Navigating Google E-A-T For SEO Success In 2021

Are you looking to truly ramp up your organic search result rankings and subsequent revenue during 2021? If so, Google’s E-A-T should be high on your digital radar.

E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and the concept of rating websites is nothing new for top-level SEOs. The concept was first published in Google’s 2014 Search Quality Guidelines, and it has gained more and more importance over the years. E-A-T was mentioned 131 times in the 168-page guidelines for 2020.

To establish E-A-T guidelines, Google has thousands of actual humans manually reviewing various webpages and then reporting their quality analysis to Google. 

Yes, actual humans, not machines. 

It’s no simple task, but this is the type of work that keeps Google at the top of the search engine game. In October, Google controlled 88% of all search queries. Though E-A-T is not necessarily a direct ranking factor through the algorithms, its data helps Google improve its algorithms. 

What you can learn from E-A-T that will help you grow your online revenue. Google says this is especially true for Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) websites, which offer advice or products around medical, legal or finances.

First, let’s quickly describe these three terms from Google:

Expertise: This element focuses on the context of the content providing an expert outlook. It looks at the expertise of the page of contents, not the website’s content as a whole. Though Google is unclear of the criteria, having an expert author or expert opinions within content will likely help you score high in expertise.

Authoritativeness: This element focuses on the authority of the website’s content and the strength of the domain. These rankings arrive from external signals such as qualitative links from other relevant websites and brand mentions across forums and social media channels. 

Trustworthiness: This element is similar to expertise but focuses on the trustworthiness of the content in relation to the trustworthiness of the domain. For example, if you had poor and untrustful content across your sales consulting website but then landed a guest post by Jordan Belfort, author of Wolf of Wall Street, the article would appeal to the expertise element of E-A-T but not the trustworthiness of the website. 

Read more: www.forbes.com