The first update from Google in August 2018 had already given rise to the idea that the EAT was going to become an important point of SEO strategies.
The second update of March 2019 confirms the giant’s interest in highlighting sites that demonstrate expertise, authority, and proven reliability.
The sites that already stood out on these criteria have therefore seen their SEO results increase.
For others, be careful, because for some sites EAT is now just as important as backlinks, technique, or content.
WHAT IS THE EAT?
The EAT: Expertise, Authority, and Trust (expertise, authority, reliability), represents the 3 criteria that Google takes into account to evaluate the quality of the content of a site.
For example, the author of a piece of content may be considered more important than the brand itself. As it is the author who writes and gives the information, it is, therefore, his expertise that is involved. Google will therefore use this element to assess whether the content is relevant but above all trustworthy.
The sites most affected by these EAT criteria are those with pages called YMYL (Your money your life). These are sites that deal with topics related to health or money.
Google (rightly) considers that these very complicated but also very serious subjects should be dealt with exclusively by trusted and authoritative experts on the subject at hand.
Also, it will favor the pages where one can clearly identify the author of the contents as a real expert.
PLEASING GOOGLE: A MATTER OF LOGIC.
Meeting the EAT criteria is above all logical: having a good reputation, revealing the history of your company through storytelling, mentioning the names of authors and sources if your site contains a blog, having a secure site …
To improve your e-commerce expertise, here’s what you need to do:
- Inform your users about the team’s journey
- View the author’s biography
- Ensure the freshness of your content
- Demonstrate your expertise
To improve the authority of your e-commerce here is what you need to do:
- Be popular and influential in your community
- Make videos, webinars, books, conferences
- Receive links from influential sites
- Be omnipresent
To build trust in your site, here’s what you need to do:
For your users to validate their shopping cart or contact you, they must have complete confidence in your site.
For this, several pieces of information must be present to demonstrate your transparency towards your customers and to reassure them.
- Integrate an FAQ: it will allow you to respond directly and quickly to questions that your users may have (warranty, product origin, payment terms, etc.)
- Display contact and connection information with customer service: chat, telephone exchange, contact email address, all this information will reassure your customers who will see that you are easily reachable in the event of a problem
- Showing received reviews: it’s no longer a secret Customer review today are very popular on websites and are an important asset for successful sales.
4 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO IMPROVE YOUR GOOGLE EAT SCORE.
Here is in detail what must be put in place on your site to meet Google’s criteria and improve your site’s SEO.
Include the names of the authors and biographies of all your editorial content.
Understanding who is responsible for a website is a critical part of EAT assessment.
For pages like product pages, this means that customer support and professional contact information are easy to find.
For blog posts, this means posting information about the author that demonstrates that he or she is an expert who understands the subject.
Invest in the personal brand.
Build your social media profiles, interact with influencers and your audience.
Develop your leadership by interacting on trusted platforms.
Tell your story to connect with your audience and demonstrate your transparency.
All of these actions will help you develop a positive reputation in your industry and earn the trust of your users and Google by proving that you are a reliable and trustworthy expert on the topics you deal with.
Remove or modify weak EAT contents.
Normally websites with multiple authors should be rated page by page by reviewers, and low EAT content on one page does not directly impact the EAT on other pages. But this will harm the overall reputation of your site.
For this reason, you must therefore make sure to delete or modify in the right direction the pages which do not meet the EAT criteria.
Keeping your pages as they are will inevitably lead to reputation loss.
Rework them to improve your EAT score.
Know that the pages that best meet the EAT criteria are those that relate to a personal experience or a mood ticket. They have a strong impact on the authority score of your site because no one will be able to treat the subject in the same way as you.
Invest in technical security.
Trust is not just a matter of reputation or accuracy.
It is also a matter of security.
For example, a payment page with an insecure connection will be identified as a page with a low score.
And since Google Chrome identifies all HTTP pages as “insecure”, all sites without an SSL certificate and not automatically redirecting their connection to an HTTPS URL, are penalized on their EAT score.
Google’s latest algorithm updates suggest expertise, authority, and reliability are playing a bigger role in ranking web pages than ever before.
For YMYL sites but also for your showcase site or your e-commerce, these criteria are therefore very important to increase your good reputation with Google and thus your places in the search results.
But normally you won’t have to torture yourself. EAT criteria are criteria that should be natural when creating your site.
Reassurance, proving your value and your knowledge on your subject, demonstrating your reliability. This is the minimum you can offer your users when you sell them something.
More than for sanction, it is to always improve the Web and what the Internet user can find there that Google refines these ranking criteria.
Be honest, transparent, and professional, incorporate the elements we just discussed into your SEO strategy and you will increase or secure your position in search results.
Our web agency Digital Marketing Agency Lahore can meet all your needs and develop a real digital strategy.
