Google E-E-A-T: How to Create People-First Content (+ Free Audit)

Google E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s a framework that Google uses to evaluate the quality and credibility of content.

Understanding E-E-A-T and demonstrating it are two very different things.

In How to Create an SEO Strategy, our founder, Brian Dean, shares examples, experiments, and campaigns for how he uses SEO to drive traffic to Backlinko.

This type of content naturally meets the standards of E-E-A-T.

The result?

The top position for the keyword “SEO strategy.”

See what we did there?

The rest of this guide will explain:

• What E-E-A-T isn’t
• Why it matters
• The core elements
• The different levels of E-E-A-T, according to Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines
• Practical ways to build and demonstrate E-E-A-T

Quick note: Huge thanks to James Brockbank for sharing his expertise and helping to make this guide truly comprehensive.

Let’s go.

What E-E-A-T Isn’t

E-E-A-T is often misunderstood, overcomplicated, and ignored. Let’s set the record straight.

Myth #1 – E-E-A-T Isn’t a Ranking Factor

Despite its importance, E-E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor.

To understand this better, let’s go back.

E-E-A-T isn’t something new. Google introduced the concept of E-A-T (more on its evolution into E-E-A-T in a minute) in its Quality Rater Guidelines in 2014.

Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines are used by the search engine’s independent evaluators known as “Quality Raters.”

In Google’s own words:

E-E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor in the way we traditionally think of ranking factors.

Instead, think about E-E-A-T as a mindset for creating helpful and people-centric content. It’s about providing what folks expect from your website. Which helps them trust you.

Myth #2 – E-E-A-T Isn’t a Checklist

As much as we want it to be, E-E-A-T is more nuanced than a checklist of definitions and action items. Building and demonstrating E-E-A-T doesn’t look the same for any two businesses or niches.

Users browsing different types of content in different niches have different expectations of helpful and trustworthy content.

This couldn’t have been made clearer in December 2022 when Google added an extra “E” to E-A-T to make E-E-A-T.

The additional “E” stands for Experience.

This meant that Google placed more significance than ever on genuine, personal involvement or practical familiarity with the topic covered in a piece of content.

Why?

Users are hungry for insights from people with actual experience on the topic they’re reading about.

But, also, not every topic requires formal expertise for its content to be considered helpful. Often, first-hand experience means just as much, if not more.

For example, epicgardening.com is regarded as one of the top gardening websites in the world. It gets an estimated 563k monthly organic traffic from 630k search rankings.

Yet, the founder, Kevin Espiritu, who had no formal qualifications in horticulture or landscaping, built an audience by sharing what he had learned from experimenting in his garden.

Now, Epic Gardening employs a team of gardening experts to produce content and build upon their E-E-A-T.

When Google introduced E-E-A-T, it also emphasized that the “T” (trust, just in case you forgot) is the foundation of E-E-A-T and holds huge significance.

And this makes total sense.

Think about it: If users don’t trust your content, what value does it have?

Despite what many think, E-E-A-T isn’t just about demonstrating these four things on your site. It’s also about making sure they’re shown off-site.

A good way to think about showing E-E-A-T is to ensure you share your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on-site and confirm this with off-page signals.

Being trusted and considered authoritative is as much about what other people say about you as it is about what you say yourself.

When you break down E-E-A-T into on-page and off-page factors, thinking about practical ways to build and demonstrate it becomes much easier.

Why E-E-A-T Matters

With the rapid development of AI, it’s easier than ever to mass-produce content not written by someone with first-hand experience or expertise.

In 2023, SEO expert Matt Digity exclusively used AI to create 526 articles for a new website by pressing buttons. The website cracked 50,000 sessions per month.

Because of this, E-E-A-T has become an increasingly important way to ensure your content aligns with what Google’s ranking systems reward.

We can be pretty sure that Google will continue to find ways to prevent low-value AI generated content from ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs), and it makes sense that E-E-A-T will play a part in this.

It’s also likely that Google is using feedback from Quality Raters to train its machine learning-based ranking systems and algorithms.

Pandu Nayak’s testimony in Google’s antitrust trial in October 2023 shows that multiple deep-learning models used in ranking web pages are trained or refined using IS (information Satisfaction) scores. These scores are produced based on search quality rater rankings.

This means that your content and site need to align with what these ranking systems are looking to reward. And E-E-A-T likely plays a significant role in this. After all, pages rated as having high or very high E-E-A-T are producing a higher IS score.

Also, as Google continues to reward content created by experts or those with first-hand personal experiences, we should expect to see content that aligns with these things positively affected in the core algorithm and other Google updates in the future.

E-E-A-T matters, and it’s only going to become even more critical.

The Core Elements of E-E-A-T

Let’s take a deep dive into each of the four elements that make up E-E-A-T.

Experience

When Google refers to “experience,” it means real-world, first-hand involvement with the subject matter of a piece of content.

This could mean:

• The author of a hotel review has stayed in the hotel they’re writing about
• The author of a roundup of “best books,” having actually read each of the books they’re recommending
• The author of a product review has tried and tested the product themselves

An authentic experience with a subject is (currently) outside the scope of AI capabilities. While AI might attempt to emulate aspects of human experience, its content lacks genuine uniqueness.

Google views experience as a key factor in distinguishing content created by humans from that generated by AI. But let’s not forget that it’s also something users expect.

Here are some examples Google gives in its Quality Rater Guidelines to highlight when experience is key and when the information or advice is best left to experts:

Experience is essential to demonstrate when creating content.

But how do you demonstrate this experience?

Let’s take a look.

How To Gain and Demonstrate Experience

One of the most effective ways to demonstrate your experience is to provide evidence of the first-hand experience you’ve gained.

Say you run a travel blog.

Your audience includes travel lovers looking for inspiration and recommendations for their next vacation.

And you’re writing a review of a hotel you’ve stayed at.

To demonstrate first-hand experience, you need to show evidence that you visited this hotel.

And while this should be a given, many travel bloggers have written reviews of hotels they’ve never stayed at. Using a hotel’s photos and write-ups to base their review on. Or copying content from another travel blogger who has invested time and money to visit the hotel

To show this experience, you could:

• Use your own photos and video content rather than the hotel’s official images from their site
• Share your own opinions on what you liked and disliked about the hotel within the content
• Include things that only someone who had visited the hotel would know rather than things easily found online

For example, travel writer and photographer Emily Lush published an article about her experience staying at the Sheki Karvansaray Hotel, one of the most unique accommodations in Azerbaijan.

As you read the article, you can see Emily has watermarked all of her photographs and has added unique insights that you can only get if you’ve stayed at the hotel.

Emily describes the size of the stonework and how certain parts were closed during her stay.

Emily has hands-on experience with this hotel; users can see this through her photos and the things she’s written.

Google’s Quality Raters would likely view this as a good demonstration of first-hand experience.

It’s pretty much impossible to debate whether this blogger visited the hotel they’ve reviewed. After all, there’s a photo of her husband at the hotel.

Expertise

Google sees expertise as tied to the creator of the content. It’s linked to their formal (or informal) education or how they acquired their skills.

Google’s Quality Raters ask questions like:

• Who is the driving force behind the content?
• Is the creator well-versed in the subject matter?
• What is the creator’s standing within the field?

As with experience, expertise’s importance depends on the content type and topic.

Demonstrating expertise is very important in topics like finance and medicine. In these cases, you’re expected to provide information within the current medical or financial consensus.

Your qualifications, academic achievements, and standing within your field are also crucial when creating such content.

However, everyday proficiency can also be classed as expertise for certain topics and types of content.

To make this clearer, let’s look at an example.

You want to bake sourdough. So you type in “sourdough recipe” into Google.

Here are the results:

Here are the credentials of the top three positions:

1. Position #1: Emilie Raffa is the creator behind The Clever Carrot. Emilie is classically trained at the Institute of Culinary Education. She also owns an Italian restaurant in New York City.
2. Position #2: Maurizio Leo is the founder of The Perfect Loaf. He’s a home baker with over a decade of experience baking sourdough bread. He’s also the author of a best-selling baking book.
3. Position #3: Lisa Bass is the cook behind Farmhouse on Boone. She’s a mom of eight with no formal baking credentials. She’s passionate about making food from scratch for her family and sharing her creations with her audience.

As you can see, there are varying levels of expertise in sourdough recipes, ranging from qualifications to authors, restaurant owners, and busy moms.

Considering the rankings, Google’s Quality Raters would likely appreciate the expertise in all three recipes and consider the context.

Of course, this would be different if the articles dealt with financial, medical, or legal topics, for example.

For instance, if you were looking for an article about health and safety regulations, you’d be more interested in a qualified expert than an enthusiast.

How To Build and Demonstrate Expertise

One of the most straightforward ways to demonstrate your expertise to Google’s Quality Raters is to add information about yourself and other authors who write for your site.

You should consider including details about each article’s author, such as their qualifications, career information, and status within a specific field.

For instance, if someone is looking for medical advice, then an author with a medical degree and years of working in the field will be viewed as an expert trustworthy source.

Take a look at this article from Healthline:

You’re shown that a medical expert has reviewed the article.

By listing this person’s qualifications, you indicate their expertise in the field.

Plus, at the bottom of the page, you get much information about the author that builds credibility and trust further.

You can also add sources to your content to show that your views are backed up by expert consensus.

Earlier, we mentioned how everyday proficiency can be interpreted as expertise, too.

So, what’s a good way of demonstrating this type of expertise to Google?

It may sound straightforward, but write about subjects you know well.

For example, if you spend a lot of time working on car engines, you should have some expertise in them. You should be able to create a blog full of helpful content about common issues with engines and so on.

On the other hand, if you’ve never baked a cake in your life and start a cake blog, it’ll quickly become apparent to readers and Google that you lack expertise (or experience) in this field.

Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness refers to how much authority a content creator or site holds. It means to what extent you’re a go-to source for knowledge on a subject.

For example, the Financial Times is considered one of the most authoritative sources on finance.

Likewise, ESPN has enormous authority within sports.

Why is this the case?

Browse any of the articles on sites like these, and the first thing you’ll notice is the massive amount of (you guessed it) experience and expertise on show.

You’ll also notice that these sites have:

• Backlinks from other authoritative sites
• A positive reputation
• Authors with strong personal brands or digital profiles as experts in specific topics
• Strong content architecture that covers all aspects of a particular topic

When considering authoritativeness, remember that it always goes hand-in-hand with expertise and experience.

If you don’t have any expertise or experience around a topic, then you can’t be a voice of authority on it.

How To Build and Demonstrate Authoritativeness

As mentioned, one way to build your site’s authoritativeness is to earn backlinks from other high-authority sites.

A great way to do this is by using Semrush’s Backlink Gap tool to view high-authority sites linking to your competitors’ pages but not yours.

To use the Backlink Gap tool, type in your domain first and then your competitor’s domain. Next, click on “Find prospects.”

You’ll then be shown a list of referring domains linking to your competitor’s pages. Use the “Authority Score” drop-down to filter for websites with a high Authority Score—Semrush’s proprietary metric that measures the quality of a website.

Click on the “Authority Score” dropdown box and, type in a custom range from 50 to 100, and click “Apply.”

Here, you’ll only see referring domains with an Authority Score within this range. You can then review the list and click on the number in the column under your competitor’s domain.

When you do this, you’ll see which page has been linked to under “Anchor and Target URL.”

Now, if you have a page on your site covering the same topic, compare it against your competitor’s page.

You’ll need to identify gaps in their content that you can capitalize on and find ways to enhance your content to be superior to your competitors.

If you don’t have a page covering the topic, you’ll need to create content around it ASAP.

Next, you’ll need to contact the referring domain linking to your competitor’s page and try to acquire the link for your page.

When you’ve decided which referring domains to target, select the boxes next to them and click “Start Outreach.”

You’ll see the list of referring domains you’ve selected to target. Next, choose which project to save them to, and click “Send Prospects.”

These referring domains will then be saved in Semrush’s Link Building Tool, where you can access them anytime.

Building links with sites within your niche is an excellent way of establishing authority for your website.

For example, if a blog post about basketball earns a link from a site like ESPN, it helps build the site’s reputation and authority.

Users trust ESPN as a voice of authority within the sports niche. When they follow a link that leads to your page, you’re seen as a credible source, which enhances your authority.

You should aim to build topical authority on your site, too.

This means creating high-quality content that deals with all aspects of a topic.

Think about it like this:

You’re looking to hire a personal trainer to help you achieve your fitness goals. The first trainer you meet knows basic fitness routines. The second trainer knows advanced training techniques, injury prevention strategies, and meal planning.

The third trainer has the same knowledge as the previous two but can also demonstrate their expertise through real-life success stories of clients they’ve helped.

You’re going to view the third trainer as the most authoritative option.

The same applies to your site.

You should have a content strategy that helps you demonstrate your topical authority on a highly relevant subject to your business.

But how do you do this?

You need to create as much helpful content as possible that covers all aspects of your topic.

For instance, if you only publish one article about cycling on your site, Google won’t view you as an authority within the cycling niche.

But suppose you post many articles covering all aspects of cycling, such as safety gear, training routines, and bike repair tutorials. In that case, Google will start to view you as an expert and authoritative source.

Your content should be beneficial and aim to answer everything a user wants to know about the topic.

So, how do you go about this? First, you need to do keyword research to generate some content creation ideas. One of the best tools for keyword research is Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool.

Here’s how to use it:

Type in your seed keyword (for example, “cycling”), and hit “Search.”

You’ll then get a list of keywords related to your seed keyword, along with their monthly search volume and keyword difficulty scores.

On the left, there are different groups of keywords. These are subtopics related to your seed keyword.

If you click on one of these subtopics, such as shoes, you’ll get a list of keywords related to your seed keyword and the subtopic. For example, “indoor cycling shoes.”

Now, you’ll have a significantly larger number of keywords to choose from to create content around.

To save your keywords, simply check the boxes next to them and click “Add to keyword list.”

You can then review them from the Keyword Manager tool whenever you want.

Another great way to find ideas for your content is to use Semrush’s Topic Research tool. To do so, type a topic into the search bar and click “Get content ideas.”

Here, we went with “gardening.

The tool will generate cards with related subtopics and other ideas relevant to your main topic.

If you click on one of the cards, you can see the search volume and difficulty. The tool also shows the Topic Efficiency for each topic. This proprietary metric helps you identify topics with high search volume and low keyword difficulty.

Plus, you get headings that are being used for the subtopic and the questions people are asking about it.

This gives you loads of ideas that you can use to create your own content and start building your site’s authoritativeness.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness is the most crucial factor in E-E-A-T, and Google makes this clear in the Quality Rater Guidelines.

Google considers your site trustworthy if it’s accurate, honest, safe, and reliable.

But you also need to understand that a page can demonstrate experience, expertise, and authoritativeness but still be regarded as untrustworthy by Google’s Quality Raters.

Still, the importance of trustworthiness to a page or site depends on the type of content. Google evaluates trustworthiness based on the content’s intended purpose.

For instance, a page that provides financial information needs to be more trustworthy than a blog post giving an opinion about the best taco spots in LA.

After all, financial information is typically based on facts, and the wrong advice could significantly impact readers. A roundup of the best taco spots in LA is based more on personal opinions and experience than facts. There isn’t as much at stake, so what constitutes trustworthy information looks very different.

On the other hand, let’s say you advise US citizens that they don’t need a visa before traveling to Japan. Well, it turns out they do.

If this advice was posted on your site, guess what? Both users and Google’s Quality Raters will view your site as untrustworthy.

There are negative implications that could come about as a result of this information.

Let’s look at one more example.

If you run an ecommerce website, shoppers need to trust that any online financial transactions will be handled securely and that their payment details are safe.

If your site doesn’t use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption or HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), users are unlikely to trust you.

Semrush’s Site Audit tool is a quick and easy way to check your site’s security.

Here’s how to use it:

Enter your domain into the search bar and click “Start Audit.”

You’ll then be taken to the “Site Audit Settings” menu. If you’re happy to use the default settings, click “Start Site Audit.”

Once the audit is complete, click on your project name to review the report.

On the next page, under “Thematic Reports,” you’ll see the “HTTPS” widget. Click on “View details.”

The tool then tells you:

• Your HTTPS Implementation score
• If your security certificates and server security are up to date
• How secure your site architecture is

If the audit detects any issues with the security of your site, you can click on the issue to learn more about how to fix it.

How To Build and Demonstrate Trustworthiness

As long as your site has an honest intent, it’s not too difficult to build trust.

Here are a few ideas on how you can build and demonstrate trust:

• Make it easy for website visitors to contact you: Depending on the type of site you run, providing precise contact details is a simple way of establishing trust. You should have an easy-to-find contact page that lists an actual address (not a virtual office or mailbox, if possible), a phone number, and an email address.
• Ensure you’ve got the basic business policies in place: You need a privacy and cookie policy that’s easy to find and a terms and conditions page. If you run an ecommerce website, you’ll need a returns policy, too.
• Keep your content updated: Your content should be regularly updated and show the date it was last updated on the page. If your site is full of outdated content, it will be harder for people to trust it.
• Collect and display testimonials and reviews: Allow visitors to leave reviews and testimonials. Good feedback builds trust, and dealing with negative feedback demonstrates accountability.
• Secure financial transactions: If your site processes payments or other sensitive data, you must safeguard your customers. You should use an HTTPS connection and have a valid SSL certificate. Make sure you’re also offering a range of trusted payment gateways as payment options.
• Display trust signals: If you’re a member of an industry organization or have earned other trust signals, such as verified security seals from well-known providers, ensure you’re clearly showing these to visitors.
• Show logos of the press publications you’ve been featured in: If the press is talking about your brand, clearly show the logos of the publications where you’ve been featured. People trust big-name media outlets, and if you’ve been featured by one or more of these, don’t be afraid to shout about it.

Levels of E-E-A-T and Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines

Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines show that E-E-A-T has different levels: “Lowest,” “Lacking,” “High Level,” and “Very High Level.”

Your objective should always be to align your site’s pages with the highest level of E-E-A-T possible.

Lowest E-E-A-T

Pages in this category are often spammy and lack credibility. They fail to provide a positive user experience (UX) and could harm users physically, mentally, emotionally, or financially.

This could mean, for example, pages that promote or participate in fraudulent or criminal behavior. These are the lowest-quality and most untrustworthy pages on the web and should be the easiest to spot.

They’re the pages you’d never trust as a user.

Lacking E-E-A-T

Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines clarify that a specific page can lack E-E-A-T even if the rest of the site is reputable.

For example, you run a health and fitness blog.

The majority of the blog posts on your site deal with topics like supplements and workouts.

They contain relevant and expert knowledge written by experienced personal trainers, and your site is generally a trusted source within your niche. However, one of your blog posts is a listicle about expensive guitars.

It doesn’t matter to Google that your other blog posts are top-notch.

It’s unlikely (not impossible) that you’re an expert on guitars to the same level as you are on health and fitness.

That’s not even considering that the site isn’t an authoritative source.

As Google states in its guidelines:

Google also lays out other examples of the types of pages it considers to be lacking E-E-A-T:

Unlike pages with the lowest levels of E-E-A-T, pages lacking E-E-A-T aren’t considered harmful. But they’re usually created by authors without relevant experience or expertise.

Google encourages its Quality Raters to look out for:

• Poor quality content that hasn’t been created with adequate originality, talent, effort, or skill needed to satisfyingly achieve the purpose of the page
• Slightly exaggerated, shocking, or misleading titles
• Sites or content creators with mildly negative reputations
• Unsatisfying amounts of information about the content creator or site that’s necessary for the page
• Ads or supplementary content that distract from the main content of the page significantly

Let’s look at an example of a page that meets at least one of these criteria.

This article is titled “40th Birthday Party Food Ideas.”

At the top of the page, you can see some of the content.

It’s poorly written and contains errors, clearly showing a lack of effort and skill. But it gets worse.

When you scroll down, you’re met with several ads.

It’s fair to say that Google’s raters would classify those ads as distracting from the page’s main content.

So, even if the rest of this site is fairly reputable, this page is almost certain to get a low E-E-A-T rating.

High E-E-A-T

Pages with a high level of E-E-A-T offer significant first-hand experience, expertise, credibility, and trustworthiness. This level may be required for a page to be deemed high quality.

But it’s at this level where the purpose of the page and its topic really start to define what E-E-A-T looks like.

Here’s an example of a page with high E-E-A-T from the Quality Rater Guidelines:

Google considers this content to have fulfilled the page’s stated purpose, stating that “This company sells its own line of high-end, fashionable baby and children’s furniture and accessories. It has a positive reputation and expertise in these specific types of goods. Many products sold on the site are unique to this company.”

For many businesses, this is evidence that building a positive reputation and knowing your product ranges inside out are the things that align with high E-E-A-T the most.

Very High E-E-A-T

Pages with very high E-E-A-T are created by experts or published on websites considered the go-to source for a topic. This very high level of E-E-A-T is also a key factor for Quality Raters who give a rating of “highest quality” pages.

These pages align with what’s necessary for a page to be considered one of the most trusted sources on the web for a topic.

In Google’s words:

For example, suppose you read a news article about a serious financial issue. In that case, you’d expect the author to be an finance expert and have relevant experience within this field.

One thing you need to do when aiming to publish content that demonstrates very high E-E-A-T is to ask yourself a series of questions:

• How important is first-hand experience for this topic?
• How important is formal expertise and education for this topic?
• What things make a website or content creator trusted in this topic?

Very high E-E-A-T can look vastly different between two topics, but the fundamentals are the same.

Let’s look at an example of a page we can consider to have very high E-E-A-T.

This is an article on the CNBC website about the Chinese economy. In particular, about the rapid growth of Huawei. The author is listed, but just naming the author isn’t enough.

If you click on their name, you’re taken to an author page with information about them. We can instantly see that this author is a senior correspondent who focuses on covering China’s economy.

An author for one of the world’s top publications whose specialist area of expertise is reporting on the Chinese economy is undoubtedly experienced enough and has the expertise necessary to report on this topic.

The information clearly shows the author’s experience, expertise, and authority. Which builds trust in the article’s content.

This is what’s expected from users when consuming content about financial topics.

11 Practical Ways to Build and Demonstrate E-E-A-T

Building and demonstrating E-E-A-T doesn’t have to be difficult, and there are many things you can do to make this happen. We’ve already shared some examples.

Here are 11 practical ways to help build your site’s reputation and align with how Google views your website’s E-E-A-T.

1. Leverage Experts and People with First-Hand Experience

Think carefully about who authors your site’s content.

Ideally, this should be an expert from within your business who is knowledgeable about the topic and has sufficient experience or expertise to write about it.

Ask yourself questions like:

• Who in the business is the most experienced to write about this topic?
• Who do we want as a spokesperson on this topic?
• Who can commit to sharing insights, comments, and thoughts on the topic?

Sometimes, you’ll have more than one person within the business who meets this criteria. Great!

But even if you can’t get these people to commit to writing the content, try to book some time with them each month to help you add value by giving quotes, reviewing content, and looking over competitor pieces to identify gaps.

Don’t fall into the trap of publishing authorless content.

Readers want to know who the person behind the content is. And this means that you shouldn’t be publishing content assigned to ‘admin’ or even your marketing person.

Here’s an example of content being assigned to an relevant author:

The author, Will Scholfield, is qualified to talk about preparing your home for a boiler replacement. You can see that from his job title as an Engineer.

The easier you make it for readers to see who is behind your content, the better.

But don’t forget, experience and expertise are different things. Some topics need formal expertise. But, often, you can show high E-E-A-T with experience.

2. Add Value Beyond What’s Already Present in the SERPs

The majority of online content is simply people rehashing the same content over and over again. Often, this content ranks at the top of the SERPs.

We call this copycat content.

A great way of demonstrating E-E-A-T to Google is to fill a knowledge gap by bringing something new to the table.

This is known as information gain.

And what is the best way to create information gain and offer something different from the content that already ranks?

You guessed it—through your experts. Whether that’s them adding comments and quotes to your pages or helping you to identify gaps in competing content.

Ask your experts to review the content that already ranks high in the search results and give you feedback on what’s missing.

But beyond just adding unique insights to your content, you also need to make sure you’re covering enough of a topic to build topical authority.

3. Establish A Positive Brand Reputation

A positive brand reputation goes a long way in helping people trust you.

On the flip side, if your brand has a negative reputation, this can make you untrustworthy.

And one of the best ways to build a positive reputation is to gather reviews and testimonials.

To get positive reviews and testimonials, though, you need to make sure your service, products, and the overall customer experience is great.

Depending on the type of business you operate, encourage reviews on platforms like Trustpilot and Yelp, as well as your Google Business Profile. Then, display these clearly on your site.

But don’t just collect these reviews. Make sure you respond to them, too. And not just to the positive ones.

If you receive a negative review of your brand, then respond in a helpful and transparent way. Apologize for what happened and offer advice or information that could help resolve the issue or show how you handled it.

If you see a positive review, thank the user for the review and their business.

Keeping track of your reviews can be a bit of a pain.

You can use Semrush’s Review Management tool to make the process easier.

To start, type in the name of your business.

You’ll then need to add your business details. Once you do that, you can view your company’s star ratings in a neat little graph.

If you scroll down, you can view all of your reviews and click on them to take you to the site where the review was posted.

This then allows you to respond to all the reviews more easily

4. Think Beyond “Owned” Media and Written Content

It’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing exclusively on written content (on your own site) to build and demonstrate your experience and expertise.

But when you stop thinking about E-E-A-T as an SEO tactic and think about it more as part of reputation building, it’s easy to see why you need to go beyond your own website.

Consider the following tactics as a way to get other people talking about you:

• Be a guest on relevant podcasts
• Co-host webinars
• Speak at industry conferences

5. Make It Easy To Find Out Who Created Your Content and What Their Background Is

Users should easily see who created a piece of content. This could be one author or many. They should also see the authors’ backgrounds.

The same goes for anyone reviewing the content.

In other words, someone shouldn’t need to search Google or social media to find out whether or not an author is qualified to write on a topic or not.

Here are a few things that you can do to make this easier:

Create Standalone Author Profile Pages

Create standalone author profile pages for every individual who authors, contributes to, or reviews content.

If you’re using WordPress, these will exist as standard but will just be a simple grid of posts authored by that person. Go one step further and build these pages out to be a comprehensive guide on that person, including:

• Who they are
• A profile picture
• What their experience is
• What their areas of expertise are
• How to contact them
• The posts they’ve authored
• Examples of where they’ve been featured in the press

The more you can tell readers about who a particular author is and why they’re qualified to write about the topic, the better.

Need some inspiration?

Nerdwallet has some of the best author profile pages out there:

Use Schema Markup

Use Schema markup to show who an author is and share their author profile page information with search engines.

There are two types of Schema you should be using:

• The author property to define who the author of a piece of content is
• The ProfilePage Type on your author profile pages

Google announced support for ProfilePage structured data to showcase more information about the author (e.g., their name or social media profiles).
See these two examples from the Schema.org library for help implementing this:

• Author
• ProfilePage

6. Get Your Brand and People Featured in the Press

We’ve already discussed how important it is to have others refer to your experience and expertise. It’s as essential as doing this yourself.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to get your brand and people featured in the press.

This is known as digital PR.

Be a spokesperson for your industry, offering valuable insights, comments, or knowledge to journalists. If you do this, you shouldn’t find it difficult to get featured in some of your industry’s top publications.

Journalists are more pressed for time than ever before. They’re also under immense pressure to make sure their content is accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

That’s right.

You can help big-name publications improve their E-E-A-T by offering to cite your expertise in their articles.

This, of course, then helps you build and demonstrate this for yourself.

It’s a win-win.

The best thing, though?

As well as mentions for your people and brand, you’ll usually land a link to your website within the coverage. That’s a link from what is likely to be a relevant, highly authoritative site.

Here’s an example of exactly this: coverage from sleep experts is linked to and referenced in this couples’ sleep guide on the Newsweek website.

7. Improve Your About Us Page

Your About Us page is the perfect place to tell your brand’s story. Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines actually suggest this as the starting point for Quality Raters to find out what a website or content creator says about themselves.

Your About Us page should be your website’s showcase of who you are, what your background is, and how you’re different.

Consider including some or all of the following things on your About Us page:

• Your story
• Your product and service offering Trust Factors
• Your unique selling proposition (USP)
• Your team
• Your awards, professional Memberships, and accreditations
• Your reviews and testimonials
• Your locations
• Your contact information
• Your clients and customers

For more inspiration, check out this list of 11 About Us page examples that perfectly demonstrate E-E-A-T.

8. Demonstrate Basic Business Trust Factors

Don’t overlook the basics that visitors expect to see when they land on a business website.

Things like:

• Terms and conditions page
• Privacy policy page
• Cookie policy page
• Returns policy page
• Delivery information

While it might seem obvious that you need to have these pages in place (with some of them even being legal requirements), not having them is a huge red flag.

Would you trust an ecommerce website that didn’t have a clear returns policy? Or clear and transparent delivery information?

Doubtfully.

It’s not that having these things in place sets you apart from others. Because it doesn’t.

But, the lack of these basic business trust factors strongly suggests that a site could be fraudulent or untrustworthy.

You also need to make sure that your contact information is easy to find. This means having a contact page listing your business’s:

• Phone number
• Email address
• Physical address

9. Cite Sources in Your Content

Clearly cite sources in your content. Link out to them, too.

It’s sometimes hard to trust claims, statistics, or facts found online. This is often because there’s no clear reference to where the information came from.

Is the information from your own data? Make it clear.

Was the information sourced from someone else’s research or content? Make it clear. And link out to the original source.

10. Use Your Own Images and Video Content

One of the most effective ways to demonstrate that you’ve actually experienced the thing you’re writing about is to use your own images, videos, or other media.

Using stock images does nothing to demonstrate this and is a pretty strong sign that you don’t have the experience you’re claiming you do.

Don’t assume you need to hire a professional photographer, though. Photos taken using your smartphone are usually more than good enough.

Here’s an example:

11. Keep Your Content Updated

An authority on a subject wouldn’t allow their content to become outdated.

A page that hasn’t been updated recently likely contains old or inaccurate information.

Review your site’s content regularly and update it as information changes on a topic. Generally, we aim to review content at least once a year (ideally every six months).

But don’t just review and make edits without telling anyone.

Show the date when the content was last reviewed and updated. This can go a long way to helping users trust that the content is accurate.

Here’s what this looks like on Backlinko:

It’s really easy to see how recently this was updated.

Frequently Asked Questions About E-E-A-T

Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about E-E-A-T.

What is YMYL content and why is E-E-A-T crucial for it?

While E-E-A-T is essential for every website, it’s crucial for those dealing with “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) topics.

These pages could have severe implications for people’s health and financial stability if the information provided is inaccurate or the sites are untrustworthy. There’s a much stronger need for content created by people with adequate expertise.

Some examples of YMYL niches include:

• Finance
• Healthcare
• Legal
• News and current events

If you’re running a site in a YMYL niche, it’s vital that you follow E-E-A-T principles and expect to build and demonstrate many more signals than other sites.

Your audience needs to be able to trust the information you provide, and you need to minimize the risk of causing harm to readers.

How does E-E-A-T apply to user-generated content?

Can you fake E-E-A-T signals?

E-E-A-T isn’t something you can fake, nor is it something that you should try to fake.

Remember that E-E-A-T involves building and demonstrating the signals that Quality Raters look for and that these are things you simply can’t fake.

Why?

Building a positive reputation is about what other people say about you. Sure, you can fake what you say about yourself, but this isn’t going to be confirmed by other third-party reputable sources.

Are there any specific tools available to assess a website’s E-E-A-T level?

No, there aren’t any tools available that can assess your site’s E-E-A-T level.

Because E-E-A-T isn’t a single, measurable ranking factor, there’s no E-E-A-T score and nothing that a tool could measure.

The best way to assess your site’s E-E-A-T level is to familiarize yourself with Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines and the levels included within them. And compare your own web pages with the examples given and the criteria set out for raters.

How does E-E-A-T apply to user-generated content?

For user-submitted posts, E-E-A-T is judged individually. Standards are looser than the main page content, but moderation is still expected.

Excessive spammy, hateful or false user content suggests poor site moderation and hurts E-E-A-T. Moderation is key for UGC sections, especially on YMYL topics.

Some low-quality UGC is okay, but a high ratio of junk content is an issue. Setting guidelines helps maintain E-E-A-T standards

What are the most common E-E-A-T mistakes?

E-E-A-T is still a massively misunderstood SEO concept. This means there’s a lot of confusion and mistakes when building and demonstrating it.

The most common mistakes that we see made when it comes to E-E-A-T include:

• Creating fake authors
• Misrepresenting expertise
• Publishing low-quality content that’s a copycat of content already ranking in the search results
• Not building on-page and off-page signals
• Missing (or hard to find) contact information
• Not including references or links to sources within the content
• Outdated content
• No evidence of positive reviews for the business or products
• Not making it clear who wrote the content and their experience and expertise
• Failing to secure the site with an SSL certificate
• Using stock images
• Having a weak About Us page

What if you can’t get your business’s experts to write content?

You might not be able to get experts or those with first-hand experience on a topic to write content.

If that’s the case, you’ve got a few options. But if you want to build and demonstrate E-E-A-T to a satisfactory level, you need to collaborate with one or more experts.

On one hand, you could block out, let’s say, an hour or two each month and have them discuss the main topics you’ll be writing about.

Record these conversations and use them to write the content on their behalf. Have them review the content and include them on the page as a reviewer.

Alternatively, you could write and publish content under your name but include quotes and comments from the experts. This would still leverage the expertise of these people within your content.

Reaching out to third-party experts and using them this way is also an option.

Succeed with E-E-A-T in 2024

E-E-A-T is a crucial ingredient for achieving high search engine rankings in 2024.

Follow our comprehensive guide to make sure you demonstrate your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust to Google and your audience.

While you’re here, check out our post on the biggest SEO trends in 2024.