Does your content strategy E-E-A-T and leave no crumbs?
So, does your content strategy E-E-A-T? And yes, I absolutely mean eat in the way Gen Z means it—as a form of praise, meaning that something is so good that it can be gobbled right up to the extent that it’s finger-licking good and leaves ✨no crumbs ✨—but I also mean it as a core tenet to successful content marketing.
For any business, developing a bond with its existing and future customers is tantamount to driving long-term success. One way to build those bonds is through content marketing. Different types of content activations and formats contribute to one’s content marketing efforts, like ebooks, blog posts, webinars, and emails, for instance, and all of those content formats and content marketing tactics contribute to a business demonstrating E-A-T.
What the heck is E-E-A-T?
E-E-A-T is an acronym for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It originates from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines and helps ensure your content appears in search queries. And, appearing in search queries is a tremendously excellent way of driving discoverability and awareness of your brand, being helpful to your prospects who are searching for answers to your questions, enabling your prospects to learn through you, and ensuring that they look to you for future queries regarding their topic of interest or need. So, you know, E-E-A-T!
How do I incorporate the E-E-A-T into my content strategy?
So we’ve established the definition of E-E-A-T; cool. But how do you incorporate this concept into your content strategy? It’s straightforward when you break it down.
Experience
First-hand experiences from a content author is a valuable component to sharing insights, advice, and recommendations on strategies, approaches, products, and solutions. Case studies, POVs, and testimonials are examples of different content types that showcase a person’s experience on a subject. These content types, and the experiences shared by the author, are valuable in building trust with audiences and search engines.
Expertise
Your organization is its people—those who work behind the scenes to make your business possible (it’s obviously also its products and services). These people are the knowledge holders, the idea havers, the change makers, and your subject matter experts.
Google’s technology crawls and indexes all of the internet’s content and evaluates it based on who provides it—not what. In other words, expertise is assessed at the content level, not the organizational level. A professor of artificial intelligence from MIT will likely have more expertise in AI than a first-year student at a liberal arts college, for example.
Identifying subject matter experts for important business topics within your organization is critical to establishing a sound content marketing strategy. Furthermore, attributing the right content to the right person at your company will help establish expertise.
Is your organization suffering from a little brain drain? That’s ok. Partner with experts outside your organization to do a guest blog post for your website or a video interview where they can talk shop with someone from your business.
Authority
Authority relates to reputation and whether others see you or your website as an authority on a topic, especially other experts in your space. Recognition from third parties, be it through awards, articles, or reviews, is a great way to establish authority.
Of course, authority is relative; people and websites may be authorities in very specific or niche spaces. For example, a company specializing in window treatments, like blinds, may not be an authority in fabric curtains.
Getting third parties, like other reputable websites, to link back to your website is a great way to build authority. Remember, authority is all about reputation. So, if others in your space direct folks back to your site when addressing a specific topic, congrats! You’re on the right track. Pro-tip: It’s more about high-quality “endorsements” over a high volume of low-quality “endorsements.”
Build out a reviews page for your business, get testimonials from other authorities in your space, and pitch your company for an award. You can take an active role in building authority for your business in many ways.
Trustworthiness
As I mentioned at the start of this post, building a successful brand is about creating bonds between your business and your customers—future and prospective. And there’s no more significant bond than trust.
Think about how you establish trust with a new friend or partner. You want to make sure that you’re transparent with one another, that you can be sure the other person carries themselves with integrity, and that what you share is honest and true. It’s the same with your brand and the content you put out.
Content that’s up-to-date, properly sourced, and, simply put—accurate—is critical to building trustworthiness.
Updating content regularly, especially if it pertains to evergreen topics, is critical to ensuring your information is accurate. Taking time to audit and optimize your content, prioritizing pieces foundational to your business, is an easy first step toward building trust for your brand.
Caveats, myths, and misunderstandings about E-E-A-T
Hopefully, E-E-A-T is clearer to you now than when you decided to read this blog post. If you’re still a little fuzzy on some details, below are some common misunderstandings about E-E-A-T that might clarify things for you.
Google is grading my HW. To be very clear, while Google uses E-E-A-T to evaluate content, Google does not give websites an E-E-A-T score.
Author pages and bios are a waste of time and resources. Womp, womp; that’s not true. Author pages are a great way to tell Google that your organization has serious subject matter experts. Showcasing accolades, recognitions, speaking engagements, published works, and the like on your website via author pages is a powerful and fairly easy way of demonstrating E-E-A-T.
I don’t need to provide too many contact details for my business. Guess again, friend! The more methods you provide for a customer or prospect to contact you, the likelier they are to trust you. Provide a way of doing so to avoid appearing shady. This doesn’t mean having an always-on customer service representative available, it just means giving your customers access to help if they need it. Of course the need for access may depend on your industry and type of website you run.
Get started with demonstrating E-E-A-T
Hopefully this blog post ate and you now feel empowered to help your business establish its experience, expertise, authority and trust within your industry.
Come back soon for more helpful insights that will help you understand how to build and execute a powerful content strategy.
