A lot goes on behind the scenes at Google but they recently broke the barrier of silence and let the world know that they were rolling out a “Broad Spectrum Algorithm Update.”
On August first the Twitter user @searchliasion tweeted the following:
This week we released a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. Our guidance about such updates remains the same as in March, as we covered here: https://t.co/uPlEdSLHoX
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) August 1, 2018
While the tweets aren’t descriptive in what exactly was changed, it’s clear that Google has a strong emphasis on the end users’ experience. This latest update seems to be affecting both organic results and local searches. According to several reports, it appears that the local results are favoring small, local businesses as opposed to national retail chains, which is always a plus in our book.
Overall, the update likely will not affect your overall raking, but recent studies have shown that increasing your E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) will continue to help boost your rankings.
3 Tips Centered Around E-A-T to Help Improve your Rankings
Expertise
Not everyone is going to be an expert in every topic, that’s why here at Atilus we each take our own niche of the digital spectrum and write blogs about it. There’s no way our Digital Marketing Engineer, Sydney, would be able to write an in-depth blog about CSS3 & HTML, it’s not her expertise.
When Google crawls your site & indexes it, the bot is looking for similar keywords, phrases, etc. to be able to categorize it within its huge library of the internet and show up for the right search results. If you try to spread your information out too far, you won’t rank high for anything.
Authoritativeness
Authoritative content helps to show Google and other search engines that you are an expert in your field. However, authoritative content isn’t really something you can post about overnight, but you can continue to post a series of content pieces to help showcase your authority in your industry. For example, you can write case studies about work with your customers. Or, you can become a resource in writing about the latest trends in your industry.
Trust
Do you trust sites with article titles such as “3 facts about weight loss that doctors don’t want you to know – #5 will BLOW YOUR MIND?” I didn’t think so. Being truthful in the information you are presenting to the reader and having verifiable facts within your content will increase trust with the user & with Google.
PS: If you’re ever interested in a long read, Google has a PDF of what their Search Quality Evaluators look for on a website.
Have you noticed your rankings change over the past few weeks? What E-A-T strategies are you going to implement?