Does your website meet E-A-T guidelines for SEO?
As we all know SEO is a moving target that continues to be difficult to hit even for people like us that work in this world every day. There continue to be a variety of ongoing updates and some seem to be quick bumps in the road whereas others change project plans and strategies for SEO for the long term. One of those that has been hanging around for a while now is EAT, because search engines get hungry too 🙂
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What is E-A-T as it relates to SEO?
E-A-T is simply just an acronym that stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. These three key elements are all things that Google has wanted and continues to want to rank a website and award it more relevant organic traffic. After all, I would wager that we all would rather be navigating to websites that are trustworthy and provide expertise and authority for the audiences they serve, right? Well Google thought the same and that is exactly why around 2019 we started to see the update containing E-A-T show up on the scene and disrupt a lot of websites that don't have elements that provide their Expertise, Authority, and Trust. So that begs the question, how do I prove myself to the almighty Google?
How to make sure your website is E-A-T friendly?
Not unlike most things, there is a lot of debate on this, but some elements of E-A-T most industry experts are more than happy to agree on. This is that certain elements need to exist on your website to improve it's overall quality in the eyes of Google. Without some of the major elements it is likely that Google will in turn trust your website less and it will be much harder to gain rankings and traffic, if not impossible in some cases. Here are some of the major elements that should absolutely be included on your website in order to appease E-A-T.
Contact Information
This may seem obvious, but we have seen it countless times where a business does not have all of their contact information prominently displayed on their website. This means, email address, phone number, and physical address. Without these on the website it can make your site less trustworthy in the eyes of search engines, so if it is not there now, add it for a quick and easy E-A-T win
Other Trust Signals
In addition to contact information, there are a variety of other elements that E-A-T believes should be associated with a trustworthy website. Some of these included links to social media websites. Copyright information on the website, a privacy policy. Terms of service, an about us page, a blog page, a return policy (ecom), and links to any awards won or organizations that you belong to like BBB etc.
It should be noted that, not every website will have all of these, but we recommend adding as many of these elements as you can realistically to help better optimize your website for E-A-T. Some may be relevant and others may not, but just use your best judgement.
Website Structure
In addition to the previously mentioned E-A-T considerations, the way that your website is structured and content is optimized can also play into E-A-T. For instance, having enough, but not too many internal links can be helpful, making sure that all needed pages have a 404, and also making sure that 301 redirects are added where needed. These basic website elements can also help Google to further trust your website.
Wrapping it Up
E-A-T has been around for a while and we at Local Blitz have been monitoring this part of Google's algorithm for all our clients for years now. That being said, E-A-T seems to be here to stay and websites are constantly being updated and evolving so stay on top of E-A-T is an ongoing process for us and will be for you as well if you take it on yourself. We recommend running some type of E-A-T scan of your website at least once a quarter or once a month for larger websites, to make sure everything is still in order and if an relevenet errors are found to fix them quickly. We don't want Google to E-A-T your website!