Building Online Authority for SEO. Google has been very open about just how important E-A-T is to rank in search engine results. E-A-T became well known after the infamous Google Medic algorithm update that affected thousands of website rankings worldwide.
What is E-A-T?
The acronym E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is a factor that Google uses to evaluate the overall quality of a web page. The term comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater guidelines report.
Is E-A-T a direct ranking factor?
In the sense of measurable metrics, E-A-T is not a direct Google ranking factor. However, there are other signs that Google uses to determine expertise, authority, and trust, which are ranking factors.
In February 2019, Google released a white paper, “How Google Fights Disinformation,” affirming E-A-T’s importance in its rankings. Furthermore, Google mentions “E-A-T” over 100 times in the Search Quality Guidelines report. So, it’s an essential concept.
Why is E-A-T important in SEO?
E-A-T helps establish whether a website and its pages are reliable sources of information about a specific topic that can benefit visitors.
Building online authority can take a lot of work and time. But, the good news is that you can do some simple steps to help ensure you and or your business is viewed as an authority to search engines.
Here are fourteen recommendations to help gain authority and trust online.
1. Create a professional Business Website or Bio Style Personal Site
If you’re creating a niche or industry authority website, you will want a professional site highlighting your business expertise. Even if this is just a five-page website, it will build trust and authority if it establishes your company and you as an expert resource in its industry.
When a customer searches for a topic and your brand shows up five different places online in search results. You will more likely be seen as an expert when you appear as an author on your site. Your website information will be considered more trustworthy and authoritative than information from an author with no credits on that topic.
2. Keep content accurate and up to date as possible
Except if the content on your site is about something that never changes, there’s a good chance you have pages with outdated information.
You should review your content regularly to ensure all information is correct and as informative as possible.
3. Promote your content
It’s not enough to make great content, although that’s crucial. Once you generate it, you need to promote it to the online audience that needs it. Therefore, you should have a proactive content marketing program in place.
You should share your new informative content to everyone with your email list and social media accounts and optimize it to rank in search results.
4. Show your Contact details
Including your contact information on your website may seem trivial, but your website indicates an honest company with real people if you have it listed. Conversely, websites that don’t provide contact information can appear not to care and are untrustworthy.
On your site, you should include all the ways people can contact you. You should also include the physical address and images of your company if available.
5. Build suitable backlinks
Backlinks from relevant, high-authority domains are the backbone of an effective SEO strategy. They are one of the best ways to demonstrate that you are a trusted authority in your industry.
6. Get more mentions from trusted websites
Getting authoritative mentions or comments from trusted websites can boost your E-A-T credentials. The more your brand appears in authoritative websites around the internet, the more Google sees it as an authority to be trusted.
7. Request reviews and respond to any negative reviews
Pssst, this is HUGH. It’s always a good business strategy to earn and promote positive online reviews for your business. Online reviews help to build your site’s E-A-T and online reputation.
Having many positive reviews across numerous review sites (Google, Facebook, BBB, Yelp, etc.) demonstrates that your company is trustworthy.
8. Use industry experts to write content
Google loves expert content. They especially seem to give incentives to content written by someone with the appropriate credentials or qualifications. Therefore, expertly sourced resources are of particular importance if your site falls into YMYL territory.
What is YMYL? According to Google, any page including content that can affect someone’s health, happiness, safety, or financial stability is a YMYL page.
Therefore, many of the top health information websites have their content written by or reviewed by medical professionals, or both.
You can increase the E-A-T of your site by working with contributors who have substantial real-world experience and credentials to back up their knowledge.
To hire an expert doesn’t mean hiring a copywriter who can write about a topic but has no experience in the field. But, of course, this doesn’t help in the E-A-T perspective to do this.
9. Don’t be shy. Flash your Credentials
Don’t just call your authors professionals without proving their proficiency. Instead, verify their credentials and include them on your website alongside the content they generate. It would help if you also linked to the authors’ websites and social handles to help Google understand the person is associated with your content.
It would also be good to list the experts on pages that describe the people behind your website. i.e., About, Staff, or Contributors.
If your article writers possess credentials, accreditations, degrees and have put in the time to be an authority in a particular field, your brand has earned the right to let people and search engines know about it.
10. Build a content marketing framework
Content is KING. Regular content creation is an excellent way to establish your influence. Whether you’re blogging, podcasting, or creating online videos, effective content marketing enables you to demonstrate and distribute your specialized knowledge.
The challenge, of course, is that it takes a lot of work to create good content regularly. Hence the need for a content creation framework.
As a marketer, you need a well-defined, repeatable process that you and your team can regularly create high-value content.
When you have a defined structure in place, it’s much easier to reap the benefits of content marketing while improving efficiencies.
11. Create a LinkedIn Profile for yourself and your business
Google crawls LinkedIn and having a professional business listing and articles on this website and other business citation websites add extra trust in the eyes of Google. While this seems simple, and it is, don’t underestimate the power that this can have.
The first eleven recommendations have been about ways to help the authority of a business website. Let’s continue with more advice to help you personally gain authority and trust as an expert.
12. Answer Questions on Quora
One of the biggest question and answer sites online, Quora, allows anyone to post answers. First, create a profile that includes interests related to questions you will be answering about your topic or industry.
It would be best if you searched for questions you can write informed answers. Add images, give better information than the others, and be a helpful resource. You can also link to your site to help answer the question or solve the problem.
If you’re offering the best answers consistently on a subject on a site that Google crawls daily, Google will connect you and or your company as an expert on that topic. Then, when your name appears on your website, it has some instant authority.
13. Write on Medium.com
Medium.com is another site where anyone can sign up to write. Articles can be published directly on Medium or thousands of other publications based on topic or industry.
There are even many prominent publications that publish on Medium as a part of their online content strategy. Writing for Medium is a great place to set up an author profile, write great articles that link back to your site. Publish a few on your own, and then search for publications to write content for as a guest writer.
Aim for ones between 100-1,000 followers in the beginning. Then, as you get more success, move up to the 10,000 follower publications, and if you’re an excellent writer, you can get published in “pro” level publications. Go for it!
Writing for other publications is also a great way to get followers, direct traffic, links, and an authority boost. In addition, if you become a well-recognized expert on Medium, Google will see you as an expert in your field on the website you’re promoting, too. That’s a huge step up above the competition.
14. Blog on Substack
Substack is the new blogging platform that has come up a lot online in recent months, and what started as an experiment has taken off. It is a place where online experts create blogs, membership groups and build authority. Getting a following here can be a massive boost to getting recognized as an authority online.
Blogging here is a bit more labor-intensive because, depending on the industry, it can take some serious effort and work to build up a significant reputation. But it’s worth it.
In Conclusion on Building Online Authority
Expertise, Authority, and Trust matter, and it’s a long haul up the SERPs if you don’t have any. Building Online Authority is demanding, but it is well worth the effort. The recommended steps are relatively low effort ways to speed up the process. They must be consistent to outstep the competition in any industry.
If you’re looking to establish your business’s online presence, ensure you check out our services. We have friendly and highly experienced professionals to help you with all your needs.
Contact us to book your virtual meeting with a web strategist. “Are you looking for help with getting your offline business online and boosting its authority and trust?” Our enthusiastic team has years of experience helping companies increase their online sales and brand awareness.
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