5 things you can do right now to improve your Google E-A-T rating

On August 1, Google’s Danny Sullivan tweeted and confirm about the release of new update of the broad core algorithm update Google E-A-T rating. This directly impacts the content of the website as Danny Sullivan said “better content means better ranking”.

Another expert from Google John Mueller also said to get better ranking to make your content more relevant. And one of the best ways to create more relevant content is to take help from Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines.

Google Quality Raters Guidelines are used to give quality scores to search results for specified quarries. Such that pages which get higher rating have ‘high quality’ content and have a better chance to get a higher position in Google search result. And generally ‘high quality’ content also means ‘high E-A-T’ that is E for Expertise, A for Authority and T for Trustworthiness.

Boosting your google E-A-T rating improves your chances of ranking at a better position in search results. So here are some ways which we can start now to improve our rating.

Things to do to improve google E-A-T rating

1. Include authors names and biographies of all editorial content

The rater guidelines state that “Understanding who is responsible for a website is a critical part of assessing E-A-T rating,” and advise raters to assess this based on the type of website.

It means information like customer support or contact details should be easy to find in pages like home page, product page. But in pages like blog details of the author is necessary because it helps to evaluate whether they are suitable experts of topic or not.

The guidelines state explicitly:

“The reputation and E-A-T of the creators of the MC [main content] is extremely important when a website has different authors or content creators on different pages.”

So if the author’s information is not available or hard to excess then it can harm your E-A-T rating score a lot.

2. Invest in personal branding

Raters are encouraged to review reputation information created by third parties, rather than relying exclusively on content created by the brand or the author themselves. As third party information puts a better impression on Raters and it helps in getting higher ratings. Although self created content won’t hurt you in any sense but it is most likely that your competitor with third party connection will outperform you.

There are various ways to improve your personal branding like,

• Using your social media profile and engaging with your audience and fellow influencers.
• Engaging more on trusted platforms.
• Sharing your story to connect with potential audiences.

All of this will help you to gain positive reputation in the industry and desired third party endorsements.

3. Cut or edit low E-A-T content

Pages in the website with low E-A-T content can do major harm to the website in the long run and pages with high E-A-T content should get valuable consideration as they give a major boost in ranking to the website. So it is advisable to remove low E-A-T content pages in major cases. It can harm our numbers for the short term we can even lose our spot in ranking but it will be fruitful in long run.

We can also go with alternative solution to the reworking of that page in order to boost our E-A-T score. But it also depends on the purpose of the page. For example if it is YMYL page you may need to bring an experienced author onboard but it’s not necessary every time. You can improve your E-A-T score by including personal anecdotes or speaking from experience.

4.Invest in technical security

Security is very important now. You can trust anyone now. A nonsecure website can get really low rating. Now even Chrome is marking all HTTP pages as “Not Secure,” any site without an SSL certificate and does not automatically redirect to an HTTPS URL is on thin ice when it comes to the future of its E-A-T score. So it is very important to take verifiability very seriously. Verifiable badges and certificates can help you to get high quality ratings.

For example a shopping site that uses various brands logo but doesn’t have any permission. Or one which doesn’t have any address or company name listed is considered fraud and get a very low rating.

5. Moderate users generated content

User generated content won’t always mean low E-A-T rating. Rater guidelines do consider user generated content and stated that is can be best fitted in some circumstances.

Community management can play a role in not only moderating YMYL pages but also in encouraging this kind of discussion in order to boost E-A-T for niche topics.

In some niche topics which don’t have many experts can have user generated content for better reach and high E-A-T ratings.

Conclusion

The latest change in Google Quality Raters Guidelines has high emphasis on E-A-T. So incorporating these 5 ways in your strategies can fetch you a higher rating.