Written by: Ryan Walsh

EAT

Table of contents:

What exactly is Google E-EAT?
Why is it important to know about Google E-EAT to improve your business’s organic/local SEO?
How can a business improve its E-EAT

 

What Is E-E-A-T?

First things first, what is Google E-EAT?

Google E-EAT stands for (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness); it’s simply a way that Google came up with to evaluate how good a business’s content marketing is.

This means that employees known as Quality Raters were used to devise a way of determining whether a business’s content marketing is of good quality. For example, is the author an expert on what they are discussing?

 

So it mostly boils down to this: is the information reliable or trustworthy?

So, the central concept of Google E-EAT is whether the author knows what they are talking about.

Have you ever searched for information on how to cook curry and noticed that the quality of the answers varies massively?

Yet then, when you select another business for advice on how to make a chicken curry- well, the next business may have pushed the boat out.
Offers top-quality advice written by an expert and highly experienced chef. There might even be a YouTube video offering advice at each step of the curry-making process.

So, this is clearly good quality work, and Google and its algorithms like to rank that page higher on Google’s SERPs.

So, for Google to work out, if the content marketing is good quality, they came up with Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which works out the following:

 

Experience:

Does the author of the work know what they are talking about?

So, Google’s algorithms will look at the author’s experience.

How does Google know if that person has the experience, say, cooking delicious curries:

 

Well, how Google’s algorithm works is kept secret by Google. Yet, SEO agencies like ours, who spend hundreds of hours optimising our client’s websites, get a sense, of how the algorithm works, so this is our experience of how we think Google works out if the person has knowledge of what they are talking about, or whether they are writing waffle:

– Have they got qualifications, i.e., learned to cook in a prestigious cooking college, and that’s noted on their LinkedIn profile or in the article?

– What is the dwell time in the article? Is it retaining a shopper’s interest for a long time, or is it someone who wants to cook curry?

– Semantic SEO: Is it clear that the person is mentioning semantic keywords, such as cumin, coriander, and turmeric, and that they clearly know the ingredients that go into making such a curry, so they know what they are talking about?

 

Why do I see Google E-EAT and Google EAT mentioned? What’s the difference?

So, in December 2022, Google updated its guidelines, changing the name from Google EAT (which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) to Google E-EAT (which now stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).

 

So, Google added E for experience to their updated guidelines.

Why Is E-E-A-T Important for SEO?

So why do businesses interested in improving their local or organic SEO need to know about Google E-EAT?

Well, quite simply put, businesses and, for that matter, many digital marketing agencies went through years and years of writing absolute marketing waffles.

For example, suppose you sell fine-quality whiskey made in a remote part of Wales. In that case, the appointed SEO company may have gone to absolute town and crammed “Welsh Whiskey” into most paragraphs they wrote, which meant they were “keyword stuffing” – which

Google hates, plus a shopper hates.

Let’s face it: If you enjoy whiskey and want to read about how that whiskey is produced and the company history, well, you’re not going to enjoy reading 800 words of marketing waffle, where it’s clear the marketing company has crammed into most sentences keywords they want to improve their SEO for.

Thankfully, due to the Google Helpful Content Update, the Google Hummingbird Update, the Google E-EAT update, and many more algorithm updates by Google, this rubbish content marketing has been weeded out and replaced with top-quality answers to shoppers’ questions.

This brings us nicely back to our main point. Just as a whiskey drinker knows on the first sip of a single malt if it’s good or not, so does Google’s algorithm when working out whether content marketing is quality or not.

 

It uses the following:

– Google E-EAT
– Google’s Knowledge Graph
– Engagement, i.e. time of the site
– Google RankBrain

 

Authoritativeness

 

So, someone might think they are the absolute experts on something, but then there might be someone who knows more.

So, authoritativeness is what Google uses to determine how authoritative a business or content marketing is.

 

So, Google uses links, that’s backlinks, to work out how authoritative that business is. If the business has a lot of quality links from, say, BBC or other well-known brands, then it’s clear if other well-known brands link to that work, they have, say, mentioned a statistic you have published, and they link to you, that they think that works well.

So, if you have, say, 100 links from respected news sites or other businesses, this massively improves your Google E-EAT score.

Imagine, let’s say, you run a solicitor’s practice. You’re an ace at what you do, the best, most well-known divorce lawyer in that area.

So, you’ve completed various BBC interviews, contributed to stories on Wales Online, and been mentioned by businesses that award solicitors for their work. Well, you’re likely to have many incoming links, which will help improve your Google E-EAT score.

So, links from, say, Solicitors Journal—well, that’s a respected website; many lawyers across the nation read it daily. So, if one of your blog posts gets linked, this will improve the Google EEAT score of that page.

 

Trustworthiness

How trustworthy is the information?

We have already discussed that the Google algorithm wants to determine the author’s expertise and knowledge of the subject.
Yet also, Google’s algorithm wants to work out the following when working out how high the Google E-EAT is for that page:
So, for instance:

 

Is the page/website secure? Does it have an SSL certificate, for example?
Is the information up to date?
Or has it been written in 2018 and contains out-of-date information and statistics?
Are there links to the authors, says the LinkedIn page, which states they have relevant qualifications?

 

Create Helpful Content

Why you must push the boat out and write helpful content marketing:

 

 

So, a shopper or someone who wants to find an answer to a question wants the text they read to be helpful.
They don’t want to read 800 words of complete marketing waffles promoting a toothbrush when they want to read about how to stop their gums from bleeding.

So they want a beneficial and well-written piece of content marketing, just like what you are reading here, not that we like to blow our trumpet.

So, the work must be helpful. That’s why Google rolled out the Google Helpful Content update. Basically, well-written content with a very high dwell time and low bounce rate will improve SEO over time as you add this work to your company website.

 

How we can help:

Content marketing

Writing 2,000 articles, or near enough, takes a lot of time. The work needs to be well-written, researched, and written with the help of an expert.

This takes up a lot of time; this is why many businesses in Cardiff and the surrounding areas pay us a monthly retainer to improve their organic and local search engine optimisation. The company is owned by Ryan Walsh, who has over ten years of experience working with

Welsh businesses, to help get those companies onto page one of Google.co.uk.

Now, don’t be fooled by what some companies tell you: that organic SEO is a fast process. It’s anything but that; it’s a slow process.

It would be best to complete a lot of work, both on-page and off-page SEO before a business can get onto page one. It takes at least six months for a local business, but it depends on the competition your business faces.

So, for example, if ten other solicitors are heavily investing in top-quality SEO, it will be hard to get a business onto page one of Google.co.uk.

You have a lot of competition. However, you might not have so much competition, making it much more straightforward.

 

Highly experienced.

We have built thousands of backlinks and improved on-page SEO for thousands of pages; we have written thousands of pieces of content marketing; we are a highly experienced SEO company. We can help to get your company onto page one of Google.co.uk.

We offer free quotes, so why not give us a ring?