What is EAT – Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness?
Name: EAT
Referred To as E.A.T, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness
Category: On-Page SEO
EAT Description:
EAT standards for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These are concepts that Google created in order to understand entities and improve relevance of their search results.
YMYL is another factor related to the EAT. It stands for “Your Money Your Life,” which means anything that affects your financial or physical well being. It is understood that in YMYL niches your content, your site and associated profiles and entities need to meet a more stringent bar.
YMYL content is particularly relevant and necessary if your company falls under any of the following industries: finance, health and safety, commerce and shopping, groups of people, significant decisions, or government and civics.
Correct Use:
There really isn’t a specific correct use for EAT, it is more of an item for awareness. There are several best practices to show and enhance your EAT metrics.
Our Take on EAT:
EAT is a concept that Google uses to measure the global authority of a source. It impacts a website’s Page Quality rating, based on Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines as outlined on our website.
The Quality Rater’s Guide (QRG) constitutes the basis of these decisions and will be referenced as such throughout this piece.
It should be noted that Google has explicitly said that they don’t rank based on EAT and there is no EAT metric (and I accept and believe that).
However, Google does train its algorithm based on feedback from quality testers heavily relying on the QRG to give their feedback. So to that end, I consider that EAT perculates its way into the algorithm via implicit machine learning.
When it comes to portraying expertise in EAT, the following guidelines are basic, but important.
Do: Hire a creator with expertise in web design in your industry. This will help those that visit your website easily navigate the webpage and find the information for which they are looking.
Don’t: Hire an amateur creator to save money. This will likely result in a poor quality website and negatively impact your website’s Page Quality rating on Google, based on Google’s QRG.
Do: Ensure that customer-facing employees and content communicates expertise through experience and qualification.
Don’t: Miscommunicate or feign expertise, create content that sounds unsure or amateur, or improperly cite the expertise of your employees and accuracy of the content.
It’s important to not only sound authoritative for your company’s EAT, but to make sure your company is in fact an authority on the topic and that your readers can perceive said authority.
Do: Ensure the content of your webpage is communicated in an authoritative way. This will help readers, customers and partners feel like they can trust the information they’re consuming, as well as help you get a higher rating based on the QRG.
Don’t: Create wishy-washy content. If your content sounds like it was written by someone who’s unsure of what their industry even does, it’s not effective.