Ever since E-EAT became an SEO ranking signal in 2022, I’ve thought a lot about how I can improve my own score.

This article is a personal, behind the scenes, look at what I’m doing in 2024.  I’ll show you how I think about this important question.

As a quick refresher, E-EAT stands for:

E – Expertise

E – Experience

A – Authority

T – Trust

We all know the saying, “It’s not WHAT you say, but HOW you say it”.  

Well, I believe the essence of EEAT is “It’s not WHAT you write, but WHO writes it”.

In a lot of ways, I understand what Google is trying to do with EEAT, but unfortunately, I think this is simultaneously causing major problems with the quality of their search results.

I have a lot of experience and authority on this very topic, because I’m a co-founder of 88Herbs, which is a natural health supplement company.

Health supplements are in the “YMYL” category, which stands for “Your Money Your Life”.  The topics in the YMYL category are important topics for your health and finances.  EEAT is extra important for anything in this category. 

This makes some logical sense.  You don’t want someone who specializes in blogging and SEO to outrank a heart surgeon when giving tips on how to prevent heart attacks for example.

Unfortunately, this causes major quality problems, as I wrote about here in, “Why Google’s AI Algorithm is Terrible”

One example I gave was in personal finance.  

I searched, “How should I invest my money?”

The top result was a very basic, and in some ways inaccurate, article written by TD bank.  (TD bank is one of the major banks in Canada).

Honestly, the quality of TD’s article was very poor, but because TD obviously has a high “EEAT” score, the article was number 1.

It isn’t surprising that Google would trust a bank to write an authoritative piece on investing.  They have the experience and everything Google is looking for in terms of “quality” signals.

But TD bank also pushes people toward their own mutual funds, which have high fees, and have been proven to not be as good as ETFs for most people.  

I could give many similar examples in the natural health industry too, where large websites rank well for poorly written articles on health supplements.

If you have a small website about personal finance, it is unrealistic to expect to beat out a major bank on the EEAT score.

So what are the best ways to improve your EEAT score?

This is the million dollar question.

I’ve been doing SEO for over 20 years and I’ve seen many algorithm changes.

I don’t want to give you a boring list of generic things that can improve EEAT.  

There are too many of these lists, and none of them are very useful because they are all too obvious.

I’ll tell you what I’m doing to improve my score for this new website.  This should provide valuable insights into what you may wish to try.

I’m going to use my experience and a common sense approach to improve my EEAT score.

In terms of this website, AI growth guys, I’ve started doing a couple of things.

The first thing I did was I teach a free Udemy course on Prompt Engineering.

I see my Udemy instructor bio as the top result on Google when I search, “Andrew Best AI”.

This is a very good sign.  

As of this writing, I have 3570 students and 300 reviews from students (with an average of 4.3 out of 5 stars).  I’d say that is pretty good.

The next thing I did to improve my EEAT score for this website was to start blogging on Medium about AI and how to make money online in this new age. 

Anyone is able to write on Medium, but Medium also has “publications” that are like private little mini websites.  

The owners of some of these publications have strict criteria about who they allow to write on these publications.  Every article also needs to be approved by a publication editor to get published.

I recently wrote about Devin, the AGI autonomous agent.

An editor of the popular publication “AI in Plain English” reached out to me privately and asked if they could publish that article.  I happily accepted.

If you click on the article, you’ll see near the top of the article that it says, “Published in Artificial intelligence in Plain English”.

This is another signal to Google that I’m a “real person” who is producing valuable content in the AI space.  If my content wasn’t considered valuable, then this popular publication wouldn’t publish my content.

Other ways I plan to improve my EEAT score:

We will be making a YouTube channel, where we will interview smart people in this space.  If experts agree to come on our show, then that will signal to Google that we must be serious.

I also plan to make more content around each of the topics on this website.  This increases “topical authority”.  Topical authority means you prove to Google that you know many things about a particular topic.  It shows that you have an in-depth knowledge rather than a surface understanding.

For example, if this will be the only SEO article on this website, then we will have poor topical authority.  

So these are just some of the things that we are doing to legitimately build up our EEAT score.

You don’t need to copy what I’m doing, but you can use the ideas as inspiration.  

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