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TL;DR

 

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust — three factors that Google uses to measure how much trust it should place in a brand or website. Google wants to give its customers (search engine users) the best experience possible, so it only wants to promote websites that it fully trusts.

Domains and businesses with the best display of their Expertise, Authority, and Trust should not only see themselves promoted by Google, but this should also correlate and result with improved trust and purchases by a business’ target audience.

Websites can improve their display of E-A-T on their own website — through the various methods highlighted in this post — as well as on websites of others, including review websites such as Google My Business, TrustPilot and Feefo.

Improving a brand or website’s E-A-T should also be readable in improved brand recognition and brand sentiment, which, again, should lead to an increase in sales and revenue.


Still not sure what E-A-T really means for your business’ SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy?

Read on for a full breakdown of:

  • What the acronym means
  • Where it comes from
  • How dangerous it can be to your business if ignored
  • How several disruptive algorithm updates have occurred because of E-A-T
  • How to improve your website’s E-A-T for SEO (inc. Downloadable Checklist)

 

What Does the E-A-T Acronym Stand For?

The E-A-T acronym stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust, and was created by Google.

Each of these three words represents a measurement of a business’s right to be considered a leader in their field, no matter what industry or niche they may fall into.
Google is using each of these three metrics to measure the expertise, authoritativeness or trustworthiness of a website, the website’s individual page content (on a URL by URL basis) and the content creator themselves.

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Expertise

Expertise is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “Expert skill or knowledge in a particular field.” If you offer a service or product that you have deep knowledge about, you could be classified as an expert in that field — especially if you can demonstrate that your knowledge level matches or exceeds that of your competition.

If you and your competitors were standing in an identity parade line and had to demonstrate individually to a customer how deep your knowledge goes, the strength and depth of your insight would make you stand out. If you know more about plumbing than the person standing next to you, you’ll stand out.

No matter what the subject, if you demonstrate your level of expertise as higher than the next person, you’ll be picked out as the expert. Your website falls under the same scrutiny.

Your website and its pages are being examined to see if it or the pages within it demonstrate a higher level of expertise than the other websites or pages Google finds on the internet.

Oxford English Dictionary definition of expertise

Authoritativeness

Similarly, authority — or “authoritativeness” — is a person or website of whom or that is “Able to be trusted as being accurate or true; reliable.

In as much as “expertise” is a measurement of knowledge or skill level, authority is measured to see how well you, your brand or business, or your website and the content within it stand apart from the other options.

When you have a question about food, you may have a foodie friend you turn to for advice. When you’re unsure about how to bleed the radiators in your new apartment, you may have a DIY-addicted friend you ask for guidance.

When people search the internet, they’re looking for an authority who can give them answers they can trust. They not only want to trust the expertise of these people or brands, but they also want to be sure that they’re the best person to go to, similar to our identity parade line-up from before.

Google is scrutinising your brand, your website, and your content to determine if it is not only expertly written content, but if it’s also the leading authority or authoritative content available.

Oxford English Dictionary Definition of Authoritative

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness, or “The ability to be relied on as honest or truthful“, is the measurement of how much credence your brand, website or content has.

It’s one thing to create a lot of content out there on the internet, but it’s another thing for it to be trustworthy.

If someone offers us a deal that seems too good to be true, we immediately lose trust in the person offering it. If I offer you a pair of tickets to the Bahamas for 75% off market price, you’re immediately going to assume that there is a catch — and you’d be right to feel that, as it really IS too good to be true. Because of that, you’d lose trust in not only that offer, but also any future offer I would make to you.

Trust lost is rarely regained.

Google now measures — and has always measured — trust in a website based upon 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. As we understand it, Google has expanded this much further than the algorithm science of five or ten years ago and is now measuring the trustworthiness of a brand or website using the same types of factors a real person would; someone — like you — who would only trust someone if they have repeatedly shown themselves to be trustworthy.

We’ll be explaining how Google is measuring trust — as well as expertise and authoritativeness — a little later on.

Oxford English Dictionary definition of Trustworthiness

Where Does E-A-T Come From?

The E-A-T acronym comes from a set of publically available guidelines published by Google for the educational benefit of its quality assurance team or, as Google nominates them, the “Search Quality Raters” team.

Search Quality Raters

The role of the Search Quality Raters is similar to that of a Quality Assurance team at any company, large or small. Their task is to check the quality of the search results following any changes the team of computer science engineers in the Search Engine and Algorithm engineering team may make.

As an example, Google’s algorithm is deployed across the globe and available in almost 150 different languages. Each one will use the core algorithm mechanics to function, but each one will have separate requirements for its user base. Because of this, each language will have a team that experiments with changes specific to their needs, which they’ll want to test independently of the core algorithm. Meanwhile, the core algorithm team will also have changes of their own to test, some of which will be pushed (read: sending an update to the code) out to the other search engine language teams. In total, there may be anywhere between a half dozen to two dozen changes happening on a daily basis, perhaps almost hourly.

Search Quality Raters are in place to check that the change in the code works as intended. They pay attention to how the results improve or decline following each change. If the results did decline in quality, they’ll notify the engineers, who’ll make a few adjustments and push out an improvement.

This is a continual and cyclical process. Push, review, edit, push, review, edit, push and review.

In order to train these globally distributed raters, Google provides training and a guide for them to follow called the “Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines” (you may see these referred to as Search Quality Rater Guidelines as well).

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Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

The Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (SQEG) is a publically available PDF — which you can find here — consisting of 164 pages, equating to an approximate five-hour read.

The guide explains at length the full requirements and tasks of a Search Quality Rater, including:

  • What is required for evaluating search results (a computer, a browser, no Ad-blocking plugins, etc.)
  • What the most important definitions are (MC for Main Content; SC for Supplementary Content; E-A-T for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust, etc.)
  • How to navigate through a website
  • How to determine the author of content or who the owner of a website domain may be
  • How to research the E-A-T of content creators using Google searches and other websites
  • How to rate the quality of a page and its content
  • What constitutes high-quality and low-quality content
  • Which types of domains or pages require high levels of E-A-T (YMYL sites, which we’ll come onto shortly, require high levels of E-A-T)
  • Which types of pages, page design, or page usability could be defined as harmful to a user
  • How to compare the mobile experience of a website to the desktop experience
  • How to score domains and pages using a “Fully Meets User Needs” to “Fails to Meet User Needs” rating slider

There is a lot more to the guide then we can cover in a handful of bullet points, but the main points above are enough for us to determine what a Search Quality Rater is being asked to do, what the requirements of E-A-T are and how our content “Fully Meets User Needs“.

Again, it’s a five-hour read, but it’s well worth setting aside a Sunday evening to read through it and take notes.

So now that we know what E-A-T is, and who’s checking it, why is it so important for SEO?

Screenshot of Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines

Why E-A-T Is so Important

If your accountant lacks expertise, authority and trust, you’re likely to look around for an alternative. Google’s users are the same. When they find a domain or page that lacks expertise, authority and trust, they’ll look around for an alternative (in the form of another page or perhaps even a different search engine).

Google is training the algorithm to look at these measurements and using them as signals to determine whether they should entrust a business’s domain or web pages to satisfy their user’s needs. If we fail to satisfy those needs, Google will choose someone else to do so instead.

Put simply, if Google finds another domain or page provides a better customer experience than your own, Google will promote them instead. We’re talking lost ranking, lost traffic and lost revenue.

For some industries, these requirements to deliver a high level of content and user experience are multiplied. Google uses the acronym YMYL to categorise these types of industries and the related search queries for them.

What Does the YMYL Acronym Stand For?

The YMYL acronym stands for Your Money, Your Life. This categorises industries and search queries that may result in the searcher entrusting either their money or their life (i.e. their health and wellness) to you.

Your Money or Your Life acronym explained in Google's Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

What Are Some Typical YMYL Sites and Industries?

Google categorises the following as YMYL pages (but also at the domain level):

  • Shopping and Financial Transaction Pages
    • i.e. pages where a purchase is made or money changes hands
  • Financial Information Pages
    • i.e. pages where financial advice may be offered in the form of articles or guides on banking, investments, mortgages, savings, etc.
  • Medical Information Pages
    • i.e. pages where medical advice may be offered in the form of articles or guides on physical health, mental health, medical conditions, life-threatening illnesses, etc.
  • Legal Information Pages
    • i.e. pages where legal advice may be offered in the form of articles or guides on your individual legal rights, the legal rights of your family, your rights as a business owner, etc.
  • News and Public/Official Information Pages
    • i.e. pages that may detail local or world current affairs, or local and national governmental advice and services
  • Other Pages
    • i.e. pages where high-risk and important information is conveyed, such as “child adoption, car safety information” (as quoted from the SQEG).

Google wants to protect people. It wants to protect people against bad advice and give them the perfect customer experience to keep people returning to its search engine. When it comes to your finances and wellbeing, Google doesn’t want to take any risks whatsoever.

Bad or malicious advice, or information for your financial or physical and mental health situation can result in serious consequences. Google wants to help protect you.

If you have a herniated disk and read bad advice on the types of physical exercise you can try, you could herniate the disk further. This could result in an immediate need for a back surgery you may otherwise not have needed had you received advice from an expert who can examine your specific case.

Similarly, if you’re given bad mortgage advice from online guides and articles that don’t examine your individual finances, you may end up not only in an extremely bad financial situation, but you may also risk losing your home.

However, in our opinion, the YMYL guidelines stretch much further than the categories above.

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Why YMYL Guidelines Apply to You Too (Even if You Think They Don’t)

If everyone holds themselves to a higher standard, we all benefit. If all of our websites and content pages are crafted using the same high-quality requirements, then everyone who uses the internet benefits — not just our target audience, but the internet as a whole. It doesn’t matter if you think that your small eCommerce site doesn’t need to follow YMYL or E-A-T (spoiler alert: it does), or if your business adopts a simple one-page website — “which is just for there for the contact details and doesn’t sell anything” — every domain must show it can be trusted by people and by Google.

Here’s a simple example.

Example in Search Quality Rater Guidelines of High E-A-T eCommerce site

Digital marketer Ari Finkelstein’s pointed out that one listed example in the SQEG of a high-quality page doesn’t list expensive items — it’s a category page of cheap backpacks for school — but it still needs to match YMYL and E-A-T requirements, even though the average price point is only between $10-20.

Low price backpacks shown in Google's Search Quality Guidelines

What we can take from this is that it doesn’t matter how cheap your products or services are: if you’re asking people to entrust you with their money or with their life (whether that be medically, mentally or from a lifestyle point of view), Google expects you to earn a person’s trust by demonstrating the reasons why it should display your website’s pages.

Again, we may not see our gardening services as a risk to a person’s money or their life, but to that person using your services, it may be a choice made using the last of their monthly finances. It may even be connected to how they feel (a beautiful garden may be their only retreat in life).
Similarly, you may not see your diet plans and supplements as particularly life-threatening, but to someone who’s tried all of the diets under the sun to help with their stomach pains, they’re trusting you and your advice to make them feel better, and that may require them to spend a little money with you, too.

E-A-T and YMYL seep into everything, so it’s best that we optimise for them anyway and improve our quality of service — and potential ranking ability (as we’re about to discuss) — for the benefit of everyone.

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How Does E-A-T Influence Algorithm Updates?

It’s not the first time we’ve seen E-A-T factor into algorithm changes. At least on two occasions in 2018, changes to the algorithm significantly affected the rankings of hundreds of thousands of websites, resulting in increases for some, but decreases for many.

How E-A-T Influences Broad Core Updates

In March 2018, a “broad core algorithm update” was pushed by Google’s engineers into the main algorithm. This resulting in frantic webmasters asking why their websites had either shot up the rankings or fallen off a cliff.

The update was confirmed by Google’s Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, who explained further that the Search engineering team “do these routinely several times per year.

The update was investigated by a number of the SEO community’s brightest veterans, including Marie Haynes, Barry Schwarz and Jennifer Slegg amongst others, but the investigation and summary of the Brackets update by legend Glenn Gabe showcased domains that — in Glenn’s observation — were missing the key E-A-T signals or featured a less-than-adequate user experience.

How E-A-T Influenced the Medic Update

The second big algorithm update to happen (so far) in 2018 was the Medic Update, an algorithm we looked into with some depth and determined to be another “broad core update”, with websites receiving either ranking increases or decreases due to their E-A-T scoring, among other ranking factors.

We examined hundreds of domains and found that, whereas the total and quality of inbound links (read: backlinks) played a factor, it was largely how well a business was regarded in terms of its level of expertise, authority and trustworthiness that led to not only ranking changes, but also significant losses in revenue.

If a website had old or outdated content, it suffered.

If its content was written by unqualified authors, its content suffered.

If a brand had a bad reputation, its ranking suffered.

If it was difficult to uncover the person behind a brand, find contact information, or uncover product return or refund details? It suffered, too.

Ignore E-A-T at your risk — and you’re not just risking your ranking…

What Happens When You Ignore E-A-T?

Prevention.com lost around 5 million monthly visits almost overnight.

Estimated traffic graph for prevention.com

DrAxe.com lost around 10 million monthly visits almost overnight and has yet to turn its fate around.

DrAxe.com estimated traffic graphBut these businesses haven’t just lost ranking, and they haven’t just lost traffic: they’ve lost revenue.

They both have different business models — one is (mostly) advertising based, while the other sells dietary courses and supplements — yet whatever it is they’re selling, they will now have fewer people to sell it to than they did beforehand.

Consider what would happen to your business if, tonight, your sales dropped by two thirds. Tomorrow morning, would you be able to pay your staff? Could you afford to pay for the premises you own, the supplies you buy or the transport that moves them from A to B?

Prevention and DrAxe’s immediate losses in visibility surely lost them revenue and, with it, all of their financial planning for the months ahead. We’re talking possible layoffs and bills or invoices not being paid on time.

All of that because of a lack of E-A-T (in both this Ninja’s opinion and the opinion of the majority of the SEO community).

There are undoubtedly hundreds more Preventions and DrAxes out there hit by the Medic Update, likely frantically trying to make sense of what E-A-T is and what they need to do next to put things right, so we’re going to share with you a few tips to get you started. Before we start, however, we have a word of warning.

E-A-T Is Not a Magic Bullet

If you’ve been seriously affected by the Brackets or Medic update, unfortunately, we have to say that there’s no magic bullet. There’s no immediate “trick” or “hack” you can do that will return your website to where it was before these algorithm updates or any future broad core algorithm update that improves how E-A-T is measured.

As with SEO and other forms of marketing, we just can’t promise that things will turn around as soon as you need them too — however, we can absolutely help you to make the types of changes and improvements that will deliver a return on your time and financial investment.

As with incremental gains, a little change today may not be a vast improvement on yesterday, but a small change every day can deliver a huge improvement later down the line (and with SEO, we almost always see the best ROI from twelve months onwards).

As an example, here’s a client we began working with during the middle of 2017. Their business sold a service in the finance space, which has had trouble in their particular niche with consumer trust and reliability.

A organic traffic graph for an Thinkplus client

Our team identified that the required strategy was to improve brand awareness, improve brand trust and to improve customer knowledge of the niche through an improvement of the website’s content and content outreach.

Twelve months later and the steady and regular improvements we made led to a steady and significant increase in brand awareness, ranking, traffic, and — most importantly of all — revenue.

Make a 1% improvement to your website every day for the next year and you’ll see a 37x improvement on where you are today.

Do nothing and you’re effectively letting things get worse each day. Multiply that daily 1% decrease by 365 days and in a year from now, you could be 97% worse off with no way back.

Graph showing the affects of incremental gains or loses

Image property of James Clear

How to Improve E-A-T for SEO

So you’re probably asking yourself, “What do I do if I have low E-A-T…?”

E-A-T, the entirety of Google’s Search Quality Guidelines and how the algorithm works are complicated subjects — you literally will need a Computer Science degree to understand all three — but optimising your website for them doesn’t have to be so complicated.

If you have determined that you have a problem with low E-A-T then, in truth, optimising your website for E-A-T is actually quite simple.

It’s as simple as following a framework for your website, your content and the user experience you deliver, so much so that we’ve put together a checklist for you to freely use at the end of this post — but we’ll start by running through some of the simplest changes you can make.

1. Audit Your Brand

Start by auditing your brand. What are people saying about your business and/or your website? Forget what Googlebot is thinking, what are real people out there in the world saying about you?

You can start by asking your existing customer base. Send them a survey. Give them a call, even if it’s just a handful of customers, and ask them about their experience with your company and what they liked or didn’t like (don’t be shy, ask them what they really think — you’ll benefit from it in the long run).

Check your website and see if you’re clear, honest and as transparent as you can be about the brand and the people behind the business. This starts with your home page. How clear is it that you’re an expert in your field? What does your copy and imagery say about you? Do you look trustworthy? Do you accreditations from professional bodies, guilds or associations that prove who your business is and who the people behind the brand are? Have you and your team won awards that highlight your expertise, your professionalism or that extra something that makes you stand out from the crowd? These might be customer service awards or local business or chamber of commerce awards — anything that proves you’re the best at what you do.

Once you’re done with the home page, move on to the second most important page of your website — your About page.

Who are you? How long as your business been around? What are your company values?

Positioning what makes your company stand out from the crowd is what builds up brand sentiment, whether that is the history and prestige of your company or if you hold strong company values and are dedicated to helping your local community, the environment or a cause that your target audience will relate with directly (selling medical products? Unite with a medical charity as a partner).

Next, promote your team. Show people who they should be trusting. Who’s steering the ship? Who’s going to be picking up the phone when I call up tomorrow? Which gardener should I expect to see? How experienced are they? Who’s in the accountancy office keeping everything running smoothly? Most importantly, who’s providing you all with lunch and refills of coffee throughout the day?

Your team — whether that’s you as a sole trader, you and your partner, or you and seventy other globally distributed digital marketing ninjas — are the gears that make the machine work and it’s real people that we connect with the most. Just think of the companies you respect the most. You probably picture a face you remember fondly or a faceless person on a phone who always has the right answers.

Every shared personal part of your company gives your target audience a real person to connect with, subconsciously or not, so make it easier for them to do so.

Make sure it’s very easy for someone to get into touch with you.

Make your contact information easy to find, no matter which device a person is on, and make the answers to the most common questions immediately available to them too, including returns and refund information, customer service numbers and emails, and all legalese documents (T&C’s, etc.).

Lastly, audit what people are saying about your website elsewhere. What are people writing about your business and staff on social media? What are they writing about you on review websites?

There’s an old business understanding that one unhappy customer will tell nine of their friends, losing you the business of ten people. However, create one happy customer and they’ll tell at least one person, doubling your potential sales.

If anyone has anything bad to say about your brand, services or products then you need to nip it in the bud as soon as possible and take it as a lesson. Ask yourself: “What could I do to prevent this?” Do you see recurring problems? Go to the source and make changes so that they stop happening.

2. Audit Your Existing Content

What does your content say about you and your business?

Chances are that some of your older content doesn’t match your current level of expertise. Maybe you hired some freelance writers who added some 500-word blog posts to your website, because that’s what some “SEO expert” recommended you do. (Pro Tip: Ignore word counts. Write to satisfy a person’s needs instead.)

You’ll need to go through and audit your existing content and decide, “If I was the customer, would this significantly match my needs?

If the answer is a resounding “No”, then you have two choices:

Revise the content so it matches a searcher’s intent and the required expertise/authority level
Remove the content altogether

If the content is below par, but could be made more accurate with some minor adjustments, make them and then sign-off on the work yourself (as the website’s official expert) or have your designated expert sign-off on it instead.

By verifying the content of a page and approving it (making sure to list the authority giving the thumbs-up on the work), you’ll be able to recycle the content and improve its validity to your target audience and to Google.

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3. Build a Framework for Content Creation

Next, build a framework or tasklist for future content creation. Whether you’re creating the content yourself or you have a staff member or team of staff writing content for your website, they will need to follow a framework to future-proof their work for E-A-T.

Your content must be expertly researched, expertly written, include links to other pages on your website or on other domains that validate your claims or statistics, and be signed off by an expert, if it is created by someone who cannot claim to be one.

As with the content audit, all content must be written to match a specific customer need and not created purely for “ranking” purposes. If your content doesn’t match your sales funnel, it doesn’t belong on your website.

4. Hire in Experts

If you are not in the fortunate enough position to have the time to research and write for yourself — or anyone in your company who can sign-off on any content you commission — you do have some external options.

If you have no time to write, we’d suggest you hire a team of expert researchers and writers. These can either be as individual freelancers or an agency, but they must be strong in both categories so that the content you are paying for is solid and unmistakeably expert in nature.

To ensure that this content can be used as “expert” content, you will then have to validate and sign-off on this yourself. You can publish this content under your own name, if you wish, or you can publish the content under the author’s name and then add an “Expertly Verified by…” notation alongside it as visible proof of any claims made.

If you do not have the time to validate and sign-off on produced content yourself, it’s remarkably easy to find a freelance editor with the necessary qualifications who’ll be able to validate the work on your behalf. This editor can and should be documented on your website in either your About page or Team page (if you have this as a separate page).

As an example, the US-based health and wellness publisher Healthline — which expertly demonstrates its E-A-T and performed exceptionally well during the Medic update — link to either to its authors or to the co-signing expert validators on each of its blog posts.

Example of a verified author

5. Promote Onsite

Promoting your expertise will build up your authority and trust. The more people see of your brand and the higher the level of expertise you display, the more trust they’ll develop.

This starts by promoting your team, as mentioned above, starting with your About page or Team page (if separated).

Promote your writers. Promote your researchers. Promote your experts.

For good examples of this, we’d suggest looking at Healthline and VeryWellHealth, which not only promote the expertise of their teams on their About pages, but also in individual author profiles.

Heathline’s About page not only promotes its managerial staff, but it also promotes its content creators, including their experience and their qualifications.

VeryWellHealth’s content creator Amber J. Tresca and each of the website’s content contributors have individual biography pages, which showcase who they are, along with qualifications and experience, which validates why they should be trusted. For an added benefit, there are outbound links to social media profiles and websites that these authors contribute to, so that even more trust can be built up.

To tie this all together, both websites link through to these author profiles to make it easier for readers to validate who is giving them the information and why they should trust them.

Link from your content to the author. Link to the qualified professional who validated the content, should you need an expert editor.

And when it’s all done, make sure your best content is linked to from the most logical places. Map out the expected journey a person may take to get to your most important pages and then add links for them to follow.

6. Promote Offsite

Now that you’ve started to promote the expertise of your brand and the people within it, it’s time to start sharing the message.

You can start by asking your existing customer base to help you do it. Send out a post-sales email today asking them if they’d be happy to leave a review of your services or products.

Link them to your Google My Business page. Link them to TrustPilot, or Feefo or Reviews.co.uk. You can also ask them to leave you a review on your company’s Facebook page, if you find that a lot of your customers typically come via that network.

There’s no harm in asking and you’ll very quickly discover which review sites people prefer, allowing you to reduce the number of places you ask for a review on.

Even if you get just a small percentage of respondents, each one will help to build up your credibility — so when the time comes that someone is considering using your business and they want to find out what other customers have to say about you, they’ll have plenty of reviews to choose from. This will increase a user’s trust in you, whether they realise it or not.

You can also promote your experts. Help them to improve people’s perception of your company’s expertise and how authoritative you and your team are by enabling them to write for your brand and themselves on other websites. Enable them to appear on podcasts or speak at events, and encourage them to speak at conferences in your niche, and you’ll experience a surge in brand awareness too.

The business unseen and unheard of fails to succeed. Let your expertise speak for itself.

7. Make It Easy to Access and Digest

We’re in the Mobile Age. As of 2017, more than 50% of all traffic online comes via a mobile device. Because of this, Google has been switching to a Mobile-first Index for its results, which means that a website may be ranked based on how well (or poorly) it performs on a mobile device.

Websites today must be designed with mobile devices in mind, primarily by using mobile-responsive website designs, but also by using emerging technologies such as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), to name just a few.

Whether on a mobile device, laptop or desktop computer, your content must be easy to read, easy to navigate and free of distractions. If you’re using aggressive advertising on your website, we strongly recommend considering how it’s deployed.

Google is happy with some ads, but not too many. It is also strongly against deceptive advertising, such as ads that look like links to other articles on your website, the types of ads that look like “Download” buttons, and ads that mimic other websites and platforms.

Also consider page loading time. Unfortunately, the hare always beats the turtle in this race.

The faster the website is, the quicker and easier it is for people to find the answers to their query, no matter if that’s a general query about choosing a good savings account or a more complex question of making a large stocks and shares investment.

Again, make it easy to get to your most important pages. Make the main menu easy to use on every device and include links to your most important pages. Don’t make someone scroll on their phone for ages just to find your contact details. They may be looking to start a $1,000 a month subscription to your service, so don’t block them with poor usability and hidden information.

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8. Never Stop. Improve by 1% Daily

Don’t. Stop. Improving.

Every day you don’t optimise your E-A-T for SEO, you leave the door open for your competition to do so. As with SEO, it can take a long time to see the fruit of your improvements, but it’s worth it when you get there. Just ask our client from earlier who has doubled their traffic and, because of that, significantly increased their leads and revenue.

Commit to making at least a 1% improvement to your website on a daily basis. Today, you can work on improving your About page. Tomorrow, you can improve the visibility of your contact information. The day after that, you can start auditing your content and on the following day, you can start to publish your expertly crafted improvements.

1% improvements every day for the next year will deliver a 37% improvement to where your website is today. Don’t optimise your website and, by the same principle, a 1% daily decrease in quality could result in a 97% loss in the same period.

Invest in your content and invest in your team, and the expertise, authority and trust you establish will lead to ranking and revenue improvements over time.

Downloadable E-A-T Checklist

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We want you to have this actionable checklist as soon as possible, so that you can put the tips to work and start optimising your website right now for E-A-T, Google and — most important of all — your target audience.

Click here to download the checklist.

Download the E-A-T Checklist