E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) is one of the popular key terms that every SEO company and professionals look to improve. No matter how good and effective your SEO strategy is, if you fail to prove your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness for th particular subject matter then google may never recommend your content or website to their searchers.

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When it comes to determining the right SEO strategy for a website. Many SEO experts may go behind algorithms updates and basic SEO steps (on & off-page), but in reality, it is difficult to determine how google works? Google is very much mysterious in disclosing every detail about their work.

But every mystery includes some unidentified clue, same goes with Google.

In the year 2015 google launched a search quality evaluator guideline for their human rating team evaluating search result web pages. The guideline gave a brief insight into how Google works and what they look on a web page and how they identify the difference between high-quality web pages and low-quality web pages.

The guideline released by google contains three key points which can easily help you to get an answer from the above questions:

Beneficial Purpose
E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness)
YMYL (Your Money, Your Life)

If you are reading this article then it means the above terms are not new to you, leaving one or two. So, Before getting into in-depth knowledge about the above keys, we would like to draw your attention to why you should analyze the search quality evaluator guideline and how it can help you to grow your business authenticity in Google. Below you will find an in-depth explanation of what is E-AT and YMYL? How you can improve your website E-A-T?

Why is it important to understand the Search Quality Rating Guideline?

Many of you may know that Google crawler decides the rank and quality of the websites and webpages. Yes, that’s true but other than that Google also has a human rating team worldwide who evaluates google search results to check the effectiveness of the algorithm. There are about 10,000 people contracted by google who are working behind to check the algorithm’s effectiveness in recognizing the quality of the web pages.

The human rating team evaluates every search result to ensure the algorithm is displaying the correct and accurate results for the searches. Raters conduct actual search results to evaluate the quality of the page displayed by the Google algorithm.

The Search Quality Rating Guideline released by google gave an idea to most of the marketer and SEO specialists about what is considered as the high-quality webpage and low-quality web page according to the Google crawler.

If you want to succeed in the industry then it is important for you to go beyond on-page and off-page activities. Getting an in-depth idea about how the algorithm works and how the web page quality is evaluated, will not only help you to rank on the top but it also helps you to understand what type of web page and content google wants.

That’s where E-A-T comes in, google always wants to recommend the best search results to their users. Google ensures that all the websites or web pages recommended by them display high-quality expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). The main idea behind deploying E-A-T is Google wants to save their searchers from low-quality content which is based on wrong and hypothetical thoughts that can harm their searchers.

The results (after evaluation) from the human quality rating team helps Google engineers to identify how they can improve the ranking algorithm to provide better search results. This is how it works, firstly the human research team identifies the flaws, and depending on that google makes changes in their algorithm and offers updates to users.

Key to SEO Success: Beneficial Purpose, E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust), YMYL (Your Money, Your Life)

What is E-A-T?

E-A-T stands for three common English words that relate to every person, industry, job profile, and more. E-A-T is created by Google and it stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust, Each word in the E-A-T has got its own importance and displays measures that business should take to be a leader in their fields. E-A-T helps Google in determining the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of a website and its content. (Image Source)

After July 18 update many websites were affected due to the addition of some extra features in the algorithm. And one of the most important additions that google made was reviewing authors E-A-T too. Yes, you read it right now not only your website but the authors E-A-T will also be verified by the quality evaluators.

The update grabbed many marketers and SEO expert’s attention as they have to showcase their page author, their credentials regarding the subject matter. Because now Google is focusing on providing more authentics results to their searchers. So, if you want to outperform your competitor then you have to focus on your website E-A-T as well as your authors E-A-T.

If you have confused th you can crest an author’s box that tells about your author’s expertise in the particular field. You can also link your author’s profile (social media) to make it more effective. Make sure that you are offering a small description to google that tells about your author’s experience and authenticity. To know more about FAQ on EAT you can watch the below video.

Below we will be giving you a clear picture of How those three words in E-A-T can help you to transform your SEO strategies and help you to create an effective SEO strategy.

Expertise:

From the word expertise, you can figure out its basic meaning, a knowledgeable and skillful person in a particular field. If you are offering products and services that you have deep knowledge about then you can be called the subject matter expert in that field. For example Moz, SEMrush is considered the subject matter expert in SEO.

It focuses on the creator of the main content and their expertise in creating and delivering the content. Is your content creator an expert on the topic he/she is delivering?

Many of you may say that yes our main content (MC) creators are experts in creating the content. Even if they are, the main focus is on how they communicate the knowledge to the audience? Are they creating engaging content? Yes, you read it right, you need to have an answer for these questions to prove that you are a subject matter expert in the industry.

Because having knowledge about the particular subject matter is not going to flood your website with heavy organic traffic. Until and unless you know how to create, deliver, and engage your audience.

If you want to showcase expertise in your field then You need to analyze what your audience wants and how you can deliver the information to the audience. By analyzing this step, you can successfully display that your level of knowledge matches or exceeds your competitor’s knowledge. That’s all once google identifies that you are offering content that the user wants and providing in-depth knowledge about the particular topic then google will start considering you as the subject matter expert of that particular topic.

Earlier we have told you that your author’s E-A-T is also going to play a major role in determining your website E-A-T. Recent update Google made some changes and made an exception for everyday expertise. That means Content creators with relevant Experience in particular topics can be considered as an expert. If your industries fall under the non-YMYL category then there is no formal education and training necessary. (Below we have mentioned what is a YMYL and what type of Industries falls under YMYL)
Your expertise is very much dependent on the topic of the page. For example, if a person writes a review about the food industry has “everyday expertise” if he/she loves dining out frequently.

Authoritativeness

Becoming an expert in your niche is the beginning of a new journey. When other influences and experts start mentioning your brand name or your name as a source of information for a particular topic then you are known as the authority in your field.

Your expertise helps search engines in identifying your knowledge and your skill in the particular field and authority gives an idea about how good your website and its contents are and stands apart from other options. Whenever you need health-related advice you reach out to health experts. The same goes for the internet whenever a person needs any information they try to find an authority who can help them in determining the right answers for their questions.

Reaching out to an authority assures that you are getting the right answers. The same goes for google whenever google identifies a website authoritative they place the website on the top so that they can provide the actual and right information to users.

Now you may think about how to become an authority in a particular field or industry? Check below:

When it comes to becoming an authority in a particular field then getting backlinks from an authoritative website will surely help your website in building domain authority and getting ranked in SERP. Remember google always gives preference (top ranking) to websites that hold authority in their subject matter.

There are other factors involved in building authoritativeness but getting endorsed from an authoritative website will surely help you to move one step closer to becoming the authority in the field. Whenever an authoritative website mentions your name or your brand name then it automatically amplifies your authoritativeness in your industry.

Using various tools like Ashrefs, Moz Domain Authority, and more you can identify the domain authority of your website as well as the website mentioning your name or giving backlinks to your website. Determining the domain authority of your website will help you in analyzing what needs to be done to boost your domain authority.

Your content can also help you in identifying your website authoritativeness. If users are sharing your content on their social media channels, emails, and more then it automatically shows that you are getting closer to becoming the authority in the field.

The majestic trust ratio score is also a reliable source that can help you in identifying your website authority and trustworthiness. If your trust ratio is near to 1.0 then it means that you are on the right track.

Your company or brand name also plays a crucial role, if people are searching for your brand name with a relevant keyword then it helps search engines in determining your authority. That’s why brand building is also an important factor that can help you in becoming the authority in your field. An effective SEO strategy with the right SEO team can surely help you to increase your brand awareness.

Trustworthiness

Trust is one of the most basic rules of success. No matter whether you are having offline or online business trustworthiness will always be an essential part of your business. Business offering products or services online need to look into every aspect i.e form getting backlinks from other websites to dealing with unsatisfied customers.

Whether you are building backlinks or assisting your customers, google always keeps an eye on your activity. Backlink plays a crucial role in determining your website’s trustworthiness. Google measures trust based on the links that your website gets for other websites. It acts as a circle, firstly google determines the trustworthiness of a website that is giving you a backlink, and depending on that your website trustworthiness id decided.

Things have changed as it was 5 and 10 years ago, now Google is focusing on building a human-friendly algorithm which means the trustworthiness of a website is decided based on the factors that a real human considers. A real human will always trust a website or person who is constantly proving themselves to be trustworthy. The same factor Google considers.

Customer review also plays an important role in determining your trustworthiness. You need to ensure that your customer is never left unsatisfied as it can directly affect your website’s trustworthiness. Whenever your customer is writing bad reviews about your website instead of ignoring them try to resolve it by providing proper solutions. Google looks into every detail if your website is getting more bad reviews then Google will simply mark your website as a low-quality website.

How to improve website trustworthiness?

Transparency is the key to trustworthiness. If you want to improve your website trust then it is recommended to Provide various communication methods. your customers should know how they can contact you for any problems related to your product.
Showcasing your physical location on your website so that customers can know where your office or store is located. If you are doing SEO of your website then at some point your in-house SEO team or an SEO agency will ask you to determine your location for ranking factor.
If you are handling a transactional website then it is recommended to secure your website by embedding an SSL certificate. Google also gives preference to the website that is https secured.
Instead of hiding, showcase your privacy and policy, you can place it at the bottom so that customers can access the file.
The same goes for the refund and return policy. If you are into e-commerce business then make sure that the customer knows each and every detail about your return policy.
Always determine the specification and safety measures of the product you are selling on your e-commerce platform

Why is E-A-T important for your website?

By now you might be having a clear idea of what is the meaning of E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness). Lest discuss Why E-A-T is important for every website trying to rank on the top in SERP?

As discussed earlier E-A-T helps quality checkers to analyze the value of your web site or page. Whenever a quality checker visits your web page they keep E-A-T in their mind to determine how good and authentic your content and page are for the user and for that particular search term. In simple words, Their main aim is to identify whether they are getting satisfied with online experience or not.

For example, if any of your employees lack expertise, authority, and trustworthiness then you will look for some other alternative who can effectively bring out the best results for your organization. Same goes with Google, Whenever a google search finds the web page lacking expertise, authority, and trustworthiness then they simply shift to some other website and search engine. Google is very much concerned about providing the best and effective search results to its users.

Your website E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) will help you to determine why a user would choose your website or content over your competitors. Google wants to provide the best results to its users so that they don’t shift to some other search engines. If your website lacks in offering E-A-T then it can directly affect your website ranking in the SERP.

Google always wants the best, if your web page fails to satisfy user needs then google will simply promote some other website that is offering better results. If your competitor domain and page provide better results then their website can be promoted on the top.

Your industry also plays a crucial role in determining your ranking. The requirement to deliver high-level content and user experience multiply for some industries. Google uses YMYL to categorize the different types of industries and search terms for specific industries. john muller answered questions about a medical website owner whose website traffic decreased:

What Is YMYL?

Next is an acronym that you might have heard before if you have in-depth knowledge about SEO. YMYL stands for Your Money, Your Life. It is one of the most important terms in SEO that can make and break your online business. Google has categorized a few industries that are considered as YMYL pages. In the 2018 Update google clearly specifies that they will be evaluating authors E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) mainly for the YMYL subjects. Many websites after medic update many saw a rise and fall in their website traffic.

Today if a user needs an answer for any question related to health issues, safety, finance, and more, then they simply reach out to Google to find their answer. To protect users from getting wrong information Google ensures that users are getting the correct advice from the right author and website. That is why Google has come up with the term YMYL under which google reviews each and every detail about the content that falls under the YMYL category.

Google always focused on providing the best customer experience by protecting its users from getting bad advice. For example, if you are facing difficulties in rotation your hand in 360. Then before reaching out to any doctor at least once you’ll surely search on Google to know why it is happening. By mistakenly if you read wrong advice in the search results then there are chances that You can end up damaging your nerve which can cause further more problems. That’s why Google focuses on content related to the user’s wellbeing, finance, and more.

The same goes for finance. If you end up reading the wrong information related to Mortgage then there are chances that you can end up losing a lot of money. If it is related to housing mortgage then you can lose you home just because you found wrong information that you found on Google. Any website producing content related to finance, health, and more are verified properly by the search evaluator.

YMYL categories:

Financial advises -> if your website offering any information related to Investment, tax payment, future retirement planning, any information related to Loan, insurance, banking and webpages that allows user to transfer money to another person account.
Shopping -> website selling products online and having transactional options
News/event information -> web pages that deal with national events, international events, political news, science, technology, and current affairs. If your web pages about sports and entertainment then it doesn’t fall under YMYL.
Healthcare and medical information -> web pages providing information and advising users about medical issues, physical health guidelines, Mental Health medication, illness.
Government and laws -> web pages offering information about Legal advisors, legal rights of a person’s, family, business owners, etc. advise on diverse child adoption child custody, etc.
Other pages -> web pages offering high-risk information on the high-risk decisions or important aspects of people’s lives.

Even if your industry doesn’t fall into the YMYL category, we recommend you to consider YMYL and EAT while crafting content for your website. Considering these SEO techniques will help you to produce High-quality content that can benefit both your audience and your business. No matter how small your business is, following YMYL will not only help you to improve you brand but it will also help you to establish your website and content authenticity.

Beneficial Purpose:

Search quality evaluator guideline was updated in the year 2018 and in 2019 where google was grabbing SEO expert’s attention on something important called beneficial purpose. Google clearly stated that your purpose of the webs page will directly reflect the page quality rating (as shown in the diagram).

Almost every website and web page on the intent have different purposes some are created to help users (beneficial purpose), some are created to make money (pages with little or no efforts to help users) and very few pages are created to harm users. That’s why google highlighted that your page quality rating will totally depend on the purpose of your page.

In the Search quality evaluator guideline, google mentioned that websites and web pages should be created to help users (as shown in the picture). And it should fulfill its purpose. Whether you are creating your web page to educate the audience or to make them laugh you need to be active to fulfill your intended purpose

Google also specified that if a web page only focuses on making money without providing any aid to the user then it will be considered as the low-quality page. So, if you want to succeed in your industry then make sure that your web page is not money-centric.

To make things more clear to their search evaluators google also mentioned that website page quality rating will totally depend on its true purpose. Before assigning the page quality rating, search evaluators should understand the true purpose of the page.Google always focuses on optimizing user experience so do they expect for you the same. Providing want users will automatically help your website to rank on the top in SERP.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to providing the right information to users google ensures that their searchers are getting correct information from authentic websites and authors. Mainly if your searches fall under subjects like medical, health, financial and more. If you want google to recommend your website and content to users then it is important for you to prove your website and content author E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) for that particular subject matter. To protect their users from getting false information Google introduced E-A-T and YMYL (Your Money, Your life)

Following the tips from search and E-A-T framework will not only help you to drive more traffic but google will also start considering your website and content best for its searchers. Proving your website and author E-A-T is not a short term process, you have to focus on consistently in and offering the correct information to the user. Remember your purpose of the page and YMYL also plays a crucial role in determining your website and content success. You can use the above information to cart the right SEO strategy considering (E-A-T and Y-M-Y-L)n for your website and content.

Frequently asked questions:

1. What is a search quality evaluator guideline?

The Search Quality Rating Guideline was released by Google for a quality evaluator who checks the quality of the web page and content depending on website E-A-T. It gave an idea to most of the marketer and SEO specialists about what is considered as the high-quality webpage and low-quality web page according to the Google crawler.

The search quality evaluator guideline released by Google explains various things like :

requirement and task of a search quality rater
Things that are required to evaluate search results
How rater can determine the owner of the website and author of the content
What type of page design and usability can be harmful to users
How rater can identify the web page content ( main content (MC), supplementary content (SC), advertisement/monetization (Ads)
How they can identify the reputation of the website or creator of the main content
What method they can use to identify the E-A-T of the content creator or website?
Comparison between the mobile experience and the desktop experience

2. What is the page quality rating?

Page quality ratio also called PQ is the rating given by the page quality evaluator who identifies the page for the particular search term and evaluates the page content relevance, author/web page expertise, and other factors. All these factors come into picture when the page quality evaluator evaluates your web page to provide the rating and ranking. In 2015 google released a search quality rating guideline which helped SEO experts and marketer is getting insight into how google provides the rank to an and how page quality evaluator evaluates a web page.

3. What are the most important factors of a page quality rating?

If you’re looking to improve page quality rating of your website then it is important for you to identify the factors needed for high-quality rating. In the quality rater guideline, Google has mentioned Five important page quality factors:

The purpose of the page plays an important role in determining the page quality rating. if your web page is failing to showcase its purpose then it will become difficult for the quality evaluator to determine the rating
E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) of the author and the website plays a crucial role in determining the page quality rating.
Your content also helps the quality evaluator in identifying the quality of your page. It totally depends on you what type of content you are posting is relevant to your page or not.
Information about the author and website also falls under the quality rating
Lastly, the reputation of the author and website are important when considering the quality of your web page.

4. What is a Google rater?

A Google ad quality is evaluated manually by the human to the effectiveness of the google algorithm. The human rating team evaluates every search result to ensure the algorithm is displaying the correct and accurate results for the searches. Raters conduct actual search results to evaluate the quality of the page displayed by the Google algorithm.

5. How do I check if Google manually reviewed my website?

If you’re trying to grab the attention of your potential audience through the website then it is important for you to know that Other than Google crawler there’s a human rating team that evaluates your website and content. If you want to know when Google manually reviewed your website then Google Analytics can be the best tool to identify the activity of quality rater. You can check your Google Analytics to analyze quality rater activity on your website. To know more about it you can go to your google analytics dashboard click on behavior then navigate to site content and all pages.

6. What is E-A-T in SEO?

E-A-T stands for three common English words that relate to every person, industry, job profile, and more. It is created by Google and it stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust, Each word in the E-A-T has got its own importance and displays measures that business should take to be a leader in their fields. E-A-T helps Google in determining the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of a website and its content. The main reason why Google focuses on E-A-T is that they want to provide the best results to its users so that they don’t shift to some other search engines for carrying out their searches.

7. What do Search Engine Evaluators Do?

The main job of a quality rater is to evaluate a website and web page de[pening on the google guide to know the E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) of the website and author. Google has a human rating team worldwide who evaluates google search results to check the effectiveness of the algorithm. There are about 10,000 people contracted by google who are working behind to check the algorithm’s effectiveness in recognizing the quality of the web pages. The learning from evaluation helps google engineer to improve the algorithm to provide better results to the user and optimize the user searching experience.

8.What does YMYL mean?

YMYL stands for Your Money, Your Life. It is one of the most important terms in SEO that can make and break your online business. Google has categorized a few industries that are considered as YMYL pages. To protect users from getting wrong information Google ensures that users are getting the correct advice from the right author and website. That is why Google has come up with the term YMYL under which google reviews each and every detail about the content that falls under the YMYL category

9. What are some examples of YMYL?

Below are the categories or you can say examples of YMYL

Financial advice -> website offering any information related to Investment, tax payment, future retirement planning, any information related to Loan, insurance, banking and webpages that allows user to transfer money to another person account.
Shopping -> website selling products online and having transactional options
News/event information -> web pages that deal with national events, international events, political news, science, technology, and current affairs. If your web pages about sports and entertainment then it doesn’t fall under YMYL.
Healthcare and medical information -> web pages providing information and advising users about medical issues, physical health guidelines, Mental Health medication, illness.