Focus on the E, E, and A of EEAT

Andrew says: “In 2024, more people need to focus on EEAT, as it is now.

I’m mainly referring to expertise, experience, and authoritativeness here. I read the Quality Rater Guidelines and, if you look at the way Google talks about it, trust is an overarching thing. If you don’t have the E, E and A then you can’t have the T. People focus a little too much on trust and not on the other things.

If you build those elements to show that you have expertise, experience, and authoritativeness then you are trustworthy by definition. If you build it, trust will come.”

How do you build experience?

“You have to have it first; you can’t fake it. It’s interesting to look at the way that Google talks about this in those Quality Rater Guidelines (You should read those guidelines. It’s about 170 pages and lots of people say they have read it, but they’ve only skimmed it.)

Google talks about the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience in the topic. You might call your dad or aunt to come and fix your plumbing for you, but why do you call that person? You call them because they’ve done it before. They know what they’re doing, and they have experience in that area. The difficulty is in how you prove that to a machine.

You know a lot about microphones and cameras, David, because you’ve got experience in those areas. I know that, as a human, because I’ve spoken to you. How do you prove that to a machine? How do you prove that you’ve got experience?

Lots of people copy each other on the internet now. We get all these spin-offs of content, and people scrape this and steal a bit of that, but they’re not showing that they have experience. They’re showing that they have experience in scraping, stealing other people’s content, and using ChatGPT to write things for them. You need to show Google that you have first-hand experience, and that’s where they’re becoming much more intelligent. They can tell the difference between original content and stolen or copied content, to a certain extent.

If you want to show that you are experienced in this area, and you have first-hand experience, having original photography can really help. If you have a photo of one of your plumbers fixing somebody’s sink – not just the same stock photo of a plumber that’s on 100 million other websites as well, but a photo of one of your team fixing a sink – Google sees that as an original image. That is a clue.

The intelligent systems that platforms like Facebook and Google use can identify the things in the photo. They know that the photo contains a van, a dog, a sink, a tap, a pipe, etc. If you have original photos, Google knows that they haven’t appeared anywhere else. It’s unique to you. You are showing that you have unique, first-hand experience of doing this thing.

There are certain industries where original photos are hard to come by. Some industries lend themselves better to imagery and photos than others, but it doesn’t have to be photos. Create other original things for yourself. Create logos. Don’t use a stock image from a library like Unsplash. Google can detect that, and they know that that image appears on hundreds of websites. You’re giving Google a clue that you’re copying other stuff. It’s not offering anything original, and it’s not first-hand experience.”

Is your Google Business Profile the best place to have your original photos?

“You should absolutely put images on your Google Business Profile, but I’m mostly talking about your website content. On the page where you talk about your sink-fixing service, heating-fixing service, or horseshoe-fitting service, you need to have those images on your website too.

It’s that corpus of content: building up the chapters in the book of the things you talk about and having that kind of information across your website. If Google reads the whole book of your website, you want them to have a chapter on each thing. Then they’re starting to build up a picture of you.

You say you’re an expert, but everybody says they’re an expert. When you say you’re an expert, you have some evidence to back that up.”

If you’re a thought leader in a B2B business, is your LinkedIn profile key to demonstrating experience?

“That kind of information is more about disambiguation. If you’ve got an unusual surname, like me, there aren’t many people to differentiate between. When I talk about myself, Google probably knows who I am. If you’re a James Smith, Google’s not going to be 100% sure which James Smith that is.

You can use things like schema markup to help Google understand which James Smith you’re talking about when you use the name ‘James Smith’. Also, here’s their Twitter/X profile, here’s their LinkedIn profile, here’s where they’re cited on this other website, here’s their bibliography of all the books they’ve written on Amazon, etc. That helps Google join up those dots for that entity.

Google views people as entities, so it wants to disambiguate that James Smith from all the other James Smiths. A good LinkedIn profile that is updated will mean that, when you talk about your company, Google can say, ‘Oh, that James Smith! We know who that person is. We trust them a little bit more than an unknown James Smith.’”

What’s the difference between expertise and experience, and how do you demonstrate expertise?

“Google fudges around a little bit and there’s a definite overlap between these two things. You can’t be an expert in an area without some experience but it’s about how you prove those things.

Of course, I’m going to tell you I’m an expert in SEO, but how do you know that? Who else is backing up that statement? Showing expertise in your area might include showing that you have won respected awards (not just the ones you can buy for 500 bucks). These would be awards that people love, talk about, and trust. Google’s not just reading your book; it’s reading all the books on the whole internet. When other people talk about those awards, Google knows which are worth having.

Have you got any of those? Have you got any certifications? Are you a member of a trade body or a guild? Have you done recent training courses? Are you registered with Companies House? All these things are ways of proving to a machine that you’re an expert in that area.

If someone’s offering to re-roof my house, and they are registered with a trade body, have a qualification, and have a certification, these are all things that I can use to prove that they are an expert – and a machine can use them as well. They can go and look at those awards, look through the archive, find your name, and disambiguate it from all the other people with very similar names. That is the kind of stuff that can prove your expertise.

With experience, it’s more about looking at the language and the way that Google talks about it in the Quality Rater Guidelines. They’re looking for that first-hand experience and some of that can come down to the way you communicate. When you talk about things that you’ve done on your website in the content that you write, use the kind of language that shows experience: ‘We did this.’, ‘We found that this happened’, ‘We don’t do it this way anymore because, when we did it this way in the past, it was more expensive’, etc.

Use words and language to convey your experience to a machine that’s going to be looking for these clues. They are trying to determine whether you have actually done this or you are just an affiliate website that’s trying to use the right buzzwords and keywords because you want to rank and make money when people click that link.”

Can social proof help demonstrate expertise?

“Again, Google’s going to be looking for proof. They want to know if you can prove it. I’m saying that I’m an expert on SEO. The social proof for that might be that you’re talking to me about SEO, David. You’re well-known in SEO and SEOin2024 will be another bestseller, I’m sure. The fact that you’re talking to me and the fact that I’m cited in this book are both clues to Google. That’s more social proof that I might know what I’m talking about with SEO, at least to an extent.

Again, it’s about who else is saying that you’re an expert, and that’s where this Venn diagram of circles is going to overlap. We’re talking about expertise and social proof, which very much overlaps with authoritativeness. In Google’s words, you have to be the go-to source. Would this person be your go-to source for X? If you’re looking for SEO experts, is Andrew your go-to? (Maybe not. After Aleyda and other people have said no, you might come down the list to somebody like me).

If someone is going to re-roof your house, and they say they’re an expert roofer, you go and look at something like Trustpilot or TrustATrader. If the reviews all say that this person is rubbish, you shouldn’t use them, and they’re cowboys, then they’re probably not that authoritative. If the reviews all say, ‘We had our roof redone and they were amazing! Five stars, would use them again.’, that’s another clue that is building up that authority.”

What are the key ways to drive authoritativeness?

“If you want to be known as an expert, and known as authoritative, then you absolutely need other people to be saying it for you. You saying you’re an expert is a good start, but you need other people to be saying it for you.

Also, you need to help Google to join those dots and disambiguate. When other people talk about you – and say what a great job you do and how fantastic and authoritative you are – cite that on your website. Boast about it. Say, ‘We were mentioned in the Telegraph’s best 100 companies’, or ‘We were mentioned in the Cambridge Evening News’s article about the best marketing companies in Cambridge’.

Reference those things and help Google understand that, when that site talks about you, they do mean you because you mentioned it too. You can put that in schema and join all those dots up, and Google will start to build up a clearer picture of who the company is, who the person is, what they do, who else talks about them, who else says they’re good/bad/indifferent, etc. Those are the kind of things that Google is looking for.”

Will AI-produced content ever be able to achieve the same level of quality as humans, in terms of EEAT?

“Honestly, I think that one day it might be. It’s already getting very good very quickly. There are certain areas where it is going to be much harder to differentiate between AI-written content and human-written content. This is particularly true where the lines are already being blurred – with some editors using AI to write content and then going back and editing it afterwards, correcting it, and tweaking it to make it sound more human.

These large language learning models, as the name suggests, are using that all the time. When their work is corrected, they look at what a human added to make it sound more human. They learn from it and try to repeat it.

For now, though, it’s usually easy to tell the difference between some of the machine-written and human-written content. Again, if you look at the Quality Rater Guidelines, Google talks about this. Importantly, they say that this content has to be trustworthy, safe, and consistent.

It explicitly says that content should be given the lowest possible rating if it’s created with so little effort, originality, or skill that the page fails to achieve its purpose. That is Google’s words. They’re looking out for main content that is copied, auto-generated, or otherwise created without adequate effort.

They know that people are doing it and, to an extent, it was already happening. Before ChatGPT came in and wrote all our content for us, people were using RSS feeds, scrapers, and various other tools to combine bits and pieces and jigsaw together an article. Google spotted that. It’s not terribly useful and it doesn’t take a great deal of effort.

Like most things in SEO, if it’s easy it’s probably not a good long-term solution. It might work for a bit, but probably not for long.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop buying links. We all get emails saying, ‘I’ll sell you this link for $50’. If you can set up an inbox filter to scrape all those things out, that would be useful. Stop buying links is my stock answer every year.

For something slightly different, stop pursuing trust quite so much. If you can build up and show your expertise, experience, and authoritativeness, Google will start to have a more trustworthy view of your site as a whole.”

Andrew Cock-Starkey is Founder at Optimisey, and you can find him over at Optimisey.com.