7) Writing with Expertise, Authority, and Trust (OUTDATED)
As discussed before, several best writing practices help ensure content that is valuable for awareness and support.
In this discussion, we will understand how to ensure quality content alongside best writing practices through incorporating expertise, authority, and trust within the content.
Background
The internet is a primary place where users worldwide look for information and support. The topics searched up include those that fall into the health, safety, or financial domains. Consequently, false information or content that has quality problems such as those that violate best practices can be potentially damaging to significant levels thereby negatively impacting a user’s happiness, health, or wealth. To buffer this, the Google algorithm (and Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines) used to display top content pages considers factors that include: Expertise, Authority, and Trust to ensure protection from low-quality content. These factors are commonly known as EAT in short.
As mental health is part of the health domain and is a significant area searched, the EAT factors are vital to consider when developing content.
Since 2018, the EAT factors not only apply to a website’s main content pages but are also considered when reviewing the content creators (i.e. authors).
EAT and How To Incorporate EAT into Website Content:
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Expertise:
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When considering the expertise factor for website content, expertise refers to the extent to which the website or organization is known and has the suitable credentials and any expertise supporting factors such as awards or external recognition.
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Expert Content is Researched Based: consider stepping into the shoes of your audience and perform a keyword research whilst thinking about their needs. Through your keyword research, grasp why the audience has searched for those keywords (topics). Knowing the intent of the topic queried helps you guide content on solutions and helpful information that can not only meet but exceed the user’s needs.
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Expert Content is Comprehensive yet Digestible: Try to ensure your content is simple and has good formatting, avoid confusing structures or things that are too difficult to understand unless you break down and explain difficult concepts.
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Expert Content is Supplementary: After answering the main intent of a searcher’s query or possible needs regarding a content topic, supplement your content by thinking about further supporting/supplementary content that could further enhance and support the topic: this is when back-linking comes in handy! Audit your existing content and identify which of your published pages can be backlinks to the new content piece. Think of what further topics/content pieces can be branched from existing content and include them on your content development agenda.
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Authority
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Authority refers to the ratings the website and its content get on the basis of genuine ratings as well as content relevance.
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Authoritative Content is Cited: External pages rely upon and cite the content as their sources of information. Citations include external back-linking as well as mentions on the news or social media.
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Authoritative Content is Widely Shared: This is where marketing can help boost the content to build authority. Content with authority is regularly and widely shared and mentioned across social media. Engagement efforts can help drive this factor.
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A Wikipedia Page Boosts Authority: A Wikipedia page for the brand, organization, or even people in a company helps boost authority.
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Brand Authority Matters: A signal to authority is when users search your brand name for their content needs.
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Trust
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Trust refers to validity - a website can have validation pages such as an About Us page or other main pages. Trustworthiness is also determined through positive reviews and user support.
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In terms of content, trust can be boosted through the inclusion of an author's biography as well as external sources being cited, especially if they are other authoritative sources.
Feel welcome to share your opinions on each of the EAT factors or ask any questions!
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This post is brought to you by the Content Development and Marketing Program, find out more information about the program here
❤️ Thank you for sharing this helpful information! It really shows how the results are organized and what ensures quality. About the supplementary content (Expertise), it means putting other content's link on your work, inviting the reader to visit it (and add engagement), correct? However, observing how the research influences the expertise is very interesting! I strongly agree with Wikipedia giving authority (I always thought that you are officially renowned the day Wikipedia has a page about you), and seeing its role in the authority of the content is impressive. Additionally, I think trust can be difficult to build, but always is a very important element to consider. ❤️
❤️ Thank you for this informative post! ❤️
@SoulfullyAButterfly
Thank you for this information.
In some way it establishes that quality content gets better ranking, however questionable at time authority can be, and this aspects probably explains the good ranking of some less trustworthy websites.
@WhenTheTimeComes search algorithms are improving with time so now, quality and other factors including these highly matter
@SoulfullyAButterfly EAT is very well explained and it is important to gain article popularity, and these are few amazing tips we can use. Thank you for sharing with us
@SoulfullyAButterfly
I appreciated the breakdown of EAT, I am struggling to write expert yet not overly scholarly content so this was the perfect discussion for me to learn how to ride that line of researched based content but informal readability.
@broadfemmelovelive really glad it has helped you find the needed balance!
@SoulfullyAButterfly
This feels similar to college English where if we have a source we have to find sources that are creditable. News articles can be tricky since they are sometimes opinion based (in some cases) but research articles are something I never thought of in regard to writing. I think the EAT approach is interesting as something you don't hear about in regard to research papers as it relates to content creation.
@SoulfullyAButterfly
Great post, very informative.
@SoulfullyAButterfly Thank you for this thread! It contains a lot of valuable and useful information. I have read over it and will be bookmarking this page on my laptop to come back to it in the near future. I do not have any questions as of now regarding EAT factors but I will definitely come back if and when I need any help or clarification. Thank you.
@SoulfullyAButterflyThank you for thoroughly explaining the EAT factors behind writing a good article.
I found all points helpful, and I can make connections between your post and many articles I've come across so far. I think it is challenging to make content that is comprehensive yet easy to understand, it's a skill that I'm slowly getting better at through practice 😊
For supplementary content, there's a lot of 7 cups sources that I can think of, and for citations, it is certainly helpful to refer to a wide range of sources like journal articles, news, words by professionals, videos, images, etc.
No questions yet, but I'll surely post here or reach out to a CDM mentor in that case 🌻
I'm learning so many new things through this course. I had never heard of EAT, but thinking back, these would all be points I would keep in mind while consuming information from the internet, so it makes complete sense of applying all of this as the source of content!
@SoulfullyAButterfly What a great read! Thanks for sharing! ☺️