Lean into long-tail search with the added value of EEAT

Ben says: “Use the principles of Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust to lean into long-tail search.

EEAT elements are no longer nice to have; they are absolutely essential. Practically, showing the principles of EEAT on your site is a very long list of activities, but I will rattle through them. You’ll need to show transparency as to how your material is published and show transparency about you as a business – for example, where you’re based and how to get in contact.

Your material should show first-hand experience and avoid generalisations by using statistics when making claims. Your material should cite sources and provide nuggets of information that are not found elsewhere. Also, you should be doing all of this while building a brand. It’s a very broad set of expensive and time-consuming considerations but there are some ways to make it easier to target your content.”

Does this focus on EEAT apply to every type of content and every intent?

“It applies on a sliding scale. When these principles were first introduced, it was primarily through the lens of YMYL topics – topics and niches where big financial or health decisions were involved. In the last 12 months, guidance has come out which has made it clear that this applies to everything, but to a greater or lesser extent depending on the risk for the users.

It applies to all types of content. It applies to a site as a whole when you consider business transparency. It applies to really informational content when it comes to showing unique value. It applies through the funnel and to almost all niches, but on a logical sliding scale of importance.”

Which styles of content does it apply to the most?

“I’ve seen clear evidence of it applying to all material, from home pages to landing pages to longer-form editorial.

To try and answer that question, the longer the form of a piece, the more opportunity there is to show these considerations – and the more these considerations would be expected. To oversimplify it, these principles apply most to longer-form content.

EEAT principles need to be baked into everything. For example, there’s an opportunity in an FAQ content extract (whether that’s placed on a landing page or in an editorial) and, because there’s an opportunity, everybody should be doing it.

We can see the importance of this through trends in Google’s algorithm updates from the past year (which haven’t reached their logical conclusion), and from trends in the development of generative AI in the last year (which also haven’t reached their logical conclusion). I would encourage everybody to apply these principles everywhere it’s possible to do so.”

Should these principles be baked in when you initiate your content production strategy or is it an ethos to consider with each individual piece of content?

“As with many aspects of search, it is sometimes oversimplified and only applied at the level of execution. Somebody has decided they want to publish to meet a certain kind of intent, they’ve decided on the landing page they’re going to create, then they try to show first-hand experience at the page level and bake statistics in. However, it should be considered at the absolute most abstract level of strategy as well.

If you’re planning your overall content strategy for the year ahead, it’s really important to consider how you can demonstrate that this is something you’re actually good at. When you see car dealerships suddenly writing affiliate blog posts about window cleaning services, that is clearly a paid blog post. That dealership has no authority in this niche, so it doesn’t make sense, from a strategy perspective. They haven’t considered what they’re a perceived authority at, what they’d like to be a perceived authority at, and whether they’re giving their material a chance to succeed.

That article could be executed with all the tick-box EEAT considerations, and it would still be strategically incongruous. They haven’t considered their overall expertise signals as a site, so it’s destined to fail.”

Does this impact video-first content that is then transcribed? Does EEAT have to be considered during scriptwriting?

“It depends on whether that material is going to be repurposed purely for traditional search, or simply transcribed word-for-word. In general, the EEAT principles conceptually apply just as much to video-first publishers.

There’s been a trend in the last few months for more social search results. Google Perspectives search results put emphasis on individuals and tend to share results from platforms like YouTube and TikTok. This type of search result is ripe for a video-first format and, because these result types are increasingly prevalent in search, it makes sense to consider EEAT principles for the video medium just as much as you would for the written medium.”

Why is it becoming important to look at modifiers for long-tail keywords as much as entities?

“Some of the principles of EEAT are to produce nuggets of information in your material that can’t easily be found elsewhere. That is so important with the proliferation of AI-generated content. 2023 has been the year of AI adoption. There was a post on Google’s developer blog which said that, in the last year, they found five times more spam content than the previous year. That can only have been enabled by the increased adoption of generative AI.

To add unique value to your content – with lots of people considering the same keyword data from the same keyword research tools – it’s time to go beyond the verbatim output of keyword research tools. When I talk about leaning into the long-tail, I’m talking about changing how you approach keyword research to identify gaps in the output of your common keyword research tools.

Let’s take a niche car model as a practical entity. Instead of looking just at what queries searchers modify that particular car model with, look beyond to modifiers amongst a set of similar entities in the wider industry. In practical terms, that means doing keyword research around what modifier groups people apply to all car models (colour modifiers, door modifiers, engine size modifiers, etc.). You might find that there’s no search volume for your niche car model modified with “boot size”, but you might see that modifier used quite frequently with established models – so it’s a no-brainer to address despite lack of known search volume.

You can use your keyword research to identify what there is likely volume and appetite for, that you wouldn’t necessarily find by just looking at the modifiers for an individual keyword. With your keyword research, start looking at a whole group of related entities rather than just the given entity. SEOs are used to categorising their queries by entity. Now, there’s also value in categorising queries by modifier groups within an entity group to see all the relevant things you could potentially talk about where there might be zero volume in your conventional search tools.”

How do you ensure that you don’t put too much effort into more speculative long-tail keywords?

“Even the longest of long-tail plans will have a data-backed rationale, so it’s rare to have a truly speculative idea. However, a common approach would involve testing the click-through and conversion potential of niche queries in paid search before committing too much resource into ranking organically. However, the key to succeeding in that is to use product expert knowledge to understand whether the rationale you’re applying to your keyword research is valid.

When you look at the modifiers that are applied to similar queries within the industry, the key to success is vetting that output with somebody who actually understands something about the product so that you can understand the relevance of those modifiers. It also helps that you can then explain how this material was gathered in the end output. You can say that the data was gathered by going through a named product expert.

If you’re looking at modifiers for certain financial products, it would be absolutely critical to go to a product expert to make sure that similar-sounding financial products are affected by some of the same modifiers that you might find in your keyword research.”

How can SEOs segment organic audiences in the way that social media marketers do?

“One example (which is only really possible in more popular and common niches) would be to use audience insight tools to understand what publications are more likely to be read by certain individuals.

If you’re doing keyword research for a certain niche and you have insight into what other publications they may read, you can look at queries that these related publications rank for and are also relevant to your target topic. That can help you expand your keyword research with more confidence.”

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

“I’m advocating for the adoption of a very different, more intelligent, method of topic organisation and using topic insights – and it does take time. You have to find efficiencies. To do that, SEOs should focus less on tiebreaker ranking factors for imperfect content.

Google has been encouraging SEOs to place slightly less emphasis on things like Core Web Vitals and page experience than we have been. Remind your teammates that these sorts of things are generally tiebreaker ranking factors. If you’re spending time and expensive resources trying to fix tiebreaker technical ranking factors – when you haven’t extracted all the value out of your keyword in search and applied that to content – then you might be wasting your time.

As much as we are all technical geeks in the SEO industry, and we love doing clever technical SEO things, there are definitely some instances where you can kick Core Web Vitals and page experience down the line until your content is in the best possible shape.

Consider some of those really fun technical things as tiebreaker ranking factors, rather than as key strategic enablers.”

Ben Howe is SEO Director at SEOMG!, and you can find him over at SEOMG.co.uk.