How does EEAT affect content marketing?

1 Recap: what is EEAT and why is it important?

EEAT is part of Googleʼs Search Quality Rater Guidelines 1. Google Quality Raters are Googleʼs workers who manually check content ranking 1. EEAT is not a ranking factor, it informs them 1. EEAT canʼt be measured 1. Algorithm updates are ALWAYS linked to EEAT (helpful content, product review update, fresh content…)

4 Why is EEAT important for Google? In Google’s 2019 white paper titled “How Google Fights Disinformation,” it specifies, “We have an important responsibility to our users and to the societies in which we operate to curb the efforts of those who aim to propagate false information on our platforms.”

EEAT matter most for YMYL pages 5 Google splits topic types into two categories, YMYL and non-YMYL. E-E-A-T’s importance will vary depending on the level of YMYL a site is

What can be considered YMYL site? ● Finance. Sites that offer financial advice (like fintech companies) ● Shopping. sites providing information about shopping research ● News and public information. Misinformation about politics, current events, etc ● Medical and safety. Sites that offer guidance regarding physical and mental health (that includes fitness sites) ● Government and law. If a page informs readers about the law, local politics, voting, and the like, it must provide up-to-date and accurate information. ● Associations. Pages making claims about people based on qualities such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, age, disability, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, or veteran status get closely monitored to protect users. 6

But in fact, it affects every single site too 7 Crawl Can search engines find and access your pages? Render Can search engines understand the content on your page fast? Index Will search engines add your pages to their index? Rank Where will I rank in the search results? Trust Is my website reliable? Will my users trust it, find it authoritative? Core Web Vitals International Passes on authority Content Quality, depth, availability, EEAT Internal linking Facilitates Googleʼs crawling pages & understanding the meaning of a page Cannibalisation If Google finds more than 1 page that could represent a topic, it wonʼt rank any Here the process a a crawler follows to rank a page. In pink what EEAT affects

2 How to approach EEAT in Content Marketing

EEAT should be at the core of your strategy

Experience Quality content often demonstrates the creatorʼs first-hand experience with the subject matter. This helps prove that suggestions are tried and tested. And that insights are authentic. The author talks about their personal experiences and opinions. And provides unique product photos to prove theyʼve played the game. Written in first person and providing examples of your past experience helps. 10

Google are starting to prioritise user-generated content. Content written from an experienced point of view.

Expertise 1. Set up a bio for you or your client where your expertise can be constantly shown 2. Refer to that expertise when writing the content 3. Link to potential case studies, awards, certification, studies your client might have about the topic while writing 4. Write unique content that is not there already 12

Google use entities to understand who you are and link the content to you

Trustworthiness 1. Be transparent with your content - do not copy and paste content from other sources and if you do 2. Rephrase the content and cite the origin of it 3. Research your topic, explain the process followed, write content that is new 4. Source otherʼs experts content, or opinion too 5. Be helpful & empathetic - do not try to sell your product or brand, try to help the user 14

Authority 1. Engage in forums about the topic 2. Showcase in social media your expertise and authority 3. Get coverage from authoritative pages that are important in the industry/niche by giving commentary 4. Do guest posts or get authoritative people in the field to write content in your blog too 15

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The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab compiled 10 guidelines for building web credibility based on three-year research with over 4,500 participants. 1. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site. 2. Show that thereʼs a real organization behind your site. 3. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide. 4. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site. 5. Make it easy to contact you. 6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose). 7. Make your site easy to use – and useful. 8. Update your siteʼs content often (at least show itʼs been reviewed recently). 9. Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers, content just focused on products). 10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem. A Summary of the guidelines…

How not to EEAT Topical relevance is important; make sure it makes sense for your site! Some examples of lacking EEAT ● The content creator lacks adequate experience (e.g., a restaurant review written by someone who has never eaten at the restaurant). ● The content creator lacks adequate expertise (e.g., an article about how to skydive written by someone with no expertise in the subject). ● The website or content creator is not an authoritative or trustworthy source for the page's topic (e.g., tax form downloads provided on a cooking website). ● The page or website is not trustworthy for its purpose (e.g., a shopping page with minimal customer service information). 18

3 AI Content & EEAT

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Use AI to… 1. Give you ideas of what you can write 2. Give you ideas of who are entities in a topic 3. Best organise the structure of your content 4. How to best to templates that help you speed up content

Donʼt use AI to… 1. Write the content for you: AI content just uses everything out there and rephrases it. It is not original. 2. To tell you exactly what to say: it will take the content for somewhere, it wonʼt show your authority. 3. Even if content is written by AI and you do like it and review it: make sure it is reviewed by experts in the field. Google will know if not. 4. It is also full of mistakes and offensive things, please ALWAYS CHECK.

4 Some examples of good work

24 My own example - Added review content - Added influencer content - Added first person content

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