Focus on E-A-T to avoid performance problems in 2020

Contributor and SMX speaker, Lily Ray, wants to make sure you think about your backlink profile and telling search engines through the right structure data you’re a trusted entity.

Below is the video transcript:

Hi, my name is Lily Ray. I’m the director of SEO at Path Interactive, a digital marketing agency here in New York City.

I think in 2020 marketers should be focusing a lot on E-A-T – expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. The reason I think that’s important is because there’s been a lot of big core algorithm updates on Google in the last several years that have been affecting a lot of websites, particularly websites that offer like medical advice, legal advice, financial advice. And it’s really important to think about E-A-T as part of your SEO strategy. You have to be telling search engines and users why you should be trusted. Why you’re an expert in the subject matter.

You know, think about your backlink profile and make sure you have this trusted, credible backlinks pointing back to your site. Make sure you’re using the right structure data to show Google that you’re a trusted entity and to make the connections between all the places that you’ve been mentioned online, for example.

So if you’re not thinking about E-A-T as part of your SEO strategy, you’re probably going to notice that particularly for these queries that are more like your money, your life, in nature, so medical or financial illegal or anything like that.

It’s going to be increasingly difficult to rank, to compete, because a lot of these core updates are resulting in companies that maybe don’t have great E-A-T seeing pretty big performance declines. So it’s definitely something to think of as a layer on top of your existing SEO strategy. So, yeah, focus on the E-A-T.

This is part of a special feature from our community of experts on what successful marketers will do in 2020. Read more >>

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Lily Ray

Lily Ray is the SEO Director at Path Interactive, where she provides strategic leadership for the agency’s SEO client programs. Born into a family of software engineers, web developers and technical writers, Lily brings a strong technical background, performance-driven habits and forward-thinking creativity to all programs she oversees. Lily began her SEO career in 2010 in a fast-paced start-up environment and moved quickly into the agency world, where she helped grow and establish an award-winning SEO department that delivered high impact work for a fast-growing list of notable clients, including Fortune 500 companies. Lily has worked across a variety of verticals with a focus on retail, e-commerce, b2b and CPG sites. She loves diving into algorithm updates, assessing quality issues and solving technical SEO mysteries. In 2017, Lily was nominated by Search Engine Land for Female Search Marketer of the Year, and she continues to provide SEO thought leadership and industry updates through online publications and speaking engagements.