Gain and retain visibility by demonstrating EEAT

Kerstin says: “Truly embrace building authority and demonstrating EEAT – meaning experience, expertise, authority, and trust.

With AI, there’s so much content flooding the search results. The counterpart to that is building authority, being the number 1, 2, or 3 go-to source in your industry, and demonstrating that not only to your potential customers but also Google – to keep and gain visibility there.”

Is the counterbalance to excessive AI content not using AI to produce your content?

“Using AI can help you do things faster, but what becomes more important is your own input, keeping an eye on actual expertise, and doing something unique. If everyone is doing the same things now, and using the same AI, content just becomes a big mess of mediocrity. Logically, Google has to differentiate between what is a good result, what is trustworthy, what is high-quality, and what is just the same old content being repeated.

Even with Google potentially using AI to generate search results with SGE, if you want to show up there and be the answer that Google provides, you can’t be mediocre. You need to be at the top. You need to be the relevant source that Google goes to for their AI-generated response.

You can use AI for brainstorming and to help with writing and the more laborious tasks that you can automate and do faster. At the same time, you need to think about how you can improve the quality of what you’re producing. How can you really stand out and be at the top of the playing field and not just another mediocre resource of information?”

When you look at the SERP, you will see similarities between the sites that are ranking. Can you be different to the other results and still expect to be number one?

“It depends on what your capacity is and what you’re working with. You need to have the necessary resources to produce really outstanding and quality content, and that might not be the right way to go for every company. For some, it might be enough to just produce content. However, if you’re in a YMYL field, EEAT becomes even more important because whatever you say has to be trustworthy and factually correct.

However, I believe that you can stand out by doing things differently. Some of it will be the same, but you can create your own insights, have your own opinion, and work with experts. Not everyone has the luxury of having experts within their own company, but you can reach out to experts and amplify what you’re doing through collaboration.

Use your knowledge and your creativity to really stand out. That’s not going to happen by just looking at data. Of course, data is really important, but if you just look at the numbers and who’s ranking, that’s not going to give you the edge over your competitors. It’s really important that you also do the manual work. Go into search results, see what they are doing, and look for what you could do better. Is there anything you could add to this topic, that you can’t find everywhere?

At SeedLegals, we’re a legal tech company, and we’re lucky that we have a lot of internal experts. We usually cover complex topics, often in the areas of finance and funding. We have lawyers and funding experts in-house, so there’s a lot of knowledge for us to tap into. That means that we can use our colleagues to get unique information. We are also a platform where people do funding rounds, so we have a lot of data that is unique to us, which we can use for articles we produce and reports that can challenge what is already out there based on our data.

We can start conversations, and that is exactly the type of thing that makes you unique, so you add more value than just giving a list of basic steps. Go a step further and think about what else you can add that might be useful, apart from the general information that people would like to hear or read about. It could be data that you have or insight from experts that you have access to. Reach out to them, collaborate, and bring something new to the topic.”

Should you combine the general information with those additional elements on the same piece or would you create separate pieces of content?

“We usually combine it, and we tend to do it across our content. If we work on an article around funding, it could start with an introduction that explains the trend we’re seeing from our data for 2023 compared to 2022, then compare that to third-party data has been published elsewhere. We do usually give some of our own insight for general topics, if we have something interesting to add.

At the same time, almost all of our content is produced in collaboration with internal experts, so we usually feature them in the article. We display the author in the article, and we also include the experts who’ve contributed. We link to their profile pages, and we feature them throughout the article in highlight boxes that show their quotes or expert tips.

We tend to do that across different content formats so, even within a newsletter, you might find an expert highlight. We do reports on the state of funding or option schemes in the UK, which are very data-led, but each section has insights from an expert. That could be their own view, something they can add from their experience, or something that they are predicting for the future. You can do that with content where it’s maybe not the most obvious thing to do.

Pitch deck templates are very useful in the start-up space, but they have been over-produced. When founders pitch to investors, they want to know what a good pitch deck looks like and they want to find a template online. There are hundreds of these templates already, so we looked at all of them and thought, what do these pitch decks not have?

For our pitch deck, instead of just giving the framework and design for founders to use, every step of it has insights from not only other founders but also investors. Collaborating with investors on content for founders generated a huge amount of interest and it’s been hugely successful. Founders are downloading the pitch deck because it is a good template, but it is also paired with insights from investors and what they want to see during a pitch.

That’s an example of using an idea that already exists but finding a way to make it better.”

If you don’t have access to internal experts, can you turn to external experts and get them to contribute in a similar way?

“Yes, but it involves both finding the right people and relationship building. You need to have someone who can do that, who has the time for it, and the personality to reach out and find these people to work with.

You might also have internal experts who are not recognised externally. If they’re up for it, you can try to build their profile by featuring them on podcasts or other websites. That’s something we’ve done in the past. We look for press opportunities to get coverage outside of our own website that would help establish them as experts.

Additionally, you can work with external experts. In our case, there are different types of external experts. We could be finding insights from other founders who have started or sold multiple businesses, or we could be talking to investors as well.

The content type doesn’t usually matter. We work with external people on webinars and then we repurpose that into other content formats. We have an internal contact list of people we’ve collaborated with in the past, and we reach out to them. When our writers work on content, they can then contact the relevant experts for each topic.

Sometimes collaboration also happens unplanned. We were working on and e-book that covered funding advice and I saw a post from an investor on my LinkedIn feed that was very relevant to the content we were creating. She made shared an infographic she designed on different types of funding and fundraising stages, that I thought would work really well with our e-book content.

I shared the LinkedIn post with one of our writers who then reached out to the investor to see if she’s like to collaborate with us. She agreed and we used an adapted version of her graphic and also featured her with insights and tips throughout our e-book. She’s since collaborated with us on blog articles as well – and we’ve seen some good engagement levels from the added investor insights.

We also prominently featured her on thee-book landing page and in our social media posts. And she shares our e-book in her newsletter, and it got a lot of traction. This approach isn’t limited to a specific type of content. It’s about finding the right people who have great knowledge to share.”

How can you make it more likely that experts will contribute?

“We’ve noticed that it doesn’t really work when we reach out to people and just ask if they want to be featured and what they have to say on the topic. It’s usually better if we schedule a call to interview them. We record the call and then draft the content and quotes from what they’ve said. Then, we send it back to them to see whether they are happy to sign off or if they want to make any changes.

The easiest way to do that is for us to do the heavy lifting because they don’t really have time. Investors, especially, are always short on time. They usually don’t have the time to sit down and write their own articles or draft insights; it’s just too much of an ask.

Schedule some time for interviews and be very clear with the brief and your timelines. Send them what you are asking for and your timelines beforehand so they know what’s coming, what’s happening next, what you expect, when you sign off, etc. It’s about good project management – and stakeholder management as well. Do the legwork and take care of all the heavy lifting.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop working in a silo. A lot of successful SEO campaigns are successful because you step out of the SEO bubble – and that’s also true for people. People are successful when they aren’t stuck in the SEO tunnel. Open up, reach out, find what’s important to the business, and then collaborate with other people.

A good time saver is to step back from the endless backlog and SEO roadmap. Look at what is the most important thing to do for the business at the moment, and then find the right people in the business to collaborate with you on that.”

Kerstin Reichert is SEO and Content Lead at SeedLegals, and you can find her over at SeedLegals.com.