For some people, EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) is an important SEO success strategy while for others, it is nothing but an exaggerated practice. For an SEO service company, the same is the case with YMYL (“Your Money or Your Life”).

How important is EAT for your SEO? Is it a direct or indirect marketing factor? Or is it not important at all?

What does YMYL actually signify? How important is it to boost your online business?

 Let’s check it out here. 

What Is YMYL?

In the online eCommerce world, websites are generally tasked with selling products or providing services or information that has a visible impact on the happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users. Google categorizes this as YMYL, which again stands for “Your Money or Your Life”.

For Google, YMYL types of sites are placed at the highest standard because in such type of content, the stakes are pretty high. Some popular industries that are part of Google’s YMYL sites list include financial services, healthcare, eCommerce, and legal.

So when it comes to YMYL, you have to ensure that any content on your website will help those consuming your content and not hurt them in any way.

Take great care of your users and ensure they feel safe. This is enough for Google to take good care of your online business.

 

What Is Google’s EAT?

EAT is an abbreviation for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google uses the EAT framework to assess websites, web pages, and content creators as a whole. It has also led out a set of guidelines that websites can follow to fetch the top rank.

Google’s essential priority is to reward websites that generate high-quality content with better rankings than those creating low-quality content.

Let’s look at EAT in detail.

Expertise

Make sure your content is created by subject matter experts. SMEs possess all the necessary information of your field to deliver detailed content on specific topics.

The sole purpose of Google is to provide quality links to the websites that have created useful, helpful, comprehensive, accurate and relevant content for its audience.

On the other hand, the perfect recipe for an SEO disaster includes generating inaccurate and outdated content. Google will never want to send its users unhelpful and inaccurate data and mislead them.

You have to ensure that your SMEs create valuable content by carrying out necessary research and fact checking.

 Authoritativeness

Since the very beginning, Google has been using PageRank to understand the authoritativeness of a website.

The authoritativeness of a website is linked to its popularity. The more authoritative a website is, the more popular it is among users and Google.

This is the reason why for many years, links have been compared to votes – the more votes you have, the more authoritative you are.

 While expertise involves having knowledge or skill in a subject matter, authoritativeness is the results of other people (both inside and outside of your industry) recognizing your expertise.

Sites can measure recognition in the form of mentions, shares, reviews, links or citation.

Simply put, authoritativeness sounds like your website’s online reputation. This means that quality links will continue to be part of a top ranking factor.

The best way to make your website authoritative is by creating useful content that’s helpful to the readers.

Trustworthiness

Earning trust has always been difficult, in case of people as well as Google. In order to earn the trust of people and search engines, you will have to put in a lot of hard work.

Trust can help people believe in your brand or business and it can make them want to endorse or buy your products/services.

A great way to increase the trustworthiness of your website is to highlight the credentials of your content creators on your web page.

A few other things that can help increase your website’s trustworthiness is awards, testimonials, endorsements, etc.

Your readers need to feel they can trust all the content on your website. Just like your readers, Google too wants to rank websites based on the content that it can trust.

Most importantly, trust is an essential aspect of Google’s YMYL concept.

What Is the Importance of EAT for Your SEO?

Ever since its conception, Google has been encouraging websites to create content that is helpful to the readers. Without a surprise, Google values good, high-quality content.

Clearly Google has its way of rewarding websites presenting high-quality content by placing them high in the search results.

EAT plays a significant role in Google’s organic search results, which is why E-A-T must be part of your SEO strategy.

Ensure whatever content you are creating serves a purpose. For instance, if your page is primarily meant for shopping, then it should have all the satisfying information on customer service.

 

In Conclusion

Never forget that Google, at the end of day, wants to keep its user satisfied, and therefore, its standards keep on changing frequently. User expectations keep changing with time and so Google too needs to stay up to date and stay relevant. Quality content is one of the best ways for websites to stay relevant in the eyes of Google.