Case Studies in EEAT - Going the Extra Mile to Leverage Businesses' Real-life Expertise

This talk was first delivered at Sheffield DM on 29th February 2024.
In this talk, I cover:
- A recap of E-E-A-T fundamentals
- Why E-E-A-T isn't the sole job of one SEO professional (no matter how great they are!)
- The untapped goldmine of expertise in every business
- How to identify and elicit the expertise that lies within your clients or business - the right questions to ask, how to build relationships with experts in other departments, and how to package this up into a successful strategy.
- How to increase SEO and E-E-A-T buy-in from all teams in your business.

I am available for any further public speaking opportunities!

Transcript

1. CASE STUDIES IN E-E-A-T : Going the Extra Mile to Leverage Businesses' Real-life Expertise Olivia Day SEO Lead
2. A QUICK INTRO. • Digitaloft’s SEO Lead, with 1.5 years at the agency. • Previously ran a small SEO & Digital PR agency providing services for start-up businesses. • Background in content and strategy - have written copy for a number of household names, both agency-side and in-house at Twinkl Educational Publishing. LIV DAy SEO LEAD, DIGITALOFT ALSO A PROUD CAT MUM! @oliviaday__
3. CONTENTS: 🧐 A quick E-E-A-T recap 🗣 What does Google have to say? 🤝 Why you need your clients ⛏ How to mine for internal expertise 🤓 How to use internal expertise
4. BUT FIRST, A QUICK RECAP… @oliviaday__
5. RECAP: WHAT IS E-E-A-T? • E-E-A-T is a core principle of SEO. • It is a quality signal - not a part Google’s ranking algorithm, but used by Google’s human quality raters to determine whether Google’s search ranking systems are providing helpful and relevant information to users. • Google then uses this feedback from raters to train machine learning (i.e. their ranking systems, like the Helpful Content System). • Multiple recent Google algorithm updates have focused on sifting through unreliable or unhelpful content, making E-E-A-T increasingly important. In an age where fake news, clickbait and AI are becoming more and more prevalent, E-E-A-T is Google’s way of ensuring that it is somewhere that people can continue to come for reliable information. @oliviaday__
6. EXPERIENCE EXPERTISE AUTHORITATIVENESS TRUSTWORTHINESS The extent to which the author has first-hand experience in the topic being discussed. The reputation of the author or website as a reliable source of truth on a specific topic. The author’s level of expertise, skill or knowledge on the subject matter. The accuracy, honesty, safety and reliability of the brand and its content. @oliviaday__
7. E-E-A-T EXISTS AT THREE DISTINCT LAYERS… Content Author Brand How is your content verified? Is it of a high quality? What are your sources? Do you quote other experts? Do you use the most up-to-date statistics? Who’s writing your content? Is this information available to users? What qualifications and experience do they have? Where else have they been cited? What are people saying about your brand? (e.g. TrustPilot) Are other sites linking to your content/expertise? Is there evidence of your brand across the internet? ON-PAGE SIGNALS OFF-PAGE SIGNALS @oliviaday__
8. Page 27, Google Quality Rater Guidelines: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf BUT DON’T JUST TAKE IT FROM ME… GOOGLE’S QUALITY RATER GUIDELINES @oliviaday__
9. IT’S TIME FOR A COUPLE OF TRUTHS… @oliviaday__
10. YOU ARE NOT AN EXPERT… (at everything) @oliviaday__
11. YOUR CONTENT TEAM CAN’T MAGIC EXPERTISE OUT OF THIN AIR… @oliviaday__
12. COPYING (OR EVEN BETTERING) WHAT’S ALREADY ON GOOGLE DOESN’T EQUAL EXPERTISE… @oliviaday__
13. YOU NEED YOUR CLIENTS… @oliviaday__
14. CLIENTS ARE A LARGELY UNTAPPED SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU AND YOUR TEAM WILL (PROBABLY) NEVER HAVE More years of experience Qualifications you’ve never even heard of Buying teams Customer service teams Authoritative figures Product/design teams @oliviaday__ In touch with latest trends and research
15. NOT USING THAT EXPERTISE FOR YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY IS LIKE TRYING TO WRITE CONTENT BLINDFOLDED. @oliviaday__ So how do we leverage this?
16. 82% of survey respondents had only ever spoken to up to three people at a client company. This presents a huge missed opportunity - think of all the insight you’re not hearing because of this! If you work in-house, you have even less of an excuse to not be talking to anyone and everyone about SEO…
17. TALK! TO! PEOPLE! @oliviaday__ Find product experts in your company and talk to them. • These could be the innovation team, product buyers, engineers, designers, researchers sustainability experts - anyone who is an expert in something you know nothing about. • Put aside an hour for an open interview (record it!) and watch the ideas flood in. • Communicate the value of SEO and E-E-A-T beforehand for maximum impact.
18. @oliviaday__ What would you love customers to know about X that you don’t think is getting through already? Explain to me X product/service as if I were an alien who’d just landed on planet Earth. Do we have any wider marketing campaigns that we can support on? What are our wider goals for X product/service or the company as a whole for this year? What competitors do you think are doing really well at the moment? Why? What do you love about the site as it is? What do you absolutely hate? What are our biggest challenges to growth at the moment? Is it competitors/ demand/the site? Are there any trending topics in our industry that I might not be aware of? What’s got you excited lately?
19. TALK! TO! PEOPLE! (PART 2) @oliviaday__ Talk to people who have direct contact with customers. This kind of expertise you can’t find on Google. • Sit down with your customer service teams and work out what customers have to say. ◦ What questions/feedback is coming up again and again? ◦ What comments are we repeatedly getting on social media? ◦ How can we address these before they even arise?
20. @oliviaday__ BUT WHY? • You’ll get new ideas and identify trending topics, even if they have no search volume yet. ◦ Getting inside the minds of customers means getting input from all angles. • You can enhance the user journey by answering every possible question before it arises (this’ll help conversion rates, too). • You’re providing genuinely helpful content that answers real problems - not just content created for the sake of it.
21. DELEGATE (SOME) CONTENT WRITING. @oliviaday__ Your content team are great. But they won’t always be best-placed to showcase your whole company’s expertise. • Producing helpful content that demonstrates E-E-A-T requires unique insight backed up by expertise. • Your content team’s job is to collect internal expertise and package it up into high-quality content.
22. SPECIALIST CONTENT REQUIRES SPECIALIST AUTHORS “Pavement engineer” “Concrete technologist” “Graduate chemist” “13 years experience” @oliviaday__
23. TURN YOUR EXPERTS INTO CELEBRITIES. @oliviaday__ Use digital PR to showcase your experts to the press (and the wider world). • Journalists love to quote genuine experts and link to author pages. • Showcasing specific experts to the press can lead to journalists coming back again and again for comments. • It might make your expert’s day to see their name in the press!
24. • Make sure these people are genuine experts! ◦ ASK your client who the best experts are within their team. • Google’s Quality Raters will see through it if you’re using a marketing person or someone with no online presence as an expert. • Make sure these people are the same authors for your blog posts, to tie it all together! @oliviaday__
25. GET YOUR CLIENTS TO BE YOUR INTERNAL CHEERLEADERS. Make sure as many people in the company know who you are and what you do. • Ask clients to share results and projects in team channels, newsletters etc. • Communicate the importance of spreading the word about SEO and our projects. • Build up that excitement and let wider teams know this is a collaborative effort that anyone can support. • (Do good work - it shouts about itself!) @oliviaday__
26. BUT WHY? • You’re always on people's radar, meaning the ideas are always flowing - ones that you may not have thought of. • You can promote SEO best practices in every area of the business. • It encourages collaboration - people volunteer themselves as experts for comment. • It educates about the importance of E-E-A-T - encouraging every area of the business to think about how they can showcase expertise. @oliviaday__
27. A FINAL SUMMARY. • E-E-A-T is unavoidable - businesses can’t keep burying their heads in the sand about it. • Succeeding with E-E-A-T means offering unique expertise - something that a marketing department or agency alone cannot always offer. • There is a goldmine of expertise in every company, but you need to go digging for it. • How you communicate SEO has a big impact on getting these experts to share their knowledge. Going above and beyond to extract this knowledge and weave it into your existing SEO strategy will be what sets you apart from the competition in 2024. @oliviaday__
28. Thank you! You can find me at: Twitter: @oliviaday__ LinkedIn: Olivia Day Email: olivia.day@digitaloft.co.uk You can next see me speaking at Digitaloft’s Digital PR Summit on 11th April 2024! Tickets are on sale now.