EAT stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust — three factors Google uses to measure the trust it should place in a brand or website. YMYL means Your Money, Your Life. This categorizes industries and search queries that could result in the searcher entrusting their money or their life (i.e. their health and well-being) to a company. And what do these two acronyms have to do with your company’s SEO strategy? That’s what we’ll find out in today’s article.
How Important is EAT?
As we mentioned above, the acronym E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trust, and was created by Google. Each of these three words represents a factor for a company’s website to be considered a leader in its field. It doesn’t matter what industry the company is in.
1. Expertise
Expertise is defined as “specialized skill or knowledge in a particular field”. If you offer a service or product that you have deep knowledge of, you can be classified as an expert in that area. Especially if you can demonstrate that your level of expertise matches or exceeds that of your competition.
No matter what the subject is, if you demonstrate that your level of expertise is higher than the next person’s, you will be designated as an expert. Your website is under the same judgment. This means that your page is being examined to see if the content contained therein has a higher level of expertise than other sites or pages that Google finds on the internet.
2. Authority
Authority is the measure used to check how well you, your brand, your company and, of course, your website and the content within it stand out from the other options. When you want life advice, you probably have a friend you turn to, right? When people search the internet, they’re looking for the same thing – an answer they can trust.
So, think about the elements that lead you to think that a site has authority on that subject – these are the elements that you should also include in your content. If you are a dentist specializing in clear aligner treatment, for example, include this information in the content. If a person is looking for this type of treatment, they will prefer the opinion of someone who is an authority on the subject rather than that of a general dentist.
3. Trust
“The ability to be recognized as honest or truthful” is a measure of the credibility of your brand, website or content. After all, it’s one thing to create a lot of content on the internet – to be trustworthy is an entirely different one.
If someone offers us a deal that seems too good to be true, we immediately lose trust in the person offering it. This lost trust is rarely regained. Google works like that too. It now measures trust in a site based on the backlinks pointing to your site. This means that the more trusted sites (big media outlets or universities, for example) include links to your site on their pages, the more trustworthy your domain will be.
Why Is Eat So Important?
If your accountant lacks experience, authority and confidence, you are likely to look for an alternative. Google users will do the same thing. When they find a domain or page that lacks experience, authority and trust, they look for an alternative (in the form of another page or maybe even a different search engine).
Google is training the algorithm to look at these measurements and use them as signals to determine whether to trust a company’s domain to address users’ concerns. Simply put: if Google finds another domain or page that provides a better experience for that user than yours, that page goes up in the rankings – and yours, consequently, goes down.
We’re talking about lost ranking, lost traffic, but also lost revenue. For some industries, these requirements to provide a high level of content and user experience are multiplied. This is the case for sectors classified as YMYL, or Your Money, Your Life.
What is YMYL?
The acronym YMYL stands for Your Money, Your Life. These are companies’ websites that, according to Google’s definition criteria, can impact the health, happiness and financial balance of users. They are companies linked to areas such as nutrition, sports, physical and mental health, finance and investments and even legal services.
And what does it mean? That each and every website from a reliable company must have true and quality content. But if your company falls into the YMYL segment this is even more important, as Google understands the importance of doing its best to prevent its users from falling for scams or having access to false information that can impact their health.
Improve Your SEO Strategy
What we can take away from this is that it doesn’t matter what kind of product or service you sell: if you’re asking people to trust you with their money, Google expects you to earn the trust of your customers.
That’s why EAT and YMYL infiltrate everything. Invest in your content and invest in your team, and the expertise, authority and trust you establish will lead to ranking and revenue improvements over time. And if you need help crafting a solid SEO and content marketing strategy, please let us know and we can help.