Going over the top isn’t easy in such dynamic and competitive industries as ecommerce. It requires genuine trust to encourage consumers to choose your product or service over millions of others. Luckily, the E-E-A-T concept can help.
Read on and we’ll tell you how to optimise ecommerce website to win the race, earn trust, and achieve your business goals easily.
What Is E-E-A-T in Short?
It’s a part of Google’s guidelines for search raters – specialists who give their feedback on the quality of search results provided by Google and help the company make its Search feature even more effective.
The past version of search rater guidelines – E-A-T, stood for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, meaning that every result shown in SERPs must demonstrate these three core quality indicators. In a 2022 update, Google enhanced this equation with another “E” that stands for experience. The added factor implies that all websites appearing at the top of SERPs should provide content crafted with a certain level of experience.
This concept shows us how much Google is dedicated to delivering top-notch content to its users. Hence, this concept can come in handy to SEO specialists and marketers. This system can give you an idea of what Google’s definition of high-quality content is and develop a working E-E-A-T strategy that will help your website get higher in search engine results pages and remain competitive in the ever-changing SEO world.
Why Must Ecommerce Sites Showcase a Genuine E-E-A-T?
Every ecommerce website falls into the YMYL category, which stands for “Your Money, Your Life”. This category of sites deals with topics and pages that can have a real-world impact on users’ lives.
Before coming to a particular ecommerce website and making a purchase, users typically browse multiple YMYL queries. The results they see in the search engine eventually impact what kind of product they will buy, how much they will spend on it, and how it might affect them in the future.
Since pages that fall under the YMYL category have a direct impact on users’ lives, Google believes that consumers expect them to use even higher standards of safety, quality, and trustworthiness. Hence, pages from this category are ranked differently and more meticulously compared to non-YMYL ones.
Given the stricter standards, ranking high for YMYL queries becomes harder. Thus, when it comes to SEO for ecommerce, E-E-A-T becomes an efficient road map to success. This concept can help you boost the experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of your pages. Since all these factors are pivotal for consumers looking to buy products or services, implementing this strategy can not only help you get higher in SERPs but also earn genuine user trust.
How to Optimise Your Site for E-E-A-T
Here are some of the best E-E-A-T strategies for ecommerce websites that should help:
1. Create Unique and High-Quality Content
In every SEO strategy, content plays a pivotal role. The thing is that search engines use advanced natural language processing technology that makes it incredibly easy to filter out spammy or low-quality content or, on the contrary, recognise and reward top-notch content. Thus, the quality of the content directly affects how high your site appears in SERPs. But that’s not all.
Apart from defining your rankings, content can also make or break users’ trust in your brand. You need to focus on creating rich, valuable, and share-worthy content written by someone who is an expert in your subject. This way, you should be able to establish your authoritativeness and make prospects trust you.
2. Maintain Author Visibility
If your goal is to demonstrate your site’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, establishing and maintaining author visibility is an effective trick.
When your content is produced by someone with in-depth knowledge and expertise in the field, this can significantly boost the credibility of your site as a whole and have much more impact on your audience. Thus, you want to keep your authors visible to demonstrate their expertise and make your site look more reliable.
3. Control Your Website’s Reputation
The online reputation of your website also contributes to E-E-A-T. After all, the reputation you have directly speaks about your credibility and trust level.
Here are some hacks for managing your reputation wisely:
- Focus on delivering customer satisfaction.
- Always encourage customers to leave positive reviews.
- Actively respond to the reviews you receive, including the bad ones.
- Ask your customers to provide feedback.
- Establish an active presence on social media.
- Consistently monitor your brand mentions and reputation to analyse your performance and hone your strategies for better results.
Your backlinks deserve a separate mention in this block. They also play an essential role in E-E-A-T for ecommerce because being featured on other authoritative websites helps establish deeper trust and highlights your credibility. And it also helps boost your rankings. So focus on building a solid link profile that contributes to your authoritativeness and use a handy website backlink checker to analyse your backlink profile health and improve it for better E-E-A-T.
4. Add Trust Factors Throughout the Site
Finally, your E-E-A-T strategy should definitely involve empowering your site with crucial trust factors.
There are five of them:
- Up-to-date contact information;
- Links to your profiles on social media;
- Reviews from customers;
- Trust badges, such as an SSL certificate, verification by reputable payment gateways, and other recognitions and awards;
- Clear and transparent policies.
All these are the signals that your website is safe and worth trusting. So be sure to add them throughout your site.
A Great Example of an Ecommerce Site Implementing E-E-A-T
Given the considerable value of this concept for ecommerce, many brands use it concept to their benefit.
Dyson
Dyson seems to show us a quintessence of how to optimise an ecommerce website. This brand demonstrates all trust signals on its website and perfectly manages its reputation, resulting in a high level of trust. It’s being featured in many credible resources, such as The New York Times, Forbes, and others. It has long created a big network of fans (including those among professional hairstylists) that advocates for the brand and boosts its authoritativeness.
Also, the company features a very rich knowledge section on its site. There, it shares research data, handy tips, and lots of other authoritative content that brings real value to its prospects and customers.
Source: Dyson
Nike
Nike is another brand that nails E-E-A-T for e-commerce. The company always keeps its core on-site trust factors up-to-date and encourages users to mention their brand, provide feedback, and share reviews.
As for the content, Nike is known to feature famous athletes and coaches in its podcasts and articles to boost credibility and provide real value to their audience.
Source: Nike
Conclusion
Falling into the YMYL category, an e-commerce website can be rather hard to optimise to rank high in SERPs. Luckily, with the help of E-E-A-T, marketers and site owners can boost the trust for their brand and, at the same time, improve their SEO and appear higher in search engine results.
Implementing E-E-A-T for e-commerce isn’t that hard – produce top-notch content, keep your authors’ names visible, manage your reputation, and add trust signals to your site. Integrate these tips into your SEO strategy and help your business grow and thrive in a highly competitive E-commerce industry.
