How To Write and Review EEAT SEO Content in 2024
If you’re struggling to write content that ranks well on Google, you aren’t alone. Business owners, content creators, and marketers often face this challenge. They struggle to find a starting point for writing content that not only meets Google’s high standards but also ranks well in SERPs, and drive conversions. For years, SEO techniques have been designed for search engines, rather than users. However, the SEO landscape has been changing, with algorithm updates, innovative AI, and SERP feature updates / changes. This has led to a shift in the industry and the need to reassess strategies to align with Google’s request for user-first content; accessible and helpful.
At Varn, we take a holistic approach taking into account the wider aspects of technical SEO, AI-driven analytics and content optimisation, that align with the latest user experience principles. This helps to guide our clients through an ever-evolving and increasingly complex digital landscape.
Google’s E-E-A-T Principle is a cornerstone in raising your website’s SERP profile and rising through the ranking to the first position. By producing consistent useful and helpful content, a steady stream of traffic and conversions will follow. This article outlines the techniques to write quality content that both users and search engines value and ensuring you are writing with E-E-A-T at the core of your content strategy.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. E-E-A-T content should be part of any long-term SEO strategy to boost your website’s credibility and ranking. These guidelines are used by Google’s algorithms to help to evaluate the quality of the content on websites and in 2022 Google announced they were adding an extra E to the original EAT Guidelines.
So what does EEAT stand for?
This refers to the first-hand or personal experience of the content creator.
This identifies the creator’s knowledge and skill in the subject matter.
Assesses the credibility and recognition of the creator or website.
This evaluates the reliability and integrity of the content.
You may be thinking, what does all of this actually mean? In short, it means creating helpful and people-centric content.
E-E-A-T factors help to keep high-quality, reliable and relevant information available to users on the SERP. A content strategy that keeps ahead of keyword opportunities, utilises cross-functional teams, and produces organic content ensures your website’s content matches the high quality that Google is looking for. It’s also important to update existing content with contemporary research and updates so that this becomes evergreen content. Evergreen content refers to high-quality, valuable content that is relevant and useful to readers over a long period of time and unlike news articles or trend-based content that can quickly become outdated, evergreen content is designed to provide long-term value, attract ongoing traffic and continually engage audiences.
Organic SEO-first content is something we specialise in at Varn, whether for our client’s on-page content, blogs and product landing pages, through to off-page data-driven articles, guest blogs or PPC landing pages.
When creating or updating content for your website, we recommend you incorporate the elements explored below, into your overall SEO strategy to match E-E-A-T guidelines. Ultimately it’s about ensuring your content is as attractive as possible for the search engines to find, understand and rank.
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness can be shown in various ways. For example, you can include detailed author bios on your website when someone writes and shares an article demonstrating your expertise. It’s vital to produce high-quality and well-researched content, cite credible sources and engage with the industry.
Social-proof your content with reviews or client testimonials, accreditations or awards you’ve achieved. Help the reader understand why they should listen to you. If you don’t have credentials to be speaking about a certain topic, be sure to collaborate with someone who does. Industry partners, influencers, and expert quotes featured in your content will help you to create user-first E-E-A-T content.
Include a brief section about your business, explaining your expertise, the areas you serve, and the scope of your services. Why should people listen to you? Remind users why they should choose you for a service or trust your advice on a subject. A ‘Why choose Us?’ section or a succinct ‘About Us’ that mentions the years you’ve been in business, and partners you have worked with, will help to position yourself as a credible expert.
An internal link is the hyperlink on your website that takes the user to another page within your website. Contextual internal linking extends the user journey and helps search engines understand your website’s hierarchy structure and the importance of content. It doesn’t just add SEO value, it also aligns with improved user experience and conversion. Internal links add context to the relationship between pages in your website and shares page authority to important pages. Before diving into creating an internal linking strategy, make sure you understand why internal linking is important.
Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. Rather than using generic phrases like “click here”, use descriptive anchor text that aligns with your destination page’s keyword mapping strategy. Build on a page’s keyword authority with descriptive anchor text. This will help users and search engines understand your content’s purpose.
You can align the anchor text with keywords informed by Google’s perception of keyword authority for a page with Google Search Console. If you haven’t set up Google Search Console, take a look below at these helpful tips.
Make sure your call to actions (CTAs) for a page match the page’s intent. If you’re unsure of a user’s intent, understanding search keyword intent will help. Use CTAs to encourage users to take specific actions, they can be particularly effective at the end of your introduction and content. If in doubt, prompt users with your company’s credentials and offer to get in touch or speak to experts.
It’s vital to think of the user journey, so for example, if you have a blog about the benefits of a service or product, you would expect to see the service or the product page linked. Understand where in the marketing funnel your user is, if they are looking at a blog that is an introduction to a product or service, then they have just started their journey. Therefore you can make them aware of problems with the solutions that you offer, speaking to their pain points, challenges and desires. To do this effectively, you will need to know your audience inside out.
Focus on high-quality, informative content. You and your team are experts, real people with a breadth of valuable first-hand experience that people want to learn from. Your team’s first-hand experiences are invaluable. They match the Experience part of the E-E-A-T guidelines. Share them to create authentic, informative content.
Here are some helpful tips how to write user first E-E-A-T content:
Write for your audience first, then tweak and structure for SEO. Google is discouraging SEOs from writing content just for search engines. And rightly so, we’ve all clicked on a result in the SERP and been met with AI-generated nonsense. Google asks us to provide ‘Helpful, Reliable, People-First content.’ The days of writing content based on search volume alone are over. Search engines are now flooded with AI content – Google struggles to find the most helpful content to rank. In this new age of SEO, business owners, experts and SEOs must work together to find a middle ground, that is both helpful for users and optimised correctly for the search engines.
Work with a marketing/ SEO expert to perform user research. This should consist of understanding pain points, desires and the audience’s buying journey. For example, in the decision stage of the buying journey, we need to catch users when they are in the consideration stage of that journey. So think about your blog content, and capture solutions to help solve their pain points, queries, worries, wants, and needs. It’s vital to capture your audience’s attention by writing content that resonates with their experiences and aspirations.
Reflect on the next steps you want users to take and use internal links to support their decision-making process. Think about what makes sense for them, and explore this around aligning the actions you want taken which are based on your business goals and the user journey you want them to experience? Is it a brochure download, to get in contact or book an appointment?
You can use existing data from Google Analytics to help inform your decision making. The GA4 Page Path explorer can tell you which blog pages were part of the converting/purchasing users’ journey. Use this information to guide your internal linking, and take your user on a journey through the buying funnel. You can take this a step further with natural placements where a related topic is introduced. It’s important to remember that there is no need to add links for the sake of it, it must be natural, and these links need to add value.
It’s vital to ensure your content is accessible and engaging. One element to consider is the readability of your content or article on a desktop, compared to when people may be scanning the content when using a mobile. Additionally without good content structure, even the most insightful/helpful information can be dismissed as untrustworthy or irrelevant by search engines.
Structuring E-E-A-T content with keyword-rich headings doesn’t just have SEO value, it also improves user experience. These headings make it easier for users to navigate the content, find the information they need and hence perceive the content as authoritative and trustworthy. Clear, relevant headings also help the search engines understand the content’s topic, making it more discoverable and likely to rank higher.
Eye tracking research can be used to help understand how users interact with headings on webpages, revealing their role in capturing initial attention and guiding navigation. This data informs effective design decisions to enhance readability, user engagement plus overall user experience. Eye-tracking research studies found that when people read on the web, their approach depends on what they are doing, what they expect based on their past internet use, how the page looks, and the type of content it has, like text or pictures.
The most common scanning patterns are:
The F theory – where the user will mainly look on the left side of the webpage and examine the top of the page.
Spotted pattern – where the user will jump around to the most interesting spots – often influenced by effective website design and UX.
The layer-cake pattern – where the user will focus on headings and subheadings as they act as signposts for information.
Incorporating FAQ sections into a website’s content strategy aligns well with E-E-A-T principles, as this helps to create content that is not only informative and reliable but also highly valued by both users and search engines. You can use Google Search Console, to help you uncover long-tail keyword opportunities to feed into your FAQs.
If you want to find FAQ opportunities in Search Console you can do the following;
Don’t forget to structure your FAQ content to appear as snippets in search results with schema mark up optimisation, to help increase click-through rates.
On a final note, user-first content that adheres to E-E-A-T principles isn’t just about chasing low-hanging fruit or seeking quick wins. It’s about building a foundation of trust and authority for your brand and business that will continuously fuel organic search growth over the long term.
Still not sure where to start? Our team of innovative SEO experts can support you to develop a robust E-E-A-T content strategy that will drive traffic and conversions. Contact our expert SEO team to discuss your E-E-A-T challenges, we would love to help.
Varn is an expert & specialist SEO search marketing agency. Technical SEO * AI & Data Analytics * Offsite SEO * Paid Search
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