A Content Writer’s Guide to Google E-E-A-T

From SEO to B2B, being a freelance content writer means getting to grips with plenty of initialisms. Google E-E-A-T is another one to add to the list, but it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

In this post, we explain everything a content writer needs to know about Google E-E-A-T and how it can help you produce high-quality content.

What Is Google E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T is a framework that Google’s Quality Raters use to evaluate the quality of online content.

E-E-A-T stands for:

• Experience – Having the necessary first-hand experience in the subject the content covers
• Expertise – Making use of professional, academic, or other forms of expertise to write about a subject
• Authoritativeness – Demonstrating an established reputation within an industry
• Trustworthiness – Keeping content accurate, up-to-date, and well-sourced

Why Is E-E-A-T Important?

As E-E-A-T is used to judge the quality of a website’s content, it helps to determine where on the search engine results page that content will appear.

In other words, the more your content demonstrates the E-E-A-T principles, the better its SEO score will be.

But that’s not the only reason content writers should keep E-E-A-T in mind. Using the E-E-A-T concepts to improve the quality of content can result in:

• More clickthroughs
• Increased backlinks to and sharing of your work
• A higher chance of your content becoming a featured snippet

E-E-A-T in YMYL Content

While the principles of E-E-A-T are relevant to any type of content, there are some topics for which they are particularly important. These are topics that fall under the initialism YMYL, which stands for Your Money or Your Life.

Google uses YMYL to refer to content that could significantly impact a person’s health, financial status, or general well-being.

Potential YMYL topics include:

• News and current events
• Financial advice (e.g., where to invest money)
• Medical advice (e.g., how to treat symptoms of an illness)
• Emergency procedures (e.g. evacuation routes)

YMYL content needs to demonstrate the highest levels of E-E-A-T, as publishing incorrect, misleading, or otherwise low-quality content in these contexts could have severe consequences.

How to Demonstrate E-E-A-T in Your Content

Knowing that the quality of your writing will be judged by these criteria can be overwhelming, especially for new content writers.

But being able to use the principles of E-E-A-T in your content isn’t all about how long you’ve been writing. In fact, any content writer at any stage of their career can demonstrate E-E-A-T. Here’s how to do it one step at a time.

Experience

Experience is the newest part of the E-E-A-T framework, introduced in December 2022, but that doesn’t make it any less important than the other elements.

Demonstrating your personal experience in the topic you are writing about helps instill confidence in your work and adds that personal touch that’s essential for good-quality content.

To demonstrate experience in your content:

• Provide real-life examples. Sharing relevant real-life examples can help you connect with your audience and make your content more personal. If you were writing an article about the best places to visit in Europe, for example, providing an anecdote about your recent trip to Berlin would be the perfect way to cement your experience in the topic.
• Share your personal insights. While it’s not always appropriate to share your personal opinion in content, adding your own insights to less formal writing is a great way to demonstrate your personal experience.
• Reach out to your network. If you’re writing on a topic that you don’t have much demonstrable experience in, try reaching out to your colleagues, coworkers, and others who you know have the relevant experience. You might be able to incorporate that experience in the form of an interview, case study, or success story.

Expertise

Despite the alliteration formed by the words Experience and Expertise, the two shouldn’t be mistaken for each other. After all, a person who has received medical treatment from a doctor might have experience with that treatment but no expertise in it.

So, even if you’ve demonstrated personal experience of a subject, surface-level content is unlikely to impress Google’s Quality Raters. The ability to demonstrate in-depth knowledge and understanding of your subject – in other words, expertise – will help improve the quality of your content and how well it performs in search results.

Here’s how to make expertise part of your content:

• Specialize in a niche. If you have qualifications or credentials in a particular subject, your expertise in that area should already be established. You might even want to consider specializing in that topic, particularly because finding your writing niche has many other benefits.
• Do your research. If you are writing something for a client, they may have provided research resources in the brief. If not, you’ll need to find reliable sources to get the information you need. See our Content Research Toolkit for tips.
• Contact experts in the field. Consider contacting more established experts if you lack expertise yourself. Sharing a quote or interview from someone with demonstrable expertise can show how committed you are to producing quality content – and may have the added benefit of increasing your content’s reach if that expert shares your work with their network.

Authoritativeness

Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines reward content that comes from reputable sources or writers who have established respect in their industry.

However, that doesn’t mean new or part-time writers cannot reach Google’s standards for Authoritativeness.

The following techniques can help you establish authority – and quality – in your content:

• Craft an author bio. Author bios or bylines are a great place to share your credentials and help establish your authority on a subject.
• Write guest posts. If you don’t yet have a well-established platform for your content, consider writing guest posts for more established sites in your industry. That will help build your reputation as you progress in your career.
• Build up backlinks. A reputable source sharing a link to your website or content – known as a backlink – establishes your content’s credibility. There’s no one right way to build backlinks, but creating content that is shareable, high-quality, and original will increase its likelihood of being referenced on respected sites.

Trustworthiness

Arguably the most important component of E-E-A-T, Trustworthiness, can be informed by the other three factors. Yet, at the same time, trustworthiness can underwhelm their effect on a content’s quality.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how much experience, expertise, and authoritativeness you demonstrate in your work if you can’t also demonstrate that it is trustworthy.

To produce trustworthy content:

• Provide reliably sourced evidence. Every point you make in your content should be backed up by evidence in some way. This evidence could be a particular statistic or another person’s writing. Whatever form this evidence takes, though, you should always provide links to your sources – and make sure those sources are credible.
• Remain transparent. Transparency is key when establishing trust. In content writing, this means making sure you’re clear and honest about where the information in your content comes from, whether that’s by linking your sources or identifying when you’re quoting another person or publication.

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