Kapwom says: “My Additional Insight is using EEAT to supercharge your organic performance.

I have experience in seeing an impact for our clients based on improving EEAT signals on our website. Doing this we’ve seen a 34% organic boost for one client, although it took a few months for Google to acknowledge all our changes. So that's what I'll be covering.”

So, what does 34% mean? Does that mean a 34% increase in traffic over certain periods?

“Yeah, so it was a 34% increase in organic traffic, organic sessions, to be specific. So, we made all these changes, adding author pages, including references to well-established websites with data behind them. And until an algorithm update happened in March, we probably made those changes in December. So, it took a good three to four months. But once the impact did hit, it was very visible.”

You said clearly, due to those changes. How did you know that EEAT was the structure and the changes you made that impact the traffic you received?

“Well for those clients, particularly those in the legal space, no additional content was created. There might have been some additional technical changes that we also made, but nothing very significant. The key tasks that we did over those few months were establishing the authority of the office for many of their articles and content. As you can imagine, in the legal space, it's very important to show that you have that authority and experience.”

So, it was just the existing content you were optimizing rather than creating new content?

“Exactly. In their case, they already had 100s and 1000s of pages’ worth of content at that specific period, so we were just focusing on optimizing what was already established and created. Months down the line we added additional content, but during that period, no additional content was added.”

How would you summarize the changes that you made?

“One of the key things we did was add authors to the articles of the content. It was very weird because they did have authors there, but it was only on some pages and it wasn't a clickable link. So we made sure that all content that was giving advice was making recommendations, and where we could find the author that wrote it, we made sure we linked to their profile because they had a lot of profiles on their website, but they weren’t linked to from all this content. Then they also built out new profiles because it was just a bit of a mess, to be 100% honest.

We also built up the author pages and added links to social media where we made sure that they had a description that shared the experience of the authors. It didn’t have to be a lot of detail, it could be one or two sentences to explain that experience and mention any qualifications and certifications they may have.

Alongside that we improved the internal linking on the content itself so that if somebody wrote on a specific topic, it would also link to other content or other relevant articles.”

On the same website or externally?

“We did both. The next point I was going to make was linking out externally to both government sites that might have a lot of data and information around the legal space because, in particular, that was the case for them.

The last thing was just where we could incorporate the actual data on the page, either because it was well-known information or it was information that our client had dug up because they're quite an authority figure in their space as well and they have a lot of data that they've gathered themselves.

We started to make sure they were using it, especially since we had almost prioritized the pages we wanted on and were high-traffic pages. But we did that while including the other tasks around the author stuff.”

Optimizing existing content and structuring existing content better. So, digging back into the precise structure of the author's links, at the bottom of the articles, you'd have maybe one or two lines about the author, and then you'd link to the author page from there?

“So, in this instance, we would have the author's name and make that clickable, and then on the author page we would have more information about them.”

So you wouldn't even have a description of their job title?

“We kept it fairly simple. It would be like a quick description, head of whatever, job title or category. And that was a great decision with them because we have done it for other clients, where it's a bit more beefed out a description of who they are and what they do on the page itself. However, part of the design of the page was taken into consideration. So, all we did was list the job title and then link to the author page.”

Did you do that because you wanted to encourage visitors to click on that link and visit the author page and search engines find the link?

“Yeah, exactly. So, we tried to make it quite visible and I think that was part of why we didn't want to make too much of a bio on the page. We wanted to encourage people to click on the profile and discover. They won't always do that, but it just gives them the option of finding out who's giving them that advice.”

Did you use schema as well?

“Yes, we did also use schema markup with the article schema. We were also quite careful in adding author descriptions, so we filled it out in a detailed manner. It was like a combination of making sure that both the search engines and the users were aware of the authority behind the content being produced.”

Regarding the social media links you mentioned on the author pages, is that just LinkedIn or did you use other sites as well?

“We used other sites as well. I think the three key ones were Facebook, LinkedIn, and X (Twitter). There were two rounds of this. We searched for those three profiles and then where there was anything else that we could find we might add. Typically, we were aiming to get about three social media profiles for as most of the writers or the content producers.”

Did you link to any other resources online about the author as any other publications were also published?

“I think the only other link was to a website for the Law Society who have a profile of anyone in the legal space who's qualified.”

Okay, so if you've got an industry body, and you have been featured on that industry body website, then that's a good website to link out to demonstrate that you are that person. It would be best to be authoritative because you're a key figure in your industry?

“Exactly, and in a couple of cases they’d also have their websites. We ended up making an Excel file of who had what information and things like that. You can end up having loads of social media profiles that you can link to, and then it can get a little too busy. So, we limited it to three social media profiles and then a website which was the authoritative body, and if we couldn't find that, we would look for if they had a personal website or even a backup website.”

In terms of restructuring the content I love that you said linking out to authoritative, relevant websites from the article helps drive traffic to you. I think many people are a little bit scared of linking to other sites because they think it'll drive traffic out to their website instead of to it. But it can result in more traffic as well, which is great. You also talked about restructuring data or incorporating more data. Was there a particular structure that you used for that to try to encourage search engines to perhaps even use that data and featured snippets or other areas?

“There is quite a lot of work went into it. We had help from a digital PR team who ran some surveys and things of that nature so that we could also get some unique data points because a lot of the data points in a lot of spaces are shared.

I think some of the things we did with emailing questions to some of their subscribers allowed us to come up with new data points and then put that in different formats, so we tested putting in like tables. It just depends on what the information was, and the question was always, what is the most digestible way for people to take in this data? Sometimes, it was just mentioning a quote within the content, sometimes it was a table, and in a couple of instances, we also included infographics.

I think we could even do more of that, to be honest with you, because I like some of the results from pages where we include it in infographics as well.”

Does results mean inclusion on Google image search or something else?

“In terms of the results we saw from those pages, it's a number of things. So, it's the organic traffic and improvement in the metrics in terms of engagement. When I say time spent on the page, with pages where we added videos you could see, in some instances, people spending an extra 25, 30 seconds on that page.

What you mentioned as well, where you've added unique images, like with infographics you see appearing in Google Images for certain searches, we didn't see too much of a jump in traffic from that. But it all adds up. For one of the pages, for example, using Search Console, we're able to see that the image and a month that we added got an extra 22 clicks, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's all bringing people to the site.”

Absolutely. I mean, if you can do that across 10s of 1000s of articles, you're onto a winner.

“Exactly. I think as well as just the direct results of increased traffic, the good thing was seeing those engagements, people spending more time and engaging with that page.”

You've shared what SEOs should be doing in 2024. Now, let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of timing but ultimately counterproductive? What is something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“I'd say creating content for the sake of just adding content to your website because I feel like we get the message from so many sources that you want to make sure you're adding new, fresh content to your site. With the new addition of AI tools that help us generate content, the danger is you can end up spending time creating content that's not unique. You can end up trying to create content and put it out there and hope that something sticks, but I think at the end of it, it's going to be more time-consuming for the result that you get.

I think a better approach is to take a step back, understand the intent of your audience for key topics, and produce quality content. You can still use AI to speed up the process, but I would recommend people take that additional time to make sure the content is unique and it has its spin that's different from anything else out there.”

Kapwom Dingis is a Senior SEO Manager at Semetrical, and you can find him over at semetrical.com.