In a World of E-E-A-T You Need To Be Comprehensive With Your Content

Google has always pushed the envelope on quality, and their recent push towards E-A-T has since added another E to become E-E-A-T. Keeping up with Google’s long history of animal-themed updates and endless acronyms can get confusing, but this one is fairly easy to stomach. It stands for:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trust

Essentially, Google has furthered its push towards on-site and off-site ranking signals to determine each E-E-A-T factor.

How can you demonstrate your E-E-A-T-worthiness to Google?

Without getting too far into the weeds, here are some higher-level things that you can do to better hit the mark for these new quality standards.

1. Make it obvious that your organization is legitimate. This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many companies don’t clearly display their address, contact information, or the people involved on their websites and social media platforms. If it’s not abundantly clear where your business is, who works there, what you do, and how to reach you, you’re doing it wrong.
2. Demonstrate expertise in what you do. Netvantage is an SEO company, and lo and behold, if you look at the overall scope of our website it’s pretty easy to see that we have a number of authors with years of SEO experience sharing information on how SEO works and providing advice on how to do it better. Each post is written to be useful and provide insights. A user can easily see that, and Google can as well. While we’re not the most prolific developer of SEO content on the web, we do generate hundreds of thousands of impressions and thousands of visitors every month. Not bad for our relatively small team.
3. Have a professional, functional, web design. Again, this might seem obvious, but you know when you’re on a website that looks like it was made in 1998, and you know you don’t want to input your credit card info to one of those sites. Don’t be that site.
4. Fix your errors! This one often flies under the radar, but there’s really no excuse for not doing some occasional cleanup to make sure your site’s on the up and up. There are free tools out there like Screaming Frog SEO Crawler that you can run on your site to look for broken outbound links, and you can use tools like Grammarly to grammar mistakes and spelling errors that can erode trust in your content.

If you do want to get into the weeds, here are a couple more detailed articles on how E-E-A-T works.

• https://searchengineland.com/google-identify-evaluate-authors-e-e-a-t-395639
• https://moz.com/blog/5-learnings-about-eat

“You mentioned something about comprehensive content?”

Oh, yes, that’s where I wanted to go with this whole conversation. Nearly anyone putting effort into SEO these days is generating content. Obviously, we all want to write quality content, but I think it’s more important than ever to cover topics comprehensively. It’s easy to build out an editorial strategy and just blindly throw darts at the wall and hope that an individual piece of content hits it big. You need to think strategically about content and figure out which topics make the most business sense to target, and then build a plan for how to demonstrate your E-E-A-T in that area.

I’ll give you a tangible example of this from our own business. A couple of years ago we decided that it would make good business sense to market our SEO services to specific industries. So, rather than just be an SEO company, we could demonstrate our expertise in doing SEO for dentists, for example. Obviously, it made sense for us to make an industry-specific service page where we could discuss our experience, expertise, and authoritativeness in this space. And so we created a pretty comprehensive page on our dental SEO services.

Of course, anyone can tell you that they’re good at something, but we needed to be able to demonstrate it to help earn users, and by extension, Google’s trust. How did we do that? By comprehensively covering the topic of online marketing for dentists. We didn’t stop at making our service page, we created a content calendar of topical content that covered every aspect of the topic we could conjure up. We also created a dental SEO guide that explains our approach to dental SEO and gives you tips on performing your own SEO. We also created a case study showing the results of one of our dental clients.

You can even see evidence of our comprehensiveness on our service page, as we list links to various articles where you can learn more about associated topics we’ve covered. We even added a sortable category in our blog for dental-related posts.

The dental SEO space is EXTREMELY competitive, and I don’t think we had any illusions that we’d end up the top dog in this area, but we wanted to see if we could get a slice of this very valuable pie. And, so far, we’re trending the right way. Over the last three months, our service page is doing about twice as many impressions per day, and we’ve suddenly become competitive for some valuable terms related to our business.

One of the great things (or infuriating things depending on your perspective) about Google is that they keep you on your toes. But unlike some head-scratching decisions, E-E-A-T really seems like a natural extension of best practices that Google has been pushing for a long time, and by making some subtle changes to your site and your content strategy can yield real rewards in this new landscape.