SEO has been a very crucial part in enhancing online presence since the very first day. But with changing trends of the market, search engines also keep changing their ranking factors and elements that can give you a high audience reach. E-E-A-T is one of them.
Preface to E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It is not a proper ranking factor but it can be considered as the principle of ensuring your credibility among users. According to Google’s Quality Rater Guideline 2014, rater assess how well your content fulfills a user’s demand and examine the results based on expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. This show E-E-A-T as a mindset of creating useful and people demanded content.
Why E-E-A-T Matters
The rapid use of artificial intelligence has highlighted the importance of E-E-A-T. In 2023, an SEO Expert Matt Digity used AI tools and created 526 articles for a new website just by clicking buttons. This website cracked the benchmark of 50,000 sessions per month. But now Google is finding new ways to prevent low value AI generated content on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). Most likely they will use the feedback of users from quality rater to update their machine learning based ranking system and algorithms.
Core Elements of E-E-A-T
On August 1, 2018. Google applied a core update to its ranking algorithm. After this update the rankings of many websites were affected, including some top brands having strong identity. When dust settled it was noticed that content having Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) was ranking higher than others. Later in late 22 another E was added in them for the term ‘Experience’Here we will have a deep dive in each element that make up E-E-A-T
Experience
When we talk about the word ‘Experience’, it refers to the real world involvement of content with the subject matter. It could be something like if a food reviewer is writing feedback regarding some food item, we may have to check whether he/she has tried this food or not. If he/she has done this, the review will be more relevant and authentic, much better than the capabilities of AI written content trying to show human aspects. Moreover, it will be helpful for the users to decide whether they should try the specific item or technique or not. The most important thing in this regard is that Google considers ‘Experience’ to distinguish between the content created by humans and AI generated content. Moreover the user also expects the same.
Expertise
Google’s Quality Raters determine the level of expertise that exists behind content, based on how much that content might impact a reader’s mind. Same as experience, the importance of expertise depends upon the type niche and type of content. Demonstrating your expertise is very important. You are expected to show your experience, expertise and achievements when creating content with user intent. It will let you establish your identity and make you more credible than others.
Authoritativeness
Authoritativeness has two aspects. The first one is the content side. Which means if you are creating some content that needs some concreteness for a point to be proven, you may need to add some facts and figures with reference to some credible site. It is specially needed when you are providing something related to finance or other sectors like this. The next thing is your website’s credibility which you can gain by having endorsements through backlinks from other high authoritative websites. One thing you need to focus on in this regard is that the website you are getting backlink from should be from a related industry and have a good credibility. Otherwise, it is hard to achieve the goal that you are expecting.
Trustworthiness
This is the most crucial element of E-E-A-T that Google makes clear in the Quality Rater Guidelines. We can say that it is most difficult to create trustworthy content because even a page or content delivering experience, expertise and authoritativeness can lack trustworthiness. You need to be very careful while choosing the topics you are going to provide content on in the future. Because it varies according to the niche you are working in. For example, if you are working in healthcare, you have to provide content that is well researched and authentic rather than if you are working in some other niche. If you have an ecommerce store and you become able to achieve trustworthiness, your customers can rely on you while they are performing some online transactions on your platform.
Conclusion
Just like any other SEO technique, Applying E-E-A-T techniques in your every type of content is also very essential. It is clear that popular search engines like Google are trying to get rid of AI generated content by updating their systems on the basis of the feedback of users. So it is very important that content providers should try to increase their credibility by using E-E-A-T techniques.