What are E-A-T Factors and How Can You Improve on Them?

Does E-A-T-ing better result in a healthier website? Yes, it does! In a digital marketing context, E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. The acronym first came out into the world when Google’s Search Quality Guidelines got leaked in 2014, but now that they’re included in the General Guidelines for 2018, E-A-T factors are only expected to grow in importance.

Here’s what we know:

On August 1st 2018, Google rolled out a ‘broad core algorithm update’ which was later dubbed the ‘Medic update’ by the online marketing community. The update mainly affected pages that are classified as ‘YMYL’ – Your Money, Your Life.

YMYL refers to pages that have the potential of influencing a user’s health, wealth and happiness – for example, pages that offer medical, financial or legal information and pages that require financial transactions. Pages whose reliability might affect a user’s safety – such as car repair or gas safety pages – also fall under YMYL.

Google’s so-called ‘Medic’ update caused the heaviest ranking flux across all verticals of all three core updates of 2018. Although Google doesn’t give away their secrets, research by the digital marketing community strongly suggests an increase in the importance of E-A-T factors: Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

Especially if your website features YMYL pages – that may affect your users’ health, wealth, happiness or safety – you’ll want to make sure to invest in your EAT factors.

Some tips to increase Expertise signals:

• If you have in-house experts, make sure they write or sign off the content you create
• Work with established writers or journalists
• Recruit an editor to edit for accuracy
• Train your content team to reference official documents, research reports or certified professionals

Tips to establish your Authority:

• Create bio pages for each expert that writes for you, reinforcing their credentials
• Link to experts’ personal websites or LinkedIn pages
• Conduct your own research and publish the reports
• Cite your sources when referencing to others’ research
• Invest in reviews and user engagement

And finally, to establish Trust:

• Create content that’s truly useful to your users. Google’s quality evaluators will notice if you’re trying to trick the algorithm!
• Make it easy for users to contact a human
• Write a proper About Us story, and introduce the members of your staff
• Make sure your website uses SSL
• Require complex passwords where users can create accounts
• Show off any certificates, awards or memberships that underline your brand’s trustworthiness

If you’d like to request an audit of your current site to see how you perform on Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness and what can be improved, get in touch with Koozai!