James says: “My additional insight is that many SEOs struggle to explain the concept of EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) to wider stakeholders within a business to get the buy-in that's needed to actually level up in this area.

So, instead of thinking about EEAT as an SEO concept, SEOs and marketers should position this as a business's online reputation. When they're able to do this, they're able to get buy-in easier. It’s easier to align other stakeholders, who maybe aren't SEOs themselves, on board with doing what's needed to level up in this area.

You see, EEAT is something that fundamentally cannot be measured. There is no EEAT score, nor should there be. EEAT is more a way to think and do. It's a mindset that SEOs and marketers should get into.

It's all about getting a business's customers and clients, or potential clients and customers, to trust that business by elevating the visibility of experts, the brand, the expertise behind the business, the experience of the individuals, and why that business is an authority in its space.

When it comes to explaining to the C-Suite the need to invest in bettering EEAT, it's often really hard to understand the concept, which can’t be measured, until you position it as reputation. Most marketers, most CEOs, and most of the C-Suite can get on board with the fact that reputation is something that you can't just measure on a score of 1 to 10, nor can you influence it overnight.

When we think about EEAT in this way, it's far easier for SEOs to understand how to go about building then demonstrating this themselves, but also to get the buy-in needed to get the necessary people within a business on board to make it happen.”

You talk about buy-in with stakeholders/C-Suite there. What are the kinds of things that you say to them in order to encourage them to get on board?

Obviously, you say that there aren't any simple scores that you can give for EEAT but what are the metrics that you use to actually measure the value of what you're doing?

“Of course. The number one thing that we see, when talking about EEAT, is that it needs buy-in from experts within a business.

You see, the marketing team are usually great at marketing, but they're usually not the product specialists. You go into, say, financial services – let's take mortgage advice, as a sector where we've done a lot of work around EEAT with clients – and the marketing team are fundamentally not financial advisers. They're not mortgage advisers.

You need to get the individuals on board. We need their expertise. We need their input into content and PR activity. They need to be the spokespeople to demonstrate who they are, their experience, and their expertise.

Now, the problem that SEOs often have is that they are trying to get these product experts – these experts in their field – on board with giving their time to what looks like the marketing function.

This fight for time is where the struggle often begins, in that SEOs are saying, ‘We need this product expert to be spending time contributing to content, proofreading content, helping us to actually identify the topics that matter right now, fact-checking, and feeding in insights.’ Yet, this individual is going, ‘I don't have the time to be doing that. Marketing isn't my job.’

When we pivot EEAT from being an SEO concept to the business's online reputation, it's far easier for everybody to see how they play a part in that. It changes EEAT from being an SEO's problem to reputation being everybody's problem.

Then, on this question of measuring the impact of EEAT, it's the biggest challenge that any of us face: measuring something that almost can't be measured. But, when we talk about this with clients, we're often looking at things like, when we're doing PR activity, are spokespeople being referenced within the coverage? Are we seeing positive reviews?

EEAT spans so much. It's not a checklist activity. Often, businesses have to go through some sort of fundamental shift if they have reputation issues. Now, if we were talking about this from a conversion rate optimization perspective, it's really easy to understand why the business needs to be doing better to get better reviews.

Where SEOs go wrong with measuring EEAT is that we need to turn to other channels. When you are able to get EEAT right in certain sectors, in B2B as an example, we would expect to see this have an uplift in leads, conversion rate, and positive reviews over time. If we are doing the things needed to encourage this activity to build this reputation, we would expect to see a more positive sentiment on social media.

Again, a lot of these things, in isolation, are little measures. When we look at reputation holistically, we're able to see that we're making progress by looking at the things that other teams often measure but, when we get into that mindset shift that EEAT is about doing things to build reputation, it's about aligning different teams.

On the measurement front, we find that it's sentiment, it's positive reviews, it's spokespeople who are product experts being referenced in press coverage, and those sorts of measures.”

I guess the challenge is that, if you're taking those sorts of measurements as an indicator as to whether or not EEAT is a success, then it's hard to compete against brand pay-per-click, for example.

If someone types in a brand name, then they're highly likely to convert, and you can easily demonstrate the value of that particular paid campaign. But if you have an indirect result of your activities (i.e. if you're improving the quality of your content/the authoritativeness of your content, and that results in improved sentiment), then how do you actually tie back the fact that you've made some tweaks to your content to increased conversion rates?

“Very good question. This comes right back to where I started, which is why, to us, it's so important to get that buy-in. It's so important that everybody is on board in that, really, this is about doing everything you can to help a potential customer or client trust you and your people.

I get it completely. Where so much potential work that goes into building and demonstrating EEAT gets lost is in this quest for a really easy metric to measure and go, ‘Is this paying off now?’

Why I say this is a mindset shift is that this is something that I genuinely believe businesses should be getting stakeholders on board with. When we pivot this to be about reputation and helping customers trust the business, we can then start to work backwards from that to put ourselves and our stakeholders in the shoes of a customer and say, ‘As a business, on our website, we are not displaying reviews’, as an example.

Probably a pretty common one that we see is where all reviews live on third-party sites. They live on Feefo and Trustpilot. Now, bringing that in, you're going, ‘Okay, this is all about first impressions. This is all about us positioning ourselves as a trusted expert source of, in many cases, information at top of the funnel and then, a supplier/retailer at bottom of the funnel.’

When we align these things with that customer journey – if we can get buy-in at the top, ongoing – to align with what Google is saying in their quality-rated guidelines right now, no, this is unlikely to be a direct ranking factor. But, when we come on to the role of EEAT in SEO, I think we've got enough insight (from the documentation leak last year, various things that Google has said, the DOJ trial, etc.) that Google is training its machine learning algorithms on content that has been rated by the quality raters.

Whilst I don't for a minute believe EEAT is or will ever be a direct ranking factor, we are able to start to educate people that Google is training its algorithms on content that has been rated as having high or very high levels of EEAT. So, we have to demonstrate the things that put our content in that same pool when the algorithms are analysing a piece of content. We have to put ourselves in that same position.

Now, again, I don't for a minute believe EEAT is a checkbox exercise. The requirements and how far you should go, or have to go, very much depend on the sector you're in. If you're in a YMYL (your money, your life) sector – finance, medical – it becomes so incredibly important.

I think there's so much evidence right now that Google has got a lot better over the past few years at identifying content that doesn't align with the training material for EEAT.

When we come to this whole thing of getting investment and answering questions about whether this this working, a lot of the time, we have to position it as, ‘We need to build our reputation. We need to make people trust us.’ but we also need to align with what Google is telling us the quality raters are rating as high or very high levels of EEAT because that is what their algorithms are being trained to look for.

So, we bring it back to SEO, but I think the challenge is often that buy-in, whether it’s for development resource, or whatever. One of the common things we see is that author pages don't exist. Having an entity home for an individual – we could talk about entity-based SEO. We could start positioning experts as entities in the knowledge graph. We can start to look at tangential ways that we can measure parts of EEAT.

Ultimately, I think it's getting buy-in from the top to say, ‘We want to provide our customers, our clients, and our potential customers and clients with the very best experience. Help them to trust us.’ People get that. When you start saying, ‘We need author pages, and we need to be including an expert spokesperson within content’, a lot of that is still EEAT-driven SEO talk.

They're the sort of things that, when we talk about them as SEO metrics and SEO tactics, are somewhat detached from the bigger picture. But, when we look at this as helping customers to trust and helping customers to have the very best experience, then people get that.

As SEOs, we need to be in a position where we can pivot these concepts to more holistic concepts that, not just marketers, but other stakeholders will understand.”

Going back to what you were talking about earlier on, you were talking about leveraging product experts and their expertise to produce content on your website.

Ideally, what kind of content do you want to produce with them? How do you plan that content? And how do you break it down to maximise its impact?

“Absolutely. I'm a big believer that SEO has and is evolving beyond just keyword-driven content. We can take a position, as SEOs, to go, ‘How can we not just help people to discover us?’ Yes, discovery is a very, very important part of organic search in 2025 – ensuring you're showing up for the queries – but there is the whole purchase funnel, which really comes into this narrative that, when we want experts involved, we want experts involved to help us right the way through that content side of SEO.

The way we will approach this is, on a quarterly basis (ideally, on a monthly basis), we will try and block out time with product experts within a client’s business (if you're in-house, block it out internally), to say, ‘Talk to us for twenty minutes/half an hour. What's going on in this industry right now?’

That does two things. Firstly, it allows us to get ahead of trends. It means we're being proactive. We're looking at what topics are big in this industry right now. We should be reflective from that. We should be producing content on that because it's a topic that is current.

The issue you have when you're keyword-driven/keyword research-driven, is that it takes time for the keyword research tools to catch up with what people care about right now. Spend time with product experts in planning content, and they know what's happening in the industry right now. They know what's coming in the next couple of months, in terms of big topics and big changes. You will never find that solely working in keyword tools.

Then it comes to how you create content that offers what a lot of SEOs are now calling ‘information gain’. We're in an AI world now, where any of us can go and produce relatively good consensus-based content with ChatGPT or many other AI tools in minutes. That playing field for creating baseline content has never been easier, so how do you differentiate yourself? How do you go beyond the fact that anyone can produce this content, whether or not they are an expert?

You turn to the experts to go above and beyond, to get the things that are currently in their head into the content. When you're able to do that, you have PR-able content. You have content that you can use to amplify that individual, amplify the business, become thought leaders, and build their authority in the space.

Ultimately, if we look at Google to expand on where I think EEAT fits in this wider search ecosystem, the helpful content update, for many businesses, absolutely decimated their organic traffic. Now, my personal take is that Google were almost forced to do this because it became so easy for anybody to create consensus-based content.

What you then come to is, there have to be indicators of what's above and beyond and who deserves to rank because this content has been created by experts, not just written by ChatGPT.

We look at the authoritativeness side of EEAT and, yes, you've got the on-page elements and the content on a site, but you've also got that off-page relevance. As we talk about AI search, we are seeing that mentions are becoming as important as links have been to SEOs for many, many years. Why? Because you can't fake this stuff. You can't use ChatGPT to get references in top-tier publications. You do that by amplifying an expert within a business.

Using these product experts, for us, the process of that is getting the things that exist in a product expert's head down into a usable format that, as marketers, we can then reference throughout both on-page and off-page activity. When we're able to do this, it gives confidence to users/readers as well.

Largely, we're looking at this from an informational content perspective. But then, as we get down to the commercial content – category pages, product pages, etc. – the requirements from an EEAT perspective shift.

As SEOs, we should be thinking full funnel. SEO, in my opinion, gets all too often compared to paid search as a straight-up performance channel. To me, SEO should sit somewhere between branding and performance. In that, if we were to take away the organic traffic that a site gets/the organic visibility in the discovery phase, then paid isn't going to work as hard.

You're doing a lot of the building of trust and demonstrating that you are a trusted provider/supplier/retailer a little bit higher up the funnel, where it wouldn't make commercial sense to bid on those with paid. Organic? Great.

We live and work in a world, right now, where multichannel is becoming more and more complex. We are seeing more and more touchpoints involved in making a sale, in all but maybe some of the simpler, more direct consumables in B2C. So, we need to work holistically to say, ‘How can we use our people, not just to demonstrate EEAT and build a reputation through PR activity and inclusion in content, but also to steer what we are actually going to create content on, to begin with?’”

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 2025?

“They should stop thinking about SEO in its own silo.

SEO is part of a wider marketing ecosystem, and we need to understand where it sits. Take away this organic visibility, and other channels become less effective. To be able to spend more time in leveraging EEAT, building, and then demonstrating EEAT – that's the key point I want to keep making: that you cannot demonstrate EEAT if you have not built it.

Flip that to reputation and, if you've not built up a reputation, how can you demonstrate it? Too many SEOs jump straight to trying to demonstrate something they haven't built.

When we think about SEO more holistically, we can leverage what other channels are doing. We can understand how building our reputation positively impacts every channel, and hopefully see an uplift across the board.”

James Brockbank is Managing Director and Founder at Digitaloft, and you can find him over at Digitaloft.co.uk.