On August 1, 2018, Google confirmed the release of a broad-core algorithm update.
If you are affected, Google’s Danny Sullivan said better content means higher rankings. John Mueller of Google said to make the content more relevant. It shows a significant increase in the importance of EAT factors: Expertise, Authority and Trust.
And the key to creating better, better content can be found in Google’s Quality Ranking Guidelines.
What is EAT
EAT stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness, and three factors of Authority and Trust that Google uses to measure the reliability of a brand or website. Google wants to give search engine users the best possible experience, so they just want to promote sites that they fully trust.
The best display domains and businesses Their Expertise, Authority and Trust not only find themselves promoted by Google but also correlated and lead to improved trust and purchases by the target audience. of the business.
Websites can improve the EAT display on their own websites – through the various methods outlined in this post – as well as on others’ websites, including review websites. like Google My Business, TrustPilot and Feefo.
Improving the brand’s EAT or website is also readable in brand recognition and improved brand sentiment, again, will lead to increased sales and sales.
Content:
The meaning of EAT
- Expertise
- Authority
- Trustworthiness
Where does EAT come from?
- Search Quality Raters: Search Quality Raters
- Guidelines for evaluating search quality
Why is EAT so important
What does YMYL mean?
Some typical YMYL websites
Why YMYL’s Principles also apply to you
EAT influenced by Medic Update?
What happens when you skip EAT?
EAT is not a magic bullet
How to improve EAT for SEO
- Audit your brand
- Check your existing content
- Building frames to create content
- Hire experts
- Add author names and profiles for all editorial content
- Invest in personal branding
- Cut or correct low EAT content
- Promote Onsite
- Offsite promotion
- Make it easy to access and digest
- Never stop. Improve 1% every day
The meaning of EAT
Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness: These three words represent a measure of the right of a business to be considered a leader in their field, regardless of their industry or industry.
Google is using one of these three metrics to measure the Site’s Expertise, Authority or Reliability, the site’s individual content, and the creator of the content itself.
Expertise
Expertise is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a skill or knowledge of an Expert in a particular field. If you provide a service or product that you have extensive knowledge of, you can be classified as an expert in that field – especially if you can prove that your level of knowledge is appropriate or beyond your competition.
If you and your competitors are standing in an identity march and have to prove to your customers your level of insight, the power and depth of your insight will make you a highlight. If you know a lot more about the plumbing than the person next to you, you will stand out.
Regardless of the subject, if you can prove your qualification is higher than the next one, you will be selected to be an expert. Your site falls into the same consideration.
Your website and its pages are being checked to see whether it or the pages in it are more professional than other sites or pages that Google finds on the internet.
Authority
Similarly, the Authority – or the authorization of the user – is someone or the web site of someone “who can be trusted to be accurate or true, reliable”
Just like Expertise, the index measures knowledge or skill level, Authority is measured to see how you, your brand or business, or your website and how the content is different from other options.
When you have a question about food, you can have a Foodie friend you seek advice for.
When people search the internet, they are looking for an agency that can provide them with answers they can trust. Not only do they want to trust the expertise of these people or brands, they want to make sure they’re the best to come.
Google is scrutinizing your brand, website and content to determine if it is not just expertly written content but also top authority or authoritative content.
Trustworthiness
Reliability, also known as Honesty or Trueness, is a measure of the reliability of your brand, website or content.
It is one thing to create a lot of content online, but it is a reliable one.
If someone gives us a deal that seems too good to be true, we immediately lose trust in its provider. If I give you a pair of tickets to the Bahamas at 75% of the market price, you will immediately assume that there is a catch – and you have the right to feel it, because it is really too good to come true. Therefore, you will lose faith in not only that offer, but any future offer I will make to you.
Lost faith rarely regained.
Google is currently measuring – and always measuring – trusting a website based on backlinks it detects from other domains. The higher the reliability in linking from the domain, the more it is trusted in linking to the domain. As we understand, Google has expanded this much more than the algorithmic science of five or ten years ago and is currently measuring the trustworthiness of a brand or website using the same types of factors that a real people will do; someone – like you – who will only trust someone if they continually present themselves as trustworthy.
We will explain how Google measures trust – as well as expertise and authorization – a little later.
Where does EAT come from?
The acronym EAT comes from a set of publicly available guidelines that was published by Google for the educational benefit of its quality assurance team, or, as Google designates them, the Search Quality Raters team.
Search Quality Raters
The role of the Search Quality Measurement Department is similar to that of the Quality Assurance team at any company, big or small. Their mission is to check the quality of the search results after any changes that the computer science engineering team in the Search Engine and Algorithms engineering group can make.
For example, Google’s algorithm is deployed globally and is available in nearly 150 different languages. Each person will use the core algorithmic mechanisms to operate, but each will have unique requirements for their user base. Therefore, each language will have a team testing specific changes according to their needs, they will want to test independently of the core algorithm.
Meanwhile, the core algorithm team will also have their own changes to test, some of which will be pushed (read: send an update for the code) to other search engine language groups. In total, there can be dozens of changes occurring daily, perhaps almost hourly.
Guidelines for evaluating search quality
The Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (SQEG) is a publicly available PDF file – which you can find here – of 164 pages, equivalent to a reading time of nearly 5 hours.
The guide explains the complete requirements and tasks of the Search Quality List in full, including:
- What is needed to evaluate search results (computers, browsers, no ad blocking plugins, etc.)
- What are the most important definitions (Main Content: MC) for the main content; Supplementary Content (SC) for additional content; EAT for Professionals, Authority, and Trust, etc.)
- How to navigate through a web page
- How to identify the author of the content or who is the owner of the website domain
- How to research content creator EAT using Google searches and other websites
- How to evaluate the quality of a page and its content
- What constitutes high quality and low-quality content
- What types of domains or pages require a high EAT (YMYL: Your Money Your Life websites), require a high EAT)
- The types of pages, page designs or usability of the pages may be determined to be harmful to the user
- How to compare the mobile experience of a website with the desktop experience
- How to grade domain names and pages by fully utilizing user needs
There are many guides we can cover later on, but the key points above are enough for us to determine what the Search Quality Index is required to do, what the EAT requirement is and how Software content fully meets user needs.
Again, it is 5 hours of reading time, but it is worth a Sunday night to read through it and take notes.
Now that we know what an EAT is and who is testing it, why is it important for SEO?
Why is EAT so important
If your employees lack the expertise, authority, and trust, you may be looking for an alternative and so do Google users. When they find a domain or page that lacks Expertise, Authority, and Trust, they will look for a replacement.
Google says EAT is very important
Google is training algorithms to review these measurements and use them as signals to determine whether they should entrust the business domain or website to meet user needs. If we do not meet those needs, Google will choose others to do so instead.
Simply put, if Google finds another domain or page that provides a better customer experience than yours, Google will promote them instead. We are talking about lost rankings, lost traffic and lost revenue.
What does YMYL mean?
The acronym YMYL stands for Your Money, Your Life. This categorizes the industries and search queries that can lead to searchers entrusting their money or their lives (i.e. their health and wellness) to you.
Some typical YMYL websites
Google classifies the following pages as YMYL (but also at the domain level):
- Shopping and financial transactions pages: ie pages where purchases are made or money is exchanged
- Financial information pages: ie pages where financial advice can be provided in the form of articles or instructions on banking, investments, mortgages, savings, etc.
- Health information pages: means pages where medical advice can be provided in the form of articles or guidance on physical health, mental health, medical conditions, life-threatening illnesses, etc.
- Legal information page: means the pages where legal advice can be provided in the form of articles or instructions about your personal legal rights, the legal rights of your family, the rights as your business owner, etc.
- Public / official news and websites: i.e. pages that can detail current local or international issues, or national and local governmental advice and services
- Other sites: i.e. sites where information is highly risky and important, such as adoption, car safety information, (as cited from SQEG).
Google wants to protect people from bad advice and provide them with the perfect customer experience to keep people coming back to their search engine. When it comes to your finances and welfare, Google does not want to take any risks.
Bad or toxic advice, or information for your financial or physical health, can lead to serious consequences. Google wants to help protect you.
If you have a herniated disc and read bad advice about the types of physical exercises you can try, your herniated disc may get worse. This can lead to immediate back surgery that you may not need if you have received advice from a specialist who can examine your specific case.
Similarly, if you get bad mortgage advice from online tutorials and articles that do not check your personal finances, you will probably not only be in a very bad financial situation but may also have risk of losing home.
However, in our opinion, YMYL’s guidelines are much longer than the above categories.
Why YMYL’s Principles also apply to you
If everyone holds themselves to a higher standard, we all benefit. If all our websites and content pages are created with the same high-quality requirements, then all users benefit the internet – not just our target audience, but the internet as well.
It does not matter if you think your small eCommerce website does not need to be concerned about YMYL or EAT (spoiler alerts) or if your business accepts a simple website – the page is just for contact details and do not sell anything – every domain has to show it can be trusted by everyone and Google.
This is a simple example.
Digital marketer Ari Finkelstein, pointed out that an example listed in SQEG of a high-quality site does not list expensive items – that is a cheap backpack catalog page for schools – but it still need to comply with the requirements of YMYL and EAT, although the average price point ranges from $ 10-20.
What we can draw from this is no matter how cheap your product or service is: if you ask people to entrust your money or to their lives (whether it is about medical side, mental or from a lifestyle perspective), Google expects you to Gain a person’s trust by proving why Google will display your web pages.
Again, we may not consider our gardening services to be a risk to one’s money or their life, but for that person to use your service, it may be an option. This is done using their monthly finances. It can even be connected to their feelings (a beautiful garden can be their relaxing getaway in life).
EAT and YMYL permeate everything, so it is best to optimize for them and improve the quality of service – and the ability to rank potential for the benefit of everyone.
EAT influenced by Medic Update?
This is not the first time we see the EAT factor change algorithms. At least twice in 2018, algorithmic changes significantly affected the rankings of hundreds of thousands of websites, resulting in an increase for some, but a decrease for many.
How wide the EAT affects core updates
In March 2018, an update to Google’s broad-core algorithm was updated. This leads to webmasters frantically asking why their sites have risen or dropped from the SERPs.
The update was confirmed by Google’s Search Liaison, Daniel Sullivan, who further explained that the Search technical team “does these things regularly several times a year.
How EAT affects Medic updates
The second biggest algorithm update for 2018 is the Medic Update, an algorithm that we have explored further and identified as “another broad core update,” with sites that have either increased rankings or decreased due to their EAT score, among other ranking factors.
We checked hundreds of domain names and found that, while the total and quality of inbound links (or backlinks) plays a factor, how well a majority of businesses are rated for their level of professionalism, authority, and reliability not only change rankings, but they can also cause significant loss of revenue.
- If a website has outdated or outdated content, it must affect it.
- If its content is written by unqualified authors, its content is affected.
- If a brand has a bad reputation, its rankings are affected.
- If it is hard to spot who is behind a brand, find contact information, or discover product return or return details, it is also affected.
Ignoring EAT is at risk – and you do not just risk your rank
What happens when you skip EAT?
Prevention.com loses about 5 million monthly visits almost after one night.
DrAxe.com has lost about 10 million monthly hits almost overnight and has yet to turn fate.
But these businesses do not lose rankings and they do not lose traffic: they have lost revenue.
Both have different business models – one is (mostly) advertising-based, while others sell courses and supplements – no matter what they are selling, they will now have fewer sellers than before.
The immediate loss of Prevention and DrAxe is sure to lose their revenue and all their financial plans for the coming months.
All of that is due to a lack of EAT (in the opinion of most SEO experts).
There are certainly hundreds of Prevention and other DrAxes being attacked by the Medic Update, trying to understand the meaning of EAT and what they need to do next to come up with the right things, so we’ll share with you. A few tips to get you started. However, before we begin, we have a warning.
EAT is not a magic bullet
If you have been severely affected by the Brackets or Medic update, unfortunately, we have to say that there is no magic bullet. There is no trick, or hack game, you can do that to get your site back in place before these algorithm updates or any future broad core algorithm updates improve. good measure of EAT.
As with SEO and other forms of marketing, we cannot promise that things will come back right when you need them – however, we can absolutely help you make the kind of changes and improvements that will bring you investing time and money.
With increasing levels, a small change today may not be a big improvement yesterday, but a small change every day can bring about a major improvement later (and with SEO, we almost always see the best ROI from twelve months onwards).
For example, this is a customer we started working with in mid-2017. Their business sold a service in the financial sector, which had difficulty in their special field with trust and consumer confidence.
Our team determines that the strategy required is to raise brand awareness, improve brand trust and improve customer knowledge of the market through improved content and access to content on the webpage.
The following twelve months and the steady and regular improvements we made have led to a steady and significant increase in brand awareness, ranking, traffic and – most importantly all – sales.
Make 1% improvement to your website every day next year and you will see 37 times improvement in your position today.
Do nothing and you really let things get worse every day with no way back.
How to improve EAT for SEO
So maybe you are asking yourself, what do I do if the EAT is low?
EAT, the entire Google Search Quality Guidelines and how algorithms work are complex topics – you will really need a Computer Science degree to understand all three – but optimize your website for them not too complicated.
If you have determined that you have a problem with a low EAT, actually, optimizing your website for EAT is actually quite simple. You can refer to the following:
- Audit your brand
Start by checking your brand. What are people saying about your business and / or your website? Forget what Googlebot is thinking, what do people really say about you?
You can start by asking your existing customers. Send them a survey. Call them, even if it is just a small number of customers and ask them about their experience with your company and what they like or dislike (do not be shy, ask them what they really think – you will benefit from that in the long run).
Check your website and see if you are as clear, honest and transparent as you can about the brand and the people behind the business. This starts with your homepage.
- How clear are you an expert in your field?
- What do the content and pictures say about you? Are you reliable?
- Do you gain accreditation from professional bodies or associations proving who your business is and who is behind the brand?
- Have you and your team won an award to highlight your expertise, your professionalism, or something that makes you stand out from the crowd?
- This could be a customer service award or a local business or a business award room – anything that proves you are the best in what you do.
When you are done with the homepage, move on to the second important page of your website – your About page.
Who are you? How long has your business operated? What is your company worth?
Locating what makes your company stand out from the crowd is what makes your brand feel, whether it is your company’s history and reputation or if you keep your company values strong and dedicated. Help your local community, environment or cause the target audience to be directly related (sell medical products? Unite with a medical charity as a partner).
Each individual share that is shared within your company gives your target audience a real person to connect with.
Make sure someone is easy to contact.
Make your contact information easy to find, regardless of which device the person is using and provide answers to the most common questions immediately for them, including contact info, customer service number and email, etc.
Finally, check out what people are saying about your site elsewhere. What are people writing about your business and employees on social media? What are they writing about you on review sites?
You should understand that an unhappy customer will tell their nine friends, causing you to lose your business opportunity with ten people. However, create a happy customer and they will tell at least one person, doubling your potential sales.
If anyone has anything bad to say about your brand, service or product then you need to take it as a lesson. Ask yourself: What can I do to prevent this? Do you see recurring problems? Go to the source and make changes so they stop happening.
- Check your existing content
What does your content say about you and your business?
Chances are some of your old content that does not fit your current level of expertise. Maybe you have hired some freelance writers who have added some 500 word blog posts to your site, because that is what some SEO experts recommend. (Pro Tip: Ignore the number of words. Instead, write to meet a person’s needs.)
You will need to review and review your existing content and decide, if I am a customer, does this fit my needs?
If the answer is No, then you have two options:
- Modify the content to suit the purpose of the searcher and necessary qualifications / competence
- Delete the content completely
By verifying the content of a page and approving it (professionalism, authority), you will be able to recycle the content and improve its validity for your target audience and for Google.
- Building frames to create content
Next, build a framework or task list to create future content. Whether you are creating your own content or you have an employee or team writing content for your site, they will need to follow a framework to demonstrate their future work for EAT.
Your content must be expertly researched, expertly written, including links to other pages on your website or on other domains confirming your complaints or statistics. and signed by an expert, if it is created by one person.
As with content audits, all content must be written to fit specific customer needs and not created entirely for ranking purposes. If your content does not match your sales channel, then it does not belong to your website.
- Hire experts
If you are not in a position that is fortunate enough to have time to research and write for yourself – or anyone in your company can log into whatever you trust – you have a number of options. outside.
If you do not have time to write, we recommend hiring an SEO consultant and Content writer specialist. These may be individuals or an independent agency, but they must be strong in their expertise to improve the quality of content as well as increase the EAT to help you.
- Add author names and profiles for all editorial content
The reviewers’ guidelines stated that Understanding the person responsible for the website is an important part of EAT evaluation.
Specifically, YMYL (Your Money Your Life) pages must be created by trusted, authoritative professionals on this topic.
For sites like landing pages and product pages, this often means easier to find customer support and business contact information.
But for blog posts, this means that information about the author needs to be available to assess if they are the right expert for this topic.
The instructions stated:
Reputation and EAT of the creators of MC [Main Content: main content] is extremely important when a website has different authors or content creators on different pages.
If the author information is not available or difficult to find, this could hurt the EAT score.
For example, the reviewer’s guide provides this page as an example worthy of a low-quality rating (Low):
- Invest in personal branding
Careful guidelines to warn those who agree that reputation information are not always available and this is not always bad in the case of smaller businesses and organizations.
You should look for reputable information for large businesses and large organizations’ websites, as well as famous content creators.
This means that having an active personal brand is extremely important if you want your site’s quality score to be superior to others in your field.
If your content creator has a reputation for spreading false information, this will seriously limit your ability to rank well.
Responsible for your personal brand by:
- Unravel your social media profile and interact with your influencers and audience.
- Develop thought leadership through placement on trusted platforms.
- Tell your story to connect with your audience.
This will help you develop a positive reputation in your industry and earn much needed third-party testimonials.
- Cut or correct low EAT content
Reviewer’s guide states that sites with multiple authors should be evaluated on a page-by-page basis, based on each author’s EAT, website EAT or brand itself are mentioned very much throughout the guide.
Low EAT content on one page does not directly affect the EAT of other sites, but it can negatively affect the overall reputation of your site.
For this reason, pages with low EAT and minimum traffic must be removed in most cases.
Pages with high EAT and significant traffic deserve special consideration.
Cutting them down can harm your numbers in the short term and can cause you to lose a place in search results that are hard to get back. But keeping them as they will inevitably lead to loss of reputation.
The best course of action in these cases is to redo the page to increase your EAT score.
- Promote Onsite
Leveraging your Expertise will build your Authority and trust. The more people see your brand and the higher the level of expertise you show, the more they will trust them.
This starts by promoting your group, as mentioned above, starting with the Introduction page or your Group page (if separated).
Promote your Content writers. Promote your researchers. Promote your professionals.
To put it all together, the websites link to these author profiles to help readers easily identify who is providing them with information and why they should trust them.
Link from your content to the author. Link with qualified professionals who have verified content, if you need an expert editor.
And when you are done, make sure your best content is linked to from the most sensible places. Map the expected journey a person can take to get to your most important pages and then add links for them to follow.
- Offsite promotion
Now that you have started promoting your branding expertise and the people in it, it is time to start sharing your message.
You can start by asking your existing customer base to help you do that. Email after sales today to ask them if they would be happy to leave a review of your service or product.
Link them to your Google My Business page. You can also ask them to leave you a review on your company’s Facebook page, if you find that many of your customers often visit via that network.
There is no harm in asking and you will quickly discover which review sites people like, allowing you to reduce the number of places you request a review.
Even if you only get a small percentage of respondents, each one will help boost your reputation – so when the time comes when someone is considering using your business and they want to find out what other customers talk about you, they will have many reviews to choose from for reference. This will increase users’ trust in you, whether they realize it or not.
You can also promote your experts. Help them improve people’s awareness of your company’s expertise and the authority of you and your team by allowing them to write for your brand and themselves on other websites. Allow them to appear on podcasts or speak at events and encourage them to speak at conferences in your field and you will also experience brand awareness.
Intangible businesses are unlikely to succeed. Leave your expertise in the right place so it fulfills its mission.
- Make it easy to access and digest
We are in a mobile age. As of 2017, more than 50% of all online traffic came through a mobile device. Therefore, Google turned to Mobile First Index for results, which means that a website can be ranked based on the level of mobile activity.
Today’s websites must be designed for mobile devices, primarily using mobile responsive website designs, but also using emerging technologies such as Accelerated Mobile Pages ( AMP) and Progressive Web Applications (PWAs).
Whether on a mobile device, laptop or desktop computer, your content should be easy to read, navigate and not distract. If you are using the headline ad on your website, we strongly recommend implementing it.
Google is happy with some ads, but not too much. It is also strong against phishing ads, such as ads that look like links to other articles on your site, types of ads that look like Download buttons and other ads. The fox mimics other websites and platforms.
You should also consider page load time. The faster the website, the faster and easier it will be for people to find answers to their queries, whether it is a general query about choosing a good savings account or a more complex question about stock investing.
>> Learn: How to increase web page loading speed
Again, make it easy to go to your most important pages. Make the main menu easy to use on all devices and include links to your most important pages. Do not make someone scroll on their phone’s eye strain just to find your contact details.
- Never stop. Improve 1% every day
Do not stop. Always try to improve.
Every day you do not optimize EAT for SEO, you will be open to competitors to do that. As with SEO, it can take a long time to see the fruits of your improvements, but it is worth the effort. Just ask our customers from before, who have doubled their traffic and therefore, have significantly increased their leads and revenue.
Commit to doing at least 1% of improving your website daily. Today, you can work to improve your About page. Tomorrow, you can improve the visibility of your contact information. The next day, you can start testing your content, and the next day, you can start publishing your professionally-made improvements.
A 1% improvement every day next year will bring a 37% improvement to your website today. Do not optimize your website and follow the same principle, a 1% daily drop in quality can result in a 97% loss in the same period.
Investing in your content and investing in your team, and the expertise, authority and trust you establish will lead to improved rankings and revenue over time.
Good luck to you!
Reference source:
- https://exposureninja.com/blog/what-is-eat/
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/improve-google-eat-score/270711/