Erika Hornmark
A content writer at aboveA, passionate about crafting impactful stories that connect with audiences. Studying political economy and statistics at UC Berkeley, I blend analytical insight with creative storytelling to help businesses grow and connect with their audience.
Why E-E-A-T Is Your Best SEO Strategy This Year
Imagine two websites have an article on the same topic. One is authored by a certified expert in the field and includes cited sources, various real-world examples, and a variety of media types. The other is a quick AI-generated article lacking meaningful examples or images, and has no identifiable author. Which do you think Google prefers?
Exactly! That’s why E-E-A-T, or Experience-Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness, is such an effective SEO tool. Let’s explore further why Google E-E-A-T matters (especially in a time with so much AI content) and how you can implement it to make your content more SEO-friendly.
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Table of Contents
Why Google Cares About E-E-A-T
Google aims to deliver relevant and credible content to its users. Hosting and pushing content that’s factually incorrect or manipulative goes against their mission and can lead to harm. For that reason, Google cares a lot about trust and citation balance, knowledge-based trust, and on-page SEO enhancement.
Google assesses its content by evaluating many variables. Some important features include:
- Authorship: Google evaluates authorship data, ranking more credible and relevant authors higher than pages with less information on them.
- Consistency with other trustworthy sources. This can be verified with higher-tier links. Links should be fresh and come from trusted sources.
- Content updates: Content updates should be consistent and speak to the accuracy of the content. Including links and sources to new updates is crucial.
E-E-A-T can boost your website by amplifying your efforts to reach more people. For example, domain authority has a key role in page rankings. For example, 65% of marketers believe that the domain authority of a site is more significant than the sheer quantity of backlinks. A high website domain authority will help build a webpage’s rankings far more effectively than lesser-known or less-established sites.
In fact, even Google has confirmed the importance of E-E-A-T. Search engines treat these attributes in a checklist-like fashion to determine what content is boosted to the top of the search results. Convinced? Now we can dive into how to apply this knowledge to your content.
How to Improve E-E-A-T on Your Website
Show Real Experience
Including detailed narratives and substantiating your claims with other media (think screenshots, videos) can demonstrate how your content applies in the real world.
As an example, if you’re a business selling a certain online tool, start by showing how you use it! Make a quick video or interactive page on your website that guides you through your tool. If you prefer pictures or screenshots, consider labeling and annotating them!
Prove Your Expertise
It’s crucial to write an author bio. Provide certifications or cite past work and accomplishments pertinent to your subject. Including a photo and links to other professional websites and social media profiles can further boost your credibility.
Build Authority
Authority can come from proving your expertise and credentials, but it also comes from other sources. You can increase your content’s topical authority in SEO by tying it into related content. Making use of linking (onto different pages on your own website as well as other trusted sources), as well as interviews and guest contributions from other authorities in the field, can build your recognition.
Earn Trust
Trust can be earned in a variety of ways, but consider the following:
- Highlighting past performance. Including customer reviews (consider for your product: do longer corporate testimonials or shorter star reviews make more sense) can boost customer trust in your business and its associated products and services.
- From a more technical standpoint, including privacy policies, disclosures, and terms of service can make some customers feel safer. You can take further initiative by making sure that your website is also using secure (HTTPS) connections.
- Avoiding clickbait or misleading content. This will likely dissatisfy page viewers, causing them to abandon the page early, and may lead to your page becoming ranked lower on search engines.
Building Authority with AI-Driven Content Distribution
AI can be a great tool for both producing and sharing content, but only if it’s used responsibly and within limits. It’s important to avoid overpromising AI capabilities. Even if tools claim to be “AI-driven,” don’t trust them unless their claims have been substantiated. In the worst case, irresponsible AI use can mislead potential customers and may leave poor reviews. In this scenario, Google will absolutely notice and push your content further down in the search engine.
AI is a supporting tool, not the dominant workhorse. Here are some tips to responsibly leverage AI in building authority:
- Be aware of bias and the potential inaccuracy of AI-generated content
- Include information about the human author of the content
- Monitor and update content regularly. Industry trends and knowledge are constantly changing, and the more frequently you modify your content to ride these waves, the more likely you are to have your content boosted in search engines.
How to Use AI to Support Expertise Without Faking It
AI can be an incredibly powerful tool in content creation, but it does have its limitations. Using AI responsibly can help streamline production, but it should never replace true experience. Consider following these guidelines to make the most of AI:
- When you’re stuck on an outline, have it generate a guide for you.
- When you’re looking for additional data to back up your claims, have it gather the data for you. A massive caution to take with this process is that you must verify the data by checking the sources with your own eyes. Sometimes links can be faulty or take information out of context.
- Make sure to pair AI assistance with human insights. Case studies, non-AI-generated visual media, and author bios can ‘humanize’ your work.
- Disclose AI usage when relevant. Never pass off AI-generated insights as personal experiences or ideas. For further information, be sure to check out Google’s guidelines on AI-generated content.
AI and Trust: How to Avoid Losing Credibility
Overusing AI tools or being faulty with your fact-checking can decimate your content’s credibility. Whenever you use AI tools, follow this checklist to avoid common AI-related mishaps:
- Verify statistics and links being generated by AI with your own eyes.
- Check that the links are attached to reliable sources. See what you can find out about the author and their credibility as well. Also, make sure to evaluate its relevance to your content.
- Cite research that comes from the web.
- Avoid copy and pasting from AI sources. Make sure to write things in your own words to avoid plagiarism. AI-generated content may be unnecessarily repetitive, so make sure to rewrite all content.
Aligning SEO with E-E-A-T
SEO audits are analyses that can be conducted to evaluate website performance across technical, on-page, and off-page metrics. These determine the search visibility of your website. SEO audits will identify problems on your website impacting site authority, trustworthiness, and user experience.
Tools for SEO Audits
Performing E-E-A-T audits will help you verify that your content is in line with Google’s standard of trust and authority. Numerous tools exist to help you conduct SEO audits, including:
- Semrush: includes a free trial for a week. After scanning your site, they will list top issues with your site that can be easily fixed using their software. Learn more about your site’s crawlability, speed, and performance, and on-page SEO using Semrush.
- Google Search Console: Google Search Console is a free, comprehensive SEO auditing tool. The platform is focused on webmaster tools, fit for reporting on technical elements. While their free SEO tools are a little harder to navigate, when combined with other platforms like Google Analytics, which provide real-time reports on key site performance indicators, mastering the tools can unlock lots of new insights.
- Morningscore: Morningscore is a beginner-friendly SEO auditing tool. Their unique gamified SEO tasking will let you keep track of your site optimization process. While their services are more limited compared to the other two, they have different pricing tiers ranging from $49 to $259 a month (with an additional two-week free trial!) with varying capabilities.
What do SEO Audits Reveal?
SEO auditing tools perform numerous tasks, but are particularly helpful to assess various metrics, including:
- Backlinks (both their location and quality)
- Keyword performance
- Domain authority
- Site security
What Can I Do With SEO Audit Results?
Once you get feedback from SEO auditing tools, you can accordingly edit
- Business details, including address, policies, and team information.
- Reviews, to make sure they’re detailed and transparent
- All public-facing content to verify cleanliness and accuracy
- All content is to ensure it provides insightful, relevant information
How to Audit Your Current E-E-A-T Signals
Step One: Evaluate Authorship and Expertise
Comb through each of the articles on your site and ask yourself:
- Is the author’s name clearly visible?
- Under the named author is there a bio? Does the bio include credentials, experience, or background related to the topic?
- Is the author established in the field? For example, have they previously been cited elsewhere on the site or other platforms in credible contexts?
This step is important for improving your site’s authoritativeness and content credibility.
Step Two: Verify for First-Hand Experience
Make sure each of your articles reflects unique or direct knowledge of the topic. Consider these questions to help search engines identify and push your high-quality content, not repetitive or even AI-written content:
- Does your article include different forms of media supporting your anecdotes? Do you have photos, screenshots, videos, or original data (and associated visualizations) on your site?
- Does your content include distinct anecdotes from real experiences?
- If your content has case studies or research embedded in it, ensure that all results or outcomes are properly documented. If you’re referencing outside sources, make sure they’re linked and cited properly as well.
Step Three: Identify Trust Elements Across the Website
E-E-A-T can be supported on a general site level, not just individual posts. Consider your site architecture and evaluate:
- Do you have an easy-to-find contact page with full business information?
- Are there visible terms of service, privacy policy, return/refund policies, and user agreements on the site?
- Is your site secure?
- Are customer reviews easy to navigate, transparent, and verifiable?
These components are crucial to boosting your site’s trustworthiness for both your customers and search engines.
Step Four: Identify Your Topical Authority
To increase your site’s topical authority SEO, it’s important to link your content to content already available on your site and outside sources. Follow this checklist to ensure that search engines prioritize your well-connected content.
- Are related articles all internally (and externally, if necessary) linked?
- Are topic clusters on your site built around major themes? Is it easy to recognize what these themes are?
- Are you consistently publishing new content in your area of expertise? Have you also been regularly re-reading and updating your content?
Following the checklist will help you cover your area of expertise comprehensively. Search engines will pick this up as a sign that you are a source of authority and are a trusted source, improving your site’s visibility.
Step Five: Verify Citations and References
Run through this checklist by surveying all content to ensure that:
- Your content includes credible, up-to-date sources that have been properly vetted. Are your external sources authoritative, like government, university, or established industry websites?
- There’s a blend of internal linking and trusted outbound links.
Following through with these five steps and consistently reviewing your site content for updates will ensure that your content is E-E-A-T optimized. Remember to be on the lookout for any new updates from Google about how they rank searches – they occasionally release new changes or peeks into the algorithm that your site can benefit from.
Case Studies: Brands Winning with E-E-A-T in 2025
Deloitte
Deloitte is a business-to-business (B2B) service-based company providing auditing, consulting, and advisory services. Deloitte maintains strong authoritativeness by producing extensive content hubs. Deloitte’s white papers, economic forecasts, and commentary are produced by employees with deep industry knowledge. By citing experts with complete bios and external presence (i.e. LinkedIn) showcasing their experience and expertise. By following through with frequent updates and structured navigation, their Insight Hub is a trustworthy, E-E-A-T-friendly source of information.
On Deloitte’s blog, for example, they’ve uploaded an article weighing the challenges of Covid-19 in the workplace. They clearly state the authors, “three finance and transformation leaders” at the top, and mention their credentials and experience further in the article.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) company providing businesses with software and customer relationship management (CRM) tools to boost outreach. They leverage their expertise in the field with their blog and resource centers curated by established marketing professionals. Their articles often link to original research findings and customer case studies, providing new, relevant insights into the industry.
Their content includes long-form content like guides and how-tos, expert commentaries, and articles cross-linked to their relevant tools. Their long-form content is often accompanied by webinars, videos, and data visualizations to diversify their content. When advertising their services, they build trustworthiness by including transparent product reviews on third-party platforms like TrustRadius to make potential customers feel safer.
REI: Recreational Equipment, Inc.
REI is a consumer-facing business-to-consumer (B2C) brand selling outdoor gear and lifestyle goods. They target potential customers with a blog with expert advice sections featuring articles from experienced outdoor sportsmen and professionals. Leveraging their unique experience and expertise, they compile real-world use cases for their goods, including product recommendations backed by testing.
Their products are sold alongside a transparent return policy, verified reviews, and extensive gear tests. REI drives engagement and interest in their products using Google E-E-A-T signals in a very crowded B2C space.
REI uses its blog site not only for long-form text but also for well-produced videos relevant to its consumer base. The article spotlights an accomplished entrepreneur in the nature and wellness space in a unique media format, a welcome change of pace.
Common Mistakes People Make with E-E-A-T
Confusing SEO and E-E-A-T Audits
One common misconception is that SEO audits and conducting E-E-A-T audits are the same. They have a common goal of improving search visibility and website performance, but they individually focus on different parts of optimization.
A standard SEO audit will focus more on technical and structural factors that affect how search engines parse through your content and rank your site. Technical factors can range from page speed, mobile-friendliness, formatting, site architecture, and more.
On the other hand, auditing E-E-A-T signals tends to be more focused on written site content. It evaluates site content credibility and trustworthiness based on search engine guidelines. These include author credentials and bios, first-hand accounts, and trust elements like HTTPS, customer reviews, and company information.
SEO audits are about how your site functions, while E-E-A-T audits are about who is behind the website content and why it can be trusted. Overall, combining the two creates a complete strategy to tackle any challenges with site performance and credibility.
Insufficient or Irrelevant Content
Your content should be comprehensive and valuable. Short blog posts are very rarely checking off both of these boxes. Long-form content gives you ample time to provide value, solutions, and unique content. Creating in-depth, customer-focused content will help your site resonate with viewers and keep them coming back.
Neglecting User Experience
It can be easy to get sucked into wanting to optimize your site by packing as much information onto your page as possible. However, this is not the most effective approach. Website users don’t typically like being bombarded with walls of text and hyperlinks. It’s important to strike a good balance between optimizing SEO and E-E-A-T signals and making your site content easy to navigate, not overwhelming, and relevant to your audience.
If you’re ever unsure of whether you’ve gone overboard, ask a friend to take a first look at your page. It’s easier to measure SEO optimization levels with tools, but sometimes it can be valuable to get a fresh set of eyes on your site content.
Action Plan for E-E-A-T SEO Strategy in 2025
Confused about how to start implementing effective E-E-A-T SEO strategies on your site, so you can see your online growth scaling steadily? Follow the checklist below to make your work more SEO-friendly.
- Audit your site for E-E-A-T Signals
- Conduct an SEO Audit and listen to relevant recommendations
- Over time:
- Continue to invest in long-form, informative content
- Continue to use various forms of media. Using a blend of written, image, and video content will keep viewers engaged
- Continue to treat AI as a supportive tool, not a one-size-fits-all solution to content problems
- Continue to monitor content for necessary updates
- Use SEO tools to further monitor site trustworthiness and viewership. As a general benchmark, for a content-heavy site, you should be conducting both an E-E-A-T and SEO Audit once every one or two months.
Find Out If Your Website Meets Google's E-E-A-T Standards
Conclusion
E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor that Google uses to rank results. However, it’s an important framework that Google uses to determine what content is trustworthy and thus gets boosted in search engines. As search engines continue to evolve and become more intelligent, E-E-A-T will become increasingly important as it’s used to judge site trust, page authority, and content credibility. Your content should focus equally on informative, interesting content and E-E-A-T in order to maximize SEO authority growth.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How does Google evaluate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness?
Google’s search algorithm uses signals like author credentials and bios, real-life examples, external links and citations, site reputation, and content quality in order to evaluate E-E-A-T.
2. What role do backlinks play in improving authority?
Backlinks coming from high-quality, reputable sources are essentially a vouch of confidence for your content. Google reads them as a sign that your content is trustworthy and recognized as such as by others, increasing your algorithmic authoritativeness and thus SEO domain authority.
How can ecommerce websites apply E-E-A-T principles?
Ecommerce sites can implement E-E-A-T principles by leaning into high-quality verified reviews, including author bios for any long-form content (think buying guides or seasonal blog posts), clearly outlining return/exchange policies and product information, and having secure payment processes.
How often should you update content for better E-E-A-T?
Depending on how trend-sensitive or fast-growing your industry is, the timeline can look different. In general, updating your content every 6 to 12 months will help you to maintain accuracy in your content.