What is E-A-T and Why it is Crucial to SEO (with an E-A-T Checker]

By: Arik Marmorstein, Spectroomz founder

Spectroomz lets you and your team hire an online researcher so you can both focus on where your skills are most impactful AND get data-driven decisions.

In this post, I’ll explain what does E-A-T stand for in Google SEO, why it’s important and I’ll share an E-A-T checker you can use to estimate your content’s EAT SEO score. 

Skip to the E-A-T checker

Contents

1. Who are Google’s search quality raters

2. What is E-A-T in SEO

3. What is YMYL

4. Why is EAT important to Google’s SEO

5. How to know in which domain my site has authority?

6. The E-A-T checker

Google has around 10,000 human search quality raters (raters). These raters perform different search queries and rate the search results they get based on different criteria. Google shared these criteria in Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines. 

That way Google can improve its search engine performance to serve the most helpful content in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

In the guidelines, Google introduced the concept of E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. It was mentioned more than 130 times.

Google’s search engine’s purpose is to serve people with high-quality content that answer the purpose of their search. If I typed SaaS SEO I’m probably looking to learn about SEO for SaaS companies. There are many articles created to help me and part of the raters’ job is to rate their page quality.

Google mentions that one of the characteristics of a high-quality page is high E-A-T. 

While Expertise refers to the content creator’s expertise. Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness refer to the content creator, the content itself, and the site in which the content is. 

Expertise is simple. Do you have the right knowledge, skills, or experience to write this content? 

Authoritativeness is about the writers and the website’s reputations. If the writer and/or website have good reputations and have backlinks from relevant high-quality websites, they have authority. 

Trustworthiness is more about enabling readers to trust the website, the content and the writer. We trust the things we see. If there is no about page or no information about the writer, they are less trustworthy. If the content itself doesn’t include links to relevant sources, we tend not to trust it. 

Think about an article on COVID symptoms. 

Google tells its raters that a high-quality article (which serve the purpose of educating people about the symptoms of COVID and whether what they experience could be caused by COVID) written by an expert (say an MD with relevant experience), that’s published in a well-known medical website (say Mayoclinic, Healthline or WebMD) should be considered as a high-quality page. 

If a high-quality page was written by an expert but published on a less known website then it should be considered less quality. 

People can gain expertise from experience. It doesn’t have to be formal. But Google tells its raters that the standards of page quality are higher with regards to some type of content. 

YMYL stands for Your Money Your Life. Queries that relate to people’s health, financials, happiness, or safety.

These are the type of topics in which E-A-T is even more important.

If I’m trying to rank my new stock market blog on Google’s first page, I’m probably going to have a long journey. 

Google wants to serve people with the best content for the purpose of their search. 

The process in which the raters rate the content based on E-A-T, among others, and then Google’s engineers perform the required changes so the better content will be ranked higher makes E-A-T a ranking factor. That’s why it’s important to start implementing E-A-T (if you haven’t already).

But understanding E-A-T is also important so you’ll be able to assess, as an SEO professional, in which topics you or your client should focus on.

There is no fun in writing a good article, optimizing it just to see that you won’t make it into Google’s first page because you didn’t assess it’s authority or expertise properly.

Lily Ray shared a great way to start and understand your site’s authority. 

1) Use an SEO tool (I use Ahrefs) to get the pre-text of your backlinks’ anchors. 

2) Export it and use a word cloud generator to understand what are the top keywords other websites associate with your site. 



While there is no official way to check content’s E-A-T score, Google shared questions to help you assess your content quality. 

I have created a checker you or your writers can use to assess a specific piece of content. You answer the questions and get a score at the end.

Google hasn’t endorsed it in any way, but I think it makes sense. 

I think it also makes sense to do it before putting the work of writing the content as you might understand what’s efforts are really required to write valuable content that might rank high.

This post was written by Arik Marmorstein, Spectroomz founder. Check why he started Spectroomz on the about page. Here’s his Linkedin profile.