Google pays a team of manual website reviewers to examine websites that come up in Google searches and evaluate them against their competitors. In their effort to train Google’s algorithm, those who wrote the manuals for these reviewers came up with the acronym E.E.A.T., which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Optimization for E.E.A.T. involves finding ways to demonstrate these characteristics on your website. The websites you link to as sources, how you explain your credentials on your About page, personal case studies, and sharing your experiences on your website do this. And the people who link to your website as a related source also add to this.
This article will discuss specific things you can do on your website to optimize for E.E.A.T. See my related articles: “Why is Topical Authority Important in Local SEO?” and “What is E.E.A.T. in Local SEO?“.
About Page
If you look at the About pages of websites with a lot of E.E.A.T. like WebMD, you get a good idea of what Google is looking for in About pages. Let’s see what we can learn from WebMD’s About page.
Left Side: If you look along the left-hand side, you see that they have links to multiple About Us pages talking about various aspects of who they are and what they do. They even link to a page about the awards and recognitions they have received. They also have links to their policy pages, terms and conditions, how to use their site FAQs pages, and a Contact Us page.
Main Focus: Their main focus is an article you can click on to read in full, talking about what their website will do to benefit the users. They have one about their senior staff and editorial team that opens up to an article showing the pictures and credentials of each individual. And then they have the one talking about their awards and recognitions again.
Conclusion: Local businesses may not have all the things to highlight that a WebMD-type site might, but most will have some really important things they can add to highlight their accomplishments, experience, and expertise.
So don’t just write a bland little blurb about your business on your About page. Use it like a company resumé, and highlight all the reasons why customers would want to trust and work with your company.
Frequently Asked Questions Page (FAQs)
Having a FAQs page on your local business website can really help establish you as an authority. But don’t make the common mistake of just having questions about your business operations; have questions that customers ask about your industry in general, which will help your readers.
For example, look at these questions I got off of the FAQs page from this dentist in Dallas, Texas. I recommend you click on that link, go to that page, and read how they thoroughly answer each question. And look at these great questions that they answer:
When you answer real helpful questions that customers have for free on your website, you are not only being really helpful to your readers (which Google really likes), but you are showing your knowledge of your industry, experience, and expertise.
The above video is one that I did explaining more about Topical Authority in local SEO.
Products and Services Pages
The below image is of some paragraph text from the website KES Auto Repair in Dallas, TX. I selected it because it provides a good example for me to show you how to build topical authority on your products or services pages.
Example Text:
My Assessment
There are both good and bad examples to show you in this text. They have the right idea in that they give the reader very good practical advice that could help them if they have the symptoms mentioned in the text. That is what we are going for on a product or service page, along with explaining your product or service.
The problem with this text is in their effort to fit keywords into the text, they have made it a bit cumbersome and clunky to read. People only benefit from helpful written information if they are willing to read it. It needs to read well and have good spelling and grammar.
Also, notice how they fit their city into the paragraph text where they could. That is very important. Your city is a keyword to establish relevance within your text. The only problem in this text is that they mention the city so often that it doesn’t read naturally.
What Google Is Looking For
Your products and service pages provide great opportunities to demonstrate all aspects of E.E.A.T., experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Readers are on those pages because they have a problem that needs to be resolved.
If you are super helpful on these pages, even showing them how to solve simple problems themselves, they will trust you more and want to use you for the things they don’t want to do themselves. Doing so also goes a long way in establishing you as an experienced expert authority in your field.
Let me show you that same example, KES Auto Repair in Dallas, Texas, lower down on the same service page below the text.
What Google will like about this page is how helpful their initial text was; then, with each of these blue buttons, they list their various related services, and then below a short FAQ list specific to these services.
This was the best example I could find of a local business going out of its way to be helpful and establish E.E.A.T. They just need to make their text more natural, as I discussed above, so that it is more readable.
Final Thoughts
I have given you some important ways you can establish E.E.A.T. on your local business website. Be creative about this. Really showcase what makes you stand ahead of the pack in your industry locally on your website. Doing so will pay off big in your search rankings as well as in the conversion ratio on your website! People trust those who teach them.
I hope you learned something from this article and that it was helpful. If you benefited from it, please share it on your social media. That really helps us get the word out.