As a writer at a content marketing agency, I’ve written for a lot of different clients, and almost everything I’ve produced has been intended to rank on Google and encourage website traffic.

Here’s the challenge I (and every other marketing writer on the planet) am up against: search competition.

No matter what industry you’re in, or target audience you’re speaking to, you’re not alone. You have competition. And if you and your competition both understand the SEO game (which is very much the case for most companies nowadays), then what do you have to fall back on to protect your visibility in the all-important SERPs?

According to Google, it’s E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

But here’s the complicated thing: Every one of my clients — even the small ones thriving in very big industries — has expertise, and authoritativeness, and even trustworthiness. So, how does that help them in search? And how can they possibly prove to Google, amid all the noise and competition and other experts out there, that they deserve a place on Page 1?

Last year, I set out to find out.

Methodology

Google is pretty clear about the fact that websites need E-A-T, but what they don’t really clue us in on is what E-A-T actually is or how it’s measured. I hypothesized that, if I compiled a big list of SERPs and closely analyzed all the Page 1 results, I could narrow down what may comprise E-A-T.

Theoretically, E-A-T affects different industries in different ways. That’s because some topics and subject areas are more critical than others to have extremely reliable information — like when you’re searching for information about prescription drugs or complicated financial products.

So, the first thing I did was choose seven topic categories to focus on: legal, insurance, health care, loans, pharmaceuticals, military, and informational questions. Next, I picked 10 queries for each category.

Then I searched. The resulting 70 SERPs produced 647 results. I analyzed each of those results, looking specifically for 32 different factors.

Finally, I reviewed what I had recorded and asked:

• Which factors were the most prevalent across all 647 results?
• Which factors were most prevalent among the 210 Top 3 results?
• Were there differences in prevalent factors across the various topic categories I chose?

Before we get into the results, let’s talk about correlation vs. causation for a moment. While each of these factors seemed to be very common among Page 1 results, and it seems clear that some of these factors do play a role in establishing E-A-T, all I can really say for sure is that these traits are associated with pages that rank well in search. They could be indicators of a good page or website, but not necessarily the determining factor that’s putting them on Page 1.

With that in mind, here are five lessons I learned about E-A-T after closely analyzing the results from those 70 searches.

Lesson 1: Original, relevant, recent content is essential

Of all the lessons, this is the least surprising to me, but perhaps the most important. To rank well for relevant terms, you need to strongly demonstrate that your website belongs in search results. How? Content, obviously.

But it’s got to be high-quality content. Usually, I’d say that means you’re addressing the topic from all angles and leaving no questions unanswered. But after this SERP inspection exercise, I’d actually say the three most important characteristics of high-quality content are that it’s:

1. Original
2. Relevant
3. Recently published or updated

Original research

One factor I sought throughout this study was original research. To me, this included any content that’s created using information the organization sources, analyzes, and publishes themselves.

Just shy of two-thirds of the results’ websites contained original research, but among the websites whose results were in the Top 3 positions, 70% had original research available. This shows the importance of creating your own, unique content — a story only you can tell. Trust me, you have one.

Relevance and topical authority

Beyond content just being unique, it also needs to be relevant to your industry and target audience. Topical authority is a weird concept because SEOs know it’s real, but there’s no way to measure it, and Google hasn’t exactly come out and said they have a topical authority ranking factor.

However, they have given us a lot of clues that point to topical authority being a highly important factor in E-A-T — like this patent they filed in 2017. Even in their recent Helpful Content Update, Google highlights questions that creators should ask themselves when considering their own site content. The question, “Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?” in particular alludes to the importance of creating content for a topic niche or specific subject area.

Given the limited tools on this subject, I decided to create my own (rudimentary) method of measuring topical authority by way of roughly determining the topic coverage depth throughout the whole website. Here’s what I did:

1. Determine the parent topic of the query in question. “Insurance” is the parent topic for “types of insurance” and “world population” is the parent topic for “how many people are in the world,” for example.
2. Find the Topic Coverage Score (TCS, as I call it) of each result’s website. That’s the number of pages indexed by Google that contain an exact-match of the parent term.
3. Calculate the average TCS of all Page 1 results for each query.
4. Compare the TSC of each result with the average TSC for that query.

After that procession of steps, I found that while 25% of Page 1 results had a TSC higher than the average, 40% of Top 3 results boasted the same. In other words, the websites that had the most topic coverage were more likely to land at the top of the page.

Recently published or updated

Half of all Top 3 and 48% of Page 1 results were dated within the previous two years. There are plenty of evergreen topics that don’t need regular content changes (the oldest result in my study was a page explaining why the sky is blue from 1997). Updating content just for the sake of giving it a new date won’t help you rank any higher in Google. However, creating timely content and updating old content as necessary could help.

Lesson 2: Your off-site, online presence matters

Here’s a lesson I wasn’t expecting to learn. When I set out on this study, I thought the biggest E-A-T factors would correspond to the website in question more so than the organization that manages it. Not so much: It became clear to me that your off-site, online presence plays a role in helping you rank in Google search results.

The vast majority (95%) of all results had third-party reviews of some kind, whether they’re Google My Business reviews, comments on Glassdoor, site trustworthiness information on Trustpilot, or something else.

Wikipedia is also a common thread between many of the results. While 89% of Page 1 results’ websites or organizations had at least one Wikipedia mention, 93% of Top 3 results did, too. As far as actual Wikipedia pages, 73% of Page 1 results and 82% of Top 3 results’ organizations had one.

The high prevalence on Page 1 tells me that it’s fairly common to have a Wikipedia connection, but the higher numbers corresponding to the Top 3 results hints at what their importance might be.

Another patent from Google, this one updated in 2018, discusses the topic of seed sites. A seed site, theoretically, is one that the search engine trusts because it generally has quality content and good, valuable links. Google hasn’t revealed whether this seed site theory is valid, or to what extent it plays a role in search algorithms (if any). But if I were to choose a seed site, Wikipedia would be a good contender. Each page has tons of links to websites with relevant information on carefully organized topics.

Another website worth mentioning is the Better Business Bureau. While it only gives limited perspective (since it only relates to Canadian and US businesses), I found that many Page 1 results’ organizations (70%) and even more Top 3 results (74%) had at least a BBB page but not necessarily a grade. In fact, a little over one-fourth of results that had a BBB page didn’t have a rating.

It seems to me that the value is in getting listed on BBB’s website more so than achieving a good grade — perhaps a North American-specific seed site of sorts.

Lesson 3: Transparency and honesty are