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When focusing on search engine optimization (SEO) for the first time, it’s tempting to focus on one or two ranking factors, in particular keywords, in hopes of a quick ranking fix. However, improving search ranking is a much more comprehensive and necessarily long-term practice. Keyword research is an excellent starting place for SEO, but simply scattering keywords throughout content will not be effective. If your online presence does not successfully also meet E-E-A-T guidelines, having the right amount of keywords or an optimized website will be, in some ways, a wasted effort.
E-E-A-T is a Google quality search guideline that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. Ultimately, neither SEO best practices nor E-E-A-T quality guidelines will be as successful without the other. Combining E-E-A-T guidelines with SEO practices is a helpful approach to make sure that no key criteria for excellent search rankings are being neglected.
Related: 4 Ways This SEO Expert Uses AI to Create Content — and How You Can, Too
Use keywords to develop E-E-A-T
Once you’ve established what words to focus on in your content, consider how you can demonstrate your experience, expertise, trustworthiness and authority in the context of those topics. Your website might have increased traffic with the right keywords for popular searches, but to turn traffic into clients, it needs to do more than meet keyword metrics.
There are multiple ways to combine keyword usage with E-E-A-T. Don’t just advertise your services; demonstrate your product knowledge or successful case studies to establish authority in your field. Adding internal links to related pages on your site can also help to demonstrate your expertise and authority. Any visual content that establishes expertise, such as photos of jobs completed or infographics, should be optimized to enhance user experience and have keywords in the caption and alt text.
Connect teams to combine strategies
One of the difficulties of paying attention to SEO and E-E-A-T is that it means applying more standards to the same content. For example, for SEO content to establish E-E-A-T, it has to be well-written to effectively demonstrate expertise and accuracy. To make this happen, everyone working on the content needs to be on the same page.
Implementing SEO best practices and E-E-A-T quality guidelines simultaneously may mean making changes to how your content is created and who is working together. At Outpace SEO, the content and SEO teams work closely together to create content that follows SEO best practices while also being accurate, creative and well-written.
Content and SEO processes can be integrated at several levels. New team members should be given clear training on how content is created, optimized and edited and where they fit into the process. Loop in the content team when SEO practices need to change and keep the SEO team updated about editing standards. Rather than pigeonholing team members to one area of expertise, encourage them to understand the processes and goals of the team as a whole. If another company handles your SEO and content creation, establish a clear workflow so that content is seen by the right people at the right phase. Efficient, consistent communication will help guarantee that the content being optimized is completely accurate and representative of your expertise.
Related: Writing Content With AI Won’t Help You Win Against Google Search Rankings. Here’s Why.
Use SEO to build trust
It may be helpful to think of E-E-A-T as a way to evaluate optimized content. If your business falls into a YMYL category, meaning Your Money or Your Life, E-E-A-T standards are applied even more carefully by Google’s quality raters. The tone of the writing, the knowledge demonstrated and the authority of the author are all important ways to build trust — the most important of these four.
Successfully combining SEO and E-E-A-T practices involves considering every aspect of content creation. Trust does not just involve content but user experience. Enhancing the speed of your website, optimizing URLs and avoiding or optimizing 404 pages are all part of technical SEO. All of these contribute not only to a positive user experience of your website but also to how much searchers will believe in your authority and expertise after interacting only with your online presence.
Rather than distracting from SEO, E-E-A-T will be more effective when combined with strong SEO practices. For an online presence that delivers results and high rankings long term, create a strategy that focuses on combining SEO best practices and E-E-A-T guidelines. This may involve overhauling your content creation and SEO process, promoting communication between teams or reconsidering who handles your website optimization and content development. Together, SEO and E-E-A-T are a winning combination to continuously develop an online presence that ranks high and generates more business.
