Google EAT Update: What does it mean to the Market!

Posted by Prachi Priya

In today’s digitalized era, every business is online trying to rank itself with the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy. Nevertheless, the recent update by Google shook the web with several updates in algorithms. Google updated its Search Quality Rating Guidelines with E-A-T! These three letters seem to be the biggest buzz these days for the SEO and content writing field.

Well, let’s understand it better:

E-A-T is an acronym for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.

You must be curious to know why everybody is going mad over the update.

It is because the update tells about how Googles’ search engine will now consider “Quality” content. It measures the trust Google should place on a website.

A brief on search quality rating:

Picture Source - Semrush

The web is a vast place where people search for different requirements. Google feels it important to provide authoritative content when a person searches something.

Like when a person hunts for call centre service or maybe lead generation service, he should end up with a diverse set of high-quality result, accessible in a supportive order.

Google understands that people have different enquires and that there is diversity in search results. The ultimate goal of these search results is helping the people, which is why search quality rating is imperative.

The new algorithm understands that when two people search information on “call centre service”, they may be having different objectives. Therefore, the new E-A-T update also talks about defining adequate answers for both users with the help of BERT.

BERT is the acronym for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers that aims to understand what people search in the search bar. It uses a neural network-based method for natural language processing, which makes it easy to give more relevant search results.

Moving forward, Google stresses the following facts:

Aim of search quality rating

With the new E-A-T update, Google will now evaluate your ratings to check your quality around competitors. The user will only get those results that have a good rating and are authoritative.

This is the reason businesses around are buzzing up over their quality content, SEO strategies and bringing in good results to the business ratings.

E.g.: If I search for a continental cuisine restaurant around me, Google translates the audience thought and provides the best around the users’ geographic location.

This result is based on ratings. Consequently, those businesses not having a good rating will fall back in the list.

Consequently, you have to buck up if you need to work on your customer service and quality ratings for your business success!

Ratings to represent peoples’ choice and not personal views

As we are talking about Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, the update says that the algorithms will read ratings that are genuine and are not influenced by personal opinions, spiritual beliefs, or political interpretations.

It suggests businesses use the experience of people in the business locale.

E.g.: If a person buys clothes from your online e-commerce business, and gives positive ratings to your product uploading a picture of the same, it will be considered a genuine rating.

Later, when a person will search any online store for clothes Google displays your business name in the top list along with other e-commerce companies that have the best ratings from customers.

Simple, right!

Browser needs

The update says a business might use whichever browser add-ons or extensions it requires. However, none of these should hamper the user experience of the page.

Extensions that block ads

There are advertisements for needs met rating/page quality rating. Updates suggest that as a business owner, you should avoid add-ons or extensions that block ads.

Ads can change your business results, thus effect your search quality ratings. Earlier interested users landed on your page with different search experiences. However, the E-A-T update changed the way Google search engine looks forward to your services.

How does the E-A-T update make a difference to your marketing strategy?

How does the E-A-T update understand your marketing-strategy

Picture Source - stickyeyes

Google’s machine learning and artificial intelligence technology is now more powerful as it understands the expertise, authority and trustworthiness of a page. Google describes its update in-depth in its quality guidelines.

Although the authority of a page has always been a strong measuring factor, however, business marketers need to be more active to weigh their trustworthiness. After all, Google’s core algorithm has improved and you cannot hide anything!

With the updates, it is obvious that businesses have to be sharp in their services and strategies so that standing against competitors is not a nightmare.

Here is Googles’ take:

This week we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains the same as in March, as we covered here: https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoX
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) August 1, 2018

EAT also makes a difference in content marketing strategies because all it relates to is ranking the page on Google. When the search engine has a different set of guidelines for ranking your webpage, it is important to integrate the same to bring a productive outcome.

Things that you can do to improve E-A-T rating:

Make sure you have the author name and bio for all your content posted.
Check your branding adequately for boosted results.
Edit content that is low in expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Make sure to invest in technical security
Keep a check to offer user-based content.

Along with the E-A-T update, YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) also changes a lot for businesses.

YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) talks about the inaccurate, untruthful and misleading content, which affects the safety, or financial stability of a business. Google in its new algorithm says that anyone who comes up with a bad/wrong information online leads to effecting livelihood, which is not correct. Google also emphasizes the fact that only experts with relevant experience have the authority to write YMYL content.

Here is what YMYL is all about:

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Page

Picture Source - Semrush

Although the YMYL update is to benefit the users, however, some industries like finance, e-commerce, and healthcare claim it to be the reason for their downfall. Their marketers feel that Google is slowly cracking the sites low in reliability and authority (which is good). However, Google has not confirmed anything yet.

Google's Medic update had a big impact on YMYL Page

Picture Source - ignite visibility

The YMYL update states that one needs to have the expertise to write something. There has to be authoritativeness, otherwise, it is a threat to the readers reading the content.

For example: If a person searches anything related to healthcare or maybe the best call centre in India, the updated algorithm aims to give an adequate result to the request.

Google feels that customers need to get adequate answers, as it is important for their life decisions. When it comes to YMYL pages, they are high standard rating pages.