Week 5 – EAT

It’s that time again, week 5 of the #atozofseo which brings us on to:

🄴 for EAT

EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness and is something Google is very much on the lookout for – they expect you to have ‘good EAT’ & very, VERY much so if you are involved in anything financial, health or what is deemed ‘YMYL’ (Your Money or Your Life) business.

Google has a document called the Quality Raters Guidelines (QRG) which is a publicly accessible document – link in first comment – and this doc, all 168 pages of it, mentions EAT 242 times (I’ve just checked) which, to me, means you should take note of it.

Examples of having ‘good EAT’ includes things like having a phone number, address and contact info (i.e. you’re a legit business) down to substantiating content via your author profiles on your blog/main content (referred to as MC in the QRG by the way).
EAT in itself isn’t a ranking factor (yet, directly anyway) but the constituents of it feed into the core algorithm which in turn does determine who ranks where of course.
Got old content that isn’t backed up the authority of the person writing it? Fix your EAT. Does your website luck trust elements (e.g. a returns policy)? Fix your EAT. This is just a quick overview, there’s much more to it. #seo #google

Link to the QRG as mentioned – it’s a good read, honest!

UPDATE MARCH 2020

Since adding this post, Google has made (to me) an important update to their official post on all things Search Quality

Note the wording in the sentence including “assessing your own content…”

…is that a big hint as to the importance of EAT? I think so. I really think so!