Introduction
In search engine optimization, there is an evaluating concept named E-A-T, which is the acronym for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Originally, it was a part of Google’s guidelines released for its Search Quality Raters to ensure the effectiveness of search engine results. Google prioritizes providing quality results for its user’s needs, so it chooses only trustable sites or brands. Search engines use these E-A-T factors to determine the credibility of your site.
E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor; it signals search engines to assign your website’s rank in search results. Thus you need to apply E-A-T standards on link building to boost your site’s google SERP ranking. Google disregards websites that lack expertise, authority, and trust while checking their reliability. Lacking E-A-T metrics may lead to a decrease in your site’s google ranking or a reduction in its organic traffic. Hence, you can succeed in your niche by leveraging these guidelines to obtain backlinks for your site.
What Does E-A-T Mean?
Google algorithm uses E-A-T measurements to evaluate the worthiness of your website. You can leverage them for impressive link building on your site. Now let’s see the detailed explanation of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness)
Expertise
Having high proficiency of knowledge and skill in a specific area is referred to as expertise. You can easily win a competition if you are more updated on the topic than others. Likewise, if you are an expert in a chosen niche and have in-depth knowledge of it, you can succeed in your business among the competitors.
Anyone can be an expert, as it is optional to acquire any formal certifications of expertise. The primary qualification of expertise is having deep insights and a good understanding of your niche. Your site’s credibility will increase if you are an expert in your business field. Google will consider your site more relevant in your niche if you are highly expertized compared to other sites. As a result, you can see significant growth in traffic and revenue for your brand.
Showing Expertise On Your Site To Visitors
To show the visitors that you are expertized, you must have an about us page and publisher profile on your site. Include details about yourself and the reasons for providing the particular service on your site. Mention your qualifications in the niche field to gain the trust of users. For example, if you have a website based on trade, let the readers know about your experience in trade markets, financial expertise and technical skills. If your website is related to the medicinal field, mention your scientific knowledge and the results of your studies to the visitors.
Including your case studies on the niche subject can be an additional bonus. You can add your social media profile and own publications or articles like books and whitepapers to indicate your expertise in the particular niche. Ensure you provide only accurate information about your experience and educational qualification to increase your site’s reliability.
Showing Expertise In Link Building
If you obtain backlinks from expertized sites of your niche, it passes a high link value to your website ranking in google. Usually, the experts in a field have more followers on social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Experts also have their own blog platforms with massive audiences. There are high chances of gaining visitors to your site from their followers if they link back to you. This helps your campaign to get more organic traffic and trust from search engines.
Authoritativeness
Authoritativeness refers to a website’s authenticity, accuracy level, and reputation. People will approach a person with high knowledge relevant to their needs to get information or buy any product. Similarly, users search sites with high authority scores to fulfil their queries on the internet. Users consider the expertise and authority of a website as significant components for choosing the best source, among others. For people to pick your site from available options, your site must stand out from others.
Authority is used to evaluate whether your website meets the user’s required criteria. Using this, google assigns your site’s rank position among your niche competitors in search results. To check the authoritativeness, google crawlers will examine your site, business and contents. Backlinks are vital elements for gaining authority on your website. You can ensure that the inbound links are obtained from authoritative sites using metrics like DA, Trust Flow and Domain Rating. To increase authority, positive reviews of customers and external sources about your site are beneficial.
Showing Authoritativeness On Your Site To Visitors
Include all good feedback you got from google reviews with a link to the original page on your website. These reviews make your site look more authoritative to visitors. You can mention your partnership with other reliable sites or companies on the site to boost its authority.
Showing Authoritativeness In Link Building
Authority can be measured based on the backlinks on your site. Acquiring links from reputable sites for link building on your campaign enhances the authority. But building backlinks from authority sites may take a lot of time. Private Blog Network helps you to obtain quality incoming links in a time efficient way. It contains a group of domains that have an excellent backlink profile. And that is why you should use the PBN network to quickly achieve quality link building and high authoritativeness in your site. Also, the authoritativeness of your site rises if you get more positive brand mentions from other sites.
Trustworthiness
Trustworthiness is achieved by having credible content and truthful information about the service you offer on your site. You can automatically acquire trust in your site if you have authority and expertise in it. If you provide fake offers to get click baits on your site, it damages your brand’s reputation. This will lead the customers to lose trust in your site, and it is difficult to regain once you lose it.
Google checks the trustworthiness of your website to rank it on the SERP. To achieve it, you have to create high-quality and honest content with targeted keywords on your site.
Showing Trustworthiness On Your Site To Visitors
To earn the trust of visitors, you need to be transparent about yourself and the service provided on your website. You must add only correct contact details and reliable info on the About us page of your website. Give proper and quick replies when customers contact you with any queries. Bad customer service or wrong phone numbers can affect your site’s trustworthiness.
Monitor the comment section of your website regularly to give early responses to the visitors. Use pop-ups, advertisement links and ads only in appropriate places on your website. Most users will not trust sites with too many ads as they may look spammy. Design your site’s layouts professionally and use formal language without grammatical errors in it. Contents with spelling mistakes and improper wording will make it hard for visitors to trust your site.
Showing Trustworthiness In Link Building
To get backlinks, you have to make other relevant sites to trust your website. You can make them believe you by posting reliable content and info about your way of gathering data on the site. Create an infographic on your site about the data and the source from where you collected it. List all your analysis and statistics on the niche topic on the website. Through this, you can prove the trustworthiness of your site for the websites to link back to you.
How TO Improve E-A-T For Effective Link Building
Mentions From Reliable Sources
By getting mentions from highly trusted resources of your niche, you can enhance the E-A-T standard of your website. Backlinks from relevant sites make your site more authoritative than other sites in google. You can pass high link value to your site if the inbound links are received from trustworthy sites. As a consequence, you can rank your site on top of the search result page.
Provide Contact details
Contact details are essential for proving to the customers that your site is legitimate. Convey the visitors that you are a professional business site by adding the correct contact info. This gives the users the confidence to trust your site and be in touch with you to solve their issues. Customers or sites who want to link back to you will only accept your site if it has an email address, telephone number or social media profile on it.
You can lose potential backlinks or customers if they cannot reach you to contact. So ensure your contact details are available on the website’s homepage. Insert all the ways of communication between you and the visitors, even the address of your company, to build credibility. Thus you can attract more sites to link back to you for link building.
Conclusion
Leveraging E-A-T in your link building strategy has a significant impact on your website’s SERP ranking. E-A-T enables you to identify potential domains for building an efficient backlink on your site. You can use these credentials to verify the sites while searching for backlinks. Thus you can save time and avoid irrelevant sites whose incoming links do not have any value. Google examines the backlinks detected on your website to measure its trustworthiness. So when search engines find inbound links from credible sources on your site, they will mark you as reliable.
To emphasise the truthfulness of your site, you can publish trustworthy content and endorsements related to the niche. Update the contents constantly according to niche evaluation and monitor them to change outdated ones from your website. Most trusted sources prefer websites with fresh and actual data. So, modify the contents of your site to make it look relevant for getting link building opportunities. Audit your website to create brand awareness among the targeted audience and sites for link building. Using the E-A-T technique, you can make your website appear more professional. Also, it reassures customers to visit your site, which results in high authority and organic traffic.
