Google makes money by showing people what they are looking for. Google does it with extreme efficiency and also looks for the authenticity of the information it is showing to the viewer.
E-A-T is an acronym Google uses to maintain its search quality which means, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. Now let me be very clear, this is not a new SEO concept. It has been around the corner since 2014. And it was fully commercialized in 2018.
E-A-T was also known as Medic Update. This makes Google E-A-T another factor that google uses to assess the quality of your webpage.
E-A-T is usually referred to as “the medic update” after a journalist Barry Schwartz nicknamed it. The medic update was mostly affecting the websites which were related to health care and medicine in general.
E-A-T affected the ranking of websites from other verticals, but the damage was exceptionally less than the medicine vertical of the industry. These websites fell under YMYL “Your money your life” section.
Today, you have to bear with me as it will be a lot of acronyms and complex terminology. But, you don’t have to worry at all, as I will sherd everything down to the smallest blocks, making it simple for you to understand and benefit from.
In the tech industry, usually, acronyms were made by digital marketers. They make funny, impressive, and easy-to-remember acronyms. But with the release of E-A-T by Google, Google decided to do it cleverly. So this time, they released the acronyms.
Now Google plays the most important part in the ever-growing complex technical linguistic.
YMYL helps Google to identify the web pages which harm users. In much simpler words, if these pages are extremely low quality based on the content they contain, these pages can potentially impact a user’s mental well-being.
In short, Google cares a lot about the well-being of its users, considering their health, financial issues, and safety. Therefore, to protect its users, Google doesn’t want them to land on pages with no authentic information related to health and finance and could lead to safety concerns for the users.
To ensure authenticity and content quality, Google ensures that it will only recommend those websites and web pages with a very high E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) score.
Its Google’s way of contributing back to society by ensuring the well-being of its user.
So in today’s article, we will be discussing E-A-T, how it works and how your business will be affected if you understand how important E-A-T is for your virtual presence.
To break E-A-T down, we have to dig a little deeper than usual. So without any further delay, let’s begin. E-A-T is divided into three parts:
- Expertise
- Authority
- Trustworthiness
Expertise
You can be an expert in many things. But your experience is of no use if you don’t know how to communicate well. In order words, your knowledge is useless until and unless you let people get benefit from it.
It is very important to be an expert in your domain or be knowledgeable. But to let the knowledge flow, you need excellent communication skills. You have to communicate engagingly, a convincing one. In addition to communication, you need to know what your audience is looking for.
If your audience is not interested in whatever you have to communicate, no matter how the knowledge you or your website is, it’s not going to be of anyone’s help.
Let me explain to you. Have you ever noticed that the most common answer to the question “how to rank my website”? The answer is “Create what your audience wants.”
You need to understand that this virtual world is customer-centric and has nothing to do with what you want to do. Of course, you can do that too, but that will a prolonged growth as it’s not what the audience would like to see or read.
So being a subject matter expert, you need to follow the following points in mind:
- You need to understand the psychology of your user. You need to understand what your customer does when he comes onto your website.
- Once you understand your user’s behavior, you need to feed him the information he is interested in and ensure that he stays for a longer time on your website.
- Drill down and think about the possible reasons to understand the user searches.
- Work hard on keyword research and act accordingly.
- Once the user behavior has been analyzed:
- You need to communicate well.
- You need to publish content on your website that is interesting to reading and simple to understand.
- Be proactive and think about what the next question of your viewer will be.
- Either you drive their thoughts in a certain way that they unintentionally keep on scrolling in-between pages on your website.
Authority
What does authority mean in the literary world? It is the state of being knowledgeable when other people start quoting you as a valid source of information. So it is when others quote your words or work or refer you on their website.
When this starts happening, then the world acknowledges you as not only an expert but authority. And believe me, I can’t explain what it means to be an authority to Google.
Google loves validation, and nothing will help you rank higher than your authority and reflecting it in E-A-T. With authority, your E-A-T score increases to a new high.
To evaluate your authority and maintain a higher E-A-T score, you need to follow the below-mentioned points:
- It matters the most if someone else is quoting your work on their website.
- Ensure your work is simple and understandable, with examples to be quoted and validated.
- Links coming from others websites help you build your authority. For example, this validation or endorsement done by someone else helps Google understand the authority of your work.
- Another form of endorsement is making your work easy and understandable enough to be shared on every social media platform. If it is being spread around genuinely and daily over a certain time, Google starts increasing your work’s authenticity.
- Make your own Wikipedia page for your website. Why is it important? The page validates your existence and authority big time. Second, it lets people see what your organization or website is about, and they should be contacting you or not.
Trustworthiness
What do you think? Where will your website be moving with good level expertise and validation of authority? Yes, you guessed it right. It will move your website to trustworthiness.
E-A-T will let Google rank your website in higher positions with the increase in your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. All you need to do is to ensure that you don’t publish anything objectionable on your website.
Continue following Google and E-A-T instructions, maintain a high authority level and continuously increase your trustworthiness, and in return, Google will rank your website.
Positive feedback on social media websites makes it easy for Google to understand your content quality and evaluate your E-A-T score.
Some ways that we can promote trustworthiness on our website are:
- Contact us page should be written.
- Your website needs to have a real physical address.
- Mention the terms of your business.
- Owning a secure website’s domain.
- State your privacy policy
- Refund Policy in case you are adding a financial gateway in your domain.
Bottom Line
Being the owner of a website or a web page, you need to understand that if you are publishing information related to medical, health, and financial matters, you need to prove your experience.
You need to ensure that Google understands your authority on the topic and that you are trustworthy enough with the information you are communicating to your audience.
If you fail to do so, Google will not rank and recommend your page to any of its searchers and tag your webpage as unauthentic or fake news.
E-A-T helps Google to rank only authentic information. It allows Google to ensure the safety of its users. E-A-T also enables the experts to work hard on their communication skills and gather the audience.
E-A-T will ensure problems for those people who act mean. These people only want their websites to rank irrespective of the content they are publishing. They don’t care for the user at all, and E-A-T stops them from doing so.
As an SEO expert, E-A-T helps you make your content marketable. So applying the pillars of E-A-T is very important. For example, it will help you rank your website or specific web pages on Google at the top.
Still planning on finding a way to avoid E-A-T, I would not recommend that. I am looking forward to your questions in the comment section. Let me know what scares you regarding E-A-T and why are you avoiding it?
Meta Description:
Google E-A-T ensures incremental growth of your brand with a positive natural online presence.
Focus Keywords:
Google E-A-T, YMYL, Google Cares, Mental Health, Financial Support, User safety.
