Future of SEO in 2024 with Google's E-E-A-T Update

Much like our lives, Google’s ever-evolving algorithm always ceases to surprise us. While new upgrades enhance your digital standing on the search engine, it is imperative to stay updated for sustaining a frontrunner position in the SEO race.

Once again, Google wrapped up 2022 with E-E-A-T, sleep, enjoy, and repeat, continuing its legacy to keep us on our toes and align our websites to its standards.

If you are a digital marketer, SEO specialist, entrepreneur, blogger, or advertiser, you would have guessed the pun by now, but if you are new to the industry, in December 2022, Google released its latest algorithm — E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Keen to know how E-E-A-T works and its impact on boosting rankings on SERPs? Walk with us as we explore this talk of the town algorithm in depth.

What is E-E-A-T?

Since you already know the full form of E-E-A-T, let’s understand its meaning. Many think of this algorithm as a facet that increases rankings on Google. On the contrary, it is a core aspect of Google's Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (SQEG).

It helps them gauge the quality of your website and if it ticks all the boxes of the best practices established in their rulebook.

Now that you are familiar with the concept of E-E-A-T let’s break down each to determine the best factors to heed upon.

Experience

You might have recently set your digital footprint; however, your experience remains the backbone of your business and can do wonders if exhibited effectively. While offline businesses rely on word of mouth and references, online ventures aim to grab the attention of their visitors through compelling, high-quality, and relevant content.

Google says to focus on creating content that encompasses your genuine experience and solves users' search queries. And it doesn’t have to be in one format, like blogs. You can assist them in a variety of ways.

Let’s assume a law firm seeks professional SEO service for its Cayman business.

How can you help them with their requirements?

You can create and promote an SEO service page, showcasing your diverse range of offerings, highlighting years of experience, and exhibiting the quality of your track record to attract users and encourage them to leverage your capabilities.

One of the most reliable and preferred approaches to demonstrate your experience is blogging. While blogs are considered a valuable source of information, many utilize them to present their experience.

For instance, website owners share their insights & opinions on a subject, create an educational & authentic blog, and promote their business, services, or products in between or at the end of the write-up.

Furthermore, incorporating an about us page and sharing your history, vision, & mission is another excellent way to signal to Google and your users that you stand tall as a reliable resource in the dynamic digital space.

Expertise

The next factor prioritized in Google’s quality rater guidelines is expertise. While the initial letter ‘E’ in E-E-A-T has been recently implemented by Google, the second ‘E’ and the official abbreviation E-A-T was launched in March 2014.

Over the past decade, Google has emphasized expertise with the purpose of encouraging knowledgeable professionals in a particular field to boast their expertise.

For instance, a real estate analyst is expected to talk about trends, opportunities, risks, the incline & decline of the economy, demand for properties, and similar others.

An SEO Agency is expected to feature expertise in its sector, including content marketing, social media marketing, paid marketing, and similar SEO service.

Overall, it boils down to the fact that only experts in a sector should flaunt their expertise rather than the ones chartering unknown territory. Why? Simply put, a novice cannot add genuine value or offer meaningful insights compared to an established resource.

Authoritativenes

You might be thinking that Google’s quality evaluator assesses the authority of a website, but let us stop you right there!

When it comes to authority, Google’s checklis includes your site, content, and creator itself. This means not only the content and website but also the brand’s reputation should be top-notch.

Let’s take the example of CIREBA - A renowned and trusted real estate association in Cayman catering to property seekers and fellow real estate companies since 1987. It has more than 1400 properties, covering different regions of the Islands.

CIREBA serves as the perfect benchmark for the E-E-A-T algorithm, indicating to Google that their website passes the authoritativeness check with flying colors.

Trustworthines

User interaction, experience, expertise, and authoritativeness are the four pillars that forge trustworthiness. If a website offers intuitive & seamless usability, while accommodating E-E-A-T requirements, it creates an extraordinary blend, drawing the users to interact with their site and keep coming back for more.

This factor results in forming and sustaining trustworthy relationships with the target audience.

Beyond these aspects, it's crucial that your content is authentic & meaningful and follows the best practices of SEO, including structured, user-friendly & modern design, compliance with security regulations, cohesiveness through the site, responsiveness on all browsers & screens, and incorporating social proofs for building reputation & acquiring the trust of users.

Displaying positive testimonials and ratings on the website is another SEO strategy for garnering trust. Satisfied client feedback acts as a powerful endorsement that vouches for your quality offerings, the experience you deliver, and the dependability you offer, showcasing to users and Google that you are a credible entity.

Now that you know everything about E-E-A-T, we shall walk you through technical SEO and its importance for ranking.

Technical SEO

Generally, On Page and Off Page SE are regarded as the cornerstones of improving your rankings on search engines. However, technical SEO is an equally crucial element that ensures the accessibility and crawlability of your website.

Here are the key components of technical SEO

Website speed and performance: A quick turnaround is vital for users to not abandon your website. Usually, the process for enhancing website speed and performance involves reducing server response time, compressing & resizing visuals, removing redundant & deceitful content, and minimizing Javascript files. 

You can harness the power of the browser cache by establishing cache control headers and mentioning the timeframe for storing the cache data. Consider using cache-busting techniques to obtain the latest version of a resource rather than depending on a cached one. 

Mobile optimization: One of the most fundamental stepping stones of technical SEO is mobile optimization, which means making your website adapt to different mobile screens. 

Employing a responsive design framework and techniques and ensuring continuous iterations for flawless functioning is a tried and tested formula for optimizing your website for mobile-friendliness. 

Other prerequisites include optimizing font size, touch elements & information forms, simplifying the user navigation journey, and, most importantly, keeping tabs on user behavior to measure performance & identify areas for improvement. 

Crawling and indexing: Every search engine has a different bot that crawls and indexes a page or website by navigating various components. For search engine bots to traverse and exhibit your site to the relevant search queries, optimize the robots.txt file, XML sitemap, and perform internal linking. 

Implement canonical tags accurately to ensure your website meets crawling and indexing standards. 

Site structure and navigation: Maintaining a well-defined and logical structure is another fundamental characteristic of technical SEO. Confusing or not prioritizing the structure to user needs can not only impact crawling and indexing but also lead to visitor frustration, ultimately increasing the bounce rate. 

Henceforth, it's eminent to create a user-centric website with clear and straightforward navigation paths and interlink other pages to enhance discoverability. Ensure to perform frequent iterations like A/B testing to refine the hierarchy based on users’ reciprocation.

Schema markup: The next and most pivotal technicality is schema markup. Its usage is directly linked to your content. Technically speaking, schema markup, also known as structured data, allows search engines to interpret the content on your website and comprehend special contexts such as snippets or ratings. 

Do ensure to add schema markup to the pertinent content you desire to highlight in your HTML code, allowing search engines to easily fathom it. 

Security: We all know that shielding a website using promising security measures can evade potential risks like cyber attacks, data breaches, malware, session hijacking, and more. But did you know that security is considered a keystone in search engine guidelines for ranking a website?

A vulnerable site not only raises red flags in users' minds but also is a concerning topic for search engines. To turn this negative aspect into a green flag, protecting a website using SSL certificates & security plugins, and following safety protocols such as periodic security audits and updating passwords are indispensable. 

So far, we gave you an all-inclusive understanding of E-E-A-T and the critical building blocks of technical SEO. Before we wrap, here’s a glimpse of what 2024 holds for SEO. 

With each year, the digital industry has observed a perpetual implementation of SEO as a means to elevate user experience and connect with the demographics, and in 2024, we are expected to witness more of that using modern and improved approaches such as E-E-A-T and AI & ML to showcase more significant results fitting to users’ search queries. 

If you are wondering whether to use AI for generating blog & website content, let us tell you that using it is not against Google’s guidelines. 

Although you need to ensure that it has been thoroughly reviewed by a professional writer before publishing to not only assess the nuances of writing, including plagiarism, AI, grammar, and tonality but also fact check and add the human touch for boosting rankings and driving traffic.

The year is also anticipated to advance and flourish with 8 mind-blowing trends, including -

• Google Search Generative Experience which is focused on delivering a next-generation or AI-driven search experience.
• Zero Click Searches are about users not tapping on the autocomplete suggestions and still discovering intended results.
• Answer Engine Optimization is all about creating straightforward and vivid content, similar to questions and answers, for effortless apprehension and to facilitate accurate responses by AI systems to users.
• Topical authority prioritizes experts creating detailed and factual content to solve users’ queries.
• Video SEO is optimizing video content to ensure it ranks on search engines as well as YouTube.
• Evolving Search Engine Ranking Factors include drafting reliable content with the goal of offering exact matches to users’ queries.
• Refreshing existing content mainly focuses on frequently upgrading content to stay relevant in the industry.
• Shifting User Search Intent is revamping your content strategy to stay ahead of the curve with Google’s adjustment to SERPs according to users’ recent increase in transactional and commercial queries.

Final Thoughts

We hope you found this blog interesting and informative. Be sure to understand and embrace these fluctuations to not only sustain but also excel in the industry. Keep an eye out for upcoming trends and changes in the market to offer valuable solutions, create a remarkable experience, and maintain a competitive edge in your niche.