Sarah Evans is Head of Digital PR at Energy PR, a full-service communications agency with a unique, audience-first approach to PR. We asked Sarah to give us five tactics for improving a website’s SEO using Google’s E-E-A-T and digital PR.
Why Google’s E-E-A-T is essential for SEO
Strong SEO is a crucial component of business success. By improving Google search rankings, companies can boost awareness, drive website traffic, and ultimately increase incoming leads. Unsurprisingly, Google is designed to reward useful, quality content with a good SEO ranking, allowing more people to find a business’s website. So, if a website is helpful for customers – whether that’s through expert advice, testimonials or a rich FAQ section – it’s more likely to rank well too.
The concept of Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust (E-E-A-T) plays an important role in how Google evaluates the quality of content. As Google becomes increasingly sophisticated at doing so, it seeks to replicate how a human would judge a business, also known as ‘reputation’. How would a human judge a brand’s reputation? Does their website look legitimate, knowledgeable and transparent? How do other people talk about them, like customers, industry news, national media titles or influencers? This is where digital PR comes in, as it is perfectly placed to build trust and authority in the eyes of potential customers, the media and Google.
So, how do you improve website SEO?
Create a company ‘About Us’ page
The ‘About Us’ page sits at the heart of a website’s E-E-A-T. It represents an opportunity to tell a brand’s story and establish its business credentials to both potential customers and Google. To optimise their ‘About Us’ page for SEO, businesses should include information such as company history, purpose, culture and team. They should outline why the company exists, what it does, how it creates value and who is behind the day-to-day.
Write detailed bios
Demonstrating exactly who is writing content is not only helpful for people visiting a website, but also equally critical for SEO. To build online credibility, business owners should craft in-depth profiles for themselves and each of their employees, detailing career history, industry knowledge, key skills and even linking to social media accounts. All content authored by each individual should then be linked to their profile page, showcasing their experience and expertise to Google.
Provide clear, accurate contact information
Typically, trustworthy businesses are happy being contacted by customers, and untrustworthy businesses are not. For this reason, Google pays particular attention to how they display their contact details. So, by ensuring contact details are clearly visible, accurate and always up to date, businesses can signal trustworthiness to both Google and their customers.
Build a digital profile as a subject matter expert
Business owners can cement their authority by establishing themselves as subject matter experts online. Capitalising on external opportunities like interviews, guest posts and thought leadership articles builds a digital profile across relevant, authoritative media. This helps establish and highlight an individual’s topical expertise to Google, which has far-reaching impacts on SEO. When Google’s deciding how to rank future content written by this individual, it’ll identify them as a subject matter expert and reward the content accordingly.
Secure brand mentions from authoritative websites
Brand mentions and backlinks from high authority websites are gold dust for SEO. With a combination of PR tactics and SEO strategy, digital PR is well placed to identify and deliver these opportunities. By featuring in respected outlets, brands can earn a figurative stamp of approval from Google, in turn improving their own website’s authority and trust. To put it very simply, the more relevant, authoritative publications a brand features in, the bigger the positive impact on SEO.
To learn more about using E-E-A-T to improve website SEO, click here: https://www.energypr.co.uk/blog/google-e-e-a-t-how-digital-pr-helps-build-seo
