After Reading This Guide, You’ll Understand 🡭
- Various ways to improve EAT information
[Note: Improving EAT isn’t just about following these best practices. This will help in the process but consider overall website quality and credibility to build trust]
Table of Contents
Best Practices To Improve EAT 🡭
EAT Audit is most likely to help you figure out what’s wrong and what can be improved on the site.
Let’s dive deep into some best practices to improve EAT:
1. Show off the expertise of Authors/ content creators
If you’ve read the quality raters guideline, you’ll know how much Google gives importance to content written by experts, especially in the YMYL niche.
The very basic thing you can do is add an author bio for every article and marking that with structured data.
If your website has multiple authors and the articles don’t even have an author bio, then it’s time to make the change.
Here’s why:
One of the characteristics of a low-quality page is “An unsatisfying amount of information about the website and author.” (Source: QRG, 7.7)
So, what to do instead?
1/ Author bio
The most basic step is to have an author bio for your articles.
Just writing the author’s name at the bottom of the article isn’t enough. The name should be tagged as the author of the article.
2/ Create dedicated author pages
“Author bio pages can and should include more than just text and a picture. Are there videos of the author speaking? PDFs? Podcast interviews? Links to published works? A photo gallery? These pages often rank for the author’s name; treat them as a personal microsite.” – by Lily Ray (SEO & EAT expert)
Having a separate page for each author is important because:
- It helps your readers to know about the expertise and credibility of the author
- Showcasing authors with high EAT makes your content more credible.
- It can drive traffic and organic links.
One great example is HealthLine.
They have a separate page for each of their authors. As a result, Healthline is ranking for the author names.
From these dedicated author pages, HealthLine is getting:
- 1.4k organic traffic/month (ranking for author’s name)
- links from 500+ referring domains
That’s how powerful it is.
Here’s an example of a separate author page showcasing the author’s expertise and authority in the topic.
FAQ: What If The Owner Can’t Hire Professionals/Experts To Write Content?
This is the problem you or your clients may face in real life. Hiring academic professionals or experts isn’t always possible because of availability, budget, deadline, etc.
In this case, you can follow the same strategy of Investopedia, HealthLine, and many other successful YMYL sites.
On the Investopedia blog, you’ll find sections like:
- Written by:
- Reviewed by:
- Fact checked by:
Not only that. Investopedia also used structured data to help Google understand that: this content is written by a freelance writer but is reviewed by a team of experts.
Here’s the schema markup:
2. Focusing on reviews, should be a part of the strategy
Another important aspect of EAT is what others say about your brand or website. Yes, reviews matter a lot in building EAT in the niche. But there are a few things to consider:
- Reviews should be from individual people, experts, or users
- The quality and quantity of third-party reviews play an important role.
Step 1. Identify the current state
You can search for existing reviews about the brand outside of your website.
The goal here should be to look at the independent reviews on third-party sites.
Personal experience
One of our clients had a similar issue with their site. They had hundreds of reviews from the clients, but the problem was that all of these reviews were on the client’s website.
As a result, we started focusing on getting reviews from other review sites like G2 and even GMB.
A similar approach you should be considering when your/ your client’s website either has reviews on its own domain or doesn’t focus on acquiring customer reviews.
Tactic you can use:
- Encourage users/ customers to write reviews on platforms (where content gets indexed by search engines) like LinkedIn, Medium, personal blog, YouTube, etc.
EAT Lessons 🡭
- Part 1. E-A-T: Beyond Content, Links, And UX
- Part 2. E-A-T: Beyond Content, Links, And UX
- Part 3. E-A-T: Beyond Content, Links, And UX
