In this article, we will learn how SEO works, what Google’s concept of E-E-A-T is and how you can adopt it to your website to rank higher on Google.
Related: Learning SEO in Kenya
What is SEO in digital marketing?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a component of digital marketing and is defined as the process of enhancing and optimizing your website through both technical and non-technical ways to ensure it ranks high on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
When your website is among the first results on Google, this gives you a great opportunity to increase your brand awareness, get leads and generate more sales.
Related: 3 types of Search Engine Optimization techniques that your website needs to rank high on Google.
When you search for something, Google crawls its index “database” of all the webpages it has, using software programs known as spiders.
For example, when you search the word Jeder Agency, the software program searches its index of all available web pages that have the keywords, which in this case is Jeder Agency. The pages that Google finds with these keywords are probably in the hundreds of billions. So how then do they know what to show you?
Google asks over 200 hundred questions to answer this question. These questions can be grouped into 3 main classifications: Relevance, Authority, and Quality.
Related: SEO Link building in Kenya
Relevance
This tries to provide the search results that best suit your keywords. It checks webpages with those keywords, the number of times the keywords have been used. So, when you search Jeder Agency, Google will not provide you with the results of the best coffee in town.
Authority
This tries to answer the question of the authority of the web pages. The founders of Google, Larry Page and developed an algorithm that determined how a page ranked based on how many links (whether internal or external links) are pointed toward this page and what type of links they are (whether they are links from websites that are trusted). This is known as link building.
Quality
This factor looks at the type of content you have, whether it’s up to date, and how your website pages have been structured.
Google then combines these factors to provide an overall score and provide you with the best possible and most relevant results.
Fun fact: All this takes about half a second!
What is E-E-A-T?
EEAT is a Google quality rater guideline that measures the quality of a webpage. This is more or less the updated version of the 3 pillars above.
It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
Google wants you to demonstrate these 4 metrics so that they can reward your website with better rankings.
Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?
Let me put it this way. Search Engine Optimization can be summarized by ensuring you follow the EEAT guideline. So, yes. This affects your website rank big time!
So how can we demonstrate each metric? Let’s have a look.
Experience in E-E-A-T
When it comes to experience, Google wants users and businesses with first-hand information on using a product or service.
The main difference between experience and expertise is that experience focuses on the duration of doing something.
Therefore, I need to showcase that I have been implementing and talking about SEO strategies for a considerable amount of time.
Expertise in E-E-A-T
Let us give an example.
If I run a car auto website and I talk about recipes, what are the chances you will take me seriously? Quite low.
Therefore, Google is looking for publishers, authors or websites that have knowledge or skill of the topic they are talking about
Authority in E-E-A-T
When it comes to authority, you need to be one of the go-to sources when it comes to that topic.
What’s the best way to achieve this? By building links and having a strong online presence where people are sharing your content, talking about your expertise and more.
Trustworthiness in E-E-A-T
For Trustworthiness, your content needs to be accurate.
Apart from that, users need to have given positive reviews on your service, product and content.
Therefore, ensure you double check content before publishing to ensure it is factual as well as request reviews from past customers and clients.
EEAT can be summarized using the video below.
You can check out the update on Google’s developer page on EEAT.
