Tag Archive for: Google SEO

What is Google E-E-A-T?

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Have you ever considered how Google ranks and displays websites? One key factor is the E-E-A-T principle. This acronym holds significant power over the future of websites, determining their visibility in the vast online landscape. But what exactly does E-E-A-T entail, and why does it matter? 

With the rise of AI-generated content, simply spinning up authority sites and bombarding them with links might not cut it anymore, at least not as a long-term strategy. Google E-E-A-T is a framework that Google uses to evaluate the quality of content on websites. E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This is a part of Google’s search quality rater guidelines, a handbook that Google uses to weigh the quality and credibility of a website’s content. 

Join us as we discuss the importance of this concept, exploring its profound impact on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here’s everything you need to know.

Understanding Google’s Quality Standards

Google published its search quality evaluator guidelines back in 2013, making them accessible to all marketers. These standards demonstrate how Google assesses web pages and ranks content from high to low quality. So, what do Google’s quality standards mean for us marketers who handle SEO? The overall goal of this is to help ensure that the page is created to help users. Here are a few examples of what a high-quality “user-centered” web page should look like:

  • Sharing information about a specific topic.
  • Sharing personal/social information.
  • Sharing photos, videos, and other media.
  • Expressing opinions or points of view.
  • Entertaining users.
  • Selling products or services.

Adhering to Google’s quality standards is crucial for enhancing user experience. Your site and content should have a user-focused purpose that provides real benefits. Now, let’s explore the extra “E” in ‘E-E-A-T,’ which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness, and the new addition: Experience.

What is E-E-A-T?

As discussed, E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s a framework used by Google’s algorithms to evaluate the quality and credibility of your company’s online information. In a nutshell, if your website’s user experience is subpar and doesn’t seem to be a trustworthy source, Google may view your site as unreliable and limit your ability to rank — even if you’re following all other “best practice” SEO guidance. 

Topics that require high E-E-A-T include medical advice, journalism/news stories, and financial, legal, and tax advice. A common misconception is that E-E-A-T is a direct ranking factor. It isn’t. Instead, it indirectly affects the algorithm because search quality raters evaluate sites for it.

Let’s break down each component for a closer look at what each entails:

Experience: This dimension assesses the depth and breadth of a website’s experience within its niche. It considers factors such as the website’s longevity, the frequency of updates, and the richness of user interactions.

Expertise: Expertise revolves around the proficiency and knowledge demonstrated by content creators. Google seeks content that showcases a deep understanding of the subject matter, providing users with valuable insights and solutions.

Authoritativeness: Authoritativeness measures the reputation of the content creator and the website hosting the content. It considers factors like backlinks, mentions from other reputable sources, and the overall prestige of the website within its niche.

Trustworthiness: Trustworthiness assesses the reliability and integrity of the content. It looks at factors such as transparency, citing credible sources, and maintaining high accuracy and truthfulness.

Why Does E-E-A-T Matter for SEO?

Google’s primary goal is to provide users with the most valuable and reliable information in response to their queries. By evaluating content based on this set of criteria, Google can prioritize high-quality content while filtering out low-quality or misleading information. Here’s how it influences SEO:

  1. Higher Rankings: Websites that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness are more likely to rank higher in search results. This is because Google perceives them as reliable information sources worth showcasing to users.
  2. Enhanced Visibility: When your website meets Google’s E-E-A-T criteria, it’s more likely to be featured in Google’s Knowledge Graph, Knowledge Panels, and other prominent search features. This increased visibility can drive more organic traffic to your site.
  3. Credibility and Reputation: Building and maintaining E-E-A-T improves your search rankings and helps enhance your brand’s credibility and reputation. Users are more likely to trust and engage with content from sources they perceive as authoritative and trustworthy.
  4. Long-Term Sustainability: E-E-A-T is not a short-term SEO tactic; it’s a long-term strategy for sustainable growth. By consistently producing high-quality content that aligns with E-E-A-T principles, you can establish your website as a reputable authority in your industry.

How to Improve E-E-A-T for Your Website

Now that we grasp the significance of E-E-A-T for SEO let’s delve into strategies to enhance it for your site:

  1. Invest in Content Quality: Focus on creating comprehensive, well-researched, and authoritative content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience.
  2. Showcase Expertise: Highlight the expertise of your content by showcasing their credentials, certifications, and relevant experience. Establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry can significantly boost your E-E-A-T.
  3. Build Authoritative Backlinks: Earn backlinks from reputable websites within your niche. This helps improve your website’s authority and signals that other trusted sources vouch for your content to Google.
  4. Prioritize User Experience: A user-friendly website design, fast loading times, and clear navigation contribute to a positive user experience, which in turn helps enhance trustworthiness.
  5. Be Transparent and Credible: Disclose your sources, provide accurate information, and avoid misleading or deceptive practices. Transparency and honesty are essential for helping build trust with your audience.

Last Thoughts

Google’s E-E-A-T principle helps shape search engine rankings and affects user trust and engagement. You can enhance your credibility and long-term success in the digital landscape by prioritizing experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness in your content creation and SEO strategies.

It’s crucial to have a sound digital marketing strategy in place. Understanding your audience and their needs can attract more traffic and drive conversions. It’s important to remember that quality content is not a one-time effort but an ongoing research, refinement, and optimization process.

As a Google Partner, Onimod Global has the experience to help you with your SEO, social media marketing and advertising, and content creation needs. Whether you have questions about creating quality content or want to learn more about our services, we are here to help.

Contact us today to speak with our digital marketing team and learn how we can help you achieve your 2024 digital marketing goals.

Google Quality Standards

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Google released their search quality evaluator guidelines back in 2015, which has since then become available for every marketer out there. Today, these guidelines show how google looks at the web pages and how they rank content by high to low quality. Here’s what you need to know about EAT, YMYL, and beneficial purpose in 2022. 

Since its release, the guidelines have been updated 3 times, recently in October of 2021. It’s important to remember that search quality evaluator guidelines can only guide us to where we need and want to go. Think of it as more of a roadmap opposed to an answer key.

Beneficial Purpose

What is the concept of beneficial purpose and what does it mean for us marketers who handle SEO? Beneficial purpose essentially is the purpose of the internet – more importantly, the purpose of websites and web pages. Websites and their respected pages are created to help their users. 

By understanding the purpose of the page you’ll be able to better understand what criteria goes into evaluating that page for quality. The overall goal of this is to ensure that the page is created to help users. Here’s a couple examples of what a high quality “user-centered” web page should look like: 

  • Sharing information about a specific topic
  • Sharing personal/social information
  • Sharing photos, videos and other media
  • Expressing opinions or point of views
  • Entertaining users
  • Selling products or services

Overall, beneficial purpose plays an important role for your users. Your site and content should have some sort of ussr-focused purpose that benefits them at the end of the day.

YMYL: Your Money or Your Life Content

Your Money or Your Life content is the type of information that can directly impact the reader’s happiness, health, safety, or financial stability. When you create a YMYL page with bad advice or misinformation it can affect your users’ lives. Google takes content seriously when it comes to spreading bad advice. Here are a couple of examples of YMYL topics:

  • News and current events – advice and information on  business, politics, science, technology. It’s important to use your judgment and knowledge of your locale.
  • Civics, government, and law – advice and information over voting, government agencies, social services and legal issues.
  • Finance – financial advice and information over taxes, retirement planning, loans, banking, insurance.
  • Shopping – information about goods and services, essentially allowing people to make purchases online.
  • Health and Safety – advice and information about medical issues, drugs, and hospitals.
  • Groups of people – advice and information on groups of people such as race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, sexual orientation.

While there are many YMYL topics, the quality evaluators that google uses have to use their judgment to determine whether a page qualifies as YMYL content.

E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness

Once a page has determined its beneficial purpose, its level of E-A-T is considered in terms of whether the content is YMYL. Non-YMYL content doesn’t require the same severity as YMYL content.

The E in E-A-T stands for: Expertise 一 It refers to the creator of the main content on a web page. The expert must have credentials to back up the content on the website. People with relevant life experience in the topics that are being covered on the web page can be considered experts—no formal training or education required. However, this only holds true for non-YMYL content.

The A in E-A-T stands for: Authoritativeness 一 This refers to the content that appears on the website. Authoritativeness stands for people knowing your background and seeing you as a leader. 

The T in E-A-T stands for Trustworthiness 一 This refers to the creator, content and website. Being trustworthy means people can trust the information you provide. You’re credible as a good source for providing information.

Here are a couple of topics that require high E-A-T:

  • Medical advice
  • Journalism/news stories
  • Science topics
  • Financial, legal, and tax advice
  • Hobbies: such as photography, playing piano 

Final Thoughts

In order to create high quality ranking content, you should incorporate Beneficial Purpose, E-A-T and YMYL to your marketing strategy. Like anything else, Google is constantly changing their strategies. To stay on top of the curve, you should be adjusting your strategy along with their changes in order to stay relevant in your industry.

As Google Partners, Onimod Global has over a decade of experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, social media advertising, content marketing and paid search. Got questions about Google strategies or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

SEO Performance & Moving Your Website Host

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Here’s a little known secret: many people are afraid to switch their web hosts. But eventually your once state-of-the-art website will begin to lag in performance and speed. However, it is important to be aware of the value of updating your web host and the difference it makes for your site. Read on to find out why. 

When you’re in the process of optimizing your web pages your goal is to have your content rank high on a search engine, like Google. Ideally, you want your content at the top of a search engine’s results for keywords relevant to your product or services.

Changing the location of your website hosting can impact its performance in search results. It may sound a little scary at first when your website hosts are slow but don’t panic – the rankings will come back!

Here’s what you should know about changing your website host location.

Google Slowing Down Your Website

The first thing you will notice when you move your host location is that your website is slow, perhaps extremely slow. Rest assured, this isn’t something that will stay that way for long. Google makes your website slow when they notice a change in host. They do this so Google won’t cause any problems in the future.

Whether you’re moving to a hosting provider in the same location, or a new location, Google will be cautious with how much it crawls the site. Over time, once Google’s systems can tell that going faster doesn’t cause any issues, they’ll speed up again. This is independent of the kind of hosting change you make. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re moving to a different provider down the road, or moving to another country.

Impact on Website Loading Times

There are a couple of different scenarios that are at play if you’re thinking about moving your website. If you’re thinking about moving your website hosting to a new location, this can have an impact on how fast your website will load for your users. If a majority of users live far away from where the website is hosted, it could lead to a slower user experience. 

In turn, that could affect the speed and page experience ranking factors. Depending on how strongly this is visible, that can play a role in speed and the page experience ranking factor for a website.

Hosting Your Website in Multiple Locations

To avoid the likelihood of your website loading time being affected, you could host your website on servers in multiple locations. Content delivery networks, also known as (CDNs) often do this, and depending on the hosting platform you’re using your site may be on multiple servers already.

If you’re using a hosting platform the chances of them already doing this for you is high. With SEO, the server’s location is unfortunately not used for geo-targeting. If you want your website to target users in a specific location, you would need to use either the country-code top level domain, or the appropriate setting in Google Search Console.

A country-code top-level domain is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. The appropriate setting in the Google Search Console can be found in the international targeting report in your settings. 

  • Use the International Targeting report to monitor your hreflang errors, or to choose a country that should be prioritized for your search results. This report has the following sections:
  • The Language section: Monitor the usage and errors of hreflang tags on your site. 
  • The Country section: Set a site-wide country target for your entire site, if desired.

Final Thoughts

Overall, changing the location of your website host will temporarily impact crawling on your website, and has the potential to impact loading time. It’s important to remember that this type of change will not impact SEO when it comes to geo-targeting.

At Onimod Global, our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. Our mission is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. We have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing.

We have a preferred hosting vendor that boosts SEO performance. If you’d like to learn more about our hosting vendor and our services contact us today!