Google uses many signals to approximate these concepts and apply these signals to ranking algorithms. To be clear, E-E-A-T are not ranking factors themselves. But they are the concepts that ranking systems attempt to emulate via other signals.
These concepts apply to individual pages and to websites as a whole.
Experience: Are the people creating content directly knowledgeable about the subject matter, and do you demonstrate credible experience?
Expertise: Does your content demonstrate genuine expertise through depth, accuracy, and relevance?
Authoritativeness: Is your website an authoritative source about the topic?
Trust: Is your website trustworthy, considering the information or purposes at hand?
In its content guidelines, Google says this about E-E-A-T:
“Of these aspects, trust is most important. The others contribute to trust, but content doesn’t necessarily have to demonstrate all of them. For example, some content might be helpful based on the experience it demonstrates, while other content might be helpful because of the expertise it shares.”
Understanding these concepts is critical for building a content strategy because publishing content with poor E-E-A-T signals could impact your website as a whole. Google’s language downplays this potential impact, but it’s critical to know that it’s possible. It’s tempting to assume that because a website has high “authority” in a general sense or in one particular area, anything it publishes is considered authoritative. This may not be true.
If you chase traffic by creating content outside your core areas of authority and expertise, that content may perform poorly and drag the rest of your site down.
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Creating Effective SEO Content
This article focuses on written content, but don’t neglect multimedia in your content strategy.
The thought process behind content should go a little bit like this:
Audience > Query (Keywords) > Intent > Brief / Outline > Create
You can also express it as a series of questions:
Audience: Who is our audience?
Query: What are they searching for?
Intent: Why?
Brief: How can we best assist them?
Create: What does exceptional user experience look like?
Keyword Research For Content
Keyword research is a massive topic on its own, so here are some key pieces of advice and a few additional resources:
Look at the SERPs for the keywords you target to understand what Google prioritizes, what your competitors are doing, what success looks like, and whether there are gaps you can fill.
Cluster related keywords together and develop a content strategy that covers multiple branching areas of a topic deeply.
High search volume often means high competition. Allocate your resources carefully between acquiring lower competition positions and fighting for a slice of competitive traffic.
Building a robust catalog of content focused on long-tail keywords can help you acquire the authority to compete in more competitive SERPs for related topics.
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Briefing SEO Content
Once you have performed your research and identified the intents you must target, it’s time to plan the content.
SEO professionals may not have the required knowledge to create content that demonstrates experience and expertise – unless they’re writing about SEO.
They’re SEO specialists, so if your website is about finance or razor blades, someone else will need to provide the knowledge.
Briefing is critical because it allows the SEO team to communicate all that hard work and research to the person or team creating the content. A successful brief should inform the content creators:
The target keyword strategy, with suggestions or a template for the title and subheadings.
The purpose of the content for the user: What the user should learn or be able to accomplish.
The purpose of the content for the business: Where it falls into the marketing strategy and relevant KPIs.
Details such as length, style guide or voice notes, and key pieces of information to be included.
Creating SEO Content
Your research should guide the format of your writing.
Remember, intent impacts the usability of different types of content. Prioritize the information most likely to solve the user’s intent.
You can do this by providing summaries, tables of contents, videos, pictures, skip links, and, most importantly, headings.
Use The Title & Headings To Target Keywords & Organize Information
The title of a page is your primary keyword opportunity. It’s also the first thing users will see on a SERP, which impacts CTR. Match the title to your target query and think about effectively describing the content to entice a click. But don’t misrepresent your page for clicks.
Your primary responsibility in SEO content is to set expectations and then deliver on them. Don’t set if you can’t deliver.
HTML heading formats help users navigate the page by breaking up blocks of text and indicating where certain topics are covered. They’re critical to your on-page SEO, so use your keywords.
Expectations are as true for headings as for titles. Headings should be descriptive and useful. Prioritize setting an expectation for what the user will find on that part of the page and then delivering on that expectation.
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Get To The Point
Whether content should be long or short is subjective to its purpose. All SEO content should be as short as possible while achieving its goals. “As short as possible” could mean 4,000 words.
If you need 4,000 words to achieve your goal, then use them. But don’t add any more than you need.
This is a call to avoid rambling, especially in introductions. Do you really need to cite the projected growth of an industry just to prove it’s worth talking about?
Not unless you’re writing a news story about that growth. Cut that sentence and the link to Statista from your introduction. (No shade, Statista, you rock.)
Features like skip links can also help with this. Give users the option to skim and skip directly to what they need.
Use Internal Links To Connect Your Pages Together & Provide Further Reading
Internal links are the bedrock of SEO content strategies. They are how you organize related pages and guide users around your website. They also spread the SEO value of your pages to the pages they’re connected to.
In the keyword research section, we suggested that you create clusters of keywords and topics to write about – this is why. You build authority by covering a topic in-depth and creating multiple pages exploring it and all its subtopics.
You should link between pages related to one another at contextually important points in the content. You can use this tactic to direct the SEO power of multiple pages to one important page for your strategy or your business.
Contextually relevant links that properly set expectations for what the user will find also contribute to a good site experience.
More reading about internal linking:
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Use Personal Experiences And Unique Expertise To Stand Out
AI presents numerous challenges for SEOs. Anyone can quickly create content at scale using generative AI tools.
The tools can replicate competitors, synthesize content together from myriad sources, and enable breakneck publishing paces. This poses two core problems:
How do you stand out with so much AI content out there?
How do you build trust in audiences looking for legitimate experts?
For now, the best answer is to lean into the E-E-A-T principles that Google prioritizes.
Tell human stories with your content that demonstrate your experience and expertise.
Use Oberstein’s “situational content” principle, mentioned earlier in this article, to connect with your audience’s experiences and needs.
Ensure that content is created by verifiable experts, especially if that content involves topics that can impact the audience’s well-being (YMYL.)
SEO Content Is Both A Strategy & An Individual Interaction
It’s easy to focus on what you need from users: what keyword you want to rank for, what you want users to click, and what actions you want them to take.
But all of that falls apart if you don’t honor the individual interaction between your website and a user who needs something.
Audience-first content is SEO content. Content is a core function of SEO because it’s the basis of how humans and algorithms understand your website.
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