Google’s E-E-A-T criteria: why do they matter for SEO?

Google’s E-E-A-T criteria appeared a few years ago, but they have gained considerable importance since 2018. It’s a system for evaluating content, especially YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) pages, that helps fight the spread of low-quality information and fraud.

Google’s algorithm updates have gradually forced many sites to take these criteria into account in order to stay competitive and visible. Discover how complying with Google’s E-E-A-T criteria can significantly improve your website’s visibility.

Discover our checklist with all our tips to improve your site’s Google E-E-A-T.

What is E-E-A-T, Google’s ranking system?

Google E-E-A-T is a system for evaluating the relevance of web page content.

It’s based on 4 main criteria:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authority
• Trust

Google’s algorithm thus ranks pages according to these four criteria. In theory, then, the more reliable and high-quality a page is, the better it ranks in the SERPs. Primarily intended for YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) pages, these E-E-A-T criteria are increasingly important for all web pages.

Complying with Google’s E-E-A-T criteria fits perfectly into a Content Marketing strategy, since the goal remains the same: to offer quality content in order to boost a website’s SEO performance and strengthen users’ trust.

Experience

The experience criterion values authentic content, written by enthusiasts with hands-on experience of the topic covered. To improve this criterion, it’s essential to share your own experience and know-how through testimonials, personal anecdotes, and details that prove your mastery of the subject.

Content should recount real-life situations rather than mere technical or commercial descriptions. For example, an article about using a product, or a write-up of a tourist visit, will have far more value for readers.

In short, this criterion rewards lively, immersive content that genuinely lets the reader experience something. Including personal photos and videos is an excellent way to add authenticity. The goal is to stand out from the competition by offering unique added value.

Expertise

Are you an expert? Show Google! High-value content is, for Google, irrefutable proof of your expertise. Producing it is therefore essential to improve your E-E-A-T score. What makes good-quality content?

An informative, clear, and comprehensive text that draws on reliable sources, a rich vocabulary and clearly identifiable keywords, impeccable syntax, coherent internal linking, and inbound and outbound links to authoritative sites.

Authority

The authority criterion is one of the most important for a site’s ranking. It applies to the content author, the content itself, and the site as a whole. To satisfy this criterion, you need to prove the expertise and legitimacy of the authors who write the content.

How? Mainly by increasing their reputation and earning quality backlinks to the content. The more these are shared on websites that themselves have strong influence, the more the website’s authority grows.

A netlinking strategy is therefore essential to meet this criterion.

The SEMJI customer case

Building quality backlinks is the strategy adopted by one of our clients, Qilibri. This start-up specializing in balanced-eating programs is indeed affected by Google’s E-E-A-T criteria. Despite these constraints and requirements imposed by Google, with Semji’s help it managed to generate more than 3400% SEO traffic in just 12 months. To learn more about the methodology used, check out our webinar co-hosted with Quentin Leandri, Head of Traffic & Acquisition at Qilibri.

Trust

Last but not least, trust. As with the authority criterion, trust applies to the author, the site, and its content alike. It primarily concerns sites where financial transactions take place, such as online stores. In the trust criterion, the question of security is therefore fundamental.

A trustworthy site provides all the information consumers need to complete the transaction with peace of mind, as well as all the guarantees regarding the handling of personal data. The presence of reviews certified by a third-party site (such as Trustpilot) is also a mark of trust for Google.

Why do Google’s E-E-A-T criteria matter for SEO, and especially for YMYL pages?

Google’s goal is to offer ever more high-quality and reliable content. With the proliferation of information sources on sensitive topics such as health, legal information, financial information, news sites, and so on, Google faces a major challenge.

How can it surface the most relevant and most reliable content for the queries users type?

How can it ensure that these users aren’t misled on topics that have a strong impact on their lives?

How can it limit the spread of fake news?

These are the challenges Google set out to address by creating the E-E-A-T criteria!

Originally, the E-E-A-T criteria are mainly intended for YMYL pages, but they are increasingly applied to all other types of content.

The Your Money Your Life (YMYL) page deals with sensitive and important topics that can have a strong impact on users’ lives. It can be a commercial or financial transaction page, or pages with medical, legal, civic, or administrative information. Pages dealing with safety are also considered YMYL.

In 2018, Google therefore increased the weight of the E-E-A-T criteria in its algorithm, causing a significant drop in visibility for many medical, financial, or legal sites. As a result, in order to meet Google’s quality and reliability requirements and stay visible in the SERPs, many brands and companies adjusted their content.

How does Google measure the E-E-A-T score of a page?

Is there really an E-E-A-T score?

In reality, there isn’t strictly speaking an E-E-A-T score. At least, it isn’t known. This is one way for Google to encourage site owners to continually improve the quality of their content. Nevertheless, a site’s level of trust can be inferred from how its pages rank in the SERPs.

On Google’s side, it’s mainly the algorithm that takes a site’s E-E-A-T criteria into account. That said, it’s worth mentioning the significant role of quality raters in shaping this evaluation.

In a hurry?

Discover our checklist with all our tips to improve your site’s Google E-E-A-T

Quality raters and Google’s guidelines

Shrouded in mystery, the Search Quality Raters (SQR) are real people, mostly contractors, tasked by Google with analyzing and evaluating the quality of organic results. To do this, they follow a detailed list of criteria. These criteria have been known since 2015 and were updated in 2019. By evaluating SERP results, the Search Quality Raters thus help Google’s engineers further improve and refine the algorithm. Even though they don’t have a direct impact on a website’s ranking, they therefore help reinforce the importance of the E-E-A-T criteria.

How can you improve your Google E-E-A-T “score”?

Now that you have a clear view of what’s at stake with the E-E-A-T criteria, here are our recommendations for improving your E-E-A-T and your website’s SEO performance.

Create high-value content.

We can’t say it enough: the essential criterion of reliability and trust for Google remains the creation of high-value content. On this, Google is quite clear about what it expects from web pages. You can find these expectations both in the guide for Quality Raters and in the various advice pages Google has produced.

We also have an article on this topic that you can read.

The SEMJI customer case

An online magazine owned by Uni-médias, parents.fr offers advice articles on pregnancy and parenting. The editorial team’s journalists use the Semji platform, in particular, to make sure they meet Google’s E-E-A-T criteria.

Here we take the following content as an example: https://www.parents.fr/enfant/sante/les-autres-maladies-chez-l-enfant/furoncle-chez-lenfant-que-faire-872047

Article URL: https://www.parents.fr/enfant/sante/les-autres-maladies-chez-l-enfant/furoncle-chez-lenfant-que-faire-872047

Of course, with the growing number of criteria, creating SEO-quality content isn’t always straightforward and can even prove complex for people who aren’t used to writing for the web. That’s why it can be worthwhile to rely on a content writing and optimization assistance solution. Drawing on all the criteria Google takes into account, Semji evaluates in real time the quality of the content you’re producing for a given keyword. Here, the article’s key term is “furoncle enfant”.

To increase your “Content Score” — that is, your content’s optimization score — simply follow the tool’s various recommendations:

Suggestions on the angle and the topics covered in the text in order to meet user intent.

Suggestions of terms, expressions, and questions in order to cover the entire subject and position yourself as an expert on a topic.

A heatmap to identify how search intents are addressed by competing content.

Recommendations on the number of outgoing links and identification of related content that allows the addition of incoming links in order to improve internal linking.

With Semji Platform, you’re guaranteed to capture SEO traffic. The platform doesn’t replace your expertise — it showcases it to Google and to users.

Behind every query, the writer targets the right search intent to produce content the audience expects, gauges the strength of competing content to know how to stand out, and covers every topic associated with the subject to deliver THE most complete, relevant, and reliable content.

Request a Semji demo now!

Identify and showcase authors

This type of action applies particularly to sites offering sensitive information — the famous YMYL. In order to strengthen the expertise and trust in your website, Google recommends identifying authors and providing information about them. Beyond systematically naming the author of an article, it’s essential to:

• Build an author’s reputation: Always mention the name and specialty of the author in order to present them as an expert in their field. Don’t hesitate to work on their online reputation by checking the results for the author’s name. Also build reputation by encouraging contributions on other authoritative websites.

For this article, the journalist’s name and specialty are mentioned with a link to the author page.

• Enrich author pages: for each author, create a dedicated page to present them: a short biography, photo, résumé, links to other publications on and off the site, links to social media accounts, and so on.

The category for author pages and the journalist’s name are clearly identifiable in the URL.

The author page includes the author’s first and last name, their specialty, a short biography, links to social accounts, and access to the latest articles written.

• Showcase your expertise and authority throughout the site. For medical, financial, or legal sites, it’s essential to provide a number of reassurance elements: mention anything that can lend credibility to your website and its authors (professions, awards, certifications, labels, etc.). Also be transparent and enrich the “About” page by adding your advertising policy, terms of use, editorial guidelines, etc.

The site includes a detailed “Legal notice” page with a presentation of the editorial team and the site’s publishing goals.

Increase the trust and credibility of the domain name

Links that point to a website have a direct impact on its ranking. Indeed, Google tends to consider that the more backlinks a domain name receives from other sites, the more credible it is. Note, however, that the links must come from sites that themselves have a certain credibility. It is nonetheless difficult to know the credibility Google assigns. Some companies offer an estimate, but it’s very complex to assess precisely. The best thing to do, then, is to try to increase your website’s authority by relying on the criteria Google provides. In order to improve a domain’s trust and credibility, you need to rely on 3 levers:

• Content: rich, varied, sourced, quality content. Well-filled tags and coherent internal linking.
• Popularity: incoming links (backlinks) from several sites that themselves have strong authority, as well as a strong presence on social media.
• Indexing and the site’s technical quality: properly indexed pages, good usability on PC, mobile, and tablet, a secure site, etc.

Get certified reviews

Nothing beats certified reviews to reassure consumers… and the search engine! Give consumers the ability to rate and review products and, where appropriate, respond to them. In order to guarantee customers the authenticity of the published reviews, it’s recommended to use third-party sites that act as guarantors, such as Trustpilot or Avis Vérifiés.

The Semji customer case

Our client Qilibri uses Trustpilot, among others, to certify its customers’ reviews. A simple and effective way to reassure its prospects.

Update content and optimize your site’s pages

Offering fresh, regularly updated content is a mark of quality for both readers and search engines. Figures that are too old, dead links, or — in the case of YMYL pages — advice that’s obsolete in light of legislation are all factors that penalize a site’s visibility.

Likewise, the <title> and <meta description> tags, as well as the ALT attribute of images, must be filled in in order to provide search engines with the essential information about the page.

In another article on parents.fr, the update is indicated below the author’s name.

Our SEO solution lets you always keep an eye on your content’s performance. Thanks to regular updates, you immediately know whether your content is still performing or whether it needs refreshing — by adding new topics, for example.

Offer optimal security for transactions

Google’s goal is to recommend to users only sites that provide guarantees on the security of data and transactions. Even though online stores are particularly concerned by this point, this criterion actually affects all websites. At a minimum, they must meet the following criteria:

• HTTPS protocol,
• SSL certificate,
• Regular site updates and backups,

· Secure payment solutions

The site offers a secure connection and has a valid SSL certificate.

Guarantee data privacy

Regulations require companies and site owners to inform visitors and obtain their consent for the processing of their personal data. Users must therefore be informed of the framework within which their personal data is processed, and must also be able to request the deletion, modification, or transfer of that data. This data must be stored for a limited time.

Even though this isn’t a criterion explicitly taken into account by Google, it’s nonetheless important to earn users’ trust. Consider, for example, setting up a “Privacy Policy” page accessible from the footer, detailing the various data-protection measures.

Contact forms must also include a checkbox accepting the use of personal data. The use of cookies on the site must also be the subject of a notice and acceptance by the visitor.

Be easily reachable and answer users’ questions.

Contact form, phone number, email, chat, forums, etc. A site that offers several ways to get in touch will be considered more reliable by Google. It’s also an important reassurance element for consumers and readers.

Key takeaways on Google’s E-E-A-T criteria

• The E-E-A-T criteria concern all sites, even if they carry more weight on YMYL pages. Whatever the site, it’s therefore important to follow these reliability and trust criteria.

• The E-E-A-T criteria provide very precise recommendations you can rely on to build your SEO strategy.

• The overall user experience is fundamental — in terms of the quality and reliability of the content offered, the handling of personal data, accessibility, and the security of a website. The E-E-A-T criteria taken into account by Google’s algorithm aim to favor the websites that best answer users’ questions, expectations, and needs.