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When you first focus on search engine optimization (SEO), it's tempting to focus on one or two ranking factors, especially keywords, in hopes of quickly fixing your rankings. However, improving search rankings is a more comprehensive and necessarily long-term practice. Keyword research is a great starting point for his SEO, but just scattering keywords throughout your content isn't effective. Having the right amount of keywords and an optimized website is in some ways a wasted effort if your online presence doesn't fit well with his EEAT guidelines.
EEAT is Google's quality search guideline for experience, expertise, authority, and trust. After all, neither SEO best practices nor his EEAT quality guidelines can be successful without the other. Combining the EEAT guidelines with his SEO practices is an approach that helps ensure that the key criteria for good search rankings are not ignored.
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Develop EEAT using keywords
Once you decide which words to focus on in your content, consider how you can demonstrate your experience, expertise, credibility, and authority in the context of those topics. Your website may have increased traffic by using the right keywords for popular searches, but converting traffic into clients requires more than just meeting keyword metrics.
There are multiple ways to combine keyword usage and EEAT. Don't just advertise your services. Establish your authority in your field by demonstrating product knowledge and success stories. Adding internal links to relevant pages on your site can also help demonstrate your expertise and authority. Any visual content that establishes your expertise, such as photos of completed work or infographics, should be optimized to improve the user experience and include keywords in the caption and alt text.
Connect your team and combine strategies
One of the challenges of paying attention to SEO and EEAT is that you end up applying more standards to the same content. For example, for SEO content to establish his EEAT, it must be well-written to effectively demonstrate expertise and accuracy. To achieve this, everyone working on the content needs to be on the same page.
Implementing SEO best practices and EEAT quality guidelines at the same time may mean changing how you create content and who you collaborate with. At Outpace SEO, our content and SEO teams work closely together to produce accurate, creative, and well-written content that follows SEO best practices.
Content and SEO processes can be integrated on several levels. New team members should receive clear training on how content is created, optimized, and edited, and where they fit into the process. Join the content team when changes need to be made to SEO practices and keep the SEO team updated on editorial standards. Encourages team members to understand the processes and goals of the entire team rather than categorizing them into her one area of ​​expertise. If another company handles her SEO and content creation, establish a clear workflow to ensure your content is shown to the right people at the right stage. Efficient and consistent communication helps ensure that the content being optimized is completely accurate and reflects your expertise.
Related: Using AI to create content won't help you beat Google search rankings. Here's why:
Build trust with SEO
It may be helpful to think of EEAT as a way to evaluate optimized content. If your business falls into his YMYL category (meaning your money or your life), Google's quality rater will apply his EEAT criteria even more carefully. The tone of the writing, the demonstrated knowledge, and the authority of the author are all important ways to build trust, and are the most important of these four.
To successfully combine SEO and EEAT practices, you need to consider all aspects of content creation. Trust isn't just about content, it's also about user experience. Improving website speed, optimizing URLs, and avoiding or optimizing 404 pages are all part of technical SEO. All of this not only improves the user experience of your website, but also contributes to how much searchers trust your authority and expertise after interacting solely with your online presence.
Rather than distract from SEO, EEAT becomes more effective when combined with strong SEO practices. To create an online presence that delivers long-term results and high rankings, create a strategy that focuses on a combination of SEO best practices and EEAT guidelines. This may include overhauling your content creation and SEO processes, increasing communication between teams, and reconsidering who will be responsible for website optimization and content development. Combining SEO and EEAT is a great combination to continually develop an online presence that ranks higher and generates more business.