Marketing Industry | Search Engines
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Over the past few months, you’ve probably seen the buzzword (or acronym, rather) floating around. While this term has been in the lexicon of many SEO’s for quite a while now, since the major Google algorithm update in August 2018 (AKA “the medic update”), a big bright spotlight has been shone on Google’s and it’s been frequently on the lips and fingertips of most SEO’s ever since.
So why am I talking about it now? Because the days are long gone when you could pop up on Google overnight. To rank well on Google, you need to nurture your brand by building its expertise, authority, and trustworthiness — which is exactly what E-A-T stands for!
In this post, I’ll cover the three pillars of E-A-T and share tips on how to incorporate each into your content strategy so that you can rank for the best search terms in your industry.
But first what do you want
Initially, this “medic” update seemed to have hit loads of websites offering health and medical advice, more than any other vertical. Therefore, acclaimed search engine marketing journalist, Barry Schwartz, declared it “the medic update”.
Yet, while this update certainly did hit many medical websites, it also hit many other websites that could be categorized under what Google calls “YMYL sites” — yep, another flippin’ acronym (and no it’s not a confused person singing a certain Village People hit).
Digital marketers are notorious for using jargon and having tons of acronyms, but this time, it was Google themselves who added these YMYL and E-A-T to the ever-growing pile of potentially-confusing insider lingo.
YMYL is a quality rating for content that stands for “Your Money or Your Life”. Google doesn’t just care about delivering the most relevant information — they also want to deliver the correct information. With certain types of searches, there is a huge potential to negatively impact users’ “happiness, health, or wealth”— in other words, were these pages low quality, they have the potential to impact a user’s well-being.
So, when it comes to health, financial issues, and safety, Google doesn’t want to serve up links to pages that share uneducated advice, opinions, or potentially fraudulent websites. Google wants to be as certain as possible that they are recommending sites that display a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness — which is what E-A-T stands for! It’s Google’s way of protecting searchers from low-quality content that has the potential to be detrimental to a searcher.
If your business falls under the umbrella label of happiness, health, or wealth then E-A-T might be vital for you to understand, so keep reading!
Google search quality evaluator guidelines
E-A-T and YMYL came from a very important Google document known as “the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines”.
Back in 2015, Google officially released its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines and this gave us an idea of what is deemed to be a high (or low) quality website, from Google’s perspective.
Check out this article from 2015 on the Moz blog — 30+ Important Takeaways from Google’s Search Quality Rater’s Guideline for an insight into their importance and why us SEOs need to take these guidelines seriously.
The document was written for their human rating team, who are performing important searches all day long and evaluating websites which top the Google results for those searches. Apparently, there are about 10,000 people employed by Google to carry out these spot-checks, a process which is designed to check up on the ranking algorithms effectiveness in recognizing web page quality.
The learnings from the quality rating team inform Google’s engineers on how to improve the ranking algorithm. As the folks at Google often remind us, their ranking algorithm is a continuously improving process, with updates made very regularly.
Check out Marie Haynes talk at Brighton SEO 2018, where she breaks down the ‘Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines’ for us, in plain English with some of her own insights.
The 2018 update to the guidelines
A week after the July 2018 update to the guidelines, Google made some additions that carried some significant impact: The quality evaluators would now be asked to review not only a website’s E-A-T but also the content creators E-A-T too. This is huge news.
So, from now on Google wants to see who the author of a page’s main content is and what their credentials are with regards to the subject matter, particularly if it’s a YMYL subject.
This means that we should now be building up author E-A-T as well as website E-A-T. Some ways you might achieve this is by having author boxes, with links to author profiles elsewhere online and using author schema markup, i.e. structured data that tells Google all about the author, making it easier to connect the author with any other authority signals (such a author profiles on authority sites, social media profiles, etc.
By: Ian Booth