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One of the biggest factors to consider when undertaking SEO work on your website is content. A common saying amongst SEOs is the pithy tenet of “Content is King”, and for good reason, too. While technical site performance, and things like backlink profiles and a strong offsite presence are very important, your content is the lifeblood of your site. In the vast majority of cases, the content on your website will be the thing that makes or breaks a goal completion. It defines your image, brand personality, and tone, builds trust amongst users, adds value, and is probably the biggest thing that contributes to strong rankings in SERPs.
With all this in mind, what exactly is EEAT Content; what does it stand for, and how can it benefit your website overall?
What is EEAT Content?
EEAT Content can be considered an approach or philosophy to writing content, as opposed to something with a strict definition. As SEOs, we all know that satisfying Google’s criteria for SEO best practices is the main ticket to success. From here, we can loosely define EEAT Content as being the approach to content writing that Google wants everyone to follow. Why does Google want webmasters to follow an EEAT framework when constructing content? Primarily, it’s in order to improve the standard of the ranking content that users will find across the web when making a search enquiry.
What does EEAT Content stand for?
So we know that EEAT Content is a loose kind of approach or guideline from Google, instructing writers on how to construct good content for SERPs. But what are these specific guidelines, if any; what does EEAT Content actually stand for? Here, EEAT is a literal acronym rather than an instruction! It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust, and the EEAT acronym represents all of the attributes that Google wants its ranking content to have.
Content with Experience behind it, is assumed by Google to be written by an individual (where relevant) with first-hand, detailed knowledge of a topic. For example, as an SEO Freelancer in Bournemouth, I have a good deal of first-hand experience to explain what EEAT Content is to you! Content that is considered to be Expert, needs to be written with expert knowledge on a topic in mind. Sticking to factual information and objective truths, limiting flimsy opinion, and providing the user with the information they need on a topic that only an expert could provide. Writing with Authority can be defined on similar terms as writing with expertise, but being authoritative with your content means writing with a strong foundation to support your content (we will explore this more later in the blog). Being Trustworthy is the final part, and a self-explanatory one at that. The content you write, and to a broader extent the brand that the content is written under, needs to be considered a trusted source by users and Google alike.
Where did EEAT Content come from?
Some of you might be wondering where exactly the term EEAT Content originated from, if you’re familiar at all with how Google usually operates in terms of talking about SEO. Despite having many pernickety, pedantic rules and best practices they want you to follow, as well as a search algorithm that may as well be sitting on quicksand with how often it updates, real-life figures and faces from Google aren’t typically known for actually telling you directly what they want you to do for SEO. It’s annoying, but true.
The first mention of the concept of EEAT Content can be found in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, under the Page Quality section. A Search Quality Rater is a person employed by Google to test their algorithm, and measure the quality of results shown for queries. Page Quality is one of the metrics they would use to test this; as outlined in these guidelines. So essentially, contrary to form, EEAT Content is listed in a literal guide Google hands out to people employed to rate how good websites are. Knowing this, we can follow what these raters are hoping to see, and can mould our content to fulfil this criteria!
What happened to EAT Content?
Depending on your level of knowledge, you might already have been aware of EAT Content. It has the exact same intention, background and backstory as EEAT Content as a topic; in December 2022, Google updated their guidelines to include the extra E for Experience. EEAT Content was born from this moment, sometimes referred to as double-EAT! Any sources you see talking about EAT Content still haven’t quite caught the memo of the extra E just yet!
Why EEAT Content is Important
EEAT is a concept that can basically be summarised as how Google wants content to be written, a fact that is incredibly important and relevant to all of us. While EEAT Content is not in itself a “direct ranking factor”, in the way that SEO tactics like keyword optimisation & backlinks are, it does serve as a direct framework for how Google wants us to construct our content, and in turn, our websites. For further evidence of this, we need only turn to look at the last five or so years of Google’s algorithm updates.
These recent updates, such as the Product Review update and the Page Experience updates of 2021, and the Helpful Content update of 2022, are all centred around improving the content of websites for users. Google updates are a big deal, often having seismic impacts on how we conduct our SEO. So for the most recent ones to be centred around improving the standard of content, this is a pretty firm indication that this is something Google is very concerned with. And if Google is concerned with it, we should be too!
What is YMYL Content?
We mentioned earlier that EEAT Content was one of two topics alluded to in the Page Quality section of Google’s Search Quality rater guidelines. The second is YMYL Content, which stands for Your Money, or Your Life. This slightly melodramatic statement is a different set of page quality guidelines, written specifically for any industries that are concerned with finance, health, and government. The best practices here are similar to those of EEAT Content, the main difference is that for YMYL websites, the page quality standards are much higher, and much stricter. This is because the topics that the content will be writing about will actually have a potentially detrimental impact on the lives of the users that read them, if the information turns out to be incorrect or misleading. Hence, Your Money or Your Life. Some examples of YMYL industries and websites includes:
News & Current Events sites
Shopping & Ecommerce sites
Health & Safety sites
Groups & Forums
Finance & Law sites
Insurance sites
Civics, Law, & Government sites
How to write EEAT Content (& YMYL Content)
We now have a better understanding as to what EEAT Content is, the factors that go into determining what makes for good EEAT Content, where the concept originated from, and why it’s so important. The next question to answer is, how do we go about making Google understand that our content fulfils EEAT Content criteria? The following paragraphs will explore some of the ways that we can write better content for Google (and our users).
Utilise High-Quality Sources
In order to build a good sense of authority and trust for your users when they read your content, one of the best ways to do this is by utilising high-quality sources and citations to back up what you say in your content. Referring back to statistics, studies and sources from high domain authority websites will tell Google (and your users) that your information is built on a solid foundation, backed up by reliable, high-quality industry experts.
Regularly Update Content
Another great way to build trust with Google and your users, is to make sure to regularly update your content; ordinary pages and blog articles alike. Information that you published years ago won’t be relevant, or even correct, forever. So taking the time to go back, update, and republish your content when newer, better info comes around is a great way to communicate to Google that you publish trustworthy content.
Attain Authoritative Backlinks
If you’re able to, then engaging in an effective content marketing or outreach strategy to attain high-quality backlinks is one of the absolute best ways to communicate expertise, authority, trust, and general value to Google. If your content is good enough to have other websites using the information you publish as citations and sources, then you are very obviously producing EEAT Content. Getting backlinks can be quite hard, but some of the better ways to produce content that will attract them is by conducting studies and research pieces that generate unique statistics, facts, and figures on a topic that are otherwise unavailable anywhere else on the web. Producing unique visuals in the form of infographics are other, common content types that tend to hook in backlinks (and traffic) easier. Having a strong backlink profile is also just generally a good thing to have for your site’s SEO, so it’d definitely worth investing in if you can get the results you want.
Maintain your Brand’s Reputation
How your brand or business is seen, by your user and audience base at large, will also define how trustworthy Google finds your content to be. Where relevant, publishing strong customer testimonials, product reviews, industry awards and other accreditations, are a great way to communicate trustworthiness where your content (and website overall) is concerned. You can also go the extra step here, by utilising Review, Awards, or Accreditation Schema to state more firmly just how trustworthy you are to Google - in your website’s coding. For more information on Schema, you should read my blog on What is Schema Markup.
Overall Site SEO
For Google, the best websites are the ones with the best SEO overall. The sites that have strong keyword rankings, good technical performance, and a strong, sensible structure - as well as good content. Writing EEAT Content is a mere step toward having a well-performing website, but SEO works best when you’re trying to target and perfect each and every area of the craft. Ultimately, your beautiful, relevant and poetically-crafted content isn’t going to achieve much in the grand scheme of things, if your site takes 20 seconds to load and doesn’t rank in the top 100 positions for any user’s query!
Hopefully now you have a much better understanding of what EEAT Content is, and why it is so important to consider when writing your next batch of pages of content for your website. Ultimately, Google wants the content that their users are reading to be valuable, helpful, and relevant; so following these general tips and guidelines is a fantastic way to fulfil this and, hopefully, help your content to rank higher than ever before!
If you like what you’ve read here, be sure to check out some of my other SEO blog articles and guides, and if you're interested in hiring an SEO Freelancer in Bournemouth that can help you put these ideas into practice, then be sure to get in touch with me here.