You’ve probably heard of the expression E-E-A-T in SEO but you’re wondering what it means.
E-E-A-T stands for
- Experience
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trustworthiness
By combing these traits for your website, you’ll grow its traffic. It’s that simple, but it’s not easy.
So, let’s break E-E-A-T down
Experience
It’s so easy to set up a blog, almost anyone can do it. This means that to make a sky diving blog, for example, you don’t need to have ever been sky diving or even left the house.
Users want to find websites they can trust and get advice from people who have experienced what they are needing.
Think of a travel blog, for example, if they’ve got an article on location and they’ve been there, that’s a lot better than a website that’s only looking at what others have said and just creating content for the sake of it.
Expertise
Let’s face it when we want advice on buying a good or service we want to know the company knows what it’s talking about.
It’s incredibly easy now to set up a business, get a website and start selling to the world but with that amount of competition, Google will favour the websites that can display expertise in their industry.
This is especially more relevant in say health or legal industries where it’s going to be harder to rank for smaller websites compared to larger ones which have a higher element of trust that they are experts in what they are discussing.
It’s not all about the content you create though, using expert writers is great but you can also demonstrate expertise by having more reviews.
Getting Google reviews is incredibly important for helping to boost local SEO, it shows your trust and it makes it more likely you’ll be chosen from the competitors.
Think about it, even if you’ve got the best goods or services in the industry if you can’t convey that with social proof, your website will likely get less traffic.
Authoritativeness
Backlinks directly affect how authoritative a website appears. Remember though it’s not about just creating any backlinks you need to be getting them from relevant sources in your industry.
All backlinks aren’t equal. Let’s say for our website we had a backlink from Neil Patel’s website, for example, it would be a lot more authoritative than say a link from a smaller website in the same niche that no one has heard of.
Link building is a slow process but the results will be well worth it. It can take a lot of outreach especially if your website isn’t generating natural backlinks over time, sometimes websites just need to find out about you to know you’re there.
And if you’re thinking about buying links then you need to be cautious. If a website wants money to link out to your website then that’s a bad sign that that website just offers any content because they are paid for it.
The best links can’t be bought.
Trustworthiness.
How trustworthy does your website appear? Firstly, are you using HTTPS to serve up the pages of your website or still using the old HTTP? Using the newer HTTPS helps encrypt your user’s data to make things more secure.
Where reviews can help show your expertise, they can also signal untrustworthiness if you’re getting too many bad reviews. Bad reviews aren’t necessarily always bad.
There will always be bad experiences in any business, but if the majority are negative, this can impact your search engine ranking positions.
This relates to social media too. Social comments can be seen as indicators of how much your audience likes or dislikes your service.
How does E-E-A-T affect your SEO strategy?
E-E-A-T should form an important part of any SEO strategy. But first, you need to consider how is your user experience, and how’s your brand’s digital footprint seen by your audience.
Having a bad website isn’t the worst thing in the world but having a bad user experience can kill it.
Think about how your content portrays your business. As an SEO company, we only write about SEO topics or things very closely related as that’s what we know about.
When creating content, your website needs to build topical authority.
This means that Google sees your website content and knows you and your website knows what it’s talking about because you’ve got various pieces of content about a particular topic.
How can you improve E-E-A-T SEO?
- Focus on building high-quality backlinks
- Get relevant websites mentioning your brand
- Get more reviews
- Create high-quality content
- Update old content to make it more relevant
