E.E.A.T. Criteria
The concept comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater guidelines, and it became well known after the Medic Update in August 2018.
Experience.
Expertise.
Authoritativeness.
Trustworthiness.
Let’s break it down to understand better.
Experience adds an importance factor in your content which can evaluate your article or blog in terms of its helpfulness and originality.
Expertise means that Google looks for a level of expertise in the content.
If the content you produce isn’t accurate and doesn’t actually provide consumers with answers or solutions, this naturally decreases the quality of your webpage.
Authoritativeness looks at the authoritativeness of the main creator of the content, the content itself and the website providing it.
So, say for example your business is about kitchen re-modelling and you put out a blog on plumbing, Google is going to want to check the authority of your webpage against the content.
Trustworthiness is the same kind of thing. Google looks at how trustworthy your content, creator and website are compared to the content.
The EEAT algorithm essentially helps maintain original, accurate, honest, and useful content being available to consumers.
For example, you don’t have to have any sort of qualification to start a website and start writing on a topic of your choosing, and this can be damaging to consumers who are at risk of seeing misleading content.
This, of course, is a positive thing as it helps consumers find exactly what they need.
However, t also means that all the content your business puts out must have the algorithm in mind to make sure it hits Google’s criteria and therefore generates traffic.
This shows us something crucial, however:
that consumers make big decisions based on what their search results find. So, your content needs to be correct and useful above all.
