I Love to EEAT

Over 80% of the internet is spam — and your website is guilty until proven innocent.

As a search engine engineer at Yahoo! 25 years ago, my job was to protect the algorithm from spam sites and irrelevant information showing up on your results page. Twenty-five years later, Google still implements roughly the same guidelines.

For a long time, Google’s framework for sorting which websites were relevant was E-A-T — expertise, authority, and trust. In layman’s terms: if you want your site to benefit from SEO, you have to demonstrate that you are an expert in your field, that you are authoritative on the subject your website is about, and that enough people trust you.

The benefit was an increase in your site’s rankings — letting you rank higher for the search terms you care about and giving your site more “SEO juice.” If your website is guilty until proven innocent, implementing E-A-T was your proof of innocence.

A few years ago, Google changed EAT to E-E-A-T, adding an extra E for experience. Now Google wants to see more stories of who you have helped and videos of how you helped them. It gives priority to businesses that overwhelmingly prove they do what they say they do, in the area they say they do it.

Plenty of “SEO experts” claim they have a secret black-hat formula for increasing rankings. But real search engineers like me know that implementing proper E-E-A-T is the single most important “SEO trick” you can do to grow. Whether it is to get more calls for your local service business, more sales for your book, or to get your name out there so you can earn a Google Knowledge Panel — this is how you do it. Here is how to implement E-E-A-T, with examples, so you can do it too.

Expertise: document what you know that others do not

When you are sick, why do you visit a doctor instead of self-diagnosing? Because they know more about health and the human body than you do. The reason anyone trusts anyone else is that they have done or seen something before, know what it is, and know how to fix it.

The reason I speak at over 50 conferences a year is that level of expertise — which has taken decades to build in digital marketing. If you visit my website, DennisYu.com, you can see that expertise in the articles I write and the problems I have helped solve. Many local service businesses do this in the form of FAQs.

Take my friend Greg Beebe, who runs Excel Concrete Coatings. He took the People Also Ask (PAA) questions on Google related to concrete coatings and answered them directly on his website. That is just one of many ways to demonstrate expertise to Google and to your customers.

What is something you can document on your website that few others in your field know? What makes you an expert in your line of work? PAA questions are a great starting point — but truly think about the questions you can answer that prove you are an expert.

Experience: show overwhelming proof through stories

Using the doctor analogy again: would you trust a surgeon to perform heart surgery who has never done the operation before? Probably not. So why would you pay an agency or local service business that has no proof it has done anything successful before?

Google — and the people you want to buy your offer — want you to show overwhelming experience that you do a good job at what you say you do, in the area you say you do it. The best way to demonstrate experience, for Google and for your clients, is with stories.

For example, if you Google “Dennis Yu,” you will find stories about how I ran ads for the Golden State Warriors, how I have spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads, and how I am training young adults to become successful agency owners.

One way to do this as a local service business is to talk about your customers and document your work. Take our friends at Oasis IV Therapy in Tampa. They run a mobile IV therapy clinic, and one thing they do well is take photos and collect feedback from their customers.

Google works roughly the way you do: it wants to see images, stories, and especially videos of a business doing what it says it does. There is no such thing as too many videos or too much documentation of your work. Ideally, you use the Content Factory process to capture these real moments and repurpose them across every platform. Record a podcast with someone more influential, and you should also repurpose it into a blog post. We want our stories and experience to exist on as many platforms as possible.

Your job, as it relates to E-E-A-T, is to document your work on your website, Google Business Profile, and socials — for Google and for your customers.

Authoritativeness: borrow it and build it

The best way to leverage authority for your personal brand or business is to borrow someone else’s. When you see an image of me debating Mark Zuckerberg on CNN, that alone gives me tons of authority I did not have before. You demonstrate authority using its three components: content, people, and properties. Each one strengthens the others.

Content is what you put out into the world — articles like this one, short-form videos on Instagram and Facebook, or long-form videos on YouTube. Content is authority we can link to and reference. Just as this article is content we can point anyone to when they ask about E-E-A-T, you should have content that explains what things are. Despite what some internet gurus claim, you do not need a million followers and a Lamborghini to show authority. You just need documented proof.

People are the cornerstone of authority, and arguably the most important. Relationships run the world. Networking with others who share your mission is a great way to elevate your authority while promoting them at the same time. This does not have to be parasitic — being seen, working on projects, and being available for others means you can help them, which builds authority because you are working on a shared mission. For local service businesses, that means using a geo-grid and talking to others in your industry. If you are an HVAC company in Boston, you should be sharing links, interviewing, and working with another HVAC company in LA. That tells Google — and your customers — that you are authoritative, because you can borrow authority from others in your industry.

Properties are things like your website or business itself. Having something real that is documented in Google and for your clients shows you are a real person or business doing real work. That is why you should invest in your own website, as we teach in our personal branding course.

Trustworthiness: earn the trust markers

Trust means others can trust you with their time and money. There are certain trust markers you should aim for. For example, our client TLS Insulation has over 1,000 combined 5-star reviews across their Google Business Profiles. That means enough people have used their service and gotten positive results that the signal to Google is incredibly strong.

Books are another way to demonstrate trust, since so few people have them on authoritative subjects. And with the Dollar a Day strategy, you can get your Amazon book to bestseller status fairly easily.

A good practice is to ask yourself, “Why do people trust my business?” — and then answer that question in a way people can understand.

Why your stories are the one thing AI cannot fake

The beautiful thing about E-E-A-T is how every component feeds into the others. By networking with people, you boost your authority, which in turn builds your trust. And the thing that matters most is stories.

AI does not have your stories. It does not have your moments — where you are in Austin eating tacos with a friend, or hanging out eating steak. Because AI is not human, those stories are how Google determines whether your content deserves to rank or was just created for search engines.

You may have heard about the difference between synthetic content and real content. I can pick a photo or video from my personal phone gallery — Google knows exactly what device I am using and where the media was taken. It has all sorts of information. That is the signature of trust Google is looking for.

When I take these stories — which start out as photos or videos — they can be turned into blog posts. If you start with your actual content, ChatGPT, like any tool, is an amplifier of what you already have. If you start from nothing, nothing times a million is still nothing.

So if you start with a seed of the stories and friendships we have, we can add pictures and videos to enhance that initial nugget. That is where people get it wrong with AI. Using AI to auto-generate everything is where Google will eventually catch you. As Bill Gates has said, AI is a multiplier of what you already have — so whatever you put into the machine, you will get ten times more of it.

Put E-E-A-T to work

E-E-A-T is not a trick — it is proof. Document your expertise, show your experience with real stories, borrow and build authority, and earn your trust markers. Do that consistently, and you stop being guilty until proven innocent.

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