Edited by Emilie Martin

Itamar shares E-E-A-T quick wins that you can utilize to help your website appear more credible in the eyes of users and Google.

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Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. I'm Itamar Blauer, and today I'm going to be talking about E-E-A-T quick wins that you can utilize to help your website appear more credible in the eyes of users and Google.

So, first, let's start with a bit of context as to why this is all quite important.

So, with the helpful content updates that we've seen over the past 18 months, we've seen three of them, which is quite significant. We've seen in August 2022, December 2022, and also again in September 2023. So, seeing so many helpful content updates really warrants the question of, well, actually, there's something going on here, but why is Google really trying to emphasize this to users?

Obviously, you can see this robot here. This is what Google is fighting with at the moment. With so many AI-generated content, large language models being put into the mix, there's a lot of difficulty in terms of how you can distinguish in terms of whether a website is actually credible and real versus one that isn't and simply isn't actually helpful for users, hence helpful content updates.

So let's bring this all into examples, and we're going to use a YMYL niche of the medical niche for these examples to cover what exactly each individual letter in E-E-A-T means.

So, first of all, we're starting with experience. This is the newest one that was introduced, and it's all about first-hand involvement and how you can actually demonstrate that you have experience in what you're writing about on your website. So, an example in the medical niche could be having photos on your website where you're performing client diagnosis and things like that to actually demonstrate that you have experience working within this industry.

The second one is expertise, and expertise is fundamentally important, especially when it comes to YMYL niches because it's about showing high levels of skill. So, certain ways to do that is if you have accreditations and degrees listed on your website so users can see that you know what you're talking about, you've been through the exams, and you really do have that level of skill within your field.

The third one is authority, and this is all about how if you've been cited in certain publications and, essentially, websites that are really authoritative in your niche. This can come in the form of having relevant backlinks from credible sources in your industry.

The last one is trust. So, this is all about reliability and credibility. So this is where you want to exactly display to users why they should trust you and avoid ways that they wouldn't trust you, such as 404 pages. A user is not really going to trust a website if they're landing on lots of 404 pages. Another example could be stock images. If you've got stock images on your website, people can see that really clearly, and they might just think you're not genuine enough and they can't trust you.

So that's a breakdown of all of the letters within E-E-A-T.

So, let's get into some E-E-A-T quick wins.

Use real authors

Quick win number one: use real authors. This is fundamental when it comes to E-E-A-T helpful content. Users want to be convinced that the person who's writing the content actually knows what they're talking about. So, if you're not using real authors, that's a problem because, again, it's something that people can see, and they might not trust you. So, use real authors whenever you can.

Author bios

The second thing is author bios. This is where, instead of just having a name of an author, you want to have a bio there so that users can read through and understand exactly why they should trust this person because then, again, that demonstrates what kind of experience and credibility they have, so all of those E-E-A-T aspects.

Author pages

The third one is author pages. So once you've got your authors and you've got their bios, have an author page that's directly linked to that author so it specifies everything to do with their experience, credibility. You can link out to other pieces of content they've written, their social media profiles. That's another way to really help boost E-E-A-T, and it's something that users and Google love to see.

Schema markup

Next, we've got schema markup. So this is more for your search engines because schema markup is code that describes code. So you can use schema markup across your content across your author pages to specify who the person is, who they are so Google better understands who the person is behind the content and what their credibility is fundamentally.

Including time of edits

Next, we've got the inclusion of the time of edits within content. So, say, for example, you're publishing medical-related content. Things can change a lot within your niche, and also, there are lots of people that you might want to review the content.

So this is where, within your content, you can specify who wrote the content, when it was last edited, and who actually edited and revised that version of the content.

So this is something that you can do as well to make it very clear for people in terms of knowing the sort of timeline of that content, and that helps users, and Google put a lot more faith within that content itself.

Use original images

Next, we've got using original images, obviously, no stock photos, which means you should actually go out there, get some original images that you can include within your content because that, again, adds a whole nother level of trust to users that you are who you say you are and people can actually see that on the page.

Get help from ChatGPT

Next, get help from ChatGPT. So, this wouldn't be complete without talking about ChatGPT in an AI world that we live in. But ChatGPT can actually help in terms of if you've got content written down, you can put it into ChatGPT and essentially ask it to critique it, ask it based on E-E-A-T signals and what they mean. You can ask ChatGPT to provide some further analysis and ways for you to improve that content. So that's a really useful tip that you've got there.

Hire experts

The last one is if you don't actually have experts within your niche, go hire them. Go reach out to your network, go on certain websites and hire somebody to help you with the content. Even if they don't work for you full time, just so you've got a bit of help from somebody who is an expert, that really adds a lot because then you can use that and mention in your content that it was actually written alongside an expert in their field.

So those are some E-E-A-T quick wins.

But there are some things that you need to remember.

Quick wins do not equal laziness

The first one is that quick wins do not equal laziness. So, all of these tips here, it actually requires some thought, and it's not something that you can just go ahead and do in a lazy way because there have been real-world implications where this has gone wrong.

One example is "Sports Illustrated" that has somewhat recently used fake authors and has used AI-generated content that didn't actually have a lot of sort of human due diligence or human additions to. So that's very important to keep in mind.

E-E-A-T is a must for Google

The last one is that E-E-A-T fundamentally is a must now for Google. So the recent addition of experience means that it's so important to have actual experience and specifying to users why you know what you know because you've actually been there and done it. So that's really important, and it does warrant actual testimonials from people.

So, I hope you enjoyed this quick and short E-E-A-T quick wins. I've been Itamar Blauer. Thank you so much, and if you want to catch me online and ask any questions, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

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