did you know that Google actually publishes his own guide to SEO Yep this 176 Page Long set of guidelines is used to help Google tune its search algorithms so you might be thinking well what's the help of Savvy marketer reverse engineer this guide apply it to their own website and profit yeah right let's do it now all right first up what is this magical Dock and why does Google publish it well Google maintains a team of search quality raters these people's job is to analyze potential improvements to Google search ranking algorithm and rate the results they do this by reviewing the websites that come up for different searches and rating them against a number of criteria these ratings are then used by Google to assess any potential change in their ranking algorithms this book this is their guide this tells those search quality raters what a good quality website looks like I. E the sort of thing Google wants to reward and also what a bad quality website is I. E the sorts of thing Google wants to avoid like the plague or like attribution in St featured Snippets LOL SEO jokes and in fact Google gives a very specific definitions and examples of both low quality and high quality websites so what we marketers need to do is look at those criteria and make sure that our website matches them now some of these criteria are really obvious they're painfully dull things like making sure that your MC or main content is good quality or making sure your page isn't covered with distracting ads making sure you're not just copying your content from other sources but one thing that keeps coming up in this guide is this concept of eeat eeat is how Google defines trustworthiness and it's what it wants to see in every website result that ranks well and eeat stands for experience expertise authoritativeness and trust and they even have this Venn diagram to show how it works so let's go through each of these in turn and think about how we might apply them to our website starting off with experience now Google added experience to its search quality rater guidelines fairly recently in December 2022.
before then eeat was just simply eat which was loads easier to say so what does experience mean and how do we use it to rank better well experience means having first-hand or life experience for the topic that you are writing about for example if I tell you that this is a great pen and it feels really nice in your hand it's nicely weighted it lasts for ages and the writes really smoothly you might believe me because I have direct experience of this pen whereas if I tell you how amazing it is to give birth you may rightly be skeptical because I have absolutely no experience of doing that as my wife reminds me frequently in the search quality rater guidelines experiences talks about a lot in the context of product reviews for example a website lacking eeat might be a restaurant review written by someone who has never eaten at the restaurant whereas a website that satisfies ee80 might include original pictures and videos from the Creator that demonstrates their first hand unique experience okay so what does this look like in practice well if we do a search for something like best running shoes for overpronation we noticed that the top ranking organic result in the UK is this one here runnersworld. com now on the surface of it this article looks like a pretty sort of standard affiliate thing where all they're interested in is linking you out to the shoes so that you can go and buy it so they can earn their affiliate commission but actually once you dig a little little bit deeper you realize that this is a really interesting article that's taking a new angle so if we go down to the reviews themselves you'll notice that how they formatted these is they've given each of these shoes to some testers they then write about the testers experience of these shoes this is great and this is exactly the sort of thing that Google wants to reward in eeat but it's also great from a user's perspective because this gives their recommendations way more credibility and increases the chance that I'm going to click on one of these links and buy one of the recommended shoes because I can tell that these recommendations are coming from someone who's actually done this thing before now I'm not saying that this content is ranking purely because of the experience element because this is actually something that is incredibly inconsistent across Google search results for example here is the website this ranking position two for that search and it demonstrates absolutely no first-hand experience whatsoever this is a much more generic article that is clearly just here to get the clicks and get that affiliate commission and I'll be honest it can be quite difficult to find searches that seem to be rewarding the type of direct experience Google claims to want to reward in its search quality rater guidelines so does this mean we can ignore the first e in e80 or even the whole thing altogether not quite and here's why remember Google search quality raters are using this guide to rate search results to help Google fine-tune its ranking algorithms experience is a relatively new component of this it's only really been out at this point for about six months so it's entirely plausible that it takes time for the principles in this guide to filter their way through various different tests and evolutions of the ranking algorithms into the results that we see remember though this is the direction that Google wants its search results to go in so like a hockey player that's moving where the puck is about to land that's what we need to do with our marketing we need to make sure we're on the right side of these guidelines so that when Google's ranking algorithms do catch up we are being rewarded okay so that's experience let's talk about expertise if we do a search for how to pass a job interview you'll notice that all of the websites ranking for this topic have expertise in this topic we have indeed they are a job site so lots of expertise around job interviews we have University of North Georgia the careers section again lots of expertise around job interviews we have wikiHow now wikiHow is a fairly generalist site but if you click on the article you'll notice it's actually written by a career coach with lots of expertise and interviews and this is something that you might notice across lots of different search results it's very difficult to find not just a page that lacks expertise on the topic it's ranking for but actually a website where the business owner or the website owner is not known as an expert in this field this wasn't always the case when I started SEO back in 2010 you could get ranking for pretty much whatever you wanted regardless of whether you had any legitimate expertise in the topic at all okay so how do we demonstrate straight expertise in order to give our sites the best chance of ranking possible well one thing that we can do is look to one of the most heavily policed areas of the internet on search and that is your money or your life topics these are topics typically financial and health related where the penalty for getting the wrong information can be very costly and Google has higher standards for your money or your live topics than it does for regular search results so it stands to reason that if we can obey the principles that the top your money or your life sites are applying then we're gonna be okay here's a site called very well mind and they are publishing medical information in this case about attention headache now we've got accredited author here with their byline and a bit of biography about them now whilst they're a therapist a mental health writer they may not have the full medical qualifications needed for a topic like this so very well mined has also added a medically reviewed tag with a description of what that means and a certified medical professional who has reviewed this information so does the writer of this article have a lot of expertise on the topic absolutely another way of demonstrating expertise is linking out to your sources so for example if we search for is social media addictive and we click on the top result you'll notice that this is a very well researched piece now how do we know it's very well researched well it's linking to all of its sources it's citing scientific studies it's citing experts and importantly when it does it's linking to the source of that information that would be a great idea but let's contrast this with this website which is actually cited as a specifically bad example in the search quality rater guidelines out this is symptoms of dehydration. com and the search quality writer guidelines say that this is an untrustworthy article because we don't know who wrote this we don't know what their credentials or credibility is we don't know what their motivation is all of the links seem to be internal I.
