We can all agree that people like Barry Schwartz, Danny Sullivan, and Rand Fishkin are experts in SEO because, well, they are SEOs all successful and outspoken SEOs themselves.

For more examples.

An entrepreneur would be a great fit to create a content regarding how to manage a company because he has the related experience which makes him an expert in the field.

While medical advice should be written by those with appropriate medical expertise and kept up-to-date with the latest medical practice.

But what about user-based communities? Do they have the expertise factor going on?

Well, it really depends. Take review sites for an example, users publishing a detailed and helpful review on a product, or personal stories and experience is also viewed as a content with high expertise. Because there really is no way to put an expert label on everyday experience.

You need to have real experience, clear understanding, proper education or credentials on the topic you’re writing in order to be called an expert.

The second question is, how to gain the A for authority in E-A-T?

It goes like this.

You can only be an authority on something if you know your stuff, which aligns with having expertise.

Like expertise, authority can be built.

What you need to get authority is by stacking up quality contents, on quality content, on quality contents, on… ok, you probably got that.

Search engines like fresh content. Pumping out quality, fresh, up-to-date content consistently is a great way to build authority.

Having fresh content consistently won’t hurt in your lead generation too, Hubspot reported that companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get nearly 3.5x more traffic than those that publish 0-4 monthly.

Another great way to gain authority is by building your link profile.

When you are linked by another website, that shows a thumbs up in the search engine’s point of view. The more links you got, the more thumbs up you’re getting. The more authority you have gained in Google’s book.

Now, how can you gain more links? Well, this actually goes hand in hand with creating quality content.

You see, when you have some kick ass content that people are just dying to share, you will be linked again and again by anyone who reads it.

When you have a bunch of backlinks coming in, that can really build up your page authority and domain authority.

Have a positive reputation.

Reputation is mentioned multiple times in the document as an important part to consider when rating the quality of a website.

Reputation is closely linked to both authority and trustworthiness. Your reputation will be good only when people are talking good things about you.

When you have a high amount of authority, there will be more people who will be talking about you. And only when you are trustworthy that people will say good things about you.

Thin content or scalped content will hurt your authority.

As opposed to original, quality content that brings value to the visitors, thin content or plagiarized content is a big no-no that will bring negative effect to the content writer and the web page.

One thing to take note though, Google does not consider syndicated content to be plagiarized content. The fact that they are hosting syndicated content like press release will not hurt your E-A-T. Though that may bring up a canonical problem, that is another topic for another day.

However, the site that hosts the content, syndicated or not, is responsible for the quality of the piece. So if the content has a low E-A-T, that will hurt the E-A-T of your website too.

Now let’s go ahead to the T for Trustworthy in E-A-T.

This is especially important for YMYL websites.

YMYL refers to Your Money Your Life. A term used in the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines to group all the websites that involve any kind of information regarding medical, financial, money transactions, and any kind of important event that can have a life-altering effect.

Essentially, if the information on the web page is bad, and you listened to it, there will be a negative impact on your life quality.

That’s why Google puts the utmost importance and scrutinize the websites giving these kinds of information.

Make it clear on who is running the website and how to reach the support team.

Letting your visitors know excatly who you are and how to reach you is one important box to tick if you want to be running a quality YMYL website that can be trusted.

Likewise, for any written content clearly showcasing who wrote it and what credentials they have also earned you points in the trustworthy department.

Another thing you need to do is fact-checking.

Are the data you’re quoting come from a reliable site? Is the information you’re providing accurate and up to date? You want to make sure that whatever information you’re sharing, they are correct and can be trusted.

Is your website secured?

Make sure you have your SSL certificate installed and had made the prompt migration from http to https.

This is especially important if your website involves any commercial transaction or stores any amount of personal information from your visitors.

Make sure your ads adhere to the standard of the Coalition Of Better Ads

If you run ads on your website, make sure they adhere to the better ads standard or risk the trustworthiness of your website.

The guideline specifically mentions interstitial webpage ( a full page that appears to show you an ad before you can reach the content you want to read) and difficult to close ads that follow a page scroll as examples of a distracting advertisement that disrupts user experience thus lower the quality of a web page.

To wrap this up, let me quote this from Google

“Our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what they think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals.”

Quality over everything. Keep E-A-T in mind when you’re creating contents or building your website. With a good amount of E-A-T, your website will be dominating the SERP of your targeted keywords.