EEAT: Expertise

Expertise, or the second ‘E’ in EEAT, is the second quality metric that Google’s quality raters use to judge the trustworthiness of your content. But what does ‘expertise’ actually mean to Google and Is there a difference between experience and expertise?

Let’s dive into this a bit deeper and see what you need to do to prove yourself an expert and keep the Google quality raters on your good side.

We first looked at how demonstrating experience is one of the best ways to show that your content is trustworthy, however, having experience doesn’t always mean you know best. If you have experience and are also an expert in your field then your voice should be shouting the loudest right?

Picture this, you’ve found two reviews online for a new running shoe, the first, from a running shoe blogger who consistently and exclusively writes and vlogs about running shoes. The second, a blogger who reviews every product under the sun, including that same running shoe you’re interested in. Although the generic reviewer might have ‘experience’ with the shoes, can you trust that they actually know what they’re talking about? they might even show a video but they’re not exactly a running shoe expert, at least as far as you can tell. The running shoe blogger on the other hand presumably knows their stuff, their review is like a gold mine of specialised knowledge.

With this in mind how would I qualify myself as an expert if I was starting from scratch? The first thing I would do is build a backlog of content within my area of expertise, making sure it was informative and accurate. I would also spread my content across articles, videos and podcasts if I could (high effort = high reward). Thinking back to the specialised shoe blogger in the above example, if it was only their first piece of content you would be less inclined to trust them.

So now you have an extensive backlog of specialised content spread across multiple media types, great, but what is stopping any old ChatGPT warrior with enough time on their hands from banging out article after article on one specific topic? Putting themselves on video talking rubbish about something they know nothing about?

Unfortunately this is a trend that we keep seeing and has only been boosted by the advent of AI. Just look at the financial sector over the last couple of years, everyone believes they are the go-to expert. So what else can you do to prove to Google and your audience that you actually do have specialised expertise, other than the sheer volume of your content? How do we differentiate you from the AI content machines?