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“E-A-T” (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) has been a trendy topic in SEO for the past few years. I love this AHREFS chart showing how each month hundreds of new articles on the topic are published.
A lot of the SEO literature on E-A-T focuses on “serious” YMYL categories like Health & Finance, but a perusal through Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (yes, I read them so you don’t ever have to – here’s my GoFundMe link) implies that E-A-T is relevant for pretty much every type of search. After all, who is to say what’s more or less important to anyone else? Maybe we should change “Your Money or Your Life” to just “Your Life?” And if E-A-T applies to everything, then since we at LSG are pretty well convinced that everything, in Search at least, sooner or later is going Local, then it stands to reason that E-A-T should apply to Local SEO, and thus, we all should be applying E-A-T techniques to our Local SEO campaigns. And if so, how?
Historically, LSG’s POV on E-A-T is we don’t talk about it much. It’s far too squishy and it implies that an algorithm is borderline sentient. We prefer to discuss E-A-T-like things as technical terms. Thinking about them this way gives us ideas for how to work with them for our clients. It also helps us avoid super-helpful recommendations like “make good content.” As the master himself said nearly a year ago, E-A-T is not an algorithm, but rather E-A-T signals should align with what the algorithm is looking for:
Our systems aren’t looking for EAT. Our raters are using that to see if our systems are working well to show good information. There are many different signals that, if we get it right, align with what a good human EAT assessment would be. See also: https://t.co/1fs2oJ9Gtl pic.twitter.com/GBbnYEjJUV — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 19, 2020
Our systems aren’t looking for EAT. Our raters are using that to see if our systems are working well to show good information. There are many different signals that, if we get it right, align with what a good human EAT assessment would be. See also: https://t.co/1fs2oJ9Gtl pic.twitter.com/GBbnYEjJUV
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 19, 2020
And a year before that, Google announced that it was applying BERT to local search:
In early November, we began making use of neural matching as part of the process of generating local search results. Neural matching allows us to better understand how words are related to concepts, as explained more here: https://t.co/ShQm7g9CvN — Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 2, 2019
In early November, we began making use of neural matching as part of the process of generating local search results. Neural matching allows us to better understand how words are related to concepts, as explained more here: https://t.co/ShQm7g9CvN
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 2, 2019
And Danny followed up with a little more nuance about how this might work:
It’s about language, not proximity. But to the degree that language might help us understand something is related to a place, it may have an influence. — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 2, 2019
It’s about language, not proximity. But to the degree that language might help us understand something is related to a place, it may have an influence.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 2, 2019
So this got us thinking that perhaps we could use E-A-T concepts to increase relevance at the local level.
Before we can figure out what E-A-T LOCAL is, let’s lay down a baseline as to what E-A-T for SEO overall is. Great SEOs like Marie Haynes and Lily Ray have gone through a lot of time and effort to pick apart how Google might define E-A-T. In reviewing some of the top posts and presentations on the subject, the consensus says E-A-T for SEO can be defined as:
There’s nothing mind-blowing here, and you can see how you could start to bake these concepts into a tactical campaign – make sure your content is accurate and up to date, use “known” authors, get positive reviews, and of course, get some links. But Local SEO has always been a slightly different game and so it stands to reason E-A-T for Local should have its own peculiarities as well.
The TL:DR (IMO of course): E-A-T for Local SEO is a collection of attributes a search engine might use to evaluate the prominence, proximity, and relevance of a local business entity in order to rank it for a specific search query.
Now let’s take a shot at breaking E-A-T LOCAL down into “technical” terms.
If I were a Google search engineer, I would think of how a search query might express a request for “local expertise.” In English, that might translate to “A business near me that sells cake.”
I might define “local authoritativeness” as “A businesses near me that sells great cake according to the wisdom of the crowd.”
And I might define “local trust” as “A business near me that sells great cake and is not a Q-Anon front.”
So besides the E-A-T factors listed above, what might be some Local-specific variables that could affect your site’s E-A-T. Let’s start with the obvious ones, using our cake example:
Now that we have the obvious stuff out of the way, I thought I’d add a few ideas that are definitely on the “fuzzy” side of the SEO theory. What are some more abstract ways that Google could algorithmically get an E-A-T vibe from your brand?
Relevant content, clear location and categorization, good reviews, and relevant links pretty much align with E-A-T concepts. So maybe you have all been doing E-A-T LOCAL all along and didn’t even know it. Well congratulations, now you have a brand new acronym to put in your presentations like this one I just gave at SEMpdx:
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