Edward Ziubrzynski says: “My big insight for SEO in 2023 is to make EAT a core component of your SEO strategy and keeping it in mind at all times.”

So are we still calling it EEAT with the extra E at the beginning?

“Yeah, it just rolls off the tongue a lot easier than EEAT?”

Okay, so let's dive into practice, and how that particular aspect of SEO or what Google are advising on, actually impacts SEO? So starting with the first one, experience, what do you mean practically by doing that?

“So experience is one of those things that everybody has it to a degree, but people just don't really talk about it. So experience is sort of tangible with expertise in the sense that someone that has been within an industry longer or has achieved more in a shorter timeframe, has experience that directly correlates with the expertise that they would have. The big thing to do here is to make sure that you implement it and have it visible and scream and shouted about throughout the entirety of your website. Previously, you'd see people have a very minimal about page or ‘our story’ kind of page and that will typically say, ‘yeah, we've been in business for over 20 years’, but that's about it. Whereas that was okay in 2017 before the Medic Update in 2018, and that really saw the rise and prominence of EAT, especially on YMYL websites. But it's what you use that experience for and how you apply that experience on your website that really separates your websites from others. Because ultimately, there's going to be countless businesses offering the exact same sort of product or service that you are. But what makes you different is the experience and expertise that you have alongside that over all your employees or staff.”

Are you solely talking about the experience of the business of the brand? And if so, what do you write, and do you need to markup the content as well to demonstrate that experience?

“So any kind of author schema that you can have. any sort of additional structured data that can make digesting and processing this information easier, would always be recommended. But I'd actually like to take it one step further, and this is something that I do quite often, is don't just focus on the company as a whole. Really hammer down into your senior leadership team, those people that there isn't expected to be a high churn in terms of staff. This way, you not only have the experience and expertise of your organization, but also the people that make up the organization. As again, they’re the difference between company A and company B. The way that I do this is look at the awards, accreditations reviews, testimonials of the company itself, and do this across multiple platforms so it creates a bigger digital footprint that you are to be seen as an expert and an authority and therefore can be trusted. But also going into the sort of experience of your employees or senior leadership teams so that you're really highlighting what each person brings to the organization and why your organization should stand out from the rest. Applying this to content as well, and making it available throughout the website is something that is quite universal in the sense that this wouldn't benefit some websites more than others, unless of course they fall under YMYL where this is a fundamental necessity now. EAT is on every website, it's part of the algorithm, and it's just one of these things that you can't say ‘I've increased my EAT by 20 points and now I'm ranking 5th instead of 10th’, for instance. It's an ongoing commitment, and one thing that may get overlooked by a lot of websites that will actually push yours or your clients’ websites above the competition.”

You also talked about ensuring that you emphasize the experience of your leadership team. Is it enough to link to their LinkedIn profiles or prominent social profiles? Or is it necessary to incorporate a lot of that experience directly on the website?

“Linking out is great again for that idea of increasing that digital footprint. But when your linking to social profiles, because that's self serving/self generated content, there is always that element of this could potentially be gamed or you could phrase things in certain ways or ultimately it can be a bit misleading. So when I like to link out, I like to link out predominantly to highly renowned industry specific organizations or news outlets that featured the people. This way you're making it much clearer for both a website visitor, and also a search engine crawler, so that when it lands on a profile, you've got all of their experience actually written on the website itself, almost like a LinkedIn on your company website, but you also get to link out to news outlets or industry media that features them. If one of those articles talk about an award that they've been nominated for or received, you can link to that news release that's generated that independent third party website that’s actually noticing the amazing things that this person or business are doing. This helps to really paint that picture that they can be trusted, they are an expert and authority, and here is the reason why, as opposed to just saying, ‘Yep, we're brilliant. Trust us, please.’”

You mentioned expertise a couple of times when talking about experience. How does expertise differ from experience?

“Expertise and experience are very closely linked in the sense that more years of service, in theory, should indicate a greater level of expertise. However, the big difference here for me is that you can show expertise in a short period of time. It sort of goes against what I've just said there, in the sense that on paper someone that has 10 years of experience should be more of an expert than someone that has two years. However, if that person has accomplished more in two years than that person has in 10, than in theory, they can be seen as more of an expert, because there's that idea of efficiency. An example of this is when you see these people that are at companies that are very much disruptors, or like unicorn companies, and they haven't been around as long, but they're achieving great things. And that's where that expertise element comes in. You can use that on the company level, or you can do it on the basis of the individual and really highlight who they are, what they do, why they're an expert, and you can even play on the fact that despite only being within the industry for X amount of years, we've achieved this, and this is where we're going. So it really creates that story and it almost creates that fairy tale of ‘against all odds’, or despite being late to the party, we've actually capitalized and taken over the industry. That's the sort of thing that can really separate your website or your company from those in the rest of the industry.”

The third element of EEAT is authoritativeness. Where does that fit in?

“I like to associate authoritativeness more with partnerships with leading industry bodies, again almost as if you're able to piggyback on the reputation, and the sort of perceived expertise and authoritativeness and trustworthiness of these other organizations. Having a partnership is essentially similar to link building, it’s a vote of confidence from this organization for yours. Having these sorts of memberships and partnerships, and making them clearly transparent on your website, also lends into that trustworthiness side of things, and allows you to again say that you are an authority within the industry, you have high quality thought leadership content written by experts, and you’re trusted by these organizations, governing bodies, leading bodies, etc. If you're in health care, you can write about all your CQC compliance, if you're in Finance, then following the Financial Conduct Authority guidance, and really scream and shout about that on your website. That then signals you as an authority because you are going with every bit of compliance there is, you’re trusted by these bodies, and also you are producing stuff that offers ultimately value to the Search Engine users.”

So if you were to pick the ultimate sign of authority, would it be a great link, would it be demonstrating that that brand is a leading entity within an industry sector or something else?

“For me, the biggest sign of authority would be producing content that is written by experts that doesn't just have financial gain. So a true website that offers expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, also offers that perceived level of value without direct commercial gain. Obviously, you can produce content that will, if it's a high enough quality, naturally gain links, which as we know are going to be the best signals in terms of quality, as well as not partaking in any sort of reciprocal linking practices, so people are genuinely linking to you because this is a fantastic source of insight or as well researched. Ultimately, a fantastic piece of content at that level has all of those signals as a byproduct as well as obviously what we do in SEO of obtaining rankings. So for me, content is king. When it comes to demonstrating EAT, whether that is just newsworthy content, whether it's support guides, how-to guides, or even if it's a simple thing like a news piece that demonstrates the recent award or anything that the business has received that bit of recognition. It's the on site content that really does all of that.”

So if a brand is looking to produce high authority content, can AI be involved in that content generation?

“I think that content is unfortunately going to be synonymous with SEO and digital marketing going forward. So I think whoever uses it best, and still integrates it with human produced content, is going to be the ones that come out on top. And by this, I mean things as simple as using AI to generate part of an article or give you the bare bones. If you can then attribute a human to it with their personal experience, expertise and authority, and assign that and essentially say, this content has been produced by AI, but it has been reviewed, amended and edited by humans to ensure factual accuracy at all times, then that is going to be the way that businesses can sort of work around and balance using AI. With freelancers or internal writing stuff, it's just going to be a game of who can use AI the smartest without taking away that human element that will really look to succeed going forward.”

Do you think it really is necessary to be whiter than white and say, AI was involved in some part of the creation of this content, or as long as humans are involved as long as the AI is it is not reasonable just to credit the humans with the authorship of the article?

“Realistically, it depends on just how involved people actually were in this. Obviously, you'd want to portray being whiter than white, because ultimately we know that Blackhat SEO works to a degree, but then an update will come out, and you'll see your visibility, ultimately disappear. So trying to be as white as white as you can, whilst actually also being whiter than white is a very good way to go, especially if you're starting out, because it will give you that longevity. And again, when core updates come out, you should, in theory, be promoted and rewarded for following the guidelines more so then have a sudden surge for a short period of time before you get found out. But realistically, I'd say it all depends on the amount that humans actually are involved in the content process. If you went on to ChatGPT and put in a command saying write me 750 words on how I can get a business loan for my startup company, and there's no sort of proofread, no amendments, no referencing or anything like that, and if it hasn't been looked over by an expert, then really I would say it would be good to disclaim that this has been written by AI following a review from internal experts just to ensure factual accuracy, as well. In some industries, things change on a dime so quickly, that something that was written by AI yesterday isn't going to be as factually accurate today, because of changes in legislation. So again, that's where that human element and the manual sort of attention to detail really starts to come in.”

And the fourth element of EEAT is trustworthiness. So where does trust fit in?

“Trustworthiness really brings all of this together. Having a website whose purpose is clear, the fact that you are obviously financial gain is always going to be part of whatever a business does as ultimately without that a business wouldn't be running. However, making sure that everything that you do is clear and transparent, making sure that content is cited and backed up by experts, and there's no sort of like weird cloaking, there's no misleading ads on your website, anything like that. But then also, as we touched on before, having that positive digital footprint, mentioning any awards, partnerships, accreditations that you have, that is a key element to ultimately making users feel safe on your website. If you're an online store, then making sure that you have payment information clear, because again, having things as simple as taking PayPal, Klarna and these sort of financing companies are becoming much more prominent when online shopping now, especially with the sort of cost of living crisis at the moment, so having things available like contact information, and anything like really makes it apparent that you are a trusted organization and users can feel safe reading the content published throughout your website, and that they also feel safe on the website itself and there's not going to be anything sort of untoward happening in the background as well.”

You’ve shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023. So now let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. So what's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive, or something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“The big thing that I think SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023, is going after high volume keywords, particularly what we call seed keywords. Obviously, when you're putting together an SEO strategy for either your client website, or if you're an agency side, any number of websites that you're working on, the idea of going after single or double word keywords that have a 15,000 monthly searches on paper is highly attractive, and ultimately, traffic is that vanity metric that everybody wants. However, the seed keywords, incorporate everything from information to discovery, and there is definitely an element of some transactional search intent behind that too. But ultimately, you're going to be putting in a lot of effort to realistically gain not a lot from a business perspective. Yes, there's the argument of the increased brand awareness and visibility, however, when starting out especially, the best thing that you could do would be to actually target those longtail keywords that have that higher intent, build an audience that way, coincide that with additional supportive articles, those information led pieces that offer value for free, to really build your position in the industry, and then you can have those high intent, commercial keywords that you're going after. By really segregating your strategy so that it's not just ‘yeah, I'm gonna go after this one keyword with 15,000 searches, or I'm gonna go after 40 low hanging fruit 10 search volume keywords that have that really high intent’, and also balancing that with going after highly informational or traffic that will then ultimately build up brand visibility. So you break it into two pillars, instead of I'll go after this one keyword that will bring all success to my business.”

I think the advice a couple of years ago was to target longtail keyword phrases, maybe four or five-word long keyword phrases that are perhaps only attracting 50 to 100 searches per month, those highly specific, relevant to your business, great relevant content for those keyword phrases, but then maybe after your year or two, as you've built more authority to your website, then you can target the shorter tail keyword phrases. Are you saying that that's still a mistake, and that there's better uses of your time?

“So I'd say that there's definitely still better uses of your time than going after those keywords. Again, the more that you develop your website, the more your visibility for those sorts of seed keywords should improve naturally and organically as a byproduct. The big thing that I'm saying is don't put too much effort into just increasing those keywords. If you were to look at additional aspects of the business or look at a new sort of information or strategy that's highlighting the reasons why people are looking to use your product, your software, your services, really diversify your offering. If you're going after these high commercial intent keywords, the output versus input risk/reward ratio is far better. This also gives you the opportunity to really focus in on either a particular area that you want to promote on your website, or it allows you to build an audience that are like ‘last time I needed this service, this product, I knew exactly where to go’, and that allows you to do that. When you're just going for these top of the funnel keywords, you lose that element of ‘these guys offering me exactly what I want’. For instance, if you Google anything related to finance, you are going to be met with say Investopedia as a website, and you know that that's just such a large organization that you're just going to be reading a piece of content that ultimately doesn't really mean a lot to you. Whereas if it's a small business that really hammers in on exactly what your needs and wants are, that is an organization that you're going to keep going back to. So it really also creates that opportunity for repeat business as opposed to one off. Again, we all want those high traffic figures, they look great on monthly reports especially when you see a sort of diagonal line on a graph of your monthly visitors, but if that's going up and your profit or even just revenue isn't, then you know that really what you've got is pure vanity not substance.”

Edward Ziubrzynski is an SEO and content manager at Swoop Funding, and you can find them over at swoopfunding.com.