How to use Google's E-E-A-T in your marketing strategy

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, otherwise known as EAT. Now, these are the ingredients that make up your SEO buffet, and they’re going to supercharge your SEO efforts if you can nail them. And in today’s podcast, we’re going to feast on some practical tips, some examples, and even our insights into what the E-E-A-T, the EAT acronym, is and how it actually correlates to better rankings for your website online. And I’m going to try to lay off the puns as we go through as well.

Hi, my name is Jordan McFadyen, and welcome to the Marketing Mindset podcast. This podcast is really here to challenge both you and I to really reassess our marketing tactics that we’re using to achieve success within our marketing strategies. I’m going to share some new thoughts and ideas to help you move away from random acts of marketing and really start helping you to succeed with more of a long-term marketing strategy.

In today’s podcast, I’m really wanting to focus on that acronym of EAT, E-E-A-T, and how you can incorporate the EAT principles into your everyday marketing strategy, especially when you think about SEO, search engine optimisation. So, E-E-A-T, EAT. Now, back in the day, this used to be pretty simple. E-A-T, EAT. Made sense. Google then went ahead and decided to add an extra E to it. So I’m guessing now it’s like an EAT, potentially. Who knows?

But E-E-A-T, what it stands for is experience, that’s the new one, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Those are the four core elements. And it’s a really crucial component for local businesses who are looking to enhance their online presence to really nail these core elements. Because what it’s going to do is it’s going to help determine the quality of the content, the quality of your website, which in turn is then going to affect your search engine rankings.

So today, what we want to do is explore how you can actually use an EAT strategy to boost your local SEO. And we’ll share a few examples and ideas. And I think the big thing I want to get across is that if your marketing strategy is focusing on trying to get as many eyeballs and brand awareness and people traffic onto your website, and you’ve identified that Google search is a way to do that, then you really do need to be sitting down and reviewing your website often around whether your website is nailing these four key components of EAT that we’re going to go through here today.

So you can kind of use today’s podcast as a bit of a checklist about what you should be looking for in your website, some of those core components that you need to be focusing on, and hopefully over time as well, you can really start to get that into your head and it just becomes like second nature. So if you’re creating a new website page or creating a new blog or anything like that, it just comes like that second nature of what you need to achieve and what you need to put on that page to make sure that it’s going to hit these core elements that Google’s actually looking for.

So let’s break it down first. The core elements of EAT, E-E-A-T. There’s four of them, obviously. Firstly, experience. You can think of experience as kind of like the “how are we doing” question that you have on your survey. It’s that customer perspective. Now, this is the newest factor of the EAT acronym. And again, it’s looking at the customer’s perspective on how they see your business. Because obviously, sometimes users, they actually want to hear from someone else’s experience as opposed to being told from within the business that we’re the best. Sometimes it’s actually good to hear from other people that you are the best as well.

So that’s where experience comes in. Expertise, that’s going more to within the business. It’s kind of showing some of your skill set or your knowledge from within the business. How you can showcase your expertise. And again, this is really essential to make sure that you can actually provide well-researched and accurate and comprehensive information on your website. This is landing pages, making sure that the website is current, up to date. Blog posts. This is what you’re thinking about with that content creation. This is where you can show that expertise. We’ll go through that in a little bit more detail shortly as well.

Authoritativeness, that’s the A of EAT. And this is about how you build credibility, how you build reputation of the contents that you have on your website. Really thinking about how you can build that authority and focus on getting things like high-quality backlinks, positive user engagement back across to your website.

And then finally, trustworthiness. Simply ask that question, why are you the best? Why should people trust your service or buy your products? And honestly, if we go through each four components, trustworthiness, this is the biggie. This is the one you’ve got to be focusing on. If it’s too overwhelming to focus on all four of these core components, this would be the one that I would suggest that you need to be focusing on.

There’s a whole heap of evidence that supports the values of being able to show trustworthiness. One of the key components is obviously reviews. The reviews element is massive. 98% of consumers, I read the stat, 98% of consumers researching local businesses will occasionally read online reviews about a business. So we’ve got to make sure that you do have reviews there and that they’re good as well, that they’re really honest and that they show exactly your product and your service.

It’s all about trying to think about how you can create a secure, reliable online experience for all your users. With trustworthiness, you’re having a look at how you can make sure your website is safe, how it’s easy to even navigate, provides a satisfying user experience and shows that you are trusted within your marketplace as well.

And if we really step back and piece this all together across those four key components, you’ll start to realise that each individual section that we have really does kind of overlap a little bit, especially if we think about that first one, experience, which is from the customer’s perspective, and then trustworthiness. So let’s think, both experience and trustworthiness does have a big focus on reviews and case studies, and that’s okay that there is a bit of an overlap.

What we need to think about is that the EAT philosophy is really a combination, a combination even, of all the different multi-world tactics that we need to be using and thinking about with our website and with our marketing strategy of how we can accomplish growth for the business across search engines. If we can collectively emphasise and focus on quality and user experience, that’s really the key to all of this, quality and user experience and how we actually portray that online.

So let’s just break this down even further just so you can get a few ideas and just to kind of help you as you kind of build this checklist as well. So starting with that first E, that’s experience. So just a reminder, experience is really emphasising the customer’s perspective about your business. And again, sometimes users are actually wanting to hear from other people that have experienced your business as opposed to you just telling them that you’re great. Sometimes it’s actually nice to have people coming in and affirming and sharing their experience with your business or your product or service.

And obviously, as I said at the start of this podcast, local reviews are the big ones here. Building local reviews is key to sharing a user’s experience. And this will, obviously, I’m going to bring this up again with trustworthiness shortly on the podcast, but local reviews are the big one. This is going to places like Google reviews or Facebook reviews or even Yelp, if that’s where your business kind of fits as well. TripAdvisor, for example, all those different niched review sites as well as the big review sites like Google are really important to showcase and share your expertise and positive customer stories of people who have used your business.

Another good way of kind of sharing experience is even kind of using customer photos and showing proof on your own website from people that you actually work with. So, for example, photos can be used for businesses, let’s say it’s a local renovation company or anything like that, and you take a before and after photo onto your website. So showing an area pre-renovation, showing it after renovation. Obviously, there’s only a few businesses that can use this.

But even customer-generated photos, I know this is big in e-commerce, but actually trying to encourage people to actually take photos of them using the particular product and then leaving a review. It may sound difficult, but there’s actually some really good plugins that you can even help to support this. Even making some workflows that send email reminders to customers after they’ve worked with you or after they’ve bought one of your products to actually do that, and to actually take a photo of them using the product or enjoying their new room if it was a renovation project that you’d done.

Because that type of thing, actually trying to share that tangible photo or video about something is key. And it’s amazing marketing as well. That’s like the gold standard in terms of a customer testimonial.

Then if you think like a service-based business like ourselves, obviously we work in digital marketing, so it’s quite hard to show a physical product being used. But being able to encourage your customers or your clients to even record video testimonials can be really beneficial. We’ll even send a videographer to some of our key clients and actually get them to share stories about how they’ve enjoyed working with us, for example. And that can also be a great way of building that trust and showing that you have customers and that the customers that you are dealing with are really stoked to be working with you or to be using your product or to be experiencing the service that you’re providing as well. So that’s the first one, experience. And again, emphasising the customer’s perspective.

Then if we look at the second E of EAT, it’s enhancing your expertise. So again, if we just recap, expertise is kind of having a look at the knowledge and the skill set from within the business right now. And how we do that is we can share and create high-quality, informative content. This is where we’re thinking around your blog content, really informative white papers or lead magnet downloads, thinking around your landing pages and making sure that they’re up to date, that they share information that is current, that is still relevant to your business and that people can actually get genuine value out of.

Let’s say, for example, you’re a local dentist and you create blog posts or videos on your website that offer things like dental care tips, or that you sit down and explain various procedures and about how you deal with them in a local capacity, and encourage trustworthiness and to show your expertise in that way.

You really need to present yourself as that industry expert. Think about even how you can showcase your credentials across your website, and give yourself a bit of a website audit right now and look to see, do you have certificates presented on your website? Do you have all the awards that you’ve won? Maybe you’ve participated in industry events or you’ve been featured at a local conference or you spoke at a local conference or something like that. This is the type of thing that you need to be putting on your website. And so if you are presenting or working in any of those different fields and you’ve got some expertise in sharing your knowledge to a wider audience, tell everyone about it.

And the other thing there is I see a lot of websites with an awards section or a media section. And honestly, I think that you need to be not having a separate page just for your awards. You need to be showcasing your awards across all your key landing pages. We can’t assume that someone’s just going to go to an awards page to look at your awards. They’re actually going to want to see that as you’re trying to convince them to do business with you in the first place. So think about some of those key landing pages and how can you actually show your expertise on every one of those landing pages, not just on an awards page.

And again, this is where you can share some of those testimonials and reviews that we spoke about with the experience. So really building out those landing pages so that it’s really showing that full roundup of your expertise and also the experience that people have had with your business as well. And obviously what Google’s going to do is it’s going to help prioritise your landing page, hopefully, to be top of those relevant keywords as well. So really, if you can show that expertise.

The other thing I just wanted to share there as well is the About page can also be a great way to share your expertise. Your team page, for example, this is a point that you could put your employees’ bios and their details, their specific skills. These are the people that make up your business, the skills that make up your business. Why are those so special? Why should they be trusted? And that type of thing is also great to show users and also Google that you have a business that is worth trusting and that is worth ranking on Google search as well.

If we continue through the acronym, EAT. So we’ve done E, we’ve done the second E because Google wanted to add in the second E. Now we’re up to the A of EAT, authoritativeness. So refreshing on this is about building that credibility, that reputation of your business and your website. And essentially, this is answering that question about what you’re actually known for in the first place. That’s essentially what authoritativeness is answering.

And the key to showing your authority is really thinking about this more as around earned media. And this is where you’ve actually got to go out and earn different connections from within your industry, within your local business community. So some of the examples you need to be thinking about here, and the big one here is thinking around how you can generate and obtain high-quality backlinks.

So a backlink, firstly, just to go on, is essentially if there’s another website or another business that you deal with or that you collaborate with that think you are so good that they are willing to put your website details and link to your website from their website. And essentially, once that’s showing Google, it’s showing Google that other websites are seeing you as authoritativeness, and Google can see that all these other websites are pointing to you for a particular product or service.

And so as many of those high-quality backlinks that you can get, the better. Now, emphasise high quality because, again, we’ve got to make sure that there are actually websites that are pointing to you that actually relate to what you do, or they actually relate to your product or service or your industry. So make sure it is high-quality links that are coming back to your site.

And then an example of how you can actually use that. So let’s say that you’re a restaurant or anything like that. So what you’d be doing there is you’d be trying to reach out or find industry influencers who, let’s say, wrote a local food blog, or trying to get them to review your restaurant and include a blog on their website talking about how great your food is and linking back to your website. That’s a great example of a high-quality backlink, an earned piece of media that you’ve gone out to actually source and to work with.

Also, collaborations can be really good. So trying to think about how you can collaborate with other businesses from within your industry or within your local business community, and how you can create content that you can each kind of contribute to and link back to your websites.

So an example there is, let’s say you’re going back to that local renovation company that we were talking about before. Maybe you don’t install kitchens, but you want to work with a kitchen installer and think about how you can create a bit of content that is going to show your authoritativeness for both your websites and both your businesses. So how can you collaborate on a piece of content and link out to each other’s websites to kind of show Google that you’ve got industry knowledge, you’ve got industry peers, and people trust you enough to actually recommend you as well?

Because that’s a big thing. If another business or another website is willing to actually recommend you, Google is going to see that and going to say, well, clearly this is a business that is doing good things because they’ve got a lot of websites that are recommending them through the use of high-quality backlinks. And that’s a good way of being able to show your authority within your market.

And then finally, looking at the T of the EAT. And this goes back to our trustworthiness. And as I said at the start, trustworthiness and experience, there’s a lot of overlap there. And well, there’s a lot of overlap between all of these different acronyms. So what you really need to be doing here is answering that question of why are you the best? That’s it. Trustworthiness is the biggie. It is the big one that you need to be focusing on. How can you show that you can be trusted or that people trust you?

And there’s a few different ways that we can do that. We’ve spoken about reviews, getting case studies, testimonials, reviews on Google platforms and Facebook and Yelp and TripAdvisor. That’s one way. Being able to actually show that on your website and amplify that across your website is really key to do that as well.

But then there’s some other things that you should be doing as well. Making sure some of the basics, like that your website’s actually secure, especially if you’re taking payment online, that you’re using an SSL certificate. So that’s HTTPS. You can actually see the lock in the URL. That’s showing that you can be a trustworthy website. That you’re using secure payment methods. That you’re showing users that their payment is going to be secure and using trusted payment gateways. That’s a great way of being able to show that your website’s secure and trustworthy.

The other big one is actually providing really clear and easy-to-find contact info. Google looks at a lot of these things the same way as a new user would look at a website. And this goes back to actually displaying your physical address if you’ve got one. And if not, displaying your contact number that people can reach you straight away. An email address that’s predominantly on your website.

And again, if we think about you as a user, if you went to a website that looks slightly dodgy, it didn’t have any details about how you could contact customer care, or it didn’t have a phone number you could call, it didn’t even have an address, or details about where the business was located, you’re going to think it’s pretty dodgy. And Google does the same, and it thinks it’s dodgy as well.

So I would consider, if you’re looking at your website, think about how you can include some easy-to-find contact information across the site. Consider adding that contact form or an email address on the contact page. Make it really clear about the country that you’re based in or the country that you serve as well. And that’s going to help build up that trustworthiness to both users and also to Google as well.

So in conclusion, if we have a think about EAT, E-E-A-T, it really is having a look at that combination, that combination of all those different tactics that we need to be thinking about to achieve greater success with your Google search strategy. But the big thing, the big emphasis that you just need to be answering yourself each time you’re making a piece of content or you’re reviewing your website or having a look at your page content, is focusing on quality and focusing on user experience.

Those are the two big things that all of EAT really is looking for. It’s looking for quality, user experience, showing that other businesses trust you, other people trust you, that you’ve got a high-quality website that’s got high-quality content, that’s trustworthiness, that it’s got your contact details. All of those things, the basics, is what’s going to help you achieve an EAT strategy from within your business.

And hopefully today’s podcast, you can re-listen to it, go back through it, use it as a bit of a checklist, answer some of the questions that we’ve asked here today around, are you showing your contact details, are you showing client testimonials, are you collaborating with other businesses, do other businesses link to your website? Ask yourself those questions and think about how can we actually do this better, and hopefully in a combination you can actually start to build up and actually generate better search rankings within your local community, your local business community or your industry, using some of the principles that we’ve discussed here today.

If you do have any questions about your Google search strategy, you don’t understand some of the things we’ve spoken about, which is absolutely fine, or the big one that we focus on is you’re not understanding how Google search could fit within your overall marketing strategy. That’s where we can actually sit down and give you a bit of a hand.

So you can head across to our website, donebynine.com. We’ve got a contact page on there. You just answer a really quick few questions just to make sure that we’re the right fit for you and your business. And just like that, we can actually sit down and actually work through your strategy and actually determine whether a Google search strategy is actually what you need right now with your current business and where you’re currently at.

And if you are looking for more tips and ideas on how to use some of the marketing tactics we’ve discussed today, all of our podcasts and our articles and everything can be found on our website, donebynine.com/podcast. You’ll find all of those different resources there. And if you’ve got actually an idea of something you want to hear on the podcast, please feel free to shoot me an email with any podcast topic ideas with jordan@donebynine.com. Just make it really clear in the subject line, “podcast idea”, and chances are I’m going to open it pretty quickly, because I’m always looking for new ideas to be able to share with you on this podcast.

And look, if you can do one thing for us as well, really urge, if you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast, you’ve got a little bit of knowledge out of it, you’ve got an actionable thing you want to take back to your business, look, the best thing you can do for us to show that people are actually listening and enjoying the content is to either hit that follow button or to give us that star rating. It really is the best way to support this podcast, and it means that it allows me to be able to invest more time and to actually creating more content for you as well, to hopefully help you steer you in the right direction in terms of your overall marketing strategy.

But hopefully you’ve learned a little bit from today’s podcast and look, we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Marketing Mindset podcast. Thanks.