Last Updated on April 8, 2024
Google Update: E-A-T is now E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. You may already be familiar with the E-A-T SEO concept. Google introduced the extra E in December 2022.
E-A-T Expertise, Authority, Trust >> E-E-A-T Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust
What does E-E-A-T mean?
- + In addition to the Expertise you bring to your field,
- + the Authority you have,
- + and the Trust you exhibit,
- + Google will now also look at your Experience.
Another way of thinking about it: What have you done in your field of expertise that proves you are a credible source of information?
I could write a blog post about my favourite fitness tips – but an actual fitness instructor with a visible track record of classes, certifications, and publications is probably a better source of trusted, helpful information than me, right? That’s E-E-A-T.
To quote Google: “Does content also demonstrate that it was produced with some degree of experience, such as with actual use of a product, having actually visited a place or communicating what a person experienced?” Google Search Quality Evaluator Guide
Google E-E-A-T: Experience
Previously, this factor was dealt with under „expertise“. This language has disappeared in the updated version of the Guidelines of December 2022.
Now these two concepts are clearly separated: Expertise means specialist knowledge, Experience means personal experience, i.e. first-hand experience. An example of this would be cooking videos, cookbooks, and blog recipes.
Google E-E-A-T: Expertise
Expertise is the specific knowledge that a person has acquired through relevant experience and/or training.
The importance of expertise is enormous in the SEO context. Specifically, expertise is expected from the authors of the main content.
Google E-E-A-T: Authority
The topic of authority can essentially be broken down into three areas: Entities, links or mentions from influential sites, and personal branding of the company.
Because the status as an authority is something that you can only control yourself to a limited extent; it only becomes credible through external confirmation.
Google E-E-A-T: Trust
Since the update of the Quality Rater Guidelines in December 2022, Trust is not only a part of E-E-A-T: it is the central point around which all other factors revolve.
The other factors – experience, expertise and authority – are now to be explicitly used by quality evaluators to support their assessment of a site’s trustworthiness.
How E-E-A-T Affects Your Content
Search engines are very interested in consuming our content – in fact, they’re a very important audience. Why are search engines and social media platforms a target audience? Without us, there would be no content to search for. Google, Bing, even Amazon, eBay, and Facebook are all reliant on great content to attract visitors. Believe me – they’re very hungry!
E-E-A-T Affects Your Page Ranking
Search engines rank where your pages appear in the SERPs based on many things. First, that your content is helpful and offers a relevant answer to what is being searched. Relevant means timely, and contextual, and you bring some authority about the subject your write about to the table.
E-E-A-T Helps Your Content Get in Front of People
Just because your page is available doesn’t mean people will find it. That’s why we practice SEO. Matching your content with what people are looking for by using the right key phrases, images, video, and all-around E-E-A-T quality.
If you want a high E-E-A-T score, then ensure the trustworthiness of your content can be easily determined by the valuable experiences it provides on a topic.
E-E-A-T Works in Search Engines and Social Media
E-E-A-T is a way to verify and rank the value of your content. Good content is valuable – it holds people’s attention.
Both search engines and social media platforms are interested in having people spend time on their respective platforms, and not somewhere else. So they provide content (SERPs, posts etc) that is relevant to what we are interested in. And, that content should be good.
If you people click on your website in Google, stay a while, share that content with others via backlinks etc, then you rank higher. In the same way, if you get likes, shares, and comments on social media, you get more impressions.
What’s important to the social media algorithms is that they can place you in a niche. If you are interacting with content and people within your niche, you will be seen more often than if you are interacting and posting content across niches. This is the positive side of the algorithms.
If the algorithm doesn’t know where to place you, you’re in a sort of limbo. That reinforces the negative side of social media – being in a bubble – because that’s where the idea of fake news comes from. That’s the negative side of the algorithms.
Read more about Social Media Marketing right here: https://warrenlainenaida.net/category/social-media/
Fill Your Plate with as much Content as you Can
SEO is like cooking and baking – a mixture of science, emotion, and something for your customer’s eyes, ears, and tongue.
„Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of improving a website’s visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and others. SEO requires a dash of marketing, a pinch of psychology, and a large dollop of patience.“ An SEO Appetizer
In addition to your website, your social media and forum discussions should also be of high quality when they involve people sharing their first-hand experiences, regardless of the topic. Don’t focus only on your website. Your On-Page SEO (everything on your website) is a very small part of your being found on search engines. Your Off-Page SEO (everything away from your website) is your best chance of being found.
Search for someone or something on Google or Bing, and you will find not only websites but also YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, links to Amazon, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and much more! Google indexes most of what happens on social media – don’t miss out!
Find out more about E-E-A-T and how to improve your SEO in either English or in German, translated by my partner Bettina Heuser.
SEO All You Need to Know: Get Yourself and Your Website Found!
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(2022 / 6th Edition! 11/2024)
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