What does EAT stand for? EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trust. These are factors that Google has laid down for ensuring that their customers enjoy a great user experience and get only quality content. Since many website owners are still grappling with issues related to EAT, it’s important to understand crucial factors that matter behind the curtain.
So what are the factors on the Google EAT list that are most significant? The crucial factors that actually matter on the EAT checklist are expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, useful content, clarity of purpose, contextual relevancy, quality backlinks, website security, and excellent off-site and on-site reputation.
I’ve prepared a list of 9 crucial factors to improve the Google EAT score.
The idea is to leverage them one by one.
But before that, why is EAT so important for Google?
Table of Contents
Importance Of EAT For Google
Google released its SQEG (Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines) document in 2015, where it spelt out the EAT concept initially. After that, there were two successive updates, once in July 2018, and then in May 2019.
According to experts, in either update, the whole emphasis of the EAT concept has been on useful, high-quality content.The idea is that invariably your content must benefit the visitor to your site.
Besides this, over time, Google has made every effort to progressively enhance the user experience for its customers. EAT is also a result of the converging purposes of “user experience” and “beneficial content”.
Interestingly E-A-T is not an algorithm. Instead, it’s a process put in place to equip actual people(called human raters) with a reference document for determining the efficacy of its algorithms. That reference document is the Google “SQEG” (search quality evaluator’s guidelines).
You can read up on SQEG in this post about improving the Google EAT score.
1.Expertise
According to the Oxford Dictionary “expert” is defined as “being very knowledgeable about or skilful in a particular area”.
The ‘E’ in the E-A-T stands for ‘expertise’.
Expertise has a lot to do with accuracy. And doubtlessly, Google wants to pretty much ensure that the information at the top of the SERPs is accurate.
Besides, certain content also falls under the crucial YMYL category of information.
YMYL stands for “your money your life”. And one cannot afford to be inaccurate about YMYL content, because of the severity of its impact on the user’s life.
You can find out more about YMYL and expertise in this article How To Improve “Expertise” in EAT Score (2021)
2.Authoritativeness
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “authoritative” is defined as “having the power of special knowledge, or (of a person) showing the confidence of having special knowledge”.
However, authoritativeness is also defined by the main content (MC) of the page or the entire website.
So how do you acquire that authoritativeness?
Well, reputation is a major factor deciding your authoritativeness.
What other reputed sites and sources say about your content matters enormously. For instance, if you can get a mention of your site on Wikipedia, it’s a great sign of your authoritativeness.The more high reputation sites mention you, the better it is for your authoritativeness.
Now here’s the thing.
This takes time. Authoritativeness requires a finite gestation period for it to manifest for the readers and the search engines.
High-quality backlinks are also a big signal for authoritativeness in the SEO realm.
It just goes to show that your site is considered worthy enough to be linked to by reputed sites in that domain.
That is the reason you find sites depending on paid (or manipulated) backlinks suddenly sliding downwards. That’s because Google is smart enough to differentiate between organic, and “manipulated” authoritativeness, through purchased backlinks. And consequently, they’re penalised by Google.
3.Trustworthiness
According to Ethics.org.au, trustworthiness means “that people in your organisation behave ethically because it’s the right thing to do, not because it will make people trust them again. A reputation for trustworthiness is, again, not something you can just anoint yourself with”.
Fundamentally, trustworthiness means credibility. It’s a matter of honour in delivering on your promise.
And reputation is proven when you can consistently claim to be relied on as “legitimate, honest, and forthright”.
For the online business owner trustworthiness, is also evidenced through:-
1.Clear terms of service, and privacy policy.
2.Identifiable website owner.
3. Proof of a physical address, and contact information
4.Reviews on trustworthy sites.
5. Consistent, factually correct information.
4. Useful Content
Your content conveys much more about your expertise and authoritativeness than any other factor. For one, it must prove that enough effort and meticulous research has gone into your content.
Readers prefer content that can be relied upon, which means that it’s factually correct and updated. Even small errors, like grammar and spelling, can say a lot about your credibility.
So if you’re aware of such errors don’t leave them unattended. You need to address them and remove them quickly.
Readability is another huge factor that can attract or repel visitors.
Your language and sentence construction should make reading an easy job.
Don’t make your visitor strain hard to understand every sentence. Make sure your content is easy to understand. Otherwise, your reader is likely to make a quick exit from your site.
Remember small differences can make a big difference in things these matters.
Most importantly, your site should also benefit the person using your content.
Your content should be genuinely useful to him. It certainly cannot be just any mishmash of ideas hastily slapped together for the sake of posting “stuff” on your site. That’s being inconsiderate toward the reader, and irresponsible toward your brand.
And do make sure your pages function the way they are designed to. This includes the crucial aspect of page loading speed.
Users should not be unnecessarily subjected to spam-type commercials and pop-up ads that interrupt their page experience.
Increased traffic and click-through rates, as well as a lower bounce rate and better visibility, can all be attributed to optimised content. So ensure that your content is well optimised.
In case there is technical-scientific, or medical or legal content on your site, it squarely falls in the YMYL category. So make sure that such data is expert-reviewed and carries consensus in the appropriate domain.
5.Clear Purpose
Purpose and relevancy of content are close cousins and they must form the foundation for creating content in the first place. That is, after you’ve decided the usefulness of your content first.
The main content of a page should be easily accessible and immediately useable.
So here are some important factors to stick to in order to maintain your purpose as the centre point of your content:-
1.Make sure that your purpose becomes evident to the visitor from a single glance at your site.
2. Be careful to remove all pages that are not useful to your audience. Particularly commercial pages.
3. Review your site repeatedly and see how well your page fulfils its intended purpose.
4. An extremely critical issue is to be clear that visitors are not misled into clicking on advertisements and pop-up ads. Such ads should be sufficiently well-labelled for enabling your reader’s discretion.
5.Your main content must clearly stand out in contrast to ads and supplementary content.