Over the last few years, Google has been stressing about the importance of website quality and user experience to improve organic search results. For that, Google came up with E-A-T in 2014 when defining its Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines. Fast forward to December 2022, Google updated E-A-T to E-E-A-T to deliver an optimal experience to its users.

E-E-A-T is an essential website quality principle in SEO that businesses, website owners, and marketers need to understand. The competition keeps growing in this industry, and this year will not be any different. If you’re still not changing your strategies according to the latest Google update, you’re missing out on a lot.

Being the leading search engine optimisation agency in Australia, we have prepared a detailed guide on E-E-A-T and SEO to help businesses improve their SERP ratings and user experience this year.

E-E-A-T and Quality Rater’s Guidelines

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Previously, these guidelines focused on expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness—all of which are still crucial for a website—but the additional ‘E’ for experience shows the significance of authenticity and readers’ experience in the modern SEO landscape.

Google has Quality Raters who evaluate your website before ranking it on SERPs. E-E-A-T guidelines, or Quality Rater’s Guidelines, provide instructions for evaluation, to determine the highest quality website and rank it accordingly.

The purpose of these guidelines is to tell search algorithms how a website will be perceived by users and gain crucial insight to offer a better experience to searchers.

Here’s How E-E-A-T is Evaluated

1. Experience

The additional E stands for Experience, which is all about the first-hand or personal encounter of a content creator with the topic. Suppose you’re buying a new phone and doing some research beforehand. Which article would you trust more? A review from a person who has personally used the phone or one from someone who has never used it? Reading content coming from an experienced individual offers better and more meaningful information.

Therefore, Google’s updated algorithm prefers content created by those with real-life experience over others.

When creating content, you have to ensure you have adequate experience to guide others. This will help your page rank higher than others.

2. Expertise

The second E stands for the content creator’s Expertise. This includes having a lot of knowledge in a particular field to write about it. For example, a search engine optimisation specialist is more qualified to write about achieving a higher rank on SERPs than someone who has just read a few articles about it.

Expertise is even more important for critical topics related to medical, legal and financial sectors. Google refers to such topics as YMYL or Your Money Your Life. This is because YMYL topics can potentially impact someone’s financial stability, health, safety or happiness. Therefore, formal or everyday expertise is crucial for creating content.

Let’s consider another example. A person is looking for information to improve their bad credit score. In this case, a financial specialist can provide accurate information (formal expertise) or someone who has personally experienced it and improved their credit score (everyday expertise).

Here’s how to incorporate Experience and Expertise in your content

• Hire subject matter experts and experienced professionals to create content for your website and include an author’s bio.
• Include SEO-friendly author profile pages that mention their qualifications and experience in detail.
• Add content that is valuable for your audience.
• Incorporate clear credits and sources with hyperlinks.

1. Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness is about all about your reputation in the relevant industry. When a user considers a website the most reliable source of information, that’s authoritativeness. This varies from topic to topic and industry to industry. For example, the most authoritative source of tour dates of the rock back, AC/DC, will be their website, but the most reliable source of meat standards in Australia will be MLA (Meat & Livestock Australia).

Here’s how to ensure Authoritativeness in your content.

• Earn backlinksfrom high-authority and reputable websites by producing relevant and accurate content.
• Update statistics and check for broken links every now and then.
• Update overall content according to the latest trends.

1. Trustworthiness

The last and most important factor of E-E-A-T guidelines is about transparency and legitimacy of a website. When evaluating the trustworthiness of a website, Google’s Quality Raters check different things. If a website belongs to a retail store, they will check whether the website mentions sufficient contact information. Similarly, if a topic is about a virus’s symptoms, the raters will check whether the website has mentioned the author of the content and their expertise.

To achieve trustworthiness, you should:

• Include affiliations, certifications, etc., on your About Us page
• Include clear contact information on the footer of every page of your website.
• Create a dedicated ‘Contact Us’ page with different methods to reach you, including phone number, email address, physical address and a form.
• Improve your online reputation.
• Avoid spam ads, outdated content, click baits (shocking or exaggerated meta titles), and misleading content.

If you need more help with E-E-A-T guidelines or any other SEO-related matter, feel free to reach out to TocToc.

We are a leading digital marketing company in Canberra offering a wide range of services, from content marketing to website development. Ben Fullarton, the company founder, is an SEO expert whose mission is to change how you do digital marketing by incorporating the latest updates and providing the highest value to users. Learn more about us here or contact us now.