Online Content Creators Receive Extra E-E-A-T Support for SEO
For about a decade now, Google has sworn by its Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) guidelines to assess content posted online. Then, in 2022, they added Experience to make it E-E-A-T. This new addition provided online businesses with new ways to rank so long as they could prove experience, especially for content like reviews or tutorials. Now, Google has expanded its E-E-A-T support for independent content creators in search.
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E-E-A-T & Search Intent
If you’re new to E-E-A-T and SEO as a whole, then you’ll need to understand how Google prioritizes search intention. When a user starts a search, Google wants to put exactly what they’re looking for at the top of the results page. In the past, lackluster content has made it to the top of search by gaming Google’s algorithms, without necessarily offering quality content. Ranking by search intention is the solution.
Not every search is the same. While most websites offer written articles and other text-based media, others support businesses in retail or iGaming. The main appeal of those sites is the ability to buy products or play casino games online, so words like ‘buy’ and ‘play’ indicate a search intention to Google. If a user searches for the term ‘play roulette’, they are expecting to see digital platforms that offer a selection of roulette games on the search results page. To meet those expectations, Google needs to figure out when a user wants the latest news or to take a spin on a digital roulette wheel. To that end, Google is aware of the content on most pages by looking at their basic HTML structure. Pages heavy on images or video embeds, for example, are more likely to be related to retail or digital media.
When combined with high-intent keywords like ‘play’ or ‘buy’, that page information starts to paint a clearer picture of what the user is searching for – an online casino or an e-commerce store. For other searches, words like ‘tutorial’ and ‘review’ also receive more scrutiny. They’re each passed by E-E-A-T, so the top search contenders have passed Google’s standards for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. First introduced in 2022, that new experience standard is a work-in-progress that tries to prioritize pages with provable interactions with the topics/items they discuss. When it first rolled out, it was skewed towards online publications, but now they have improved support for independent content creators.
The New Knowledge Panel Subtitles
You’ve probably seen hundreds of knowledge panels in your time online, but they’re integrated so seamlessly that you don’t notice them. These are the widgets or sub-windows that appear on Google searches for high-profile people, places, or organizations. Search your favorite celebrity or athlete, and you’ll generally see two knowledge panels. One appears at the top of the page, with their name, occupation, and prominent pictures of them. The second appears at the right of the page, containing their social media and Wikipedia links. Only verified people get these knowledge panels.
Like many of Google’s search tools, they exist to push relevant and useful information to the top of the results page. However, that occupation subtitle can be a tricky thing to quantify online, now that there are independent content creators in every industry and niche. Not every high-profile person has a clean-cut job or professional title, yet they are useful experts in a subject. These are content creators, and Google wants to get better at identifying them.
As a result, new subtitles are appearing in search that read ‘content creator’ alongside a bracketed keyword or phrase. These keywords include medical and travel sub-categories for the content creator occupation, but third-party datasets have identified others like agriculture, art, cooking, finance, geography, history, real estate, weather, and weight loss, among others.
As Google continues to label and assess different niches online, we can expect the list of knowledge panel subtitles to get even longer. This isn’t just good news for the people involved – it’ll also provide SEO experts and digital marketers with new avenues to rank their content online, so long as they have the experience to back up their work.
