What Is E-A-T Optimised Content, and What Is Its Role in SEO?

The profitability and sustainability of your business will function in close connection with the marketing strategy you use. Do you want to achieve organic growth in market share? To attract the attention of your target audience? To enjoy more visibility in the SERPs? In this case, a suitable solution for your business would be to turn to a company specialising in search engine optimisation. SEO can improve the credibility of your brand, give you a competitive advantage over business rivals, and enhance your local presence.

Through a comprehensive audit, the company you work with will identify the keywords used by your target audience, utilise them to create quality content that meets the E-A-T guidelines, improve the UX of your website, tweak the usability of the back-end elements of your pages, and help you stay in tune with algorithm changes imposed by search engines. SEO is an effective tool that delivers a consistent ROI in almost all cases. Moreover, it is the best financial growth solution if you are interested in long-term results.

Through professional tools, the company you work with will analyse the impact of the changes on your overall market share. In addition, the experts you call will optimise your site's parameters for mobile devices, implement the HTTPS protocol on all pages, make on-page changes to enhance the visibility of written text and examine your articles or product descriptions for search engine compliance. Any SEO-optimised text must comply with E-A-T rules. But what are these rules?

It’s All About Quality

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness and is a concept introduced by Google in 2018, which aims to create a framework to evaluate the relevance of texts for the website's target audience. Does your company operate in a field where the YMYL topics are highly relevant? In this case, compliance with the E-A-T guidelines will be crucial for maintaining your SERP visibility.

The ‘Expertise” component of the E-A-T guideline refers to the level of knowledge of the author who wrote the text. In other words, if your website specialises in chemical products but you write an article about the candy industry, the search engine algorithms may consider that you do not have the competence to address the subject adequately. “Authoritativeness” refers to the author's credibility and the institutional reputation of the organisation that contributed to the article. Do you have a history of writing specialised texts, and does the establishment you manage enjoy an enhanced reputation? Then your authoritativeness score will be excellent.

The “Trustworthiness” component refers to the accuracy of the information presented. In other words, if you write an article about an event that happened in 2023 but use sources or data that are no longer current, your trustworthiness score will be affected. As you can see, the E-A-T rules are pretty straightforward. However, what is complicated is how Google can determine the quality of the information presented in the texts. Still, if you are a company dealing with YMYL topics such as personal health and financing, E-A-T will be a significant component of your SEO performance.

How Can You Follow the E-A-T Guidelines? 

Firstly, the articles must contain up-to-date information about the chosen topics. Secondly, equally important is consistency. The written texts should be well-researched, provide a unique perspective on the selected themes, benefit from backlinks from industry authorities, and be posted regularly to improve your credentials. You should also be consistent with your sources, optimise your site to enhance the user's reading experience, adapt your texts according to your target audience's feedback, and tailor your strategy to the algorithm updates the search engine implements.

Creating content that complies with the E-A-T guidelines is not a one-time thing but must be a consistent strategy that takes into account changes in your industry. In addition to the E-A-T standards, written articles must use keywords found during the SEO audit process, link to other pages of your website, be optimised for the crawlers of search engines, and link to reputable sources for the information presented. A comprehensive on-page strategy can be crucial to your digital marketing strategies. But at the same time, it can also be one of the most complex stages of the SEO process.

Do the E-A-T Guidelines Affect Local SEO Differently? 

Let's say you're a London-based company whose SEO strategy focuses on local growth. In your case, the content on your site's pages must still comply with E-A-T rules to enjoy market visibility. But at the same time, the content will have to be tailored to the regional needs of your target audience. Are you active in healthcare, finance, and personal development? Then, the E-A-T guidelines will affect your company whether you are one of the over one million firms operating in London or a start-up in Ghana.

However, as your focus is local, the SEO strategy you pursue must be adapted to the regional needs of your customers. And for this to be possible, it's best to hire an SEO company. A London company specialising in SEO will have the expertise to create a content strategy relevant to local audiences. Because you are a UK-based firm, the texts written on your website should use British English, use location-specific keywords, and cover topics relevant to Londoners.

Do you need SEO services in London? Most likely, yes. London is a diverse city where the number of start-ups grows annually. The firm you work with will handle your on-page content strategy, use off-page SEO techniques, have access to professional tools to determine topics of interest to your target audience, monitor reviews and suggestions received from your clients, and focus the attention of your SEO strategy on emerging concepts such as AEO, which can soon have a significant effect on your profitability.

What Is AEO? 

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation and is a relatively new concept in SEO that focuses on providing clear and concise answers to queries formulated as a question. AEO is gaining more and more relevance in the SEO sphere, as queries asked in the form of a question are more common than ever. Why is that? Two words. Smart assistants. Thanks to the AI revolution, assistants like Google Home or Siri are increasing their functionality with each update, and the tasks they can perform are becoming increasingly complex. The numbers speak for themselves, with voice searches recording spectacular growth in recent years.

AEO is necessary since the AI revolution will inevitably change search patterns. Along with these changes in behaviour, optimisation for featured snippets and voice searches will become crucial to the success of SEO strategies. AEO is a consequence of the changing focus of search engines over the last year and a half. It is no coincidence that in 2023, we had no less than four Google Core Updates, and the company's focus for years has been on mobile queries. The SEO landscape is shifting, and future digital marketing strategies must consider NLP and AI's effect on the industry.

A Critical Component of SEO Strategies

Content is crucial in any SEO strategy, whether centred on local growth or has an international focus. Quality content that addresses your audience's needs will positively impact your website's relevance to your clients and increase your SERP ranking. The content written by the experts you collaborate with should relate to your field of activity, implement the keywords or phrases found during the SEO audit process, and benefit from metadata and title tags that make it easier to index by the crawlers of search engines.

Equally important is for the articles written by the SEO expert you call upon to use backlinks from sites relevant to your speciality area. High-quality content has a positive effect on user retention, can increase the profitability of the services you market, raise the chances for the information presented on your pages to be promoted with the help of featured snippets, and can be a tool to target long-tail keywords, pertinent to commercial clients interested in specific business-related topics.

For International SEO, on-page content is a way to attract the attention of different target audiences with various cultural or linguistic preferences. For local SEO, it can be a way to make your content relatable to regional clients. Content written on your website pages can address the specific needs of your regional audiences, address local topics, or present descriptions of products or services that have increased relevance to your targeted regional market.  No matter how you use it, content is and will remain an essential part of SEO. And its originality will be a crucial element influencing your business profitability.

Article by Pankaj Shah: DCP Web Designers