What is E-A-T in SEO and How It Impacts Your Rankings

What is E-E-A-T in SEO?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s a framework Google uses to assess the quality of both your content and your website overall. Strong E-E-A-T signals help boost your site’s credibility and visibility in search results.

What we know about E-E-A-T factors comes largely from the set of guidelines that Google provides to it’s network of search quality evaluators. These raters are engaged by Google to personally review websites and to provide feedback relative to their rankings and level of E-A-T for the purpose of assisting Google to improve search results. Google has made these guidelines publicly available since 2013 and they are regularly updated and can be read here.

Why is E-E-A-T Important for

Improving your website’s E-E-A-T can:

• Increase your chances of ranking higher in Google search results
• Build trust with visitors, encouraging more enquiries and sales
• Protect your site from being downgraded in future Google updates

Recent updates to Google’s core ranking algorithm place even more emphasis on quality content and transparency, especially for businesses in sensitive sectors.

Your Money or Your Life - What is a YMYL website?

It is important to understand that there is a broad category of websites (defined within Google’s Search Quality Rating Guideline’s) known as Your Money or Your Life websites, and sites that fall into this category are required to meet an even higher level of quality and E-A-T standards than non YMYL websites.

Google defines YMYL websites, as those sites that could potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users. This includes websites providing;

• All e-commerce sites
• Health and medical services and products
• Legal services
• Financial services
• Insurance services
• Real estate

What Quality and E-A-T elements are important & should be improved

The following is a list of elements too focus on to improve your E-A-T. If your website falls into the YMYL category, then it will be even more important to pay close attention to these.

• Each web page should have a clear purpose and the titling should align to this and main body content should meet that purpose
• Main body content on pages should be unique and satisfying to the user
• Info about who is responsible for the website
• Info about who wrote the content, including details of their expertise and credentials
• Authors should have domain expertise
• Blog articles should include the authors name and link to the authors profile
• If you are in science or medical, any claim you make should be backed up by a scientific reference
• Any industry accreditations should be made apparent on the website
• Customer service and contact information details. Including phone numbers, social media links and physical business address if applicable
• E-commerce sites should reside on a secure certificate
• Terms & Conditions page
• Privacy Policy page
• Returns Policy page (for ecommerce sites)
• About Us page accurately setting out experience and expertise
• Profiles of owners and key management and detailing their expertise and credentials
• Positive reputation for the business and website (as apparent in external reviews etc)
• Positive reputation for the creator of the content (as apparent in external reviews etc)

Some red flags to watch out for:

• An overall negative reputation in external reviews
• Distracting and intrusive ads on your website
• Unmoderated user generated content
• A large number of spelling and grammar errors

Overall, your focus should be on providing great quality content for your website visitors and in an open and trustworthy manner. Information about your business and it’s key people should be visible and transparent.

If you would like an assessment of your website, please see our SEO services or contact us for more information.