Panoptic media blog
Industry leading news and advice
Why Does EAT Need to Be Considered When Planning SEO Strategies?
Digital marketing is massive and always expanding as people begin to discover new, effective ways of improving SEO. Those who follow closely along with the industry will likely know of the EAT concept, which is explained in great detail in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
There was a debate about whether EAT is truly a ranking factor when it comes to search engines such as Google. Also, for the uninitiated, EAT stands for three attributes – expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. While many disagreed that EAT should be considered a true ranking factor, it was clear that sites that had a significant lack of EAT suffered negatively when Google Quality updates rolled out. Inversely, those sites that actively considered the principles of EAT were positively affected by the time that those same updates were released.
The importance of EAT was confirmed in 2019, when Google officially announced that EAT plays an integral role in their algorithms. Given this information, there is no doubt that most website owners will be wanting to improve their site so that all three attributes of EAT have been considered. It has been found that more often than not, the sites that need EAT the most are YMYL sites. This acronym represents Your Money or Your Life, which a large number of sites on the internet fall under. Without a doubt, these are the sites that benefit most from EAT, according to Google.
At its core, EAT can be best understood as an integral part of the Google algorithm that helps the search engine decide what sites to return on SERPs. Of course, this is something that SEO managers will always be aiming for, so it only makes sense for marketers to consider EAT when building their marketing strategies. While the concept is important for most of the queries that users will type into Google, the reality is that it is not useful for all searches. For example, searches that involve subjective topics such as opinions on things or pictures of pets will make the EAT attributes irrelevant. On the other hand, EAT will almost certainly be applied when it comes to subjective searches such as ‘are nut allergies dangerous’.
By now, SEO professionals should know that EAT is important when building SEO strategies. From here, the question becomes how exactly EAT is evaluated, something that will need to be understood if marketers are looking to make their campaigns as effective as possible.
Expertise
When creating content, Google will look for examples at the content level and will not necessarily rank websites according to the organisation or the website level. This simply means that content that is written by genuine experts in that field will often be favoured over other well-researched pieces.
Authoritativeness
While the concept of authority is relative, Google also pays attention to this when drawing up SERPs. This is evaluated when raters scan the internet for insights into what kind of reputation an individual or website has garnered. If there are multiple, independent references to the individual or site, then it has great authority and will likely appear high on SERPs.
Trustworthiness
A website’s trust can easily be evaluated by looking at whether similar content on the site has been correctly referenced. Websites that are considered trustworthy will link or reference where replicated content has come from. In addition to this, something as simple as providing contact information for users can dramatically improve the trustworthiness of websites.
It is the combination of all these factors that makes up EAT, and SEO professionals will want to keep this in mind when thinking of ways to improve their campaigns.
Turn your visitors
into customers.
Let's talk and discuss your requirements