Google prefers and rewards websites with Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Here’s how to show yours.

Have you seen your website slip down the list of Google results? Or were you not even ranking well to begin with? It’s always a good time to examine and refine your website, but Google’s recent update makes it the perfect time to take concrete steps to make sure your site appears to those who are looking for the kind of services that you offer.

Google has always looked for evidence of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, and more recently experience (E-E-A-T), but now it is giving them even more weight.

Once Google has identified the pages that are relevant to a search term, it prioritises them based on E-E-A-T. So, those criteria are very important if you want to ensure that people find you before they find your competitors.

Here is what Google looks for in each, and how you can demonstrate them.

What are Google’s E-E-A-T criteria?

Here is how Google defines E-E-A-T:

• Experience: The content is based on real-world of the topic at hand
• Expertise: The website offers insight and the creator’s skills are evident
• Authority: The creator’s voice, thoughts, and opinions carry weight
• Trustworthiness: The content is reliable, accurate and ethical

How can your website satisfy Google’s E-E-A-T criteria?

So, practically speaking, how do you convey your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness so that Google recognises them? Here are some hypothetical examples.

Experience

Writers or contributors need to know the topic through their own life or work. For example, when you’re writing about a topic that relates directly to your offering, that will come naturally. If your content draws on your experience and offers something useful and relevant as a result, Google will recognise and reward that.

You could ‘boost the signal’ for your expertise by publishing content featuring quotes or writing from external experts and people with highly relevant background and credentials.

Expertise

Google recognises several things as indicators of expertise. For example:

• Authorship: if the attributed author is someone with a recognisable background in the topic, that indicates that it is approved or written by an expert
• Relevance: Recent, well-cited statistics show thorough research
• Depth: Your website should offer ‘beginner’ content like ‘What is X?’ and ‘An introduction to Y’, it should also contain deeper and more advanced information and thought leadership

Authority

Much of your authority comes from what others say about you, and how they engage with you.

• Genuine reviews and testimonials from real users of your service show that you have a track record and have built a positive reputation
• Backlinks show that other sites and businesses consider you a useful source of information, and so will cite or recommend you
• Guest content demonstrates that external experts are willing to associate with your brand and give their approval to what you do

Trustworthiness

The qualities that make a website trustworthy to Google are qualities that are already non-negotiable for a successful business website:

• Security
• Transparency: Be open about your practices, and the nature of your business and policies
• Consistency: Keep the same tone of voice and branding across your website
• User experience: Maintain a mobile-optimised, user-friendly website, which is easy to navigate and well structured

Find out how your site scores for E-E-A-T, and how you can improve it

If you suspect that your website might not be hitting Google’s criteria, Nutcracker can tell you where and how it’s falling short, and how to fix it.

Our team use their digital, content, and design expertise to audit your website or your marketing, give you a clear, useful report tied to your business goals, with practical, actionable advice.

We review where your organic traffic is coming from, why any drops in traffic may have occurred, and what you can do about it.

We uncover technical issues that affect how your site performs. Speed, crawlability, indexing, and E-E-A-T are things that often get overlooked, but that make a big difference. Fixing these issues can lead to meaningful gains in how (and how often) your content shows up.

We don’t hand you a tool-generated score. We will give you insight that will transform what you are doing, and give you the clarity to take confident next steps to get the results you need.

Contact jenny.knighting@nutcrackeragency.com for a no-obligation discussion of your goals and how to reach them.