SEO: What’s EEAT, and why should I care?

For a long time, I avoided addressing EAT (now EEAT) in my SEO training. It’s a slightly geeky concept, which is used in professional SEO circles to try to explain what sort of core quality signals Google is using to assess your site over time. It’s made up of factors that Google deems important to user experience, and which it will use to determine whether you rank well for particular topics or not.

However, I’ve had journalists start to actively ask me about it, so here’s a short layperson’s guide to the four main factors that impact the search engine’s sense of your quality:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

The latter three have been in play for some time. Expertise is relatively new. Some of them are more selectively applied than others. For example, Experience and Expertise are selectively applied to different types of content:

• Experience: reviews, travel guides, how-tos
• Expertise: explainers, analysis, how-tos

The other two are more general signals indicating how good your site is, against Google’s rating guidelines.

Experience