How Google Evaluates Your E-A-T
Google algorithms continually determine which businesses will rank best on a search using many criteria. These are mostly designed, bottom line, to evaluate a business’s E-A-T.
What the Heck is E-A-T?
In the digital marketing world, E-A-T stands for
- Expertise
- Authority
- Trust
Google is focused on user experience and directing searchers to the best possible information for their needs. They constantly strive to make this user experience more trustworthy and relevant so people will come to the browser for the information they need.
How Does Google Do This?
How Google evaluates E-A-T and develops algorithms around that is closely held, but we know that the higher the quality of a website, the more responsive the SERPs will be. In Google’s eyes, the quality of a website is measured in many ways.
Content Quality
The quality of website content quality is measured through information retrieval methods in harmony with newer machine learning methods. Google assesses content quality by many different methods, using intuitive user-type questions, such as
- How trustworthy is it?
- Is it written by an expert who knows the topic well?
- Is the content original?
- Would the user be comfortable giving credit card information to the site?
- Is the content grammatically and factually, correct?
- Are the pages produced with care and attention?
Authoritative Backlink References
Part of how Google assesses the quality of a site is by measuring its backlinks to other authoritative sites, thereby inheriting some of that more authoritative site’s rank. These links are assessed based on quality, not necessarily quantity. Google will also look to see that the anchor text for those backlinks are well-crafted and informative.
If the seed sites are of high quality, are chosen carefully, and are anchored with informative text, they can influence the website that they are linked to positively.
Author Credibility and Name Recognition
The credibility of the author of the website is important to Google’s algorithms. Google will assess the reputation and credibility of the owner and author of a website for multiple different topics.
Lack of Duplicate Content
A site’s SERP may be downgraded when there is duplicate content from another site or even if it is published multiple times on the same site.
Ratings and Click-Through Rate
Sentiment analysis is how Google determines how users feel about a service, business, or product. They collect this data from review sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Citysearch, as well as Google Maps and Google Business pages.
Co-Occurrences of the Author in Queries, Videos, Podcasts and Documents
Google can assess and interpret the subject and amount of content an author has produced, whether textual, auto or video-driven and how often the author shows up regarding particular subject matter to assess their authority.
Author Transparency
Profile and About Us pages will be assessed for a site. The more these pages show that there is a legitimate organization behind the site and link out to other information, publications, and articles proving the authority and expertise of the author, the more it will boost that site’s credibility.
Domain Trust
When a website has an HTTPS domain, it means the site is secured using a TLS/SSL certificate, which makes it more trustworthy for users. Google uses this trust in assessing a site.
Knowledge-Based Trust
Google will assess the information on the site for correctness and attribute a trustworthiness score to the site based on the reliability of the information.
Your Website and E-A-T
Google constantly assesses your website based on the E-A-T principles of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. But this assessment is based on highly complicated algorithms known only to Google. Those in the digital marketing realm are always trying to stay abreast of new Google rollouts and updates to ensure that they are fine-tuning their clients’ websites to keep them ahead in the game.
Getting Professional Help to Amp Your E-A-T
Website development, analytics, and SEO are a full-time job. You don’t have time for that. You have a business to run. That’s why we are here. At Fuel Web Marketing, that’s why we are here. You can leave your website presence to us, so your rankings are being constantly assessed and optimized considering any new Google assessments and algorithm updates.
Designing, marketing, optimizing — let us help you show your best face to the world. Call us at (888) 375-3835 or contact us online to learn how we can keep you ahead of the competition.