Google first mentioned Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (EAT) in 2014, when it was added to their Search Quality Rater (SQR) Guidelines. The Guidelines provided instruction on their Quality Evaluators – how they rate website quality.
Google updated the guidelines in December 2022 to include the experience to give Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (EEAT). This means Google trusts pages with a high level of EEAT.
Quality evaluator ratings do not directly affect ranking but provide insights to help Google improve its algorithm. Improving EEAT requires the following.
- Use reliable sources
Creating accurate content based on facts is essential for an EEAT strategy. Citing authorities and using reliable sources such as original research and statistics in your content show your site has a high level of EEAT.
The SQR Guidelines state that high-quality content must be accurate and consistent with well-established expert consensus when it exists.
- Create high-quality content
For all purposes, whether professional or eCommerce service, websites and pages need to provide value and benefit the visitors. When creating content, ensure it is useful to readers by assessing if its production involves talent, effort, skill or originality.
Low-quality content, such as autogenerated content, thin content, copied content without added value or content with no purpose, will have the lowest rating.
- Leverage AI for content optimisation
Google has stated that the right use of AI isn’t against their guidelines. If the AI content meets all aspects of EEAT and is helpful, it may rank high on Google search. AI can help with the following tasks.
- Generate vital summaries from existing expert materials
- Proofread sentences or make them more readable
- Summarise survey answers
- Generate content ideas
- Create meta descriptions
- Perform technical SEO tasks such as writing Excel formulas, regular expressions, and robots.txt Schema markup.
Ensure you produce high-quality, original, people-oriented content demonstrating EEAT to rank high on Google.
- Optimise your “about us” page.
An “about us” page helps build trust that your company is credible and legitimate. Optimise this page to provide the necessary information about your company to establish trust and transparency.
Include the following information on your ‘about us’ page.
- Contact information and physical location
- The company’s values, mission and history
- Customer testimonials and reviews, awards and third-party certifications
- Overview, qualifications or experience of content creators and your team
Ensure you also optimise other pages, such as terms of service, shipping policy, detailed privacy policy, refund policy and other terms and conditions. These are important to demonstrate your website’s transparency and reputation, especially websites that process payments and eCommerce sites.
- Use existing experts’ materials.
Repurpose content – it isn’t practical to have an expert write 2000-word content for an entire day, but you can repurpose their existing materials, like podcasts and presentations, into articles and get them to review the content. Ensure you include the author and reviewer, and mark up the content, including the author and reviewer’s education, expertise, occupation and awards with schema. Ensure you format the repurposed content properly.
Host their materials on your website – original video footage, audio or photos produced by our content creator are classified as highly original. It can help improve the content’s quality in Google’s eyes.
This makes hosting these materials on third-party platforms and dedicated web pages important. At this, you can have complete control over the material’s presentation.
- Include expert quotes
You can ask an expert for a quote to support your content and build EEAT. Many people can provide a quote to get a link to their website or website, but ensure you inform the expert about what you need.
You can use existing materials from the expert or quote what the expert said in a podcast, webinar or event if you do not want to contact them.
- Get experts to answer FAQs or blog comments.
An alternative to engaging experts in EEAT optimisation is getting them to answer FAQs. For example, if you sell a product and get questions about it, you can create a questions-and-answer section for the product and have your expert team answer the questions.
Many experts welcome this because it is more straightforward and does not need in-depth content creation. Consider including the expert’s profile picture thumbnail next to their answers for improved trust and transparency.
- Get expert views through surveys.
Some content may require gathering real word information for informative content from firsthand experience. An example is an experienced writer in taxation working on a project about income tax. Even with an in-depth understanding of tax, expert-level insights may be vital to answering the following questions.
- How can I cut task bills this year?
- What are the common mistakes task payers make while filing their task income?
- What advice can you give to someone preparing for the tax-filing system?
- What are the challenges taxpayers face when filing taxes?
When you’ve got all the answers needed, create a survey using Google Forms. Ensure the questions are focused on the same content cluster. If the survey is for internal experts, consider open-ended questions so they can elaborate on real-world experiences.
- Use personal experience
Personal experiences are now important with the inclusion of ‘E’ in EAT to form EEAT. For example, users can benefit from content with information on difficult life challenges where expert advice is necessary.
While anyone can share personal experience, consider showing your first-hand experience to demonstrate accuracy, effort and originality. Pictures or videos are also beneficial.
The EEAT optimisation may seem daunting, but with the best SEO company in Dubai, your site can rank high on SERPs. Call DubSEO today on +971 54 456 3095 to optimise your website for EEAT.
