Mastering EEAT for publishers
How to make your site stand out in the slurry farm that is Google's internet
The SEO world’s favourite, ambiguous acronym unravelled before your very eyes.
TL;DR
E-E-A-T is designed to help you highlight real-world experience, showcase your credentials, establish industry credibility and build a trusted entity
As a publisher, I suggest breaking it down into elements that fit under four categories; sitewide, desk level, page level and off-site
Whilst it’s not a direct ranking factor, fewer people trust news and big news publishers than ever before. So it matters
What is EEAT?
Yelled like a 600lb life contestant, E-E-A-T is a framework that Google’s Quality Raters use to evaluate whether their search results provide a good UX. Are we promoting original and helpful content for people? Basically, is our current iteration of the algorithm prioritising the right things?
In a word, no. But that’s a different discussion.
If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading the Quality Rater Guidelines in full. Yes, it’s a pretty disastrous-looking 180-page PDF. But it does give you the best look at what really matters when it comes to page and site quality—from Google’s perspective at least.
I recommend building out a spreadsheet or custom-GPT that helps you construct a scoring system to evaluate pages and websites. This way you can self-evaluate your content for an honest assessment.
Experience
Does the page showcase real-life, first-hand experience of the problem or product?
For product reviews, this is really simple. Do you make an effort to show your audience that you have in fact reviewed and tested the products? If not, that’s a pretty serious problem.
Why should I, the user, trust you?
This is a more nuanced argument for other types of content. You don’t need to have first hand experience of playing football to write about it. This is why Google alters its algorithm at a query level.
Queries that sit in the YMYL space (queries that have real financial or health-based implications) are judged differently. The EEAT is amped up when compared to something like sport. Because the implications for the user are different.
So when you’re creating an article, you need to make sure first hand experience is included. Because it adds an element of unique content that cannot be copied. Nobody else has the same experience as you.
Expertise
Does the page and creator of the page showcase true expertise? How do you highlight the knowledge and skills of the author on offer?
It’s one of the reasons why sites like Healthline have been so successful. Because they have gone into a seriously difficult vertical and have not relied solely on fact-checking and quality writers. They have consistently worked with real experts who have some form of online presence backed up by educational qualifications and real-world experience in the medical field.
The more you invest here, the more your content will stand out. Having a singular medical professional review a broad gamut of pages is helpful. But wouldn’t it be better to engage with experts in a particular field - nutrition, strength training, cardiovascular health - as opposed to a jack of all trades?
Authoritativeness
Is the brand and creator considered an expert or authority in this space? Is that clear and obvious?
This is a really pertinent option for publishers because of the diversity of content we produce. Is it possible for a brand to be considered an expert on dozens of subjects? Maybe in a more timely and contemporary sense, but not as a legitimate expert.
Brand-level expertise is very different to individual expertise.
That’s where the value of building and working with real world experts is so important. In an ideal world, you would be working with journalists who want to build a profile. They want to feature on podcasts, write for multiple publications and speak at events.
In a social media era where people can consume news from multiple sources and big brand trust has slowly eroded, an author should want to stand on their own two feet.
I think this is the gold standard for SEOs and authors. Brands that properly incentivise this will be big winners.
And yes backlinks are still important. In fact, in an EEAT era, relevant backlinks have become even more important. There’s still no stronger signal of trust than people in your industry linking to you and talking about the content that you create. That’s why unique content that drives links and mentions is so crucial to your success.
Trust
Trust is probably the fulcrum of EEAT and fundamental to the performance of your site and page. The reliability, accuracy and contemporary nature of the content help build up a picture of how trustworthy you are.
Research done by Reuters and Oxford University shows just what matters to people. People who have more options than ever before. I think their expectations have shifted and we haven’t completely kept up. Particularly a younger audience.
There are off-site signals like customer reviews, social signals and mentions of your brand or author in a positive or negative light. How you respond to these and engage with your audience is in your control.
An individual review may not be a disaster, but a little brand building goes a long way.
And there are on-site signals like showcasing awards you’ve won, showcasing your editorial standards and the company policy on things like AI usage means a lot. People don’t trust news outlets as they once did. They don’t even get their news directly from more ‘reputable’ outlets anymore.
Building trust with an audience may sound like more of a brand construct, but it starts at a page level.
Trust is arguably the area of EEAT that has slightly more technical SEO implications attributed to it. i.e. do you use on-page dates effectively? Is the page free from broken links? Do we link to sources
Is it a direct ranking factor?
No, it’s not a direct ranking factor. Featured snippet sorted.
EEAT is more of a qualitative measure of page and site quality. But it’s a qualitative measure used by Google’s human SERP reviewers. Which I admit makes them sound a little like lower life forms, but I’m sure that’s not the case.
But just because something isn’t a direct ranking factor, it doesn’t mean it can’t have a significant positive influence. Particularly if you consider how important unique content and user engagement are for ranking. There’s no hard and fast playbook to follow, which makes it all the more interesting. It’s a project that should involve design and product teams with a few explicit instructions about creating a quality product.
Since the SPAM and Site Reputation Abuse updates, Google, publishers have come under increasing pressure. This study by German researchers in early 2024, concluded that Google was filled with "a torrent of low-quality content, especially for product searches, drowning out any kind of useful information in search results."
In essence, this is shit. Plagiarised, biased shit.
So how do we combat this? Creating helpful, people-first content of course. But standing out from the crowd with real-life experience. Showcasing your expertise and trustworthiness on the topic. EEAT.
I would also recommend running some user research. Everyone’s audience is different. Those working on a medical journal will have a very different audience with very different needs to someone reading The Athletic. It doesn’t mean EEAT isn’t important. It just needs to be framed for your audience.
Why is it important for publishers?
Publishers are a broad church. We cover so much. From how to cope with tragic loss to dating and how to avoid inheritance tax. Although I appreciate the last one is more of a Telegraph topic. Still, you get the idea.
The sheer volume of publishing makes creating a top-quality product a challenge. Desks need to understand the importance of unique content, accuracy, linking to sources and highlighting the effort that has gone into creating the content. It’s hard.
My advice is not to shoot for perfection. Focus on desks that want to work with you to make the rollout and implementation easier. Set up monthly technical SEO checks to improve external and internal linking and brief content effectively from the get-go.
If I have to say it one more time. External links are important. Google checks them. So do people. treat them like an extension of your page and link to your sources.
How to break EEAT down
Make sure you’ve got the basics covered. A quality About Us page(s), author bios and pages, well-researched FAQs, a clearly signposted Contact page and accurate and detailed structured data is a good start. These should be quick wins and seen as the bare minimum.
From there, I suggest running some customer research to find out what your users really care about. Remember, there’s no definitive guide to this. It really is about creating a better quality, more trustworthy digital product.
Then bucket these initiatives up into four groups;
Sitewide
Desk-level
Page-level
Off-site
Sitewide
At a sitewide level, you’re looking to build trust and transparency quickly. Users new and old should immediately trust you. Should they want to dive into it further. Navigating to key editorial and company pages should be easy.
I think the most important things to get right are;
About Us page
Editorial policy
AI policy
Awards won
Contact Us and FAQs
404 page
Author pages
About Us, Editorial and AI Policy pages
Here’s your chance to lay out who you are as a company. What you stand for, what you believe in and who runs the show. The NYT do a brilliant job of this. They explicitly tell you who they are, what they stand for and the standards that make them how they are.
This approach should be applied to every policy page. My only criticism is it’s a little tricky to find. I’m not saying it should be in the primary nav, but at least in the footer. As it’s colloquially known, the loser menu.
Contact US and FAQs
For sites where money changes hands, the general advice is to make contact and FAQ pages easy to navigate. Either from the primary navigation or somewhere very close by. Yes, because it looks more transparent for Google. But think about it from a user’s perspective.
The NYT’s Ethical Journalism page is very good. Shock horror I know. But it covers everything; from the scope of the guidelines to the disclosure of possible conflicts and rules at a department level.
Using third party data and data from Search Console, it’s not difficult to find the questions people want to know about your brand. Obviously, you don’t have to answer all of them, but they should form the bedrock of your FAQ content. If you don’t answer them, someone else will. Particularly if they’re related to payment-specific queries.
As a premium publisher, it’s important to try and control the narrative. A great SAAS company trick is to create a page titled ‘10 ways to get the most out of your x company subscription.’ Or, if you want to be really cheeky, ‘10 reasons to not cancel your x company subscription.’
We get thousands of monthly queries asking to cancel their subscription. But that doesn’t mean it’s definitive. It could be the user isn’t getting the most out of their subscription. It’s easy to rank and could reduce churn significantly.
404 page
Big publishers have 1000s of people hitting broken pages every day. Whilst we want to minimise it as much as possible, it’s kind of inevitable. And the drop-off rate is understandably huge.
But the 404 page is another chance to connect with users in a meaningful way. The best brands show they understand their customers, find a way to link to the most relevant pages and prolong their customer journey effectively.
Nice to use the NYT for an example of what not to do for once. But you can see why people leave when served with something like this. The very best 404 pages inject a bit of personality in there. Another micro-level chance to engage with users at an otherwise frustrating touchpoint.
Author pages
Separate from author bylines, author pages are a deeper-dive into the personal experience and expertise of an author. Whilst this may be an unfair example. Martin Lewis’ ‘biography’ page is a site to behold.
It kicks off with who he is, moving on to what he has done, before linking to numerous third-party profile pieces. Essentially saying ‘if you don’t know Martin, here’s why you should.’
Use author structured data to help Google connect the dots and be as detailed as possible. It’s your chance to add in eductional attainments, awards and contact details. Trustworthy and transparent.
Desk-level
One step down from the sitewide level means you need to focus on the specifics of the desk itself. What makes it great? Why should the user trust it? What external accreditations and validations do they have?
A mission statement might feel a bit like recruitment from 2004, sans the cocaine. But it’s important. Why should people care? You want to convey the expertise and experience the desk has without focusing too much on the individual. Individuals will come and go, so the desk needs to stand on its own two feet.
About Us page
Who we are
Mission statement
Meet the team
Awards
About Us, Team and Missions Statement pages
Yes, yes I know some of these are duplicates. But lots of publishers can’t fit their entire team into an About Us at the sitewide level. or showcase every award they’ve ever won. And each desk will have specific, unique experiences that should be celebrated.
As much as you can celebrate an award you put yourself up for.
And let’s face it, every desk is different. So here’s your chance to stand out. Humanise the people involve and showcase their experience and expertise where possible.
Awards
You can absolutely add awards to Meet the Team and About Us pages, but I think that would be doing a disservice to an excellent conversion rate ‘hack.’ Not a hack, but you understand what I mean. I’m always sceptical of get-rich-quick CRO initiatives. But telling people desks and authors have won things for their work is about as far from a hack as it gets.
Even if the awards are self-nominated. Hell, I’ve still not won any.
Page-level
Page-level is where it gets a little more complicated. There aren’t many quick fixes. Just some good old fashioned elbow grease.
Cite sources
Remove broken links
Author byline
Expert reviewer
Unique content
Unique imagery
Refreshed appropriately
User intent matching
Unique content
If a page has no unique content or imagery on it, that’s s significant red flag. If the author has made the effort to review a product or travel to a destination, then unique imagery shouldn’t be a problem. Ditto video content, although a slightly harder less to a wordsmith.
The uniqueness of content is what helps you stand out from the rest of the content farm slurry. It shows authenticity and first hand experience of the topic at hand. It builds trust. It’s too easy to rush through content at scale and chase revenue. You have to make sure that authors understand the importance of standing out. Particularly on valuable evergreen pages.
A huge problem with lots of the sites that got penalised as part of the spam updates, was just this. No uniqueness. No added value. Stock imagery. The same authors.
Google’s index is just one huge cache. You need to make it worthwhile for them to store your content.
Citing sources, broken links and content refreshing
This tends to fit more into our bucket as SEOs. We can support desks with monthly site crawls, identify and fix broken links on key pages and help set a good refresh cadence. It’s a little more of the nuts and bolts of true SEO.
Run training sessions with production journalists and writers so they understand the importance of external links (see them as an extension of your page) and unique content. Making content stand out with real, one-off information is how to stand out in 2024’s internet swamp.
Establish your most important desks and evergreen content and run monthly or weekly crawls to pick up broken and redirecting links. Ideally, you’d have a report set up in Adobe, GA or your own server logs that quickly identifies priority broken pages to fix. This way you can cater to broken news articles that could generate thousands of clicks quickly and improve the quality of long-life content over time.
You can create an easy refresh cadence by combining monthly search volume by month of the year. In a category like Travel, you can search by destination to see when demand peaks
For example, if demand for travelling to San Sebastian peaks in January, it makes sense to have that content refreshed and ready to go in December.
Off-site
Arguably the most challenging, but the most impactful were you to get this right. Imagine a scenario where your brand’s social team share the articles. They get homepage placement. Shared by journalists. Journalists who are building their profiles. The compound interest over time would be incredible.
Reviews
Social engagement
Article shares
Journalist social accounts and engagement
Mentions
Getting this bit right is hard. Simple, but hard. Create great content. Share it. Encourage your journalists to build a profile.
As an industry, the reviews for publishers are pretty appalling. They are almost exclusively around poor communications around pricing and an inability to speak to the right people. Our lack of answering to these and speaking to people is short of the mark.
I’ve not encountered many journalists who seem genuinely interested in building a profile, which is strange. Big brands don’t have the same pull and just working for someone like The Guardian, BBC or The Telegraph is rarely enough unless you reach a certain level of seniority.
But I think most would be keen to partake in a little personal brand building. Something that can be taken to their next job. So float the idea of an author or journalist promotion program and see if it piques anyone’s interest.
You can track this using a free Google Alert. Simply add their name and remove mentions from your own brand and voila. Although you do need to hope they aren’t called Dave Smith or something quite as generic. John Smith could be even more problematic.
How can you measure success?
Whilst a little intangible, I think a good EEAT program should translate into revenue. Particularly if you really understand and listen to your users.
As publishers, people are buying into a brand. We aren’t selling them a physical product (how times change). So our digital experience is everything. The better the digital experience, the fewer the pain points and the more you show you understand your user, the higher your conversion rate will be.
Google uses engagement metrics to help rank pages in its index. After the page ranks, engagement metrics help establish where it should sit for a specific query. The more you do to satiate a user, the more positive signals they will send.
How best to roll it out
Not everything is going to have an obvious or immediate impact. And you need buy-in. My advice is to work closely with senior Editorial and Product stakeholders and help them see the problem.
Once you’ve done that, start with the agreed upon quick wins. Update policy pages, fill in the FAQ gaps and look at pages or initiatives that will have an immediate impact. Then create a tailored rollout plan,m identifying areas that will need extra training and newsroom support.
People don’t like change. You have to make them care about it.
Other resources
Marie Haynes’ resource on EEAT is always a must. Marie is one of the best resources on this topic
As we embark on an EEAT Product, Editorial and Audience deep-dive in 2025, this one’s for A Peer’s Perspective. Well worth a follow for aspiring product and SEO-ers in publishing.