Enhancing Your Small Business with Google’s E-E-A-T Guidelines

Did you know that 9 out of 10 business owners aren’t optimizing their websites for Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines? That’s right, they’re not taking full advantage of E-E-A-T principles!

After selling my SEO agency, I wanted to clear things up. Why does E-E-A-T even matter? In simple terms: E-E-A-T means higher rankings, more leads, and more revenue.

Let’s dive into how you can harness the power of E-E-A-T!

Key Takeaways:
E-E-A-T was introduced in Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines back in 2014. These guidelines help a group of people, known as “Quality Raters,” evaluate Google’s search results. Plus, they assist Google’s algorithm in recognizing high-quality, relevant content.

E-E-A-T stands for Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google aims to rank content that meets these criteria. As a business owner, understanding E-E-A-T is crucial because it directly affects your website’s ranking. In essence, better rankings equate to more revenue.

Emphasizing E-E-A-T not only boosts your search rankings but also positions you as a leader in your industry. Think of it as a two-for-one deal!

While E-E-A-T sounds technical, let’s break it down, starting with Trustworthiness. Building trust with Google involves showcasing your Expertise, Experience, and Authoritativeness. Here are some “no-brainer” improvements you can make to your site today that will have a lasting impact. Check my full E-E-A-T checklist and go through each item.

I believe Google is moving toward ranking content created by real experts, not just any content. For example, would you prefer reading a football article by John Elway or a random person? You don’t need to be a huge name like Bill Gates to get your content to rank.

Here’s how you can do it: Focus on writing about topics in your niche. The more content you produce, the more you establish topical relevance and authority, which builds your expertise.

Google’s concept of ‘experience’ refers to practical involvement with your topic. This is where you can stand out from AI-generated content, which lacks legitimate experience. When writing, share your real experiences. In video content, include personal insights.

Pro Tip: Shoot a video and then summarize it into an article. This approach is effective for creating engaging content. All of our landing pages at my former agency included videos.

If you examine top-ranking websites, you’ll notice they all have high-quality content and backlinks. Backlinks are inbound links from one site to another, acting as votes of confidence from Google. The more relevant backlinks you have, the higher your content will rank.

A tried-and-true method for building backlinks is guest blogging. If you want to learn more about link building, a quick Google search will yield thousands of articles. I’ll also cover this topic in a future post, so stay tuned!

To wrap it up, Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines serve as a guide for creating high-quality content that resonates with your audience. If you keep producing great content, Google will reward you with more leads.

That’s all for now. Let’s get going!