E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T is a guideline that Google employees and algorithms follow. 

It’s hard to advise how your website or your team should use this guideline to their advantage. 

But it’s easy to suggest what you should focus on when working on your Webflow site.

Before we begin!

Keep in mind that E-E-A-T and quality raters guidelines are not a collection of ranking tips. 

It’s documentation that explains how each online business or website should think and act if they want to be successful online.

What E-A-T Meant?

Before E-E-A-T there was E-A-T.

Google released their Search Quality Rating Guidelines back in 2013. Later in 2014, they added E-A-T to their guidelines. 

E-A-T meant expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. E-A-T aimed to provide tools to classify different websites based on their value and quality.

This concept was initially used only for “Your Money Your Life (YMYL)” industries, such as insurance, investing, banking, medicine etc. In other words, industries that can hurt you physically or financially.

But we now know that this quality evaluation process has been expanded to all industries. 

What is E-E-A-T?

At the end of 2022, Google added an extra E to E-A-T. 

Newly introduced E stands for: Experience.

This means that the current guideline is called E-E-A-T or Double-E-A-T if you want to call it that way.

The current main quality rating guideline, E-E-A-T stands for:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

This means that when building websites - to expect organic search traffic, you should ask yourself:

• Do you have experience in it?
• Are you an expert on the subject?
• Do you have authority in this industry?
• Can you be trusted?

In other words, search engines like Google want to make sure that content that people will find in their search results are as useful as possible to the user.

Once again.

Not harmful. Useful.

That’s what E-E-A-T is fundamentally about: avoiding harmful content and making sure that the most useful content ranks the highest.

Now let’s dive deeper into each topic.

Experience

High-quality content within the field, should demonstrate that the creator or website owner has actual experience with the topic, or industry.

It simply helps to know that all suggestions and ideas have been actually tried or tested, making all insights or tips genuine. 

Expertise

Quality content should be created by creators who have expertise in the topic, industry, or subject. 

This expertise can come from credentials or qualifications, but sometimes having in-depth knowledge is enough.

Authority

Having authority means having positive recognition from other experts in your industry.

Authority includes the authority of your content, page, website, and brand name as a whole. 

This authority mostly comes from links but can be passed down by just mentioning you as the author as well. 

Of course, passing authority with links is way more powerful!

Trust

Trust is at the core of search engine algorithms and how they rank pages. 

Your website trust comes from being open about authors, team, terms, and other business details or information. 

Trust also comes from fact accuracy, and citations to trustworthy sources while not using any hidden content tactics.

E-E-A-T Importance for SEO

E-E-A-T is part of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. 

Needless to say, Google’s staff that manually review sites and content, use the same quality rating guidelines. 

The same guidelines are used when creating algorithms, crawlers, and indexing workflows for search engines.

The truth behind E-E-A-T is simple… 

Just be the best you can be and you will get traffic from search engines. 

Have the best user experience. 

Have the best content. 

Have the best team.

Solve problems.

Be helpful.

And most importantly, stay consistent and don’t give up.

SEO is a long-term game. Taking the first spot in search results can take more than a year. 

Be The Source for All Answers

You should strive to become the best source for X online. X being a topic, a solution for a problem, or anything else. 

X is what your website specializes in.

It is important to note that not all things are searched equally. Meaning not every industry has enough eyeballs to make this worthwhile. 

That’s where keyword research, search intents, and market research come into play.

Also, not every online business strategy converts well enough or has monetary conversion values that will make your website profitable. 

That’s the reality with any business. That’s the reality with websites.

But if there is enough:

• Traction (search volume)
• Profits to be made (conversion)

Then you should always be looking at your competitor websites and thinking…

How can we be more valuable than them?

How can we be more helpful than them?

How can we be the best website in this industry? For this problem? For this community?

Cover Topics Completely

In the age of semantic SEO, there is no better way to be the best source of information out there than covering topics in depth.

It’s no longer the longest or most keyword-stuffed content that wins. It’s the most helpful content that wins.

And being helpful means:

• Creating supporting content
• Internally linking your content
• Linking to credible external sources
• Focusing on one subject (search intent) at a time
• Editing and updating content as time passes

Actionable E-E-A-T Steps in Webflow

It’s hard to give actionable E-E-A-T advice without seeing your website or knowing what industry you are in or what goals you have.

That being said, there are a few common E-E-A-T issues that many Webflow sites share. 

Share Related Information

Adding business registration information, addresses, emails, phone numbers, VAT numbers, contact information, and all other data is important for any website. 

This creates trust.

There is also other information that users might find helpful:

• Terms and Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Return Policy
• Shipping Information
• Etc.

As you can see, it’s all about being as open as you can be with each visitor within your website. 

Be as transparent as you can be.

Create Author Pages

Who wrote this? Can I trust the author? Do they know what they are talking about?

That’s what author pages are for.

Don’t stop there! 

Here's an example from Bankrate: because their financial advice could potentially hurt you financially (if it would be wrong), they created a UI with author information that shows on hover. 

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Including links to social media, education, accolades, and even businesses that their team worked at.

Look at your Webflow site and think: What can we share with visitors that will convey trust and authority?

Create Team Pages

Naturally, the author and team pages are the same. Or can be the same. Even if you don’t own a blog, your whole site was made by your team, right?

Share all the information about each member of your team, link to their social media (apparently social media makes us real), and maybe even previous jobs. 

Show that visitors can trust your team by sharing openly who is on your team!

Use Person Structured Data

Now that you have all that data about your team or authors, don’t forget to publish schema markup that uses that information inside your structured data.

Search Intent Format

This one is one of the most common mistakes for any Webflow website. Because Webflow gives us such flexible design control… You can sometimes forget about search intents!

Read our full search intent guide if you want to learn more, but the basics are:

• Analyze what other websites rank for the terms you rank for
• Take inspiration from their UI and how they provide information
• See what those pages have in common
• Implement those changes on your own pages or do the opposite if it makes sense

Search intent is all about understanding that different search phrases set different expectations for your visitors. And those expectations have to be matched both with content and user interface.

Create Helpful Titles and Headings

Install headings map extension. Open your page. Read only the headings.

Just from the headings… Can everyone understand what this page is about? What problem or purpose does it have?

If you can’t clearly understand what you will find on your web page by reading only your headings… 

Chances are visitors will not understand what your business does even if they read the whole page. 

Keep your headings direct and simple.

Link to Reputable Sources

Always contextually link to other websites if it would help the user. Even if those sources are from your competitors.

Just maybe don’t link to pages that you will be competing directly within the same search results page.

Ideally, you should have your own supporting content to link to, but if you don’t - link to whatever source might prove your claim or help visitors learn more.

This shows that you have done your research and you know what reputable websites are out there that can be trusted.

Link to Internal Sources

Plan content in topical clusters. Add internal links from one page to another. 

Read our full guide on internal linking strategy in Webflow if you need more information.

Update Your Site Regularly

Last and the most important tip: constantly edit and improve your website.

Information changes, new ideas become important and new keyword trends appear overnight. 

Not only that but there are always things on your Webflow website that can be improved. Content. UI. Internal linking. Navigation. Design. Page speed. 

Keep changing and always stay relevant.