While you have likely heard the term “SEO” in relation to your company website, you may not fully understand the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and what you should do to help your website’s rankings on the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). Of course, there are multiple facets to optimizing your website and ranking, today we’re going to discuss Google’s algorithms and the importance of E-A-T and what it means.
Importance of SEO
Basically, SEO is a set of guidelines that can be followed in order to optimize your website for search engines and in turn, improve your search engine rankings. SEO is also a good way to increase the quality of your site by making it faster, easier to navigate, and more user-friendly.
Studies have shown that a majority of internet users are more likely to select one of the top five listings on the SERP. In order to gain as many visitors as possible, your website needs to appear as close to the top as possible. Users also tend to trust websites more that appear in the top positions for the keywords they are searching.
Think about this — SEO can put you ahead of your competition. Having a search engine optimized website means that even if someone is selling the same goods or offering the exact same services as you are, you’re more likely to gain new customers and make more sales than them simply because of where you appear on the SERP.
What is E-A-T?
E-A-T, as it relates to SEO and Google, means a high level of “Expertise, Authoritativeness, & Trustworthiness.” It is the metric by which evaluators rank pages on the SERPS and those sites with a high level of E-A-T are considered high-quality and will have a better rank.
Expertise – You need to be an expert in your field and this means that you need to provide useful and truthful content to your visitors as well as the show the skill of the creator for the Main Content or (MC) and mention it in your content.
Authoritativeness – You need to show that you are an authority or show the authoritativeness of the creator for the MC. You can get achieve this by utilizing expert writers or writing the content yourself and while your credentials are important, so are personal experiences like reviews.
Trustworthiness – You need to show that users can trust the company, the creator of the MC, and the website and content as a whole. Every aspect of your site should make users feel safe and this criterion is especially important for sites that obtain user info, such as credit card info on eCommerce websites. A good starting point is implementing an SSL certificate on your site as it’s one of Google’s many scoring areas.
The website E-A-T has a direct effect on both the company’s reputation as well as the page’s quality level. Google states that in order for websites to be deemed high-quality, they “need enough expertise to be authoritative and trustworthy on their topic.”
According to Google’s guidelines, for sites to be considered high quality they must have the following traits:
- Content is ample enough to satisfy the needs of a user for a page’s unique topic and purpose.
- The page and its associated content is expert, authoritative, and trustworthy for the topic they discuss.
- It has a positive reputation for its page topics.
- Features enough auxiliary information, i.e. About Us/Contact information.
- Features supplementary content (SC) that enhances the user’s enjoyment and experience.
- Is designed in a fashion that promotes functionality in a way that allows users to easily locate the desired information.
- Is maintained and edited frequently.
Easy Updates & Management With WordPress
Maintaining, updating, and editing your website on a regular basis used to be pretty time-consuming, especially for the old hand-coders among us. With WordPress however, those days are pretty much long gone. Providing the ability to edit content real-time and manage your images, logos, and blogs with a few simple clicks, along with affordable WordPress hosting that provides security and peace of mind, it is absolutely no wonder that WordPress is so popular.
Your SEO campaign doesn’t have to be a headache. Learning about the Google algorithms and E-A-T may seem daunting at first glance but as you have seen above, it’s not all that difficult and WordPress can make it even easier. Whether you’re just getting ready to launch your website, you need a fresh start, or you just want a new home for your company website, BionicWP is the one you need. With 90-day off-site backups, daily malware scans, automatic updates, real-time uptime monitoring, and expert WordPress support, we have all the answers you need.