All Eyes on You: Validating Your EEAT Authoritativeness for Google

Google EEAT Authoritativeness guidelines involve different website requirements to help you rank higher on Google searches. While expertise involves proving that you’re an industry expert and experience focuses on creating a solid website journey, authoritativeness is dependent on others recognizing you as an expert. It’s easy to claim that you’re the best HVAC company in town, but it means much more if there are others to back up your claims, and not just from testimonials. 

The third step to creating the perfect, SEO-friendly website requires you to create a website that is packed with authority, from domain authority from third-party websites, page authority, links, and citations. You are trying to create a brand that is recognized by people outside your business and that helps prove you know what you’re talking about. 

What Are Google’s EEAT Authoritativeness Guidelines and How Do They Affect My Site?

In March 2024, a Google core update was launched that changed how Google assesses the SEO effectiveness of websites. This was the EEAT guidelines, where EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Experience refers to the user journey from start to finish, expertise relates to how you portray yourself and your business as experts in the industry, and authoritativeness is your overall authority. Authority in this case relates to other entities, usually third-party aggregators or experts, recognizing you as an industry expert. 

There are a few ways that you can be highlighted as proficient in your field beyond word of mouth or testimonials, though these are both good for local SEO and credibility. 

Expertise vs. Authority 

Knowledge and recognized influence are not the same metrics. While they are similar, proof of your expertise and others proving your credibility are different enough to warrant different EEAT metrics. Your expertise is something established by you, but your EEAT Authoritativeness is something defined by others. Google measures your authority through expert recognition, such as accreditation, along with historical trust if you’ve been around long enough and third-party endorsement like backlinks. 

Determining Domain and Page Authority

When aggregate sites assess a website, your rank is typically based on how reliable you are as a source of information. This can be proven through the amount of other sites that backlink to you, how likely your site comes up in search results, and the number and quality of links on each of your pages. 

Domain authority is a metric that predicts how likely a web page ranks on search engine results based on a variety of factors. Similar to Google EEAT Authoritativeness, the number and quality of links directly affects how your website is ranked in domain authority. Similarly, page authority is a metric that measures the strength of individual pages on your domain. The more those pages are backlinks to other sites or even on your own, the higher their page authority score. Combining page domain metrics into an average is part of the process towards creating an overall domain authority. 

Online tools like SEMrush or Moz give you a numerical representation of your domain and page authority to help you assess where you stand and where you could improve. These tools calculate how many backlinks exist for your site across your domain and the internet, how reputable those sites are, and combine these elements to create your domain authority score. 

Not Everything Has to Be Linked

Backlinks make up the backbone of your EEAT Authoritativeness score, but they aren’t the only way to create authority. If your business is mentioned by someone in an article, this is considered a form of authority. They don’t even need to link back to your site for it to count on Google’s algorithm. 

Google’s impression of you is surprisingly easy to change, it just requires some legwork on your part. If a well-known, well-ranking news site, website, blog, or other online resource mentions your brand, someone in your organization and their affiliation, or information about your physical location like contact information, this is considered recognition of expertise and authority by Google. If they link to you, that’s just as good if not better, but it isn’t necessary to generate a good authority score. 

Give People a Reason to Come to Your Site

Building authority is building credibility. People need to have a strong reason to return to your website as a search result and through backlinks. This is easiest to accomplish by following EEAT guidelines. Experience is achieved through crafting a cohesive, complete website journey. If someone follows a backlink to your website, you want them to understand the layout and find what they need without the first thought being “now what?” 

Expertise is similar to authority but covers how you portray your credibility in the industry. People that end up on your website want to be assured in some way that you know what you’re talking about, have the credibility or credentials to back it up, and have enough information to sate their interests. Combining experience and expertise creates a website that people want to visit and spend time on, It has the information they’re looking for and is visually appealing enough to hold their attention. Combine this with SEO and trustworthiness and you have a recipe for SEO and EEAT success. 

Having Your Cake and EEAT-ing It Too

Some businesses may struggle with creating an effective EEAT-focused website, and that’s understandable. There are multiple elements that compose your site’s EEAT metrics and while you may be an expert in your industry, being a website and marketing expert is a bit different. That’s where a marketing professional like GROW Marketing Agency comes in. 

We help you follow SEO and EEAT guidelines to create or maintain a website that Google approves of and recommends to others. GROW creates effective websites that cover all of the EEAT parameters including backlinks, user experience, and domain authority adjustments. While credibility is something you need to prove, we help display it prominently and professionally. EEAT SEO may be difficult to wrap your head around, but GROW helps you create a website that Google will make sure nobody misses.