Gone are the wild west days of content marketing and SEO where climbing the search engine rankings was as easy as stuffing your webpage or blog post with your chosen keywords and watching it rise to the top of the results.
Now, consumers [and Google] rightly demand quality content that is relevant, trustworthy and accurate – enter Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines.
Standing for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, each is a component of Google’s wider Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines [SQEG], and is used by the algorithm to judge whether content is meeting the search engine’s criteria for quality content.
E-E-A-T and SEO
Google launched its initial E-A-T guidelines in 2014, adding the additional “E” for “Experience” in December of 2022. This marked a broader trend towards quality, meaningful content geared towards human users rather than keyword-stuffed content designed to game the algorithm.
While the E-E-A-T guidelines themselves are not direct ranking factors, they heavily assist Google with determining the quality and relevance of search results. As such, ensuring your content and website meets these criteria is vital for abiding by Google’s definitions of desirable content.
This is particularly important for websites that fall into what’s known as “Your Money or Your Life” [YMYL] sites, where inaccurate or deceptive information could have potentially harmful consequences, such as sites that deal with health or financial advice, or ecommerce sites. Complying with Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines in these instances is a core component of ensuring your content remains relevant in the search results.
Experience
Being the latest addition to the guidelines, experience refers to how closely content relates to first-hand experience of the writer.
It might refer to whether someone has tried the food at a restaurant they’re reviewing, or used the brand of lipstick they’re raving about. These forms of experience feed heavily into social proof, with once study finding 96% of people read reviews, and only 11% of consumers trust brand messaging over public sentiment.
The experience criterion will naturally vary depending on the business/website in question, and this may be accomplished in many ways, but the main concern is demonstrating that real-life, first-hand experience on the topic in question.
Expertise
Expertise refers to the topical knowledge and know-how of the author in question. This criterion was merged with experience until recently, though they are now two distinct components of E-E-A-T.
Considering whether your website falls into the YMYL category is particularly important here, as content that deals with topics where the stakes are higher, such as health, financial or legal advice, will need to demonstrate credibility. This could take the form of professional credentials like qualifications, licenses or similar.
Even “low-stakes” content, like instructional how-tos, informational blogs and other forms of practical guidance benefit from demonstrating expertise. You don’t necessarily have to possess a formal qualification in a topic to write about it, but providing evidence of your expertise throughout your content helps Google identify it as relevant and high quality.
Authoritativeness
While expertise and authority are linked, they do refer to distinct aspects of content. Expertise is concerned with the overall credentials of an author as an expert within their field, whereas authority refers to your and your website’s wider reputation in your industry.
Demonstrating authoritativeness essentially means proving yourself as a leader within your industry or subject niche. Google prefers and prioritises content from sources that are established as long-standing authorities in their niche, and are recognised as such. One of the main ways of demonstrating this is through backlinks – but not all backlinks are regarded equally.
Earning links from websites and publishers that are themselves well-regarded [think leading news outlets, trusted informational sources and the like] tells Google that your content holds weight within your industry.
Trustworthiness
Google have confirmed that trustworthiness is the most important criterion in E-E-A-T, meaning without trust, content will suffer regardless of the levels of experience, expertise or authority.
There a quite a few aspects that go into determining the trustworthiness of your website, and each is used to judge the overall accuracy, honesty, safety and reliability of the site. This does, of course, encompass content. Anything published on your website should be factually accurate, backed up with evidence and error-free.
However, Google also takes into account the wider aspects of your site when judging its trustworthiness. For example, an ecommerce website must demonstrate that their checkout and transaction pages are safe and secure, or YMYL websites that must provide accurate and accessible contact information. Google takes all these factors into consideration when evaluating trustworthiness, so a holistic approach to the entire website is required that goes beyond content marketing.
Final thoughts
Complying with the E-E-A-T guidelines doesn’t just ensure a minimum quality for content you publish on your website and the quality of your site overall, it’s also a key component of building real trust with your audience through effective content marketing. Above all, following the E-E-A-T criteria ensures you’re writing content for your audience – not the algorithm.
Tom Wilson is a leading authority in digital marketing, helping brands unlock their full potential through compelling digital and media strategies. His wealth of experience has seen him work across several high-profile enterprise brands including Curry's, Disney Store and Johnson & Johnson before joining leading digital marketing agency, Climb Online, as their Head of Media.
