Improving Your Website’s EAT Algorithm for Health and Wellness
Let’s start by simply explaining E.A.T.
E—Expertise
A—Authoritativeness
T—Trustworthiness
So, What Exactly is the Google E-A-T Algorithm Update?
First of all, this update isn’t a very new thing. It already happened in the beginning of August 2018. At that time, it caused a lot of variance and fluctuation in SEO and search rankings.
It Changes How Google Ranks YMYL Pages
If you have never heard of YMYL, you are not alone. It’s an acronym that stands for “your money or your life” and it’s a term that Google uses for many medical or health websites. The August 2018 update had the most effect on these websites and pages that fall into that category. Some of them saw immense changes in their search traffic.
That’s also the reason why some people refer to what happened as the Google “medic” update.
Fast forward to today, now the content that is created, and your marketing, must up its E.A.T. Score. The higher the score the more safeguarded your site. You may have the best quality of content, however, if the score is low, it may affect how you show up in Google search rankings.
So How Do You Improve Your E.A.T. Score?
There are a few steps that may help improve your score and keep you safe from getting hit with Google’s “medic” algorithm.
Follow these steps to try and stay the course and/or improve your websites’ rankings:
- Always add an author to all blog posts. This shows Google the “who” behind the information provider. Because these are YMYL sites, the expectation of Google is that the source should be a trustworthy author (i.e. a healthcare professional).
- Consider what goes live on the site and trip down potentially low EAT content. Remove the poor or low-quality content, focus on content that is in your niche and written by experts or adding personal experiences.
- Create personal branding. Boost your About Us page, include testimonials on your website, customer reviews as well as publications…all of these show trustworthiness.
- Who is Back-Linking? While having people back-link to your website is very important for SEM, with E.A.T it’s quality over quantity. So if you are in healthcare, having other sites that are in your niche back-link is deemed better by Google and will give you a better score.
- Secure your site with HTTPS. Website security is a big deal to the E.A.T. score, so it’s important to keep your SSL certificate up to date.
- Be active on social media. Sharing content beyond the website with your target audience helps to build a positive reputation. This doesn’t directly affect the E.A.T. score but does help you gain more signals and stand out amongst competitors that are not doing the same.
While SEO and Google algorithms do change and get updated occasionally, it’s up to us to continually maintain and update our websites as needed to keep our rankings up. It may not always be met with positivity, but at last, it’s something that is important.
Because Google’s Algorithm hit the health and wellness websites in particular, we do recommend that all websites in that sector take a look and try to increase their overall E.A.T. scores.
Need more information on SEO, SEM or how to improve in rankings? Contact us directly for an analysis.
