 Good morning, everyone. Happy Wednesday. How we doing? Still awake, still alive, hanging in there. Awesome. First of all, I just want to say it's a dream come true for me to be on this stage. I've been coming to MozCon for about seven years now, got a little Roger tattoo here in white. Really, really happy to be here. Yeah, looking forward to sharing some some new tips about EAT and most importantly, we're gonna be talking about expertise today. So, today we're gonna be talking about why I think expertise or real expertise is the most important ranking factor of them all. I know it's a very bold statement. Again, I'm Lily Ray. Rob did a great introduction. Thanks, Rob. But I'm the senior director of SEO and head of organic research at Amps of Digital based in New York City. Have a few teammates here. Love you guys. We're also hiring, so come talk to us after if you're interested. So if you've heard me speak before, you probably, maybe you've seen this gift, but I personally think that EAT is this new force that's kind of overtaking a lot of the other SEO tactics and strategies that we talk about at SEO conferences and in our industry and things that we do day to day with our clients. Now, just to take a step back for anybody who's unfamiliar, EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It comes directly from Google's quality guidelines and it's basically the criteria that Google uses to evaluate how expert, how trustworthy, how authoritative a content creator is, a brand, a website. And this is something that the human search quality evaluators who basically evaluate how well Google is doing in terms of meeting content quality with its search results. They're using EAT as the criteria for measuring that. Google's also framed EAT as one of the most important factors for achieving optimal SEO performance in recent years. So, for example, if you want to learn SEO, you can go to Google's search engine optimization starter guide and they're going to say you should cultivate a reputation for expertise and trustworthiness in a specific area. They also say expertise and authoritativeness of a site can increase its quality. If you'd like to improve your website's performance after a core update, this is Danny Sullivan saying get to know the quality reader guidelines in EAT. If you want to rank in Google News and Google Discover, again, we have Danny Sullivan explicitly saying that make sure you're regularly producing original news content that's high in expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. If you'd like to rank better after the product reviews updates, which were three big updates that rolled out here in the US in the last year, this is Alan Kent from Google saying that you should express expert knowledge about products where appropriate. If you'd like to rank better on YouTube, which is obviously owned by Google, YouTube uses a lot of references to basically EAT and authoritativeness in its documentation. For example, by saying that we use machine learning systems that prioritize information from authoritative sources. This is especially true in regards to how they combat misinformation on YouTube. So some interesting quotes about EAT. This is Danny Sullivan doing a presentation a couple of years back for Google News in particular. And somebody asked Danny, you know, how does Google determine who is an authority on a topic? And something Danny said that I thought is very interesting is that we use these broad notions or we understand broad notions of topics when we're measuring and calculating authoritativeness. So hold on to that for later because I think it's important for today's presentation. We also know that EAT matters more during times of crisis. So Google has explicitly said when there's a crisis happening in the world, they're going to algorithmically elevate authoritative content over content that maybe just has, you know, exact match wording in the title or it's extremely recent, which is what they were doing in prior years, but that tended to circulate a lot of misinformation throughout the search results. So now when there's a crisis rolling out, i.e. a pandemic that's lasted a few years, Google will algorithmically elevate authoritative sources. We can also see some examples of EAT in the search results themselves. So they rolled out an update a couple of years back or maybe early 2021 called about this result where you can click on those three little dots next to any organic result and expand some information about who the website is, why you can trust them, how long the website's been indexed, you know, the fact that it's an organic result and not a paid result. If there's Wikipedia information about the brand, they're going to pull some of that in as well. So I believe this is a manifestation of EAT directly in Google search results. There's also another new label that Google introduced on top stories called highly cited. So basically when one top story is the one that's really breaking the news doing a lot of the original research and the other top stories are linking back to that story, you can potentially get this label that says highly cited and this ties right into what Google is saying about elevating original reporting in search. So a couple of years back they said we're going to algorithmically elevate the content that's breaking the news that's providing the original reporting as opposed to a lot of the other content that's just rehashing or kind of saying the same things that the original source said. I also thought this was a very interesting example of EAT at work. So do you guys know Brody Clark, SEO Brody? Yeah. Feel free to tweet at him that he's in Moscow and I think he'll appreciate that. Him and his wife, like when I share this slide. But basically I thought this was really interesting because when Brody googled his name, he noticed he had this article carousel of articles that Brody had written for different SEO publications. And this was, you know, a little bit deeper down in the search results whereas we also had the knowledge graph with another Brody Clark, not SEO Brody. He's a British civil servant and Google was basically able to take the name Brody Clark and disambiguate them and show SEO Brody with this article carousel, which means Google was capable of understanding Brody as an author and disambiguating him from the Brody who held the knowledge graph. So I think this is a good testament to what Google's been doing with authorship and really identifying and elevating individual authors. So obviously EAT has become extremely important for SEO in the last few years. So how has the SEO community responded? Well, the way we always respond, right? Let's EAT all the things. So this is live footage of a SEOs over the past couple of years. I guess this guy's not going to move. He's supposed to be sprinkling a little EAT factors all over everything. But you know, adding author bios, adding date of publication, adding expert review, adding all these little enhancements without actually doing the work of updating the content or improving the content quality or actually working with experts or doing anything that requires a lot of work. This is how a lot of SEOs have responded in the last couple of years. Well, unfortunately, improving EAT is not a simple process. Adding these so-called EAT elements without substantially improving or updating the content is not going to be sufficient for SEO success. So I've been digging through examples of this over the past couple of years. The sites that have been negatively impacted by core updates. This was an example of a site where, you know, they were hit by a core update. They went in there and they put, you know, expert review. They put somebody's name, a person's a scientist or something. But when you look at the content, the content is exactly the same. So that person supposedly reviewed the content, but they didn't do anything, right? This is not sufficient. I believe that we need to work a little bit harder to demonstrate that we're actually working with experts using expert review because Google can catch onto these things. If I can catch onto them with the Wayback machine, I think Google has much more sophisticated technology to identify the same thing. So I also noticed that there's a lot of, you know, shocking shortcuts that the SEO industry has been trying to take to demonstrate good EAT. So I went to a popular SEO spammer forum and somebody said, okay, if my understanding is correct, you basically just need to have this expert as an author. So if I just create this fake expert, then I'll have great EAT, right? So this is why we can't have nice things. We're trying to oversimplify something that's very complex in nature and that Google probably has thousands if not millions of highly sophisticated algorithms that are really trying to get to the bottom of how to elevate high EAT content. So this is what I believe Google's probably been thinking over the past few years. We need to get a little bit smarter about how we're doing this because like all great things in the world, SEOs like to come and spam everything and we have to adjust to that, right? So Google's probably saying it's not just about how many bells and whistles you add to your site, it's about who you are and what you say. And I believe that they have the technology to really drill down and get an understanding for those things. So there's a really interesting patent that I looked up that is called the contextual estimation of link information gain. And there's this notion in this patent that Google applied for, which is an information gain score. And essentially what this says is that it indicates that there's additional information included by a page beyond the information that's provided in all the other pages. So it's like net new information that the page is providing. And I think this is an interesting patent that kind of speaks to what Google's trying to do in terms of elevating expert original content. We also know that there's core updates rolled out several times per year. And core updates are about how Google assesses quality overall and relevance and all these different things. So you'll see throughout the year, Google announces three to four major core updates, generally speaking. And this could be the time when they're rolling out a new set of algorithms to better understand and identify and elevate high EAT content. So if you're like my team and I and you work on sites that are heavily impacted by core updates, these types of charts might look very familiar. We get, you know, there's been, again, three to four per year core updates in the last few years, starting with the medic update around 2018 is when Google really started to ramp up its communications about EAT. We've also had the product reviews updates in the last couple of years, which is affecting not only sites that do product reviews, but also like e-commerce sites and informational sites that might also be impacted by those topics. So it's been a whirlwind, right? It's like very, very volatile on Google right now. And I believe that what Google's doing is they're leaning in on real expertise. This is a quote taken from the documentation about the product review update. They're saying the overall focus of this update is to provide users with content that provides insightful analysis and original research that's written by experts or enthusiasts who know the topic well. And I think this is a very interesting update because what I think Google's doing is algorithmically understanding who the true expert is and looking for proof in the content itself that they've actually spent time with the products, testing the products, reviewing the products and separating that content from people who are maybe just writing the same things that everybody else has written online. So what is this resulting in? Well, we're seeing a slow but steady decline in many different types of publisher sites. And I want to be clear. I don't think these sites are doing anything wrong from an SEO standpoint. In fact, I think they're doing a lot of things right. I think they're following the right, the great SEO and EAT best practices that we talk about in our industry. But Google tends to be reducing the visibility with a lot of these sites that talk about health and wellness and financial, your money, your life type topics. And on the flip side, we're seeing the rise in what I like to call the real authorities. So if you work in health or you have clients that work in that area, you probably notice the Mayo Clinic gets to rank number one for everything now. And the CDC and the FDA and these big health authorities that Google has decided, we need to lean on them for a lot of these, your money, your life keywords, which may have something to do with the fact that we've kind of been in a state of crisis for the past few years. We're also seeing the rise of real subject matter experts. So this is where I think things get really exciting. Let's first start by remembering that experts are entities. We talk a lot about entities in the SEO space. I know Crystal talked about it and Noah talked about it. Entities are a way that Google can evaluate information, identify people, places and things. You know, they have the Knowledge Graph, which is 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities. One of those, other way around maybe. But point being, Google is able to identify billions of entities and all the attributes and qualities about those entities when it's making things like ranking decisions or deciding what type of content to show in the SERPs. So a few years back at PubCon, somebody said to Gary, well, are you guys capable of understanding who every author is? And Gary basically said, it's not exactly about the author, it's about the entity. So if you're a really popular author for the Washington Post, Google probably has a recognized entity for you. And I think that's what we're seeing with the Brody Clark example. Also a few years back, I was blessed with the privilege of collaborating with the late Bill Slavsky, Rest in Peace. And we worked together on an article that was really exciting where we basically combined Bill's expert knowledge about Google patents with what I was trying to uncover with EAT. So basically what we did was we said what Google patents exist out there that kind of support a lot of what Google's trying to achieve with this EAT initiative, right? And these are five different examples of what Bill and I discussed. So the first is agent rank. This is a patent that Google applied for in 2007 or was granted in 2007. This allows them to algorithmically understand who the author is of a given article and rank the content according to who that author is. That's in 2007 that they were able to do that. Website representation vectors is from 2018. This is a patent that enables Google to classify websites and web pages into different levels of expertise. This was granted around the time of the medic update in 2018. And they can basically say this is an expert website, this is a lay person website or this is an authoritative article or not. Author vectors is a very interesting patent where Google is able to identify who an author is just based on the writing style alone even if that author's name is not included on the page. We also have speaker identification which does the same thing but for audio. So if a speaker is speaking and they have a notable voice even without saying their name, Google is able to understand who that speaker is. And lastly we have identifying authoritative results which is basically when Google sees a certain query should generate authoritative results they're able to understand that the query deserves authoritative results. So all these things in tandem, I believe Google's putting a lot of these patents to work in terms of how they're calculating and demonstrating EAT in the rankings. So this is a tool that I've been digging into a lot lately and my teammates here are also enjoying it. It's the Diffbot Natural Language API. It's currently free, it's online. I was joking with my team that probably when I say that at Mosconn I won't be free on online anymore. But as it stands you can put a block of text in there and it's going to identify the entity, right? So I took my bio, put it in there and it knows who I am, knows where I work, it knows my age, it knows where I live, it knows that I'm a drummer, it knows that I'm a biker, all these things. So this is a really dumbed-down rudimentary version of what Google is probably capable of doing with entities, right? So this is a really fun tool and I encourage you to use it and you can actually play with the text to improve the visualization. So it's a fun way to get an understanding of how your content can be visualized in terms of on an entity level. So let's do a theoretical exercise. Let's pretend that we just got a new puppy. That's my puppy Marcy when she was two weeks old. Yeah, so maybe we want to search for, you know, how much to feed your puppy? Why does my dog whine all the time? Why is my puppy so hyper? Best guard dogs or why does my dog lick the carpet? These are all real search queries. And guess what? You guys know Cesar Milan? Really? Okay, I was like, is it just me? I'm like obsessed with Cesar Milan. Okay, so Cesar Milan is a dog whisperer, dog behaviorist. I know him from his shows. He also has award-winning books. But he happens to earn featured snippets for a lot of these different queries related to dogs and puppies. So this makes sense conceptually, right? And he's literally an expert on these topics. So I ran Cesar's bio through that tool, and immediately you can see the entity of Cesar. You can see when he was born, the fact that he's Mexican, what his former name is. He's an author. He's a best-selling author in the New York Times. We also have the fact that he owns a company called Caesar's Way. So just using this tool, I'm able to visualize all these different attributes and qualifications about this individual entity. We also have his company. So he owns Caesar's Way. I put Caesar's Way's biography into that tool, and I'm immediately able to understand Caesar's Way as a dog behavior company. You know, it's also a website publishing company. And so you can start to understand, like we have these different entities with these different attributes that we can then qualify, how, you know, qualified they are to rank on different topics. And we also have the ASPCA. I ran some information about them through there. And you can tell, you know, it's an animal well-being site, but it's not necessarily focused specifically on dogs and puppies. We also have the New York Times. Obviously, everybody knows them. A highly authoritative publication. So this is a theoretical exercise. When somebody types a dog or puppy behavioral keyword, Google's probably saying, okay, let's start with the authors. You know, which authors should I consider to rank for dog keywords? I'm gonna look for somebody who has a lot of expertise in authority on dogs. So, I think we already know, and I think we already know, Cesar Milan demonstrates a lot of EAT in this area. We also have Google doing this on the organizational level, or on the domain level, because they don't just evaluate EATs for people. They evaluate EAT for sites and brands as well, right? So, you know, again, probably Cesar's way is the most qualified when it comes to dog and puppy behavior keywords. So Google's doing this exercise of evaluating all these different attributes about these entities, and I think it's a good question of what they're probably doing when they're evaluating EAT. So I think that they're basically looking at the website's contributors, the website itself, all the possible entities that they can evaluate the EAT and how qualified they are to rank on different topics. And I want to be very clear, this process is done in tandem with all the other algorithms that we talk about in the SEO industry. This is not an exclusive process. EAT is something that becomes more important, depending on the query itself, depending on your money, your life, the query is. So if we're talking about vaccines, if we're talking about the 401k or, you know, heart attacks or something like this, this EAT process of evaluation is going to become much, much more important. And it's kind of a spectrum of how important it is. So, yes, still focus on everything else that we talk about in the SEO space, you know, focus on technical SEO, focus on content quality, optimization and website architecture and page speed. All these things matter, but this EAT process is, again, that absolutely matters, but matters more the more your money or your life, the query is. So now let's talk about some examples of real experts. So I've been digging through some niche corners of the internet to see some examples where I believe that someone's individual expertise is the thing that's driving their SEO success. So Google talks a lot about rewarding expert content, you know, elevating original research. So I wanted to see if there's examples out there where this is actually happening in the wild. And, lo and behold, there's a lot of it. And these are some examples of individuals and, you know, bloggers who actually SEO and content creation is not at all their job. They have other jobs, you know, they are actually experts in their field. And these percentages that you can see here are the percentage of growth that their sites have seen according to the Cystrix Visibility Index since early 2021. So all of these sites are seeing really significant SEO growth in the past couple of years. So I've been digging through their content and seeing what they're doing well. So what do these winning sites have in common? Well for one, the entire site focuses on one niche. And that's not to say go home and, you know, only create niche sites or if your site talks about multiple different topics you're not doing anything right. It's not to say that. It's just to say that with these experts on the site level, Google has said, remember Danny Sullivan, we understand these broad notions of topics and we can do that on the site level. So if you're an expert really digging into one area, Google's able to understand that your site has a lot of EAT in that area. They also use robust about me and about us pages. Every single one of these experts that I listed has a really comprehensive about me page. It's pictures of them. It's awards that they've won. It's why they're so enthusiastic about these topics. They all use firsthand expertise. Almost all of their content is written in the first person, which I think is very interesting. And they're basically saying, these are the things that I notice out in the field when I'm doing my job. And I believe that Google's capable of understanding that first person expertise. Again they use transparent authorship so whether it's them writing the content or maybe some other content writers that they work with, it's always very explicit who the authors are and all those authors always have author bios. They back up their expertise with evidence, anecdotes and experiences and this is where I think things are getting interesting on the algorithmic level. I think Google's able to understand especially with the product reviews update we understand that this person has actually spent a lot of time doing this thing. They're very enthusiastic about this topic. They have real life experience. They have real life advice. They have empathy. They have all these things that a real expert would have. They also offer objective advice without pushing their products. This has been a really key factor in the last several years of core updates. If you're providing informational content you have to be really careful about subliminally trying to sell your product or your service throughout the content. So some of these experts will actually say you know what, you don't even need to call an expert like my company. You can probably fix this thing at home. Others often link to them as the primary source. So we talk a lot about linking obviously within the SEO space. Of course when you're citing your sources and linking out to authorities I think that's really great for SEO and for users but in these cases other people are linking to them. They don't even have to link to anybody else because they just spent the whole day doing beekeeping and now they're coming to write about their experience as a beekeeper. They don't need to reference anybody. Other people need to reference them because they're the actual experts and I think Google's able to see the direction that the links are going. For product reviews they're always providing proof of extensive tests. Google's documentation says we want to see you using the product. We want videos of you using the product and these people, if they're doing product reviews are providing a lot of evidence that they've actually spent time with the products. There's a very robust depth of coverage within their niche so if you were to take a tool like also asked, which is a great tool any tool that can like visualize people also ask questions or a lot of the deeper questions you're going to notice that these experts have generally hit on all those different questions so they're doing a really good job providing a depth of coverage in their area. Let's talk about what this actually looks like. I'm going to go through a few examples of experts and pages that I think are doing a really, really good job of demonstrating real expertise throughout the content. This is a gentleman named Zachary Smith. He runs Smith's pest management company. They've been growing in terms of SEO really significantly in the last couple of years and it's just a pest management company, local business. They rank number one for how to get rid of cockroaches. They also happen to rank number one for a couple other similar keywords like how to get rid of mice and, I don't know, different pests that you might have in your home. What's interesting about this content is that number one, they offer step-by-step guidance which earns them the featured snippet. They always use first-hand experience to back up their claims so again it's like hey, we're the experts, this is what we see day to day. This is what Steve or any other authors bio on every single page. They're using unique images that the company took themselves so they're not relying on stock photography. They're actually taking photos of what they see. They lay out the honest pros and cons of each method so it's like, well, you can do this but this is going to happen, this is this. It's very honest. Obviously he's highly qualified to write the article. He's the one doing the work, he's the one running the business and he's very empathetic with the reader. It's like, wow, you have roaches in your home. That sucks. I probably appreciate too that somebody is actually speaking to their audience. Next is Mind Body Green. This is an exceptional site to look at just in terms of all things EAT. They were negatively impacted by core updates a couple of years ago and have been very much on their recovery. Actually they have more visibility now than they had during the time of the medic update so it's a very interesting site to pay attention to. And this is an article that they were ranking number one for attachment styles which gives the user interactive quizzes and videos about their attachment style. There's an organized table of contents at the top that's used for jump links, helpful internal linking to other similar articles. They're always citing expert sources when they make any type of health or medical claim. There's expert advice on how to change your attachment style and then they're doing a really great job with expert review here so they have a clinical psychologist working with them to write the content with a little pop-up that explains her qualifications. Next is the number one ranking site for Road Trip Utah and this is a travel blogger named Renee Roman. And what I love about this article is she starts by saying I've visited each of these parks multiple times. Me and my boyfriend have spent or husband have spent all these times here. Here's pictures of us at the parks. Here's all the things we learned throughout our travels. There's places to eat, safety tips. There's always photography of her at the park which I think Google can probably appreciate. Again it's not stock photography. There's considerations for each season, recommended apps and resources and always just explaining why she's qualified to provide this advice. Next is a site called Bob Villa. You guys might know Bob Villa. The site does really well for SEO. It's been growing a lot the last few years and Bob is actually involved in the content creation process. You can see here he's co-authored something about basement waterproofing that ranks number one for basement waterproofing. There's honest recommendations about how to work with a contractor. They include really fantastic FAQs. They include the what, the why and the how with firsthand experience that they've encountered on the job. Again he's not linking externally very much because he's the one breaking the information. He provides clarity around expected costs with actual pricing. I think this is really respectable because a lot of sites will say how much does something cost and then they don't actually tell you how much it costs. Bob will actually provide explicit pricing that you can expect to pay. Whether it's Bob himself writing the content or not, I know, but clearly they're focusing on leveraging Bob's expertise as part of the content creation strategy. Next we have a woman named Charlotte that's number two for queen bee size. Charlotte is the beekeeper of the year in South Carolina. She's won that award. Again she doesn't need to link to the source too much because this is the woman that's spending all day beekeeping and then I guess going home in the evening and writing about her experiences. So it's all first person and her writing style really demonstrates her enthusiasm for her work. This is an interesting example from a site called retro foam of Michigan. They're also doing very well with SEO. This is a company that does foam and insulation and they have their whole team laid out on the site. This is a gentleman named Eric Garcia who's probably the world's biggest enthusiast of foam insulation for your walls. He's highly qualified to write about it. He's the star of what they call foam university which is their YouTube account where they talk and they've been interviewed many different times. And what I think is really interesting about this is that they often will rank in the video thumbnail as well as in the featured snippet or in the top result. So this is potentially a way that Google's basically evaluating EAT across different areas of search. And if you've seen me present about the EAT ecosystem before, this is what I think Google's really trying to get to. Basically we have at the center of this ecosystem we have organic search and the knowledge graph but there's a lot of other search features and products that Google has where they can transfer this EAT knowledge across different Google products like YouTube and Google Maps and Google Discover and Google News. Once Google gets an understanding of the EAT of your entity or your experts they can maybe see that expert in Google Scholar for example. There's all these different places where they can connect the dots and I believe this is what they're trying to do across various Google products. So how to analyze and improve your site's perceived expertise? Number one, use custom extract and crawling tools. Extract your subcategories, your categories, your tags, your breadcrumbs. Cross-reference that with something like search console performance and you can see where your site over or under indexes in terms of the different categories that it tends to drive traffic and you can kind of get an understanding of where your site demonstrates the EAT. Number two, work with internal experts to build out their SEO presence. You can also take that expert's content like video content or podcast content you can describe that as text for content on your website and always if you struggle to get by and you can just tell them I want to help you rank number one for your name and that's a good way to get people to pay attention and to work with you. Tip number three, provide thorough, clear and consistent author and expert bios. Try to be consistent in the language that you use throughout different external sites because Google can start to connect the dots there and maybe show that bio in the knowledge graph and always provide original research that's written. So the more you can break the news the more people link to you because that's the primary source of information the better the strategy is going to succeed. So I have literally 10 seconds to demonstrate how well this EAT stuff actually works. So three different case studies. This is a client of ours that was negatively impacted by the medic update. They focused really hard on EAT launched a new EAT focused site as soon as they launched it they skyrocketed invisibility another health and medical site and props to my teammate Paulie's been working really hard on these clients. They started focusing on EAT in late 2020 and we're really happy to see with the last two core updates we're starting to see that recovery. And lastly this site's also been working on focusing on EAT getting rid of thin content, low quality content consolidating content together working with experts doing all the right things and we're seeing that it's a really consistent growth over the last several months. So with all that thank you so much and enjoy the rest of MozCon.