What is E-A-T in SEO?

In the world of SEO, everyone is focusing on E-A-T. Have you heard of E-A-T? It is a metric used by Google for identifying the quality of the page. Google uses E-A-T in its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Search Quality Evaluators are humans contracted by Google to evaluate its search results. They are responsible for rating the quality of a web page. The evaluators use E-A-T as one of the key metrics while judging the page quality. Hence, understanding E-A-T in SEO is very important to rank higher in SERPs.

Understanding E-A-T

E-A-T is the short form for

  • Expertise
  • Authority
  • Trustworthiness

These are 3 simple English words but means a lot for your page quality.

Now in order to understand this metric, it is important to know about YMYL. YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life“.

Google puts the pages related to the user’s money or life in this YMYL category. This includes medical information websites, financial transaction websites, financial information websites, legal information websites, news/press articles or any other website which belongs to a niche that can affect the reader/visitor financially or visitor’s life.

Therefore, websites belonging to these categories must have high quality and reliable content. Google ensures this by search engine quality evaluation and the guidelines for this includes E-A-T as a key metric of measurement for the page quality.

Better the E-A-T score of a website, more is the page quality, reliability and trustworthiness. And, such websites will obviously rank higher in SERP as Google aims at delivering the most relevant and quality results to the users.

Expertise

The internet has evolved to a great extent and we live in an era where anyone having internet connection & willingness to create content can actually create content.

You would have read or heard about the school going kids who have created websites and are earning more than MBAs or Engineers from it. The age of digital marketing is here & content is created by anyone who wishes to do it.

But, imagine a 16-year school going kid who has no idea about the side effects of certain healthcare products but is running a blog on lifestyle products and doing affiliate marketing to earn out of it. There are many such blogs. As a visitor, we will never come to know about who is behind the blog unless the author mentions it in the Bio/About sections and we bother to check it.

An innocent user might read this blog and buy a product that is harmful for him. The kid has no expertise in the domain – Healthcare. He might have good writing skills, interest in this healthcare industry and amazing digital marketing skills.

How can we assure that we don’t fall prey to such traps? How can we ensure that we are making the right choice?

In order to help innocent visitors like us, Google has this E-A-T metric. The “E” of this metric helps in this situation. The evaluator checks whether the person/company running the website has expertise in that niche.

Taking the above example ahead, the 16-year old kid might have little knowledge about the healthcare industry but a Doctor would be having a complete perspective and understanding about the products. If a doctor would also be having a similar website, the expertise score for him will be much more.

Authority

The “A” in the E-A-T metric is for Authority or authoritativeness. Considering the example which I talked about earlier. The 16-year old kid is out of the question here.

The “doctor A” might be an expert. But, does he influences the industry? Is he an authoritative figure?

There might be a “doctor B” who attends seminars, speaks in conferences, have a lot of testimonials, Facebook page reviews, Practo reviews, etc. Here, doctor B is having more authority than doctor A. Yes, both of them are experts. But, doctor B is an influencer and his “authority” score is much more due to the reviews and recommendations about him.

Even if you might be an expert, your website must illustrate your authoritativeness. Display your achievements, conferences where you spoke, success stories, etc in your website. If you are a part of a particular industry body, proudly mention it on your website.

This will increase the E-A-T score of your website and help you rank higher in SERP.

Trustworthiness

As the name suggests, how trustworthy is your content? The information which you share must be reliable and trustworthy.

If your content is not accurate, the users will be disappointed and rate your website low in reviews. Websites with incorrect or irrelevant information are not liked by Google too.

In order to gain trust, be correct and help people consistently.

Suppose you are an expert and an authoritative figure, but there is a lack of trust between you and readers, then you cannot have a great E-A-T score.

Trust is a key metric in marketing and it takes time to build it.

In the above example, we saw that doctor B is an expert and even an authoritative figure. This means his “Expertise” & “Authority” quotient is high. But, consider an instance where he shared incorrect information. Will the users still trust him?

Or consider another instance of not having an SSL certificate. Google Chrome will prompt the users about the insecure connection and users might never visit back to the website.

Ensure that things are in place on the website, information is accurate and nurture the relationship with the visitors by helping them.

Importance of E-A-T in SEO

Till now, you would be aware that E-A-T is a key metric used by evaluators for judging a page’s quality. Better the quality, higher the ranking on SERP. Lower the quality, lower the ranking in SERP.

This makes it quite evident that how important is E-A-T for your SEO. A lot of SEO people are even not aware of the terms E-A-T and YMYL.

But many experts are successfully implementing E-A-T in SEO. SEO is changing rapidly. It is very important for webmasters to keep themselves updated with the latest SEO trends. Webmasters can now not fool the search engines. Search engines are becoming smarter and smarter. And with metrics like E-A-T, the search quality is going to improve more.

Content is going to be the King and it is very important to create great content. Great content is accurate, helpful and easy to understand. Webmasters should focus on E-A-T & this will definitely help them rank higher.

You must read about the search quality rating guidelines of Google.

Please do share your understanding of E-A-T in SEO in the comments section. Get in touch with me if you need any further assistance. Ready to help!