Want to get to the top in any industry? You have to work smart and work hard. In addition to your usual business processes, you need to create content, have a regular posting schedule; the works! And that’s not even getting into SEO practices yet. So to make a suitable game plan for SEO, you need to account for ranking factors. Whether it’s for mobile or desktop, several factors go into your SEO rankings, such as your CLS Score and how natural your links are. ‘How do you rank better in terms of SEO’ is a million-dollar question, and the answer is E-A-T!
E-A-T? In your SEO? It’s more likely than you think.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s not an algorithm! Instead, they’re concepts that can help judge a site. So, they’re not SEO ranking factors in their own right. Yet, they can represent factors that can indicate ranking. So, here’s an extra caveat to how you can apply E-A-T to SEO:
Search Quality Raters
You shouldn’t trust YouTube to create video chapters to boost your SEO efforts. Likewise, you shouldn’t trust the algorithm alone to handle your SEO game plan. That’s why Google relies on Search Quality Raters. They’re third-party individuals trained in Google’s guidelines. Such guidelines state that content ratings should not be based on personal opinions. Otherwise, they’d be considered unreliable. That’s why Search Quality Raters created the concept of E-A-T: to judge search results better.
So, a Search Quality Rater will check for how much content follows E-A-T. However, they don’t impact SEO rankings. But what Raters do is give Google information on the quality of content on the Internet.
Also, in addition to E-A-T, those looking to boost their SEO rankings might want to check Google’s (admittedly) “extensive” guidelines. Doing it will surely help to understand just how much their content measures up to E-A-T. (But it’s over 150 pages long, so you can just skim through it!)
Notable qualities for better SEO rankings
E-A-T can help establish if your content comes from experts. Thus, it can find if a particular page has authority, which can be considered trustworthy.
Examples of factors that can indicate E-A-T are AI and hyperlinks! For example, a particular blog post has many links related to the post’s topic. Therefore, the blog page can be considered authoritative. However, “authority,” like with E-A-T, is a quality of webpages or content. On the other hand, AI can find and take out content that’s little better than window-dressing. After all, Google cares a lot about user experience, so it has to pick up on reputable information worth its users’ time!
Expertise.
Finally, as the last E-A-T quality, Trustworthiness is “the quality of being deserving of trust or confidence; dependability; reliability.” This usually involves your audience mentioning pages or domains or how many Internet users will link to your page!
When creating your content, you will want to use an objective or scientific perspective. But, of course, just because you’re raising a lot of points and have prolonged articles doesn’t necessarily work. Expertise means that you have a bone-deep understanding of the topic at hand. So, a single topic with several closely related subtopics will indicate Expertise very well!
Quick note: Expertise doesn’t mean that adding an expert’s credentials can help you with your SEO game plan. The Expertise quality deals in the knowledge that the page provides. So, an expert with training, hands-on experience, and verified knowledge can handle or at least provide information for the content. Of course, then, you can always give the expert’s credentials. Still, you can’t expect the credentials alone to get noticed by the Search Quality Raters.
Authoritativeness.
The next E-A-T quality for SEO rankings is Authoritativeness, which implies a verified authority. Or rather, Authoritativeness is “substantiated or supported by documentary evidence and accepted by most authorities in a field,” according to Dictionary.com. So when it comes to SEO, you can quantify Authoritativeness if the page has useful or accurate intel.
Authoritativeness is also where hyperlinks (or just links) can come into play. Links to your site are what’s “known and confirmed for authority,” according to Search Engine Journal. However, note that neither authority nor Authoritativeness can help your SEO game plan; they’re not ranking factors. However, PageRank is still a factor, so there’s that!
Trustworthiness.
Finally, Trustworthiness, as the last E-A-T quality, is “the quality of being deserving of trust or confidence.” You’ll be able to spot Trustworthiness with every mention of your domain by your audience or how many Internet users will link to your page!
If people talk about you positively, that’s an indication that they look to you as a reliable source of information. But, such things do not necessarily mean that Google will also notice. In terms of a trust metric, there doesn’t seem to be a trust metric. (However, you can always rely on link distance ranking!)
However, in terms of Trustworthiness, all you can really do is provide reliable information and make sure you get quality links while you’re at it.
And that’s how you can put the E-A-T in SEO!
Google Search Quality Raters devised the concept of E-A-T. It stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness and is not an algorithm. Nor is it a group of SEO ranking factors. Instead, they’re a collection of qualities that Raters use to find if a particular page has authority. Google recommended that content publishers follow E-A-T to discover whether or not it will boost SEO ranking!
With Expertise, one can see the actual depth of your knowledge on a given topic. In addition, you can check if others look to you as an authority on the subject in terms of Authoritativeness. Finally, for Trustworthiness, you will know how many think of you as a trusted knowledge provider.
Though E-A-T is helpful, none of these are SEO ranking factors and cannot assist your game plan. Yet, they are an excellent way to measure how well your content will do.
