The Google E-A-T guidelines have been talked about for a long time. The first murmurings about E-A-T came in 2018 and Google has been communicating more and more about it in recent months. So it’s time to take these guidelines seriously. But what exactly does this mean for SEO? And for whom is it interesting anyway? We’ll tell you that in this article!
What is E-A-T?
Let’s start at the beginning: what are the E-A-T guidelines? It is good to mention that E-A-T is not a technical ranking factor. This means that it is not measurable, like the loading time of a website. It is a ranking factor that has everything to do with content, reliability and authority. E-A-T therefore stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
Let’s dig a little deeper into that.
Expertise
Expertise means that you, as an expert, write high-quality content. It should be content that matches the search intent of your customers and serves their needs. Show that you are the expert with your content.
Authoritative Ness
The quality of your content is therefore important to position yourself as an expert and Authoritativeness is in line with this. It is important to name in your content who wrote it, or who was interviewed to write the article. E-A-T gives more value to your content if the expert is also mentioned a lot online and there is, as it were, a spider’s web of authority about the entity.
Trustworthiness
And finally: trustworthiness, or reliability. Make your website more reliable by posting reviews and comments. It gives Google a picture of how authoritative the content writer is.
For which websites is E-A-T important?
Now that we know what the guidelines entails, we can talk about its importance for certain industries. While meeting the criteria has advantages for all websites, there are a number of websites that are extra related to the guidelines: the Your Money Your Life (YMYL) websites.
In short, these are websites related to health, safety and financial information. Reliability and quality of content is of course of great importance for these websites.
What Google wants to achieve with this is to end spam websites that share incorrect information. Websites that are too commercial are a thorn in the side of Google and quality is essential in the above sectors.
Do you work on websites in the health, safety or financial industry? Then you know that in addition to the latest Google Ads guidelines, you now also have to focus on the quality, reliability and authority of your content.
