Can you have your Google cake and EEAT it too?

Content is king, right? I mean, I am a loyal subject to it as a copywriter, supplicating before its wordy throne, feeding it fine morsels of verbiage and sentences crafted to perfection to satisfy its ever-growing hunger, says Tom Valcanis founder of I Sell Words.

However, the conventional wisdom is that content in isolation doesn’t really do much. Especially if it’s just spun up by AI, which will usually contain errors if it’s not carefully massaged and edited by a real person.

For the Search Engine Optimisers out there, you’re already shouting at the screen that it’s the incoming links that determine the worth of your content. The more backlinking your piece of content has, the better it ranks on search engine results pages. (SERPs.)

Industry authority Moz says backlinks are especially important as they’re a “vote of confidence” in the relevance of the information displayed on a site devoted to certain search term. The more and higher quality backlinks you earn, the better your SERP (on average).

As much as SEOs harp on about backlinks, it’s not always the be-all and end-all.

Google’s general guidelines on Search Quality Rating, one of the components that Google’s PageRank uses to sort and display results based on relevance, is a rather weighty 176 pages long. Not exactly “read it on your lunch break” sort of material.

With all that said, can you write content that’s just so fantastic and useful to people, it can rank on the first page of SERPs without even going through the drudgery of waiting for (or begging/paying for) backlinks? What do you need to do to get there?

EAT + Experience – The Secret Ingredient

Prior to December 2022, Google’s human quality raters pursued three factors to rank high-quality content apart from the rest. “Elite” quality content needed to possess exemplary levels of:

• Expertise – someone with demonstrable knowledge on the subject, such as a Medical Doctor discussing flu remedies.
• Trustworthiness – the same doctor has good standing with the medical profession at large.
• Authoritativeness – other experts refer to this doctor as someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Now, Google also prizes Experience – does the author of the page actually have any on-hand experience with what they’re discussing? Can they show evidence that they have experience with the topic? Is this Doctor a neurosurgeon or an influenza specialist?

A vast and rich body of prior content is usually good enough proof – especially if you’ve been building that up over time. But you can speed that up a little bit.

Let’s Get Savvy

When it comes to fast-ranking results, finance brokers Savvy have used SEO since 2011 to grow their brand from a small car loan company to a national finance powerhouse servicing tens of thousands of Australians with car loans, personal loans, mortgages, insurance, and more.

They’ve been producing high quality content around personal finance and associated topics, as part of their ongoing keyword and topic strategy.

As car loan brokers, they’ve branched out into well-researched content about electric vehicles, car insurance, motoring reviews, and more recently, representative surveys about the cost of living and automotive consumer sentiment.

However, one piece attracted massive attention from Google: their skyscraper or long-form article on petrol prices around Australia.

It covered historical and current prices, how pricing works, the current petrol price cycles (at the time) and a whole host of information relevant to wholesale and retail petrol pricing in Australia.

As a result, it ranked for 1,100 keywords – with 21 of those being top three ranked – without having a single backlink to show for it. That’s 596 visits for free each month – no additional spend on PPC advertising required.

It sounds like sorcery, but there is logic behind the magic: Savvy has established itself as a high quality, E-E-A-T source with a proven track record of providing quality, novel, and highly prized content in the broader automotive segment. Their extremely positive reputation, exemplary level of effort and research, and tremendously high level of E-E-A-T meant that Google assigned the page as one of the best of the bunch; one that would overwhelmingly satisfy the search requests of users.

“It was incredible because as soon as we posted that article, our analytics lit up,” says Adrian Edlington, Savvy’s PR and Communications Manager. “We take the same approach as any news organisation or niche blog. We always present high levels of original and fact-checked research that people can rely on. In fact, our report was so well received, we were featured on 7News Adelaide as expert spokespeople on petrol prices.”

Another example of E-E-A-T in action is South Australia Hand Therapy. As a leading expert and authority on hand injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, their page on “How to choose the best carpal tunnel brace” almost instantly ranked for 550 keywords, with 26 top three rankings and the coveted number one position for related carpal tunnel keywords.

The page garners over 1,400 visits per month of organic traffic. As you can read on the page, they included academic references and demonstrated their on-job experience with hand therapy and treating carpal tunnel – the secret E-E-A-T sauce that rockets up the rankings.

No One Is a Born Authority

Adrian says that establishing one’s site as a trusted authority doesn’t happen overnight. “If you think that publishing regular, high quality content doesn’t make a difference, I can tell you firsthand, it does. Optimising your content for E-E-A-T from the get-go means your initial efforts will snowball into even higher rankings for niche topics.

“That’s not to say your technical and off-page SEO should fall by the wayside. A comprehensive SEO keyword strategy allowed us to be in the position where Google recognises our E-E-A-T as being better than most. We are trying to sell a product, but these pages aren’t blatant self-promotion, either. It’s fulfilling a need for good quality and reliable information people are searching for.

“Above all, your content needs to be accessible and relevant to your audience, yet on the same factual level of trust and authority as academia or journalism. It does mean extra effort but it’s well worth it.”

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