Google E-A-T: How to Master Quality Control

What exactly is Google E-A-T? (No, it has nothing to do with your lunch.)

Google E-A-T is a term referring to website quality standards. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not an algorithm that ranks your website. Instead, E-A-T is a set of standards that Google quality testers use to determine a website’s caliber. (Basically, these testers make sure Google’s algorithm is working the way it’s supposed to.)

In other words, E-A-T involves guidelines about what makes a website high-quality, but isn’t an automated ranking process. E-A-T is important to know about because it entails the official parameters set by Google testers and can act as guiding principles for your site.

Google E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Following these guidelines can help you boost your Google ranking indirectly. It’s the perfect way to hit your SEO targets and plan content goals for your site, among other actions.

Let’s get insights into Google E-A-T and how it impacts various aspects of your website quality control, so you can create a site with excellent Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

Expertise

Expertise is all about showcasing your company’s know-how, often through expert voices or credentials. This principle ensures that your website isn’t giving incorrect information, or misrepresenting its services.

This value is also about understanding your audience and ensuring all your content is easily digestible. Your content needs to be user-focused and simple to understand.

At the same time, expertise involves analyzing your audience and serving them what they want. Your ability to respond to their needs and find fresh content for their interests is also part of your expertise.

As you build your expertise for your website, there are a few key actions you can take:

• Format your content so it’s easy to read.
• Make use of visual media including images or video.
• Hire and give voice to your expert voices on your blog or About Us page.
• Showcase your company’s certificates or credentials.
• Keep your blog up-to-date with new content.
• Ensure your web voice has the right reading level for your audience.
• Check and cite facts/data with authoritative sites.
• Understand searcher intent and respond to possible queries through FAQ or blog content.
• Curate reviews and mentions of your site on other platforms.
• Make your contact details easily visible.

By taking these actions, you’ll highlight your site’s expertise and achieve a higher level of quality. We especially recommend working on the presentation of your content. Whenever possible, visual aids like icons, infographics, photos, etc. can really break down the information.

Likewise your blog voice should be accessible to your audience. Forget about industry jargon and focus on speaking clearly. In the long run, these actions could boost your Google ranking.

Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness goes hand-in-hand with expertise. In Google’s eyes, authoritativeness built by other sites and readers engaging with your content. The more your site appears on other relevant sites and social media platforms, the more authoritative your content is to Google.

When working to improve authoritativeness, you’ll want to get your site content linked to and shared in the most impactful ways possible. Some important actions you can take to boost authoritativeness include:

• Share your web content on social media often.
• Engage with others to get social media shares and mentions.
• Keep a News page up-to-date on your site with relevant external links.
• Establish strong backlinks of your content on relevant industry sites.
• Curate results for your company on review platforms and mega-sites like Wikipedia.
• Get your company profiled in big-name sites and industry hotspots.
• Send regular expert updates with web links on social media such as LinkedIn.
• Spotlight guest voices on your blog to create relevant external links.

Getting great authoritativeness relies on having a linking strategy that works. It’s important to identify relevant sites for guest posting, as well as have a strong social media strategy for web backlinks.

In particular, you should work to create a social media strategy that spreads your blog content far and wide. Even organic social media can be your best friend in getting your content seen by industry voices.

Trustworthiness

Finally, trustworthiness is essential for creating a relationship with the customer. In order to create a sense of trustworthiness, you’ll want to give users signals of a safe, serious and secure site.

This often means that you’ve received positive reviews from customers in the past, have fully certificated payment methods and updated privacy policies that define data usage. These are all markers of having a trustworthy site.

Building relationships of trust is best achieved by the following:

• Delight customers to get great reviews.
• Curate and respond to reviews on TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, Facebook, Google My Business, BBB.org, etc.
• Ensure your site is secure, with good hosting, HTTPS domain and well-protected payment methods. (Consider a web builder to get all-in-one services!)
• Include a privacy and data policy for customers to understand how their data will be used.
• Have a refund and return policy clearly defined on your site.
• Make it easy to get in touch with any questions or concerns.
• Stay transparent in your words and actions.

Building trustworthiness requires making the potential customer feel safe and secure while on your site. For many of these items, you’ll need an IT specialist. Don’t skimp on your security settings. Instead, make sure you hire an IT expert that will keep your site and payment methods highly secure.

Final Takeaway

E-A-T is an excellent way to indirectly improve your site ranking. By considering every aspect of E-A-T – Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness – you’ll boost Google’s most important quality indicators.

You can achieve expertise by highlighting your expert voices and credentials; improve authoritativeness with a robust linking strategy; and build trustworthiness by doubling up on your reviews and site security.

Just as you implement a strong SEO strategy and blog content strategy, you can make an E-A-T strategy so that your site stays high-quality and improves its Google ranking. It’s a good way to gauge your site’s caliber and maintain it over time.

It’s clear: you can use E-A-T to ensure your site is the cherry-on-top best it can be.