Have you heard the word E-A-T? Then you must remember that E-A-T is the ranking factor that is used for reaping the benefit for your business. Here in this blog, you will find all the information about E-A-T and how it is related to SEO services.

What is E-A-T?

It merely stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, and this term has come from the Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines. These guidelines are used to access the quality of the search result of Google. Google has published these documents to help webmasters understand what Google uses while looking on the webpage.

How Important is E-A-T?

You should know E-A-T is crucial for all the queries; say for example if you are looking for the pictures of cute dogs then E-A-T does not matter. Since this topic is subjective, it does not mean that once you see the dog, you will find it cute. However, if you are searching for the correct dosage for the old man, then E-A-T is important. Google will surface only those content that is trustworthy as posting wrong content about this topic will be potentially life-threatening.

The queries like ‘how to enhance credit score’ come under Your Money or Your Life topic. Some topics impact the future, happiness, safety, health, and financial stability of the person. If the page is created around the YML topic, then having E-A-T is very crucial for this.

How is E-A-T Evaluated?

Since E-A-T means expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness are three similar concepts, but they are different from one another. It means you have to use a different method to evaluate all three.

• Expertise

It means having the highest level of skill and knowledge in a particular field. This term is evaluated on the basis of content-level as Google wants the content that is created by the subject matter expert. 

If the topic is about YML, then this term is mainly about the qualification and the education of the content creator, For YML topics like finance, legal advice, and medicine, the formal expertise is vital. Moreover, for the non-YML topics, this is about showing the everyday expertise and life experience. 

There is some YML topic that requires everyday experience. Let say, ‘what does it feel like while suffering blood cancer.’ This query can be written perfectly well by the person who is suffering from this disease rather than a qualified doctor.

• Authoritativeness

It is mainly about the reputation, or simply you can see if you seek to go to a particular website or person for gaining some information, then it is called authority. Using the reputation research will help in finding what experts and users think of the website. You can look for the references, reviews, news articles, recommendations by the experts written about the website.

Take, for example, Wikipedia is one of the good sources of information that is mentioned by Google. You must know that the authority is just a relative concept which does not concern when it comes to the SEO.

• Trustworthiness

If we talk about trust, it is mostly about the accuracy, transparency, and legitimacy of the content and website.

Raters are known for considering many things when they are trying to evaluate the trustworthiness, which includes checking who is responsible for publishing the content. It is important for YML as well as non-YML queries. Since the YML website needs to be trusted by the users for giving the satisfying answer, that is why the person who wrote the content should be mentioned on the site. These sites must have the contact details be it the email address or physical address of the content creator specified. Raters will also look for that the content mentioned is accurate or not. One can use citing for making the content highly trustworthy.

Is E-A-T really the ranking factor?

If something is tangible that can be understood and evaluated by the computer will means it is the ranking factor. Say, for example, the number of backlinks a website page has. However, the expertise, authoritativeness, trust is the human concept of the concept, which is why you can’t use the computer to rank the pages. Google has a solution to this problem, and that is:

• Algorithm tweaks can improve the quality of the search results.
• Search results will be shown to the quality rater so that they can provide feedback to Google.
• Google will use the feedback to make a decision whether the tweak proposed has a positive or negative effect on the search result. When the result is positive, there will changes.

Google engineers use this process to understand the tangible signal, which is aligned with the E-A-T, and then the ranking algorithm will be adjusted accordingly.

If you want to know more about the E-A-T, then you need to consult the experts from the SEO company. They will not only help you understand the term clearly but will also help you in improving E-A-T too.