Technology Services Firms and Google’s E-E-A-T

SEO is still one of the most potent marketing channels for growing IT companies. Being at the top of the organic search results page, or in the Google local “Map Pack” is simply the best way to get in front of people who are actively looking for your services.

But how do you get there? The answer is complex, but one of the strategies that we use is to make our client’s websites rank high on Google is to establish their experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness.

Why does that matter? Let’s take a look, starting with the basics.

What Is Google’s E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T is an important concept in SEO. It’s widely misunderstood, and few technology services firms understand the power E-E-A-T can bring to their SEO strategies.

Put simply, E-E-A-T is a framework for assessing the quality of online content. Google invented it and has deployed thousands of human reviewers who use it to evaluate the quality of Google’s search results. Let's take a closer look at the four parts.

• Experience: The content creator’s real-world experience with the subject matter.

• Expertise: The creator’s knowledge and skill set related to the subject matter.

• Authoritativeness: The creator’s status as a “go-to” source within the industry and/or subject matter.

• Trustworthiness: The reliability and accuracy of the content and the website at large.

Why Does E-E-A-T Matter?

For IT services firms, E-E-A-T matters because it gives you a blueprint for creating great content — content that builds your brand, strengthens trust with your customers, and, importantly for SEO, satisfies Google.

That means boosting the E-E-A-T of your content could result in better rankings. Not because E-E-A-T is a Google ranking factor (it isn’t a direct ranking actor), but because Google wants to reward great content.

As time passes, Google improves its ranking systems. And majority of those improvements are aimed at one thing: Surfacing great content for Google users. And we know Google’s definition of great content is all about E-E-A-T.

So, if you’re creating content with E-E-A-T in mind, Google is likely to reward your content with great rankings more and more over time.

E-E-A-T itself has changed over time, too. It used to be E-A-T. Google added the second E (for Experience) in late 2022.

And that second E has proven to be a critically important part of the formula for content that performs well in Google.

That’s great news for IT services firms. You have loads of experience. All you have to do is showcase it in your content.

How Does Google Judge E-E-A-T?

Google uses complex algorithms and crawlers to discover, crawl, index, and rank the internet’s vast ocean of content.

But it doesn’t use any of that stuff to judge E-E-A-T. Instead, Google uses good, old-fashioned human beings. Thousands of them.

They’re known as “Quality Raters.” They work for Google on a contract basis. And they, essentially, review search results and assess whether they meet Google’s standards. This creates feedback for Google to use to improve its ranking algorithms.

Here's just a single page from the quality rater's guidelines.

An important part of the Quality Raters’ job is to assess the E-E-A-T of content they encounter. To do that, they look at the content. But they also look at:

• The entire website the content appears on

• The creator(s) of the content

• What outside, independent sources have to say about the website or content creators

Dispelling E-E-A-T Myths

E-E-A-T has caused a lot of confusion since Google first introduced it. Here are some of the common myths we’ve seen:

• Myth: E-E-A-T is a Google ranking factor.

• Fact: Not exactly. It overlaps with some known ranking factors, but E-E-A-T is a framework that human beings — not algorithms — use to assess content quality.

• Myth: Only legal, health, and finance sites need to be concerned about E-E-A-T.

• Fact: This myth comes from the Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) categorization Google uses to understand sites that should undergo extra scrutiny because of their impacts on people’s lives. But E-E-A-T very much applies outside of those industries — IT services included.

• Myth: E-E-A-T is just about author bios.

• Fact: Adding detailed author information is a great first step in boosting your E-E-A-T. But this framework extends far beyond authorship, from content quality to website reliability and your backlink profile.

• Myth: You can make a few quick changes and be done worrying about E-E-A-T.

• Fact: Optimizing for E-E-A-T is an ongoing affair. That’s because every article needs to send trust signals and showcase expertise and experience. And you have to build your reputation in your field.

What Can You Do to Build E-E-A-T?

Here are some ways IT services firms can build their E-E-A-T.

Develop Your Online and Offline Reputation

E-E-A-T transcends blog posts. It’s a holistic look at your reputation, both online and offline.

So, try to build your IT services reputation everywhere you can.

Try making videos. Try pulling experts from your industry to do a podcast or co-host a webinar. Contribute articles to other websites in the IT industry. Speak in your local community or at a local community about the IT industry and business.

In other words, think outside of the box. Because Google is looking beyond traditional SEO signals in an ongoing effort to separate high-quality content from the growing pile of content garbage the internet is experiencing.

Network with Other Experts

You can use the reputations of others in your professional network to grow your own reputation. And that can improve your E-E-A-T.

How? By interviewing other experts in a related market or industry and publishing that interview on your website. Or by co-authoring a piece of written or video content with that expert.

It’s not a hack or a shortcut. It’s a real effort to provide value in your content. And that’s what Google wants to achieve with its E-E-A-T framework.

If Google’s human Quality Raters look at your site and see great content featuring other experts, you’re going to achieve a high level of E-E-A-T.

Add Value in Your Content

One of the best ways to boost your E-E-A-T — and “future-proof” your SEO content — is to add something new to the conversation.

The vast majority of the content you encounter on business websites is simply repackaged from another website.

Why would Google reward that type of content with high rankings? Further, how can you showcase your own experience or expertise if you’re just copying what others are saying?

You can create better content than what’s out there already. You’re an actual expert, so leverage that in your content. That builds your E-E-A-T, your reputation, and, very likely, your Google rankings.

That may look like sharing your personal experiences working in your sector of IT. Or localizing a broad topic to address your target market in a new way.

Keep It Real

In a way, E-E-A-T is about authenticity. Do you have real experience and expertise? Are you a real expert readers can trust?

The answer should be yes. And you can showcase all of that by:

• Using original images, not stock photography

• Creating a robust “About Us” webpage with lots of details about your experience and credentials

• Using real names and images for customers who are giving you testimonials

• Implementing structured data (organization schema and similar) to help Google understand who the key people in your firm are

  
  

Make Your Website Trustworthy

If your website doesn’t work properly, it’s hard to trust you. There are a lot of scammers out there, and you can build your E-E-A-T by making sure no one thinks you’re one of them.

That means making sure that you use the more secure HTTPS protocol for your webpages (instead of the older HTTP protocol).

It also means making sure your various website functionalities — checkout pages, confirmation pages, contact forms, etc. — work without any issues.

These things may seem small, but they can contribute to your E-E-A-T — or lack thereof — in a bigger way than you might imagine.