Google E-E-A-T: What it is and why it matters

Google E-A-T recently became Google E-E-A-T, and this is important.

Google has been pushing E-A-T as their main set of quality metrics for years now.

This has become especially relevant with Google’s announcement of their helpful content update on 18 Aug 2022, which was probably the biggest step towards enforcing E-A-T that Google take taken until then.

Then in Dec of 2022, E-A-T became E-E-A-T.

This post is part of a series and here is the link to the main glossary page.

So what is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T stands for “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.”

Let’s break it down…

Experience

This is the addition in Dec of 2022. The writer has personal experience with the topic in question.

Expertise

When creating content for your website, how much expertise goes into the process? Does your content demonstrate a high level of expertise, or was it  “flung together” quickly?

Demonstrating expertise means showing you, or the experts you spoke to, have appropriate credentials backing up the claim to expertise.

To illustrate the important difference between experience and expertise, I’ll use the example of cancer.

If you’re an oncologist, you’re an expert. If you have or had cancer, you have experience.

Authority

You need to show that you, or the person you spoke to, to get information, are an authority in the topic area.

How do you achieve this? By knowing what you’re talking about. By providing answers that work.

When it comes to showing authority, experience matters.

Trust

Trust is above and beyond the writer, trust comes from the writer as well as the people responsible for the website.

This is especially true for eCommerce websites and any other website that accepts payment.

But the concept is valid for all websites. Are you, and the website, a trustworthy source of information for your topic?

Why E-E-A-T matters is pretty clear

A high level of E-E-A-T translates to higher site rankings because the more your website is trustworthy (which comes partially from the expertise and authority of the writer or the person providing the information, and partly from who runs the site) the higher it will rank.