How a Los Angeles SEO Service Can Help Boost Your E-A-T
Managing your website calls for a thorough and attentive approach. The design and layout of your site, as well as the content it hosts, require occasional updating and refreshing to improve your search engine optimization (SEO). While Google and other search engines are somewhat evasive about the exact metrics and information they use when ranking pages, you can sense, to a certain degree, what they are likely looking at. Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (think of these qualities as the acronym “EAT”) are important attributes for your site, and a Los Angeles SEO service can help you improve in all of these areas.
Understanding “Your Money or Your Life” Pages
Google is known for using complex algorithms and ever-evolving criteria for categorizing and ranking sites on its search engine results pages (SERPs). One phrase that they utilize, “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL), has gained attention lately as it can cover a broad swath of important content.
Google deems pages that feature relevant content about a user’s health, financial stability, or future happiness to be YMYL. The search engine holds these pages to a more rigorous standard than other content, as it holds specific value for potential searchers. Understanding the specifics of YMYL topics can be key to maintaining your site’s dynamic SEO strategy.
Page raters working for Google–the individuals tasked with assigning page quality scores–are instructed to hold pages that can impact a user’s life to a particularly high standard. A part of this rating process is to look closely at a site’s EAT qualities.
Strengthening the E-A-T of Your Website
Terms like expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness can sound confusingly vague. How you measure your content against these terms will largely depend upon the industry that you are catering to. While these qualities combine to give your site a degree of authenticity, there are no specific numbers or metrics that are used by Google to make an assessment.
Instead, Google combs other information around the internet when determining your site’s EAT value (e.g., backlinking). Thanks to some documents that have been made publicly available, we do know a little bit about just what Google is looking for.
If a page offers medical information, page raters are instructed to look for content written or composed by accredited medical professionals. For news articles, content with high journalistic standards, citing reputable sources, is also held in higher esteem. Pages that offer financial advice must also show a level of expertise on top of being consistently updated to stay aligned with market fluctuations. Websites that are about hobbies, like sports or music, should also host content created by authors that are knowledgeable in those areas.
Even non-YMYL pages can benefit from employing EAT principles. If, for example, you operate an e-commerce website, you want users to trust what you are offering. Studies show that an effective way for online retailers to convey trustworthiness is by having strong reviews. You can encourage this by making it easy for users to give you feedback–include links in your emails to your customers, or find unique ways to incentivize reviews.
So, how can you put this into practice? One effective avenue for EAT-rich content is to use authors who feature expertise in the subjects they are writing about. Think doctors or financial advisors. Additionally, strengthening the online reputation of your own brand will increase your authority. This can be accomplished by having strong Google or Yelp reviews. Links that cite your page in other articles can also be of great value. This works the other way as well–make sure you are citing quality sources in your own articles.
A Los Angeles SEO Service Can Assist with Your Site
Staying on top of SEO trends requires a near-constant vigilance. Google is famously known for changing its algorithms and standards on a frequent basis. While this can be somewhat of a headache for content managers, it does make sense, as industries and the content that is relevant to them, are always changing.
Even if you put a steady amount of work into your site, generating new content regularly and employing expert content writers, your site’s SEO deserves specialized attention. A Los Angeles SEO Service can give your site the focus and strategy that it needs to climb Google’s rankings.
