Mary Lou Brink | November 29, 2021
When you plan a trip, which website do you visit to learn more? Many of you would probably answer TripAdvisor. Right? Most would say they choose TripAdvisor because it appears to be a vetted and trusted source.
According to Merriam-Webster, trust is an assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something. That something can include content on your website.
Can you confidently say that your website is a trusted source in your industry? No? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. And it’s easy to get ahead of the competition. All you have to do is learn how to E.A.T.
Watch what you E.A.T.
Expertise, Authority, and Trust — the three components Google uses to measure how much confidence it should place in a brand or website. It’s also referred to as page quality.
Together, they gauge whether a business should be considered a leader in its field. Google’s algorithm considers details such as who created the content (a PhD in the field?), the thoroughness of the content and its usefulness to the reader when evaluating a site for each of the three components. Of course, this looks very different depending on the type of website.
Without going deep in the weeds, let’s break down EAT SEO a bit more.
Expertise
No matter the subject, if you can demonstrate a greater expertise than others, you’ll be identified as the expert. Your website falls under the same scrutiny.
Google examines your website to see if it demonstrates a higher level of expertise than similar sites on the internet. Has your company won awards and are they reflected on the website? Is your brand well known? If so, Google places your site higher in search ranking factor.
Authority
Authority, on the other hand, is measured to see how well your website and the content within it stand apart from all the others.
Are you well reviewed on third-party sites, like Yelp? Do other websites link to your content when referencing your industry or topic? When someone searches the internet, they’re looking for someone to give them answers they can trust, but not just anyone. They want an authority on the topic.
Trust
It’s one thing to create a lot of content, but it’s another for it to be trustworthy. And once trust is lost, it’s rarely regained.
Google measures trust based on the backlinks it detects from other domains. The higher the trust in the linked from domain, the more trust it puts into the linked to domain. Google now measures the trustworthiness of a website using the same factors a real person would use – repeatedly proving themselves to be trustworthy.
To help uncover your content’s trusted voice, follow these seven steps (inspired by a recent Inbound conference seminar):
Now you know what Google algorithms are looking for and how they determine high-quality content from low quality. Don’t rush it. There are no shortcuts here. There’s only persistence and patience.
Mary Lou Brink
Mary Lou Brink is senior director of content at Falls & Co. She has spent more than two decades as a newspaper editor. In her integrated marketing career, she shepherds digital content through the strategy, creation, review/approval and publication processes to ensure timely and high-quality deliverables for a wide range of clients.