Overall, Google’s algorithms are trending more and more towards quality content, especially for the major update in August 2018. This was dubbed the “medic update” due to a lot of medical-themed websites instantly seeing a ranking hit. What quietly went on in the background was also a decrease in YMYL (Your Money Your Life) sites.
What’s a YMYL site?
Essentially, anything that could impact your health or money. Medical sites fit neatly into this, but so do investment sites, for example. The reason these sites saw a ranking decrease is that in Google’s eyes, if pages on these topics are low quality, it could cause harm to people who take the advice. As a result, only the most qualified sites will rank well, and these niches saw it the most. How do you succeed in this new arena? It all boils down to E-A-T SEO.
What Is E-A-T SEO?
E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Sites that Google feels falls in the YMYL category need to be able to prove these in order to rank well. However, even if it doesn’t apply to your market niche, it’s worth building these concepts up. For example, content that works well in these areas is more likely to get qualified backlinks.
Expertise: Some people make the mistake of thinking that having a lot of knowledge about a given topic qualifies as expertise. That’s only part of the discussion. You also need to make sure that you are able to communicate this effectively to your audience, which can be difficult when we talk about certain niches. Keyword research and searcher intent are important here to make sure you are covering the topics that your audience wants to hear about.
Authority: Authority builds off of expertise in a lot of ways. In essence, being featured through backlinks or publications is a way to let your audience know that you are an expert. The key is to make sure the resources you are featured in are also considered to be authoritative. You can figure this out through metrics like domain authority score.
Trustworthiness: This generally falls into social proof a lot of the time. You may put out a lot of content on your niche, but you have a lot of negative reviews or impressions online, it’s going to cast doubt about how strong your content is.
How Can You Check Your E-A-T Score?
We mentioned domain authority before, but there are some other ways that you can check aspects of your E-A-T rank. These include:
- Amount of branded search queries
- Positive reviews ratio to negative reviews
- Bounce rate
- Social media impressions
There’s no single tool to check your entire ranking. Rather, you need to see how you are doing in each of the individual categories.
Improving Your E-A-T Ranking
So, let’s say that you use these methods to get your E-A-T score and aren’t happy with what you see. What’s the next step? Here are some tips to help improve your overall ranking.
- Secure guest posts with respected publications
- Change your strategy for handling negative reviews
- Increase the length of your content
- Do an interview with an industry influencer
- Make sure your keyword strategy is keeping with trends in your niche
When we talk about Google search quality evaluator guidelines and other aspects of E-A-T SEO content, it’s important that you’re willing to think on a broader scale after figuring out the general details. Even if you nail this aspect of the content, your overall SEO rankings may be hindered by other issues that you may not be aware of. One of your best tools for getting the most ROI in this area is using a website SEO audit. Be sure you find a provider who offers these services.
