EAT is another acronym/term brought to you by google, it stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness and plays a big part in determining how your websites pages will rank with in its search.
Whilst the actual measurements and method to evaluating these criteria is a close guarded secret ensuring your content meets these three criteria will ensure better search rankings but also guide you toward writing better quality content for your website that your visitors will find interesting.
The first criteria ‘E’ – Expertise, this is a measure of how interesting your content is, google takes in to account factors to determine how interesting and true your content is, if it is found to be useful, interesting and true you pass this criteria.
Whilst the more humorous side of the internet doesn’t get too harshly ranked on this criteria i.e. websites such as gossip or websites with meams other more industry focused websites such as insurance, health care or legal websites will loose out if their content is not accurate or useful.
Being an authority in your subject area means that google has recognised your website as a good source of knowledge over other websites.
Demonstrating this to google can be done in a number of ways including having other websites link to articles on your website (back links) or having reviews published on your website with positive customer experiences.
Every website owner should be looking for ways of generating links to their website, whilst some of these are easy to get such as directory services they offer limited proof of authority however getting your website linked from a website that is in a related sector as say a recommended retailer or supplier is like gold dust and can boost your natural SEO ranking considerably.
Being trustworthy implies that people feel safe visiting your website especially when it comes to entering in private information such as credit card numbers or email addresses, one easy way to improve trustworthiness is to implement SSL encryption so your website is delivered over HTTPS as opposed to HTTP.
Other factors can include…
- Having a privacy policy
- Informative about us page(s)
- Having an active social media account
- Having an older domain, don’t EVER change your domain unless you have to
Whilst some of the steps above may not be possible or at least not possible yet anything and everything you can do will make a difference and in some cases are simple.
Don’t think that these changes will make any difference over night as building your website up to the top of the natural search results takes time and requires patience.
The most important points to remember is that your content has to be interesting, your site needs to be secure and vistiors need to engage with your content in order for it to meet the EAT criteria.
At AME WebTech we can advise on how best to hit as many of the EAT criteria as possible not just that all our websites are made secure with SSL certificates not just to get trust from google but your visitors as well.
