“Relatively” because, although some of its guidelines are already known to website optimization professionals, Google recently updated them, establishing important changes in what it understands as good content.
Thus, the initial concept of the acronym emerged in 2019, as “EAT”, but, at the end of 2022, Google announced the addition of another “E” among the foundations of its “ranking guide”.
Today, we’re going to fully understand what Google EEAT is, its origins germany email list importance . Oh, and of course, we’ll also list some practical tips on how to optimize your website today.
Starting from the beginning:
What is Google EEAT?
Google's search engine has one of the most advanced algorithms in the world. It's no wonder that it still holds over 80% of the market share in this field.
And, to work, this mechanism has several pre-established rules, which are disclosed by Google itself, as a form of transparency.
You may have heard of the crawling, indexing, and ranking cycle, for example. It’s how Google finds, catalogs, and then decides how to rank web pages.
In the infographic above, when SemRush talks about your page meeting the requirements , the requirements we are talking about are precisely the EEAT.
Google EEAT (or “Double EAT”) is nothing more than a set of guidelines that evaluate the quality of a website’s content for Google.
This alone demonstrates the importance of the acronym, which has its guidelines studied by SEO professionals from all over the world.
EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust . In Portuguese, we have Experience, Specialization (or Expertise itself) , Authority and Trust .
Which means that, for content to be considered good and trustworthy by Google, it necessarily needs to explore these four pillars .
Those who create the best content, in addition to just appearing on the search engine results page, are also shown in the top positions, as the resources that can most reliably answer users' questions.
And this, if it wasn’t already clear, can be very, very important for your brand.
Later on, we'll talk about how to explore each of these requirements, but first, one more interesting fact:
From Google EAT to EEAT
Since the beginning of its history, Google has been optimizing its algorithm to improve search results for users and, of course, maintain its position as the largest search engine on the market.
Thus, as we explained in the introduction, EEAT is a relatively new precept, with the addition of the “E” for “Experience” having occurred in 2022, through the document Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines .
This new addition only reinforces the engine's latest trends in prioritizing useful, informative, and in-depth content for the user .
Today, it is preferable for someone who has “hands-on” experience on a given subject to write about it, rather than someone who has had no contact or has only studied the topic from afar.
Read also: Future of Marketing: To 2024 and Beyond .
What is the difference between EEAT and YMYL?
Despite being published in the same document, the two concepts are completely different from each other.
YMYL stands for “Your Money, Your Life” and deals with those pages or websites that address content that Google considers sensitive, such as health, security or finance , for example.
The company understands that YMYL topics can directly impact people’s health, financial stability or safety — or even the well-being of society as a whole.
For example, even small content inaccuracies can affect users on keywords like: “symptoms of a heart attack”, “how to invest money” or “what to do in case of an earthquake”.
The acronym exists to highlight that some content requires greater scrutiny for classification, and thus an even greater focus on EEAT.
But we haven't talked about the main thing yet: what each letter of this acronym represents, in detail? Let's go there?
What does each part of the EEAT mean?
For precise definitions of each letter of Google EEAT, we have separated what the brand itself says about them. Follow:
Trust
We start with the “T” for Trust , because, despite being the last letter of the acronym, it is the central pillar of the EEAT guidelines.
Experience, Expertise and Authority are elements that are there, in the end, only to reinforce the reliability of a given domain.
That's why it's our main focus here. Let's see what the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines say about it:
“Consider how accurate, honest, secure, and trustworthy a given page is. The type and amount of trust required depends on the page, for example:
Online stores need secure online payment systems and reliable customer service.
Product reviews should be honest and written to help others make informed purchasing decisions (rather than just selling the product).
Informational pages on YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics must be accurate to prevent harm to people and society.
Social media posts about non-YMYL-related topics may not require a high level of trust, such as when the purpose of the post is to entertain your audience and the content of the post poses no risk of causing harm.”
Experience
The most recent criterion added by the search engine concerns the experience a content creator must have on the subject they are writing about.
In the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines we have the following description:
“Consider how much personal or life experience the content creator has to the topic . Many pages are authoritative and serve their purpose well when created by people with a wealth of personal experience. For example, which would you trust more: a product review from someone who has personally used the product or a “review” from someone who hasn’t?”
As we said, this criterion explores the latest Google trends and prioritizes texts that focus more on people than on techniques in search results .
After all, who wouldn’t want to read content that includes personal accounts, whether positive or negative, from people who have already gone through the experience the text is about? And that doesn’t make it any more trustworthy either — strengthening our central pillar.