How to Increase your Credibility & Authority Online - Why E-A-T is Critical for SEO Success

Thank you for having me, Matt.

It’s a fascinating area for me because this area, in particular, is where you need to hone your skills around marketing. It’s the classic part where the technical skills and everything we know about joins those links with traditional marketing and how to tell that PR side of the story if you like. So at the top level, if we take expertise out of it for a second, being good at something is perhaps slightly different, you’ve got to have something to be good at in the first instance. But eviving, demonstrating your authority, or authoritativeness and trustworthiness, is through several different signals. That could be through a link graph if you like a social graph, this concept of connectivity between other authoritative sources. So who am I linking to, and where am I receiving links from? It’s just classic PageRank evolving from there. We’ve also got these other trust symbols or symptoms, like, reviews and social proof.

So not necessarily the syndication part, but your money in the personality. So using small businesses as an example, you’re buying the person solving the problem. It’s going to be about availability. If I’ve got an emergency, we’ll use plumbing since you’ve mentioned it. My primary criteria might be available in an emergency. If you’ve more time, I will look at things like reliability, trustworthiness, and reviews in the UK if there’s another motive in my decision. We’ve got a couple of websites like Trusted Trader or Check-a-Trade. And these are independent trade bodies, and organizations will verify and vet professionals. They’ll do credit and background checks, collect independent reviews and compile them. So if I were a plumber, I’d ensure that I was collecting reviews from my customers, priced competitively and fairly compared to everybody else in my particular area, and tell these stories online.

That’s the Key and the hard thing to do. From a math point of view, we could look at link quality. If we were trying to figure out an algorithm, you and I were looking at the ingredients of what data would prove Joe Bloggs is a better plumber than Matt Fraser and Nichola Stott. So we’d be looking at numbers and all sorts of things that gets harder for an algorithm to work out. And what becomes much more sophisticated is this concept of personal authority and personal trust. And we can get additional dimension, which is harder to be gained through things like social media or having a YouTube channel or a Tik Tok account. So when I’ve told the bathroom because I’m a plumber, and I’ve done a repair, and I’ve done all of this job, and I’ve done, put some beautiful tiles in and some Victorian chrome taps, I’m going to Tik Tok that. And I’m going to say, look at this amazing handiwork just did a five-hour job, dadadada. There you go. I did this by using this technique, and that’s why I’m going to. It’s no extra dimension, harder to gain, and it’s more generic and harder to ignore.

It’s a waste of time and energy. Just be what you’re good at and demonstrate what you’re good at and why. And if you get into the habit of doing it, the rest will naturally fall into place.

Do you mean the consumer or the business owner?

Setting aside the benefits of improved rankings because if you don’t have these symptoms, you’ll have quality raters looking at a sign, no reviews that look grab, those are all faked. Algorithmically that will then be machine-learned to perform rhythmically, so your site will be throttled or inhibited. Aside from that, you’re not going to convert well. It would have spammed my way to the top of the ranking even if I did. However, if I’m ranking for an obscure term, and I get a landing because I’ve paid 20 cents a word for a piece of content that is vaguely average, when my potential customer lands on the page, they’re just going to go no.

It does make perfect sense. I would say everything Google has done since Dewey in March 2008. Every update has been about some form of quality, whether Panda, which is all about duplicate content and having the most original content or Penguin. So having quality links, as opposed to crappy links, every update, tuning whatever direction has been about trying to work out that.

I’m not sure. It might come from the quality raters’ guidelines. When we first saw what might be considered EAT, we were calling it medic, weren’t we?

That’s what the industry was like, oh, look we’re seeing the first signs of behavior. And I think we were calling it the medic update because it was hitting sites that made claims, and we’re pushing out content with no credibility or professional qualifications. Detox: how to detox your body by drinking this. Who are you, and how do we know you are qualified to write this?

We know you, and I know it because we’ve been here and seen all sides of this. But how many times have you said via friends and family you thought you might have been capable of discerning certain things, but they’ll come to you and say, I read this on Facebook the other day, did you know, and you’re like, no, you as well. People like me put stuff on Facebook, people in our industry. And they pay nothing to somebody in a country far away to make that up. It’s such a lawless place.

I guess it’s rewarding. And there is always going to be some lawless.

It’s rewarding authenticity.

Yes, as far as that product would be on a landing page.

So that becomes the subject to local laws and advertising standards within individual markets, and it’s very different to the US and Canada as to the UK. But generally, it’s around making unwarranted claims about the product.

You’ve got to be very careful about that. And to make claims about something, it has to be verifiable, medically backed, and several studies. I don’t know if there’s a magic number, but I know a considerable amount of studies have to be conducted to back up the claims. They have to be peer-reviewed, verified, and published. So if it was a supplement that was medically proven to have said effect, then as the producer, you must invest in research that will extrapolate why it does what it does if you’re producing a point of difference and you’re the supplier.

It’s ground up. It’s everything.

So if you do have a product it’s reviewed, safe, verified, closed, a proven product, and its medical claims have been backed up by independent research that is all done, then yeah, it’s pure marketing. It’s about those classic things like press releases and creating a story. Getting the product reviewed.

Yeah. I don’t know where the law stands. There might be property laws around compensation in those sorts of situations.

We shared this on Search Engine Land about a week ago. If you search, Search Engine Land, each order Nichola Stott or something like that, you’ll find it. We have a systematic approach that covers around seven different areas. And there are several aspects within each of those areas. So it’d be things like trust marks and credibility statements. So in the UK, we have the British Kitemark. So if you’re producing electrical goods, you would have that particular stamp. You could have things like by Royal appointment. So on rare occasions, your products might be approved for use in the royal household. And then you get the Queen stamp on the bottom of your site. It might be the BSI-British Standards International, a body that looks if your organization meets certain standards. So, ISO 9001 is all kinds of different types of management structures and that sort of thing. So you could have different types of trust and credibility marks. So that would be one we’d look at. So we’d be looking at structured data and how the site is marked up. So it’s like a second depth of understanding algorithmically. You can use several primary sources to submit your site, as a piece of structured data or as an entity to trigger entity recognition. It can help you get traction early on if you’re a startup. So I’ll be looking at things like Wiki data, for example, and you can edit, unlike Wikipedia.

Nobody’s ever asked me this question before, and the answer is quite interesting.

So you already mentioned I was at Yahoo for a spell, from 2005 to 2009. Yahoo was always small in the UK, it wasn’t what it was in North America. I don’t know the market share in Canada, but for the UK, it was the best at 12%. But even at 12%, it was cool to be there in those days and see that much data. One of my roles was to manually review websites to see if they were of the right quality to join the Yahoo partner network. So we had a process, a checklist of things we would do to vet the site. Some of the 87-point checklists we now have today at Erudite started back in 2005 before Google quality raters were even a thing. So we are looking at the website and thinking, is this a legit business? Who the hell runs this show? Can I find them on Companies House? Can I do a credit check on them? If I do a domain-restricted search, will I find adult content on it? Is there any reference to weapons? We would be drilling in and pulling it apart, asking, is it legit? Has it been hacked? Is it a proper business? Where are the company Directors that own this thing? Who are these people? What Directorships do they hold? So we’d be going right in under there. That’s the germ of the seed if you like.

It is a part of the onsite signals for many reasons. First, it’s that legitimacy, authenticity, trust, and the legality of it all as an organization. You want to see these people as legitimate company directors, operators, or independent business owners. So that’s part of it, first off. Secondly, if you want to own the SERP for your brand, you want as much real estate as possible. So if you search for Nichola Stott, you’re going to get. I haven’t looked at it for a while, but you should get Erudite, LinkedIn profile, one of these things, and they’re all joined together. And every single one of them interlinks and references the other. So it’s that social graph concept that connects to that entity that is understood. Doing that, having that, joining that data up not only explains to Google that Matt Fraser is an entity and this entity Matt Fraser is this same Matt Fraser throughout because it always talks about SEO and Digital Marketing. It allows us to own and connect more of that SERP real estate. So someone Google’s name or business name, we’re going to be all over that. So many benefits you’ve got to do.

He is a crossfit Guy, Matt Fraser.

Yeah. I’m lucky my name is spelled slightly unusual, with Nichola spelled with an H, which is not that common. But if I hadn’t named that quite a lot of other people had, I’d try and find a little point of difference to help. So I would use my middle initial. Matt, the plumber, we get a lot of that. So you can add your specialty in.

Oh, of course. We’ve talked about links, it will always be about link citations. When people are talking about you, if we’re writing on the web, referencing your brand, or you are the officers of your company or the products you make, that’s the game. So that’s what we want. Branded search is a citation, product plus brand, anything like that. So the more we can make our product or brand name synonymous with a product, that is gold. Absolutely. And, of course, there are social signals, genuine social signals attached to that. So they’re not ranking signals, per se, but the validity of a trusted profile.

If two people launched the same business with the same idea from position zero, it’s going to come down to who’s got the biggest PR budget. So if we’re going to identical sites, both from WordPress, everything else is a level playing field, the person that’s going to win will be the one with the biggest PR budget and not the link budget. Because if we say, okay, you’ve got $250,000 Matt that you can spend on PR and Nichola, you’ve got to do $250,000 you can spend it on links. If I go out, it will take me a while to spend that. So it will take the whole year to get through, but that’s a lot of work, and I’m just renting that crap. I’m renting it because it’s going to go away, it’s going to fade over time, it’s not going to last, and it’s a risk. It’s a house of cards. But spending $250,000 on three, four, or five good PR campaigns will blow you into the stratosphere.

Okay, EAT is difficult. I’ve shared our entire audit Checklist. I wouldn’t say that somebody would have to feel they’d go through and have to pass every test. So with something like EAT, it’s not a technical audit where it’s brought you a big list of things, and all of these things are broken, and you should try and fix them at some point. There might be things it doesn’t make sense for you to do as a business. And it’s not that you have to do every single thing. It can be difficult, and sometimes what you pay an expert to support is to help you find. I’ve got a 100 gap, which ten do I pick out and work on first? And do I sack some of them off because they’re never going to ROI for me? And then I look at something else. So don’t feel pressured if you look at this list and go, Oh, my God, we’re failing everything. Don’t feel like it’s a pressure, pick things that will drive that difference. And the way to work that out, I’ll try and distill 20 years of SEO knowledge into just a simple sentence. Just put yourself into the mindset of a consumer. Would my mom buy this? Think of somebody that isn’t a web expert but the public on the street. Is my partner going to fall for this? Is my dentist going to buy them? Every normal person, take them through the journey in your mind. Would they come and buy from your site?

Does this look right to you?

Twitter is always the best way to get ahold of me. @Nichola Stott

Yeah, just give me a holler. And I’m happy to chat with anyone about anything.

I am certainly on LinkedIn. I get a lot of all sorts going on, so things can get very deleted. But Twitter is the most visible way to see somebody and the conversation.

Oh, thank you for having me.