If you’re struggling to write content that ranks well on Google, you aren’t alone. Business owners, brands, and marketers often find it difficult to create content that both meets Google’s quality standards and genuinely helps users.
For years, SEO strategies focused primarily on search engines rather than people. But the landscape has changed. Algorithm updates, evolving SERP features, and the rise of AI-generated content have shifted Google’s expectations toward helpful, accessible, user-first content. As a result, content strategies must now balance optimisation with genuine value.
Google’s E-E-A-T principles are a cornerstone in raising your website’s SERP profile and AI search visibility. When applied well, they help improve your presence in search results while building long-term trust with users. This article outlines how to write and review content that puts E-E-A-T at the core of your SEO strategy.
What is EEAT Content?
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. E-E-A-T content should be part of any long-term SEO strategy to boost your website’s credibility and ranking. These guidelines are used by Google’s algorithms to help to evaluate the quality of the content on websites and in 2022 Google announced it was adding an extra E to the original EAT Guidelines.
So what does E-E-A-T stand for?
- Experience
This refers to the first-hand or personal experience of the content creator.
- Expertise
This identifies the creator’s knowledge and skill in the subject matter.
- Authoritativeness
Assesses the credibility and recognition of the creator or website.
- Trustworthiness
This evaluates the reliability and integrity of the content.
You may be thinking, what does all of this actually mean? In short, it’s about creating helpful and people-centric content that simultaneously signals to Google that it’s a good source to pull into SERPs or AI overviews.
How to build an E-E-A-T strategy?
E-E-A-T factors help ensure that high-quality, relevant information remains accessible in search results. A strong content strategy should:
- Address genuine user needs and search intent
- Be informed by keywords and opportunity research
- Be supported by subject-matter expertise
- Be updated regularly to remain accurate and useful
Updating existing content with new research and insights can turn it into evergreen content. Unlike news articles or trend-based content that can quickly become outdated, evergreen content is designed to provide long-term value, attract ongoing traffic and continually engage audiences.
Organic SEO content is something we specialise in at Varn, whether for our client’s on-page content, blogs and product landing pages, through to off-page data-driven articles, guest blogs or PPC landing pages.
When creating or updating content for your website, we recommend you incorporate the elements explored below into your overall SEO strategy to match E-E-A-T guidelines. Ultimately, it’s about making sure your content is as attractive as possible for the search engines to find, understand and rank.
How can I show Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness?
E-E-A-T can be shown in several practical ways:
- Include clear author bios that explain relevant experience and expertise
- Reference credible sources and industry research
- If a topic is outside your credentials, reinforce with expert quotes, partnerships, or collaborations
- Showcase your reviews, testimonials, awards, or accreditations
- Be transparent about who created the content and why
- Add an “About us” or “Why Choose Us” section to show credibility by highlighting your background, experience and the services you offer
These strategies can be enhanced with three simple technical UX steps, which we cover below.
1. Develop your internal linking
An internal link is a hyperlink on your website that takes the user to another page within your website. Contextual internal linking extends the user journey and helps search engines understand your website’s hierarchy and the relationship between pages.
From an E-E-A-T perspective, internal linking is crucial because it:
- Signals to search engines which pages you consider authoritative and important
- Helps distribute page authority (ranking power) across your site
- Improves user experience by guiding visitors to additional relevant, trustworthy information
- Encourages deeper engagement, which can build trust and demonstrate expertise
Well-planned internal linking therefore supports Google’s assessment of your site’s authoritativeness and trustworthiness by showing how content pieces relate and reinforce one another.
Learn more about why internal linking is important.
2. Use descriptive anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. Using descriptive, keyword-aligned anchor text helps both users and search engines understand the purpose of the linked page.
For E-E-A-T, descriptive anchor text:
- Reinforces the topical relevance and expertise of the destination page
- Improves user’s clarity and confidence when navigating your site, enhancing trustworthiness
- Signals to search engines the relationship between linked content
You can align the anchor text with keywords informed by Google’s perception of keyword authority for a page with Google Search Console. Here’s how:
- Open Search Console and look at your website’s keyword performance data
- Filter down to page view and sort by impressions (these have the most potential)
- For each page, select a keyword that describes the purpose of the page
- Use this as the anchor text to further strengthen Google’s perception of that page’s authority relating to that keyword, as well as your website’s topical authority and other search engines the purpose of the page
3. Align CTAs with search intent of the page
Every page should have a clear intent that matches user needs. Aligning call-to-action text(CTAs) with this intent is essential for E-E-A-T because:
- It respects user expectations, improving the user experience and trust
- It guides users smoothly through their journey, demonstrating expertise in understanding their needs
- It encourages meaningful engagement and conversions, showing your site’s value and authority
When CTAs connect directly to what users are looking for, whether to learn more, contact experts, or make a purchase, they reinforce the trustworthiness and authority of your content. If you’re unsure how to figure out the intent behind a page, see our blog on understanding search keyword intent.
How do I write user-first E-E-A-T Content?
Focus on high-quality, informative content. You, your team and your customers are experts andreal people with a breadth of valuable first-hand experience that people want to learn from. Creating content around this matches the Experience part of the E-E-A-T guidelines perfectly.
This could mean creating case studies, writing blogs about experiences, or creating industry whitepapers in your area of expertise. To get started, here are some helpful tips on how to write user-first E-E-A-T content:
1. Write for people first
Write for your audience first, then tweak and structure for SEO. Google is discourages from writing content just for search engines. And rightly so, we’ve all clicked on a result in the SERP and been met with low quality content.
Google asks us to provide ‘Helpful, Reliable, People-First content.’ Business owners, experts and SEOs must work together to find a middle ground that is both helpful for users and optimised correctly for the search engines.
Work with a marketing/ SEO expert to perform user research. This should consist of understanding pain points, desires and the audience’s buying journey. For example, in the decision stage of the buying journey, we need to catch users when they are in the consideration stage of that journey.
Next, think about your blog content, and capture solutions to help solve their pain points, queries, worries, wants, and needs. It’s vital to capture your audience’s attention by writing content that resonates with their experiences and aspirations.
2. Consider your audience’s next steps
Reflect on the next steps you want users to take and use internal links to support their decision-making process. Think about what makes sense for them and then align this with the actions you want taken (i.e., based on your business goals and the journey you want them to take). For example, is it a brochure download, to get in contact or book an appointment?
You can use existing data from Google Analytics to help inform your decision making. The GA4 Page Path explorer can tell you which blog pages were part of the converting/purchasing users’ journey. Use this information to guide your internal linking, and take your user on a journey through the buying funnel.
You can take this a step further with natural placements where a related topic is introduced. Just remember that these links must be natural and add value.
3. Make sure your readability is good
It’s vital to ensure your content is accessible and engaging. One element to consider is the readability of your content or article on a desktop, compared to when people may be scanning the content when using a mobile. Additionally without good content structure, even the most insightful/helpful information can be dismissed as untrustworthy or irrelevant by search engines.
There are lots of free tools that will tell you the readability of your written content. This is based on things like using the active voice, shorter sentences and paragraphs, and writing in plain English instead of industry jargon.
4. Structure it with keyword-rich headings
Structuring E-E-A-T content with keyword-rich headings has SEO value and improves user experience. These headings make it easier for people to navigate the content, find the information they need and hence perceive the content as authoritative and trustworthy. Clear, relevant headings also help the search engines understand the content’s topic, making it more discoverable and likely to rank higher.
Eye tracking research can be used to help understand how users interact with headings on webpages, revealing their role in capturing initial attention and guiding navigation. This data informs effective design decisions to enhance readability, user engagement plus overall user experience. Eye-tracking research studies found that when people read on the web, their approach depends on what they are doing, what they expect based on their past internet use, how the page looks, and the type of content it has, like text or pictures.
The most common scanning patterns are:
- The F theory – where the user will mainly look on the left side of the webpage and examine the top of the page.
- Spotted pattern – where the user will jump around to the most interesting spots – often influenced by effective website design and UX.
- The layer-cake pattern – where the user will focus on headings and subheadings as they act as signposts for information.
5. Add FAQ Sections
Incorporating FAQ sections into a website’s content strategy aligns well with E-E-A-T principles, as this helps to create content that is not only informative and reliable but also highly valued by both users and search engines. You can use Google Search Console, to help you uncover long-tail keyword opportunities to feed into your FAQs.
If you want to find FAQ opportunities in Search Console you can do the following;
- Open Search Console and look at keyword performance, filter down to page view and sort by impressions.
- Review impressions to clicks ratio for keywords – what terms are getting high impressions but low clicks?
- Identify which of these keywords contain question modifiers. Who, what, where and why are the most obvious ones but you can go further with can, should, could, do, is, etc. You can get chat gpt to help with regex string creation.
Don’t forget to structure your FAQ content to appear as snippets in search results with schema mark up optimisation to help increase click-through rates.
Final thoughts on E-E-A-T
On a final note, user-first content that adheres to E-E-A-T principles isn’t just about chasing low-hanging fruit or seeking quick wins. It’s about building a foundation of trust and authority for your brand and business that will continuously fuel organic search growth over the long term.
Still not sure where to start? Our team of innovative SEO experts can support you to develop a robust E-E-A-T content strategy that will drive traffic and conversions. Contact our expert SEO team to discuss your E-E-A-T challenges, we would love to help.
