably not too much content overhaul, you can begin to improve your ranking.
Authoritativeness
Authoritativeness is trickier than expertise. Many people can be experts, while very few people are authorities to the degree that their name alone is synonymous with their area of authority. By saying or reading the name, you associate it with this authority. That said, this isn’t only a human-perceived measurement. I might believe that everyone in the world associates Ms. X with a particular topic, but it’s highly likely that the leading authority on a subject is someone most people have never heard of. It’s not about how well-known a person is generally but rather how much authority they hold within their own domain, however niche. Search engines will be much better at recognizing this authority than a human, which is why building expertise, as above, is key, and if you are the authority in your field but don’t have an active online presence, it might be possible to leverage that authority for search visibility.
Trustworthiness
Essentially search engine rankings reward content that is most relevant and correct in achieving the goal of a user search. Ultimately, the name of the game is user-focused content development with judicious use of target keywords. And what else makes content user-focused? Beyond relevance to user intent and correctness, trust plays a key role in how a page gets ranked. Trust can mean different things in an SEO context. It is partly the content itself: is it accurate, honest, helpful? Another part, though, is about the site quality and experience, such as site security, accessibility, a visible and easy-to-find privacy policy, and other similar measures that foster a sense of trust and security about the page or site’s authenticity and trustworthiness, i.e., we are who we say we are and do what we say we will.
E-A-Ting SEO success
As we, and many others, have discussed before, a big factor in SEO success is about delivering quality content. The E-A-T pillars help measure whether or not the content has been designed to deliver value to and sincerely help human users or to game the keyword ranking system. Because of content and technology/automation, SEO can be about quality, and expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are core to succeeding in this paradigm.
Are you optimizing for E-A-T?
SEO success is not only about ranking highly on E-A-T pillar terms, which is abundantly clear when we examine ever-changing Google search algorithms. Yet, as we will advise time and again, solid SEO results aren’t achievable without good content backed by expertise and trustworthiness (at least). Like most SEO and digital marketing initiatives, the only viable strategy is long-term and flexible, allowing for shifts based on insights you gather, changes in the market or to search algorithms. Optimizing for E-A-T factors requires a time investment: both in the sense that you will need to dedicate resources to generating and optimizing your E-A-T content, and then will need to give it time to build its quality-based rankings.
Give us a chance to E-A-T with you: we’d love to discuss how optimizing for E-A-T in your content and across your digital properties can contribute to better search ranking and visibility.
Get in touch to discuss how you can shape up your E-A-T-ing for more effective digital marketing.
