EEAT: What it is and why it is so important in an SEO strategy

One of the most popular concepts in the SEO ecosystem in recent years is EEAT.

Although it appeared in the Quality Raters Guidelines as EAT back in 2014, it gained special relevance following the Medical Update in 2018, especially in YMYL (“Your Money Your Life”) portals.

Google added an additional "E" (Experience) to the EAT quality standards to ensure that content is useful and relevant.

The additional "E" stands for "experience" and precedes the original EAT concept: expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

Currently, it is a factor that affects all types of websites, and we will discover why it is so important to consider it in a web positioning strategy.

Table of contents

What is EEAT?

EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. In Spanish, we can translate it as Experience, Knowledge, Authority, and Trust. To understand it better, let’s look at each one separately:

Experience

This refers to the experience that the content creator has on the subject in question. Think of lived experiences, specifically, first-hand experiences about the topic you are writing about.

Experience is especially important in a digital world that is moving towards AI-generated content. Artificial Intelligence cannot demonstrate true experiences of anything. At best, it can make assumptions about human experience, but the content it generates will not be unique.

It is probably no coincidence that Google announced the addition of "experience" in its guidelines for rating search quality shortly after the launch of ChatGPT. It is very important to differentiate content written by humans from that written by AI.

Expertise

At this point, we talk about the level of knowledge and the ability of the creator to produce quality content. It refers to the part that justifies whether the creator is an expert on the subject, to their specialization.

And you may ask, how do I demonstrate this? since the difference between experience and expertise can be small. Google uses them interchangeably in different situations.

For YMYL content, experience is important. People reading it need to know they can trust the expertise of the person who wrote it. Would you take medical advice from a mommy blogger? You might if she became an expert due to her life experience.

But when it comes to evaluating the level of expertise, we need to know more: Is the person who wrote the article you are reading an expert? Can you find out something about them? Are they renowned experts, have they won any awards? Where did they study?

A signal that is gaining more strength is topical authority, defined as the relevance of a webpage concerning its topic or niche.

In other words, it is about conveying to Google that our web domain is an expert on the subject. If you think this might interest you, we expand on this topic in a class with 4 YouTube videos by Manuel Martin:

Authority

Authority can be defined as the notoriety of the author, the editor, or the website. The better the reputation, the greater the website's ability to influence, and for this, one must become an informational benchmark based on the sector or specialty topic of the website.

Authority considers to what extent a content creator is known as a reference source on the topic.

Authority can be demonstrated in three main ways:

• Establish a solid content architecture that covers all aspects of a particular topic.
• Gain links or backlinks from other authoritative sites.
• Build a digital profile or personal brand as an expert in a particular topic.

Authority, expertise, and experience go hand in hand. One cannot be an authority on a topic without experience and knowledge, and vice versa.

Trust

Trust is the credibility of the author or website on a specific topic. If we have seen that having authority means having a good reputation, having trustworthiness is related to whether that authority is good or bad. It is not so much linked to whether the content is true or informative, but to whether the handling of data or payment processes is completely secure for users.

If we look at the QRG, EEAT is defined as:

• The experience of the content creator
• The level of knowledge or specialization of the content creator
• The authority of the content creator, the content itself, and the website
• The trustworthiness of the content creator, the content itself, and the website

This will help us derive more concrete evaluation factors and where we can focus to improve this aspect of our project.

Google has emphasized this concept for many years and it should be one of the pillars to work on any website or online business to improve its visibility.

In the official document accompanying each new core update, special emphasis is placed on factors related to EEAT.

In fact, currently, in the era of AI-generated content and misinformation, it seems more important than ever to validate what Google can and should show its users.

Why is EEAT so important?

EEAT is vital for the relevance and authority of a website. Google cannot afford to rank content from unreliable sources or created with Artificial Intelligence, as it could affect its own reputation and the users looking for reliable and quality content.

So much so that, many times, we have seen how authority has taken precedence over other aspects. We have seen this in the various updates of recent years. This should balance out as Google becomes a truly semantic search engine and moves away from traditional database-based ranking.

In fact, in the QRG, it was stated that their ranking systems were designed to prioritize authority over factors such as timeliness or exact word matches during a crisis.

In any case, Google needs to add more entities to its knowledge graph and learn to interpret language better. Thus, for example, we will also avoid some errors in the information of the snippets.

How EEAT influences rankings

Google could evaluate the quality of the author or editor via EEAT and the relevance of the website concerning search intent through text analysis and other methods related to machine learning (Rankbrain, natural language processing…).

We could see it as an order created according to relevance and an extra layer of quality, which becomes more important in the first ten or twenty search results. Additionally, it may also depend on the keyword itself, by topic or search volume.

When analyzing a website, EEAT applies to the entire domain, to sections, or all content on specific topics within it. It is a more holistic factor compared to relevance, which would be applied individually by URL.

Google can use it to elevate or send any website to the dark zone, so it can have a global impact on the visibility of any project. It not only affects organic ranking but also appearing in snippets, Discover, News, insertion of sitelinks, reviews or stars… and even indexing.

Think of EEAT as the reason why users would choose your site over your competitors. As a result, EEAT could have a direct impact on how Google receives, and ultimately ranks, the website.

What factors can influence EEAT?

There is no universal score or ranking, as EEAT is not considered a ranking factor in itself; a set of factors indicating a good level of experience, knowledge, authority, and trust can determine the quality of a webpage.

The quality of the content is one of the key factors that determine what results Google shows when you make a query. In its documentation, we can read that they prioritize content that is most useful, one of the signals that helps them with this is checking if there are prominent websites linking to that content.

Although links still carry a lot of weight, we can affirm that there are other factors to consider that have evolved over time and will continue to do so. From what we have seen in these years, we could derive some of them:

• PageRank or references to the author or website
• Anchor text
• Distance to trusted seed sites
• Signals indicating the credibility of the author or website (experience in a specific topic, how long they have been around, evaluations of published content, where the author has published, citations or appearances in documents or videos, or the number of published contents, among others.)
• Transparency of the author's data on the webpage itself. For example: “about me” page.
• Links to other external references
• Security of the website's domain (HTTPS certificates, etc.)
• Content in accordance with widely accepted facts and conventions.

In summary, EEAT is the quality concept that Google uses. To evaluate it, it is based on three clearly differentiated pillars:

• Off-page evaluation
• Content evaluation
• Entity evaluation

Entities and EEAT

The work of these entities is closely related to EEAT, both in their definition and their relationship with each other. Entities are used to thematize or classify URLs into shards, but it is not a simple database; it goes much further.

Google has been working to become a semantic search engine since the advent of Hummingbird. It does not want to be a simple database; it wants to capture information based on entities and their relationships. These relationships stem from the text itself, from the proximity between them, and from the frequency of occurrence, both in content and in structured data.

Entities are key in ranking due to the relevance factor. Google needs to understand what is hidden in each search intent and what results it should provide.

In this sense, we should not underestimate the weight of link building to define and relate entities, as its role is fundamental in this process. Links remain key to discovering, relating, and understanding content today.

However, if you want to succeed in the EEAT game, you must go beyond entities.

A few years ago, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, pointed out the following:

“The Internet is rapidly becoming a ‘black hole’ where false information thrives. Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are the way to solve the black hole. Brand affinity is clearly wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it is not going to disappear. It must have a genetic component.”

In the big leagues, it is no longer enough to be an entity. You have to be a brand, a digital authority. Let’s see how.

Link building: key to enhancing EEAT

We have known for a few years that the concept of affinity is essential for working on link building. Additionally, it should be approached from four distinct points: Semantic affinity in our content (creating clusters…), affinity between entities (relationships that interest us), affinity between nodes (references), and audience affinity (reaching your audience).

We will not only be creating those relationships that interest us, but we will also be favoring our business from the very first moment. We must not forget that SEO should always be business-focused and link building is another leg of our strategy.

We can achieve direct leads if we know how to reach where our audience is, and in the right way, and it will help us achieve that organic visibility we seek with web positioning.

To do this, it is essential to find like-minded websites to use in the link building strategy. To help us better define the concept of affinity, we should start by finding those keywords that relate to the entities we are interested in and look for sites that rank well for those keywords. If a website ranks for those searches relevant to us (for our sector), we are interested in being associated with these sites. It is crucial to identify and collaborate with these sites (media, blogs…) and for this, you can use the AFFINITY tool from Unancor.

With this, we will be able to connect with the entities that interest us and become an authority, both with the website itself and through relevant and expert authors. Because you can bring in expert authors or turn the company's own author into an expert.

Practical case of improving EEAT on a website

As a reference, and to see better how to work on this concept practically, let’s look at the actions we recently took for a client:

1. Publish articles that reference the domain with a link and take the opportunity to cite the author. Or using quotes as references when commenting on news. Example: New self-employed quota system. Something specific is explained, and a quote from the author is added. “As Cristian TAL from the blog comments…”.
2. Choose general news media based on affinity criteria, with clusters positioned by keywords that interest us, and combine it with specific thematic sites.
3. Combination of links + citations, both to the domain and the author.
4. Adding variety of links, such as to social networks.
5. Create articles published as interviews or as an invitation to a expert author to write on a specialized blog.
6. Contextualize well the mention or link that you are going to introduce. For example, when talking about the expert author, mention if they are a Specialist in TAL or an Expert in TAL. Remember the weight of entities in this sense.
7. And always keep in mind the basics in link creation: variety and naturalness in the anchor and in the destination URLs.

To improve the impact of these links, and to favor the business with each action, we will seek to boost organic traffic from each publication. With this, we not only achieve qualified traffic and leads from that first impact, but we will also achieve gradual visits to our website that come through that article in the positioned media on Google.

To do this, we can:

• Search for longtails of clusters for which the media ranks.
• Take advantage of already ranked articles for keywords that interest us and update them with news while introducing links. If we cannot place the link, let’s take advantage of freshness in our favor: create a new, updated, and more complete article to take that position and introduce the link in it.

Online reputation: key to improving Authority and Trust

Online reputation management also influences
the EEAT, especially in Authority and Trust. It is essential to analyze the search results for the brand and those directly related to the brand, such as user opinions, ratings, reviews, and even possible accusations of fraud or scams.

It is crucial to care for and clean your brand reputation and for this, articles in media through a link building strategy can also be of great help. Google puts itself in a vulnerable position when it chooses to rank content when a user searches for something, which is why Trust is so important within Google’s EEAT evaluation guidelines.

In fact, Google asks its evaluators to check those types of searches related to brands (authors and websites) to measure the quality of their search results. By monitoring the SERPs for those searches related to ours, we will be working on our EEAT, our online reputation, and the user's trust in our product or service.

In summary…

As you can see, EEAT has a significant influence on the ranking of a website on Google.

Working on the structure of the website to improve the experience, obtaining quality backlinks, creating informative and detailed content with expert authors, and ensuring maximum security for visitors to your page are essential pillars to improve the EEAT of your website.

Although we have focused on the link building aspect, it is evident that we cannot start the house from the roof. For this, we must ensure that the other On Page factors we have discussed are well implemented.

Without a doubt, EEAT is a pillar that must be taken into account and is becoming increasingly important in all types of projects and topics. It is the only way we have to demonstrate to Google that our content is of quality.