For one, it reduces the duplication from page to page, which is obviously a really big concern in local SEO. It increases trust in the user, because they’re thinking about, Oh, I meet the team or the owner or the manager at this place, or what are the different things that I should know when I’m visiting here. Maybe you have some unique or historic photos about how the business looked 50 years ago, maybe you’re adding really unique COVID-19 protocols, or local events at that location, or anything they should know about that city, or how that location gives back.
Put the task of coming up with a lot of this information on the people that work there – they could have fun with it! Ask, what are some unique things that I should know about this location, or who works there, who is the employee of the month, or whatever the case may be. That makes people trust that location more, trust that location page more, and again it has the impact of reducing duplication among local landing pages, which we all know is something that can potentially get you in trouble with Google’s algorithms.
How can you approach E-A-T differently?
I really encourage you to focus on an expert led approach to your content strategy, and leverage real business owners and real staff at those locations whenever you can.
Questions to ask your clients
- Who are the real experts that work at your company or your business?
- What role can they play in your content creation strategy?
- What’s the knowledge that actually makes you different than the other businesses?
- What’s the unique angle that can set your content apart? You know, what are some unique experiences that your business owner or your staff has had when they’re actually at work that we can incorporate into our content strategy?
- What value can you provide in your content that can’t be found in an SEO tool?
Some pushback that I get from SEO professionals when we talk about this is they say, “Well, I don’t have access to experts or they won’t give me their time”. Okay, that’s fine.
Expert reviewed content
But maybe the experts can be involved in at least reviewing the content for accuracy. You’ll notice in many cases, somebody else wrote the content, but then the expert or the business owner will actually go back in there and just review and make sure that everything’s kosher. Then you can say this was reviewed by XYZ expert.
Transcribe video or podcast content
Again, you can transcribe expert video content or podcasts as text. This is a low hanging fruit opportunity for many businesses that have an expert on staff because they might be doing their own podcast or their own video series. Just making sure that that’s transcribed as text on your website itself. Again, that could potentially result in Google My Business pulling up that page for justification purposes; which is a huge, huge opportunity for Google My Business rankings.
Use expert contributions to curate content
You can also use expert contributions to create the content for you. Maybe you don’t have expertise in a certain area, but you can reach out to experts to ask them, hey, can you contribute to this piece of content that I’m writing, and use their name in the article to show that you’re working with real experts.
Wikipedia page
Also, in some cases, there might be a Wikipedia page for the business, for the business owner, or for an expert that’s connected to the business. There might be all kinds of information on that Wikipedia page about the different things they’ve done, different books they’ve written, just making sure that all of that is front and center, listed on your website. Maybe there are different ways that you can convey that information throughout your Google My Business or anything that conveys expertise of the people that work at your company, that’s going to be really great for E-A-T as well.
Build personal brand
Another piece of feedback that I get from a lot of SEOs is as well, nobody knows who my experts are. Nobody knows who the business owner is. To that, I always say, well, we all started somewhere. Building up an expert’s personal brand, in my opinion, is part of SEO. So how can you get a business owner to care about SEO? Or an expert on staff? How do you get them to care about this process?
Sometimes it’s very difficult to reach out to them and say, hey, I’d love to involve you in something that’s just going to take more of your time and try to get you involved in this process? Well, the answer to that is you stroke their ego and say, this is something that’s going to help your name show up better on Google and the information related to you as an entity is going to show up better when people Google your name, we can control what that looks like.
Tell your experts that this is a method of controlling their branded SERP.
We can potentially push some things down that you don’t want showing up there and we can really clean up the way that the search results look. If you work together with me on this strategy of involving your name more in our content creation process. That usually does the trick.
The expert is the keyword
I’ll also say that, think of the expert or the business owner as a keyword. You should be monitoring how that keyword’s doing in Search Console, filter by that keyword and see what questions people are asking.
Google the name of the business owner or the people that work there and see what comes up. Because this is a strategy that’s part of SEO now. Think about making sure that things look great and optimized and trustworthy when you Google the name of the business owner or potentially the people that work at the business.
You can also use the new Google Search Console Regex filter to spot any E-A-T issues. I’ve shared some of these on Twitter. But basically, you can go into Google Search Console, use the new regex filter and look for things like: scam, fraud, return policy, customer, or who, what, when, where, and why question keywords, plus the name of the brand, or the name of the expert, or the business owner, or somebody that works at the company.
