Why E-E-A-T is particularly important for companies in the YMYL sector

The quality of websites is very important to Google. After all, the search giant's stated goal is to provide users with only high-quality, trustworthy information that comes from experienced and authorized sources. But how can this be guaranteed?

This is where Google's expanded quality concept comes into play: In addition to expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, the search engine now evaluates the user's experience on a site.

The new version of E-A-T is called E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). In this article, you will learn how to apply this concept to your website to improve the user experience. Because one thing is certain: if you want to rank well on Google, you can't do without a high-quality website.

What is E-E-A-T?

For companies in the YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) space, Google's E-E-A-T quality concept is especially important. After all, these are topics that can have a direct impact on users' health, money, or lives. To ensure that only high-quality, trustworthy information appears in search results, Google has expanded its quality concept to include the "experience" factor.

But what exactly does E-E-A-T mean? The concept consists of the four terms Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust and provides Google's Search Quality Raters with a clear guideline for evaluating search results. Not only the main content (MC) and the supplemental content are evaluated, but also the author, the publisher and the source in general.

What is Your-Money-Your-Life (YMYL)?

YMYL stands for "Your Money Your Life" and refers to websites that can affect people's safety, health, financial stability, or community well-being. YMYL refers to sites that have the potential to impact important areas of users' lives. These sites are particularly challenging because they must meet high standards for the quality, trustworthiness, and authority of their content.

Google evaluates YMYL sites more rigorously than other sites, and expects them to demonstrate a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). Financial, health, legal, or news sites are examples of YMYL sites. These sites must ensure that their content is accurate, up-to-date, and useful, and that it does not contain misleading or harmful information. Otherwise, Google may penalize or even remove them from the index.

Here are the questions you should be asking

Google's Quality Rater Guidelines describe how human quality raters evaluate the quality of web pages. Especially in the YMYL space, evaluating the credibility of a source is essential to protect users from unreliable or harmful information. To ensure that your site provides quality content, you should ask yourself some of the key questions that Quality Guide raters ask when evaluating sites:

• Can users find enough information on your site about the topic they are interested in?

• Does your site provide author pages for individual blog authors to learn more about their biographies?

• Does your site have sufficient security measures in place to protect users' credit card information, if necessary?

• Do you inform users how their information will be used when they provide their e-mail address?

• Does your site contain consistent spelling and grammatical errors? Do users feel they could find the same information on another, more reputable site?

• Would you recommend the site? Would you be willing to bookmark or share the blogs you find with colleagues?

• Does your site appear deceptive with aggressive pop-ups or unexpected content changes? Does your site try to deceive users?

Only by answering these questions and optimizing your site can you ensure that it meets Google's high quality standards and users' expectations.

What should companies consider when optimizing for E-E-A-T?

To optimize the E-E-A-T of a website, there are some tips you should follow:

1. Show your expertise and experience on the topic of your website. Companies should create or have content posted that shows in-depth knowledge of the topic. Content should be current, accurate and useful. Companies should have content created or posted by qualified writers. Authors should make their qualifications and experience clear. Use clear author names and profiles, include references or certificates, and link to other relevant sources.

2. Build your authority and reputation. Get positive reviews and feedback from users and other experts, publish quality content regularly and update as needed, and participate in online communities or forums.

3. Increase your trustworthiness and security. Provide clear contact information and masthead, use a secure HTTPS connection, offer a transparent privacy policy, and avoid misleading or false information.

4. Generate trust. Companies should communicate transparently and honestly with their users. They should provide their contact information, have a privacy policy, and care about the security of their website.

Tip 1: Properly tag content with structured data

Structured data author attribution - if used at all in the source code - looks like this in the simplest case:

{ "@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Max Mustermann"
}

However, the information that is communicated to Google in this way is extremely small. However, you can use structured data to send positive E-E-A-T signals to Google and significantly influence the authority of its authors if you follow these tips for creating and respecting them:

🤟 Step 1: Use the element property "Author".

• always disclose the name of the author(s).

• Use the "jobTitle "and "worksFor" element properties

• Link the author's LinkedIn profile using the "sameAs" element property

• Link the author's profile page by referring to his/her unique @id

• Add the author's expertise with the element properties "worksFor" and "knowsAbout".

The profile should then already send significantly more information and expertise to Google:

{

"@context": "http://schema.org",

"@type": "Person",

"name": "Max Mustermann",

"url": "https://www.example.com/experts/max-mustermann",

"image": "https://www.example.com/images/max-mustermann.jpg",

"sameAs": [

"https://www.facebook.com/max-mustermann",

"https://www.twitter.com/max-mustermann",

"https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-mustermann-123456789"

],

"jobTitle": "Finanzexperte",

"worksFor": {

"@type": "Organization",

"name": "Finanzberatung AG",

"url": "https://www.example.com/companies/finanzberatung-ag"

},

"knowsAbout": {

"@type": "Thing",

"name": "Hedgefonds",

"sameAs": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q103849"

}

}

🖖 Step 2: Use Element Property "reviewedBy"

• disclose each person involved in the editing and review process

  use the "jobTitle" and "worksFor" element properties for this purpose

  use the "knowsAbout" element property and associate it with Wikidata

  Link their LinkedIn profile with the "sameAs" element property

This sends a clear, positive E-A-T signal to Google. Every editor and reviewer adds credibility to published content, and you don't even have to display that information in the browser. Accordingly, the ideal author markup looks like this:

{

"@context": "http://schema.org",

"@type": "Person",

"name": "Max Mustermann",

"url": "https://www.example.com/experts/max-mustermann",

"image": "https://www.example.com/images/max-mustermann.jpg",

"sameAs": [

"https://www.facebook.com/max-mustermann",

"https://www.twitter.com/max-mustermann",

"https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-mustermann-123456789"

],

"jobTitle": "Finanzexperte",

"worksFor": {

"@type": "Organization",

"name": "Finanzberatung AG",

"url": "https://www.example.com/companies/finanzberatung-ag"

},

"knowsAbout": {

"@type": "Thing",

"name": "Hedgefonds",

"sameAs": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q103849"

},

"reviewedBy": {

"@type": "Person",

"name": "Anna Schmidt",

"jobTitle": "Finanzexpertin",

"worksFor": {

"@type": "Organization",

"name": "Finanzberatung AG",

"url": "https://www.example.com/companies/finanzberatung-ag"

},

"sameAs": [

"https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-schmidt-123456789"

],

"knowsAbout": {

"@type": "Thing",

"name": "Rentenfonds",

"sameAs": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q384308"

}

}

}

Tip 2: Easily test content on E-A-T yourself using scripts and AI

Harness the power of Google App Scripts and ChatGPT's advanced AI to analyze the potential of existing content. Let the AI be a true Google Quality Guide Rater and evaluate your content and uncover improvements. And here's how to perform an E-E-A-T / YMYL audit of your content:

• Open a new document in Google Sheets, select EXTENSIONS > APPLICATION SCRIPTS

• Copy and paste the following script and save it

Htmlconst SECRET_KEY = "PUT-YOUR-API-KEY-HERE";

Htmlconst MAX_TOKENS = 1000

Htmlconst GPT_MODEL = "text-davinci-003"

Html

Htmlfunction generateOpenAIRequest(prompt, temperature = 0.7, model = GPT_MODEL) {

Html  const url = "https://api[.]openai[.]com/v1/completions";

Html  const payload = {

Html    model: model,

Html    prompt: prompt,

Html    temperature: temperature,

Html    max_tokens: MAX_TOKENS,

Html  };

Html  const options = {

Html    contentType: "application/json",

Html    headers: { Authorization: "Bearer " + SECRET_KEY },

Html    payload: JSON.stringify(payload),

Html  };

Html  const res = JSON.parse(UrlFetchApp.fetch(url, options).getContentText());

Html  return res.choices[0].text.trim();

Html}

• Get a free API key for chatGPT and replace PUT-YOUR-API-KEY-HERE in the script - remove the parentheses around the api[.]openai[.]com portion of the script

• Save and insert the following text in cell A1:

I would like you to audit content for me based on a URL I specify below. I would like you to audit content as if you were a Google Quality Rater following the rules set out by Google (which you can see here https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/12/google-raters-guidelines-e-e-a-t) in respect of E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority and trust) - I would also like you to consider YMYL (your money your life where applicable) and Google medic factors also depending on the content type and nature. I would like you to provide a content quality rating based on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is best and 0 is worst. You should take into consideration - how well the content is written, how well it aligns with Google's E-E-A-T guidelines for human quality raters, how well structured the content is, if it makes it clear what is on offer, is it gramatically correct and well written and does it fit the end users intent when comparing the main H1 tag to the body of the content. You should provide clear, actionable recommendations for any areas where the content has an issue as well as guidance to bolster expertise and trust where applicable. You should not self reference and should avoid making any assumptions, the content for you to audit can be found here:

• In cell B1, type the URL you want to check.

• In cell C1, type =CONCATENATE(A1,B1).

• In cell A3, call the =generateOpenAIRequest(C1) function.

• Get the results and start the optimization.

Conclusion

If you want to rank well on Google, you can't avoid having a high-quality website, especially in the area of YMYL pages. Google's E-E-A-T quality concept gives businesses clear guidance on how to present high-quality, trustworthy information on their websites. By following these tips for content creation and author and content attribution, you can get a lot closer to your goal of a well-ranked site.