Your Money or Your Life (YMYL)

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness E-E-A-T is an updated acronym, building on Google’s 2014 update to their Search Quality Rater Guidelines ‘E-A-T’. The handbook now features the additional trust factor ‘Experience’, as of the December 2022 update, which helps Google to measure the success of its algorithm updates and search results. Google is adamant that while E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor it does want to serve results that display websites with strong E-E-A-T. In conjunction with SEO, E-E-A-T is a major focus for websites aiming to improve trust, engage customers and lead to an improved conversion rate.

E-E-A-T Timeline:

Mar 2013: Search Quality Rating Guidelines Introduced Mar 2014: E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) added to the guidelines Dec 2022: Updated to E-E-A-T, with the additional ‘E’ for ‘Experience’

Experience

Good quality content should demonstrate an expert level of understanding with subject matter, proving that insights are authentic and ‘tried and tested’. Adding ‘Experience’ to the E-A-T guidelines is a signal that consumers of the content can trust its authenticity.

Expertise

Expertise differs from experience, though there is some overlap. While experience shows a real life understanding of the subject matter, expertise demonstrates a professional connection, through credentials, qualifications and a deep level of knowledge that qualifies authors to provide reliable information.

Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness, like expertise and experience, derives from the same place of being qualified to provide reliable information on a subject matter. Unlike the previous two, however, authoritativeness is reputation based, leveraging the power of industry peers to support your credibility as a trusted source of information. In this sense, authoritativeness is sourced by backlinks and citations from other credible, reliable sources of similar information.

Trustworthiness

In essence, Trustworthiness is the combination of the above and in essence, the most important factor of the E-E-A-T guideline - especially in subjects considered to be YMYL. Raters must consider the content as a whole, the look and feel of the website where the content lives, and the author who created it. Being clear, upfront and honest about who wrote it, its sources and any other factors that may encourage a transaction of conversion from users.

Majestic Link Graph was introduced in 2020, giving link builders and SEOs a new way to visualise the immediate map of links surrounding a website or URL. By the very nature of the internet, links and link networks are everywhere. Many of them are benign, as Majestic state, such as footer links within corporate subsidiaries or a single website translated into many languages. However, some networks are not so innocent and are designed to manipulate search rankings. These are known as private blog networks (PBNs), and fall under the black hat tactics that white hat link builders avoid at all costs. Due to their malicious intent, PBNs are not always easy to spot and are designed to appeal to marketers for commercial gain. The Link Graph, therefore is a highly useful tool for marketers to quickly get a real time analysis of the top 50 websites that point to a domain or URL. It considers the four tiers stipulated by Majestic (1-4), collecting the top links within each and then calculates which are linking to each other. Whilst the tool is insightful and accurate to a degree, it does not consider all network possibilities, and Majestic provides no guarantee that it is all encompassing. It does however provide an instant insight into the top external links (or lack thereof) that surrounds a website or URL - which in conjunction with other authority metrics can be a vital component in the decision making for link acquisition. The static image provided by the Link Graph is made up of red dots and dark lines - where the dots are websites or URLs, and the dark lines are the links that connect them. The size of the red dot depicts the Trust Flow of the referring domain, while the lighter dots and lines show links that are farther away from the domain in question.

Keyword research is the act of finding and analysing search terms that users enter into search engines such as Google, with the goal of finding keywords that will help direct and support decision making within SEO campaigns. Through keyword research, marketers and SEOs can better determine which kinds of search terms they should be targeting, based on their popularity, their relevance to a specific business niche, their competitiveness, and other variables. SEO keyword research is one of the most fundamental aspects of on page SEO, and makes it possible to measure the impact of SEO work.

A Brief Guide to Keyword Research

Seed Keywords

The process of keyword research begins with brainstorming broad-topic seed keywords, which will help you define the topics that apply to your site and find more developed keyword ideas. If, for example, you’re running the SEO for a tea brand, you might want to list terms such as “chamomile”, “earl grey”, or “matcha”. Though these seed keywords themselves usually aren’t worth targeting through your further SEO work, they offer an important starting point for future keyword research.

Using a Keyword Research Tool

The next step in the process is entering these seed keywords into a keyword research tool. These tools will use your searches to return lists of related keywords, showing their volume (how many searches they get per month), their competitiveness, trends in how much they’re searched over time, and other metrics pertinent to how these keywords can be used in SEO.

Sort Keywords by Searcher Intent

People enter different things into search engines looking for different results, and it’s important to bear this in mind when you’re researching keywords to use in your SEO. Going back to the tea company example, you might come across a keyword like “organic chamomile tea”, which suggests a searcher intent on buying a product, or another term like “how is tea grown?” which suggests a searcher who simply wants to educate themselves on a given topic. Understanding searcher intent is an important part of deciding which keywords should be implemented where on your site, and knowing which terms to prioritise based on the overarching goals of your business.

Sort Keywords into Topic Clusters

Finally, keyword research involves sorting these keywords into specific clusters, which will further inform your SEO strategy and align it with the way your business categorises its products or services. For example, if you’ve determined that your site is going to have a lot of content that fits into a “green tea” topic cluster, you might want to assign keywords like “green tea health benefits”, “is green tea good for you”, “does green tea have caffeine”, and other related search terms.