How to Create 8 Million SEO Test Ideas Using ChatGPT — Whiteboard Friday

As SEOs, we tend to come from an audit mindset, to look for things that are wrong and to try and decide what is the best way of doing things. In today’s episode, Will tries to get you into a testing mindset, and helps you do so by generating test ideas through ChatGPT.

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Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. My name is Will Critchlow, and I'm the founder and CEO at SearchPilot, and I wanted to talk to you today about generating eight million test ideas for your website. At SearchPilot, if you don't know us, we run SEO tests for some of the world's biggest websites, and I think probably at this point have run as many SEO tests as anyone in the world.

The whole angle that I'm coming from here is getting ourselves into a testing mindset. So as SEOs, we have a very big temptation to come from more of an audit mindset, to look for things that are wrong and to try and decide what is the best way of doing things. I want to argue that when you've got testing in place, you want to move to being an explorer, not an auditor.

So you're kind of looking for inspiration, ideas, all the different things that you can test out to see if they're better than what you're doing right now. We're going to talk today just about title tags. Title tag testing is a great way to get started with SEO testing. They're a particularly powerful form of SEO test because your title can affect what you rank for and where you rank, as well as the click-through rate that you get in the search results because it tends to show up right there in the snippet.

We'll get on to where the eight million comes from. But I'm going to be talking a little bit about a tool that we'll link to and you can download so that you can help yourselves do this with our tool and with our help. But we've put together this tool that helps you look at, say, the top 100 ranking pages for a particular query and analyze the titles of all of those pages that are ranking there.

I find this a really powerful way of doing ideation because you get to see all the things that your competitors are doing. You get to compare those and look at, "Hey, there's an angle that I could be taking." Or in my exploration, I can think, "Hey, that's an interesting idea. I'm going to give that a test." What the tool does is it basically spits out a couple of charts that look like this, where you get to look at different kinds of features of these competitors' titles.

So it runs on a keyword, something like "hotels in London," and you might look for features like: Does it mention London? Well, yeah, I mean, they pretty much all are going to mention London. But does it say best? Does it have reviews in there? Does it have prices in there? Does it talk about discount, all these other different features that you might see in different titles? So we spit out a bunch of charts that say relative frequency of all these different features across the top 100, across the top 20, or even one that compares what's prevalent in the top 20 versus the bottom 20 in that 100.

It just drives off a simple spreadsheet. So it's a simple Screaming Frog crawl. You can get started with this really quickly on your own machine. You do the crawl, crawl those titles, and pull them into an export from Screaming Frog, dump them straight into the spreadsheet. Then it's a whole load of regular expression lookups that can say, "Does it have a pipe in there? Does it have a hyphen? Does it have a colon?

Does it have a pound sign? Does it use the word "best"? Does it talk about London and the UK and all these other features?" It pulls all this kind of stuff out, and you can customize it in the tool. But this is where the eight million comes from. Because the way I've put this together right now, it has 23 columns, so there are 23 different things that you may or may not include in a title, and 2 to the 23 is 8 million and a little bit.

So you even get some bonus ones above that eight million. But what I wanted to specifically talk about in this video is to get into the tactics of one specific thing that I found interestingly useful in the work of putting this together, and this is just one of the columns in the spreadsheet. So I mentioned a lot of these drive off regular expressions, just looking up a basic yes or no.

Does the title include a pound sign, for example? But there's one particular that was slightly trickier, which is I wanted to say, "Does the title include the brand of the company?" That at first glance seems like it's going to be easy because you're just going from domain.com to the brand is domain, which works for something like Kayak.

Kayak.com is the domain, and you can just pull out the brand name as Kayak. But it's not always that simple. Some of them use the whole domain name as the brand. So hotels.com, booking.com, the brand is not hotels or booking. It's hotels.com and booking.com. Then some of them, the information isn't even there in that domain name. So cntraveler.com for example, the brand is Condé Nast Traveler.

So there's actually no way of doing that in a spreadsheet. You can't just use a regular expression and pull out those bits of things because that information isn't even there in that domain name. So this is my little tactical tip is this is a perfect place to turn to ChatGPT, because if you're going to do this for hundreds and hundreds of domains, you don't want to be doing this manually.

Some of them you might be able to type in and some of them you might be able to automate, and then some of them you're just going to have to go and look up, and that is a really slow process. The industry is abuzz with ideas for using ChatGPT right now. But this is one that I found particularly interesting because it's almost just working out of the box. It doesn't actually need too much human oversight, unlike when you're asking it to produce new content for you.

You can create a prompt that just works for ChatGPT. I've experimented with a few things, and you can start out just asking. You can say I'm going to give you a list of domains and I would like a list of brands returned for those domains, and that prompt will get you part of the way there. It works even more powerfully, I've found, if you give it some examples.

So just like I did here, you can give the prompt saying, for example, the brand of kayak.com is Kayak. The brand of hotels.com is hotels.com. The brand of cntraveler.com is Condé Nast Traveler. When you put all of that together, ChatGPT can straightaway out of the box give you hundreds of lookups between domain name and brand, which straightaway lets you build a spreadsheet where you don't have to do all of that manually.

This is just, for my mind, given where artificial intelligence tools are at right now, this is one of those perfect uses because when you've got that big long list, it's actually super quick to do a quick human pass over that and just look down the list and go, "Yeah, those all look right." So much quicker than it would be to type them all out or go looking each one up individually, copying and pasting them around the place.

A really great time saver. I think it's Benedict Evans who talks about the current state of the art in artificial intelligence is roughly it gives you 10,000 interns. Anything that you could delegate to an intern you can get ChatGPT to do. This is a perfect example. While we're on examples of this, my other favorite one is for debugging. We talked about regular expressions, and I'm convinced that nobody really understands regular expressions.

Certainly I find, when I'm putting them together, I often make little mistakes and I need to do a little bit of debugging. I need to try and figure out why it's not doing exactly what I wanted it to do. This is also a great use of ChatGPT. Drop your regular expression in and just ask it questions. Just say, "Why is this not picking up this example that I thought it would?" It is a great like sparring partner coming back to you with ideas and helping you figure out those things.

So that's been a little bit of a lightning journey through how to generate eight million test ideas. If you're into SEO testing, follow @searchpilot on Twitter and head on over to our website at searchpilot.com and sign up for the newsletter because every couple of weeks we publish a new SEO test result that helps the whole industry figure out what's working and what's not in Google.

So, as I said, my name is Will Critchlow. I'm the founder at SearchPilot. It's been great talking to you today. Enjoy your day.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

How to Use Digital PR to Improve E-E-A-T Signals

If there is poor quality information being served up in the SERPs, Google will have a big problem: Users will stop searching, and this hits Google where it hurts — in their advertising revenue.

So it makes sense that Google is keen to push forward authoritative and trustworthy sites when it comes to ranking in the results. Towards the end of 2022, Google updated three key areas of the algorithm that it uses to judge where it ranks websites within search engine results pages. The helpful content update, link spam update, and E-A-T — which is now known as E-E-A-T.

Distrust is now our default emotion

Nearly six in 10 consumers say their default tendency is to distrust something until they see EVIDENCE it is trustworthy. If you’re working with brands in typically untrusted verticals, such as health, finance, banking, lending, e-commerce, recruitment, legal, etc., then I am sorry to say that Google won't automatically trust you.

In this post, I’ll share the digital PR tactics you can use to help to improve your E-E-A-T signals, explain why building trust and credibility needs to be at the top of your list if you want to have greater visibility in the SERPs, and share success stories that showcase how these tactics have led to commercial gains for brands in typically untrusted sectors.

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and these are the four qualities that your brand should have if you want to have the best chance of ranking well and providing the best experience for your audience.

Experience

Experience is the newest addition to E-E-A-T, highlighting the need for brands to demonstrate experience in whatever topic or subject matter the brand wants to be known for.

Digital PR is one of the most effective ways for brands in any sector to demonstrate experience, by securing coverage on external, topically-relevant websites showcasing your first-hand experience. This can be done through thought leadership articles, supplying journalists with insight into relevant news stories and even sharing brand-owned data to showcase credibility in a subject area.

Expertise

Expertise is one of the most important attributes for brands to demonstrate to Google, and digital PR is the perfect vehicle for doing this.

If your CEO has been interviewed, or has written an article, for a key trade publication, these can help you establish credibility through expertise. However, brands need to be mindful that they only comment and contribute to the industry areas where they are true experts, otherwise they run the risk of diluting their credibility and destroying the hard work they are putting in.

Authoritativeness

Backlinks and brand mentions can supercharge your SEO strategy and are an incredibly effective way to build brand authority.

By earning links and brand mentions in relevant, credible, and well-respected media titles, you’ll be showing Google that you’re the most authoritative brand to include in their search results.

Relevance is key when it comes to building topical authority via digital PR, so it’s important to focus on the quality of the backlinks that your brand is earning, compared to the sheer volume of them.

Let’s use the Moz Blog as an example here. As you’d expect, it’s a very high authority website, with a domain authority of 91. For the digital PR agency I work for, JBH, writing content for Moz will ensure that Google understands that JBH has the approval from a high authority, credible domain and, in turn, should reward us through increased organic search engine visibility.

However the content I produce for the Moz blog on behalf of JBH needs to reflect our collective expertise, which is digital PR. It wouldn’t make any sense (or help with our topical authority) for me to write an article about PPC on the Moz Blog, for example.

Trustworthiness

Google now places trust at the heart of its algorithm, with experience, expertise, and authority all feeding into it.

Using digital PR can help brands do this really effectively by earning backlinks from relevant, credible and established publications. We know earned media is far more valuable than paid media as it is secured on the basis of expertise and experience.

Journalists hold the keys to the publication they write for, and will only mention a brand, or reference an expert if it adds value and credibility to whatever they are writing, and provides additional value to their readers.

How can digital PR help brands demonstrate each of the E-E-A-T criteria?

Now that we’ve unpacked what E-E-A-T stands for and why digital PR is the perfect vehicle to deliver each of the key elements, we’re going to look at a range of digital PR tactics and how they can be repositioned to demonstrate each one.

Tactic 1: Using thought leadership to demonstrate experience and expertise

When Google sets out to discover whether a site is to be trusted or not, they will crawl the web looking for signals that demonstrate experience and expertise. This can be in the form of interviews, articles in industry publications, or commentary on news events in relevant niches, amongst many others.

But these pieces of content don’t happen by accident — they should be carefully crafted in order to showcase the experience and experience of the person behind them.

Joel Kurtzman, founding editor of Strategy+Business magazine, explains that, “A thought leader is recognised by peers, customers and industry experts as someone who has distinctly original ideas, unique points of view and new insights.”

Meaning that not everyone can (or should) be a thought leader. A thought leader needs to provide relevance and engagement in order to demonstrate experience and expertise properly.

Success story: How thought leadership digital PR activity improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare space

For a brand in the addiction recovery space, we identified that they needed to improve their E-E-A-T signals in order to be able to compete with more well-known brands dominating the search results AND to prove to Google they were a brand trustworthy enough to include in the search engine results pages.

This healthcare brand had tons of experience and expertise in-house: mental health nurses, addiction therapists, and psychologists were just some of the experts we had access to for this activity. What’s more, the founder had been through the addiction recovery process, so they were perfect candidates for our thought leadership activity.

We used the principles of thought leadership to build digital trust by:

1. Identifying the best people within the business to be our thought leadership champions.

2. Interviewing them to discover what they are most passionate about.

3. Uncovering the most interesting parts of their job role and started thinking about PR stories we could create around those things.

The result? We found that journalists from relevant publications (e.g. health editors) were excited to use our experts to add credibility to their editorial.

How does this promote experience and expertise?

• The content sits within the relevant sections on large publications (e.g. the health section),

• The keywords we want to rank for are used within the content.

• Any links we generate point back to the relevant service page on the site — a vote of trust through the link.

Tactic 2: Earning regular backlinks from relevant titles to demonstrate authoritativeness

One of the oldest and most well-known E-E-A-T signals are backlinks from high authority third party sites pointing into the page you want to rank in the search engine results.

This isn’t necessarily new information, but the type of links that demonstrate the authority of your brand might be different to what you first thought.

Many times in my career I have been told by a client that they need brand new referring domains and they need to be from top tier national publications. There is a time and a place for those types of links (you might be trying to create or close a link gap, for example), but if we look at how Google has told us they judge websites placing high importance on trustworthy and helpful content, I would argue that regular links from hyper-relevant titles have just as much impact, if demonstrating authority in a niche is our end goal.

Success story: How regular links in hyper-relevant titles improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare software space

In 2022, a B2B healthcare software provider asked us to help with their digital PR. We earned six links to their software product page, from three hyper-relevant publications.

The impact was huge. We saw a 219% increase in traffic to the page year-on-year and the client reported back that they had increased leads through that page.

By getting repeat coverage on a topically relevant site you’re proving you’re a trusted expert to audiences and to Google. Your audience is likely to be more engaged and spend longer reading the content and an engaged audience is more likely to convert, proving the commercial value of digital PR.

Demonstrating authority isn’t about ego. It’s about giving a platform to knowledgeable professionals who are passionate about what they do and proving to Google that the information you supply is helpful, credible and authoritative

Tactic 3: Data-led digital PR campaigns to demonstrate trustworthiness

Brand-owned or proprietary data helps demonstrate trustworthiness. Whether you’re using anonymised customer data or other methods, original research reports are always a sign of quality.

Data-driven PR campaigns build trust with potential customers, journalists and Google by going the extra mile. You’re not just providing an opinion, you're providing evidence to back up why you’re saying what you’re saying.

This type of content is perfect for attracting relevant, high quality backlinks at scale which in turn leads to more eyeballs on your research, increased brand awareness and therefore votes of trust through those links.

Success story: How brand-owned data drove trust for a money saving website

For a global money saving coupon brand we used brand-owned data to tap into a trending pop-culture moment - the ‘House of Gucci’ film starring Lady Gaga and Adam Driver.

One of our priority pages was the Gucci landing page on the site, so we were able to place our client, the page and their data-backed insights at the heart of the trend.

Capitalising on the buzz surrounding the much-anticipated release of the movie, we attributed a spike in user traffic from customers looking for vintage Gucci discount codes. Alongside this statistic we included commentary from our client to explain the increase in demand.

Brand-owned data is great for building trust, but only if:

• The data can be fact-checked and verified by the journalists who want to use it.

• It supports and adds credibility to the story being presented.

• Has a sound methodology to show how you sourced the information.

Digital PR is just one part of the E-E-A-T puzzle

Digital PR isn’t just about building a volume of links anymore. Repositioning your digital PR activity to focus on the key elements of E-E-A-T is a sure-fire way to generate impactful results without needing to focus on volume.

The brands who invest in trust-building techniques and follow the principles of E-E-A-T will overtake the brands who do not. Google has been quite transparent with what they expect from brands and their websites.

SEOs and PR professionals need to use a blend of techniques that match the brand they are working for. Not every brand has a credible expert, but might instead have some great brand-owned data that can be used to build credibility.

How to Use Digital PR to Improve E-E-A-T Signals

If there is poor quality information being served up in the SERPs, Google will have a big problem: Users will stop searching, and this hits Google where it hurts — in their advertising revenue.

So it makes sense that Google is keen to push forward authoritative and trustworthy sites when it comes to ranking in the results. Towards the end of 2022, Google updated three key areas of the algorithm that it uses to judge where it ranks websites within search engine results pages. The helpful content update, link spam update, and E-A-T — which is now known as E-E-A-T.

Distrust is now our default emotion

Nearly six in 10 consumers say their default tendency is to distrust something until they see EVIDENCE it is trustworthy. If you’re working with brands in typically untrusted verticals, such as health, finance, banking, lending, e-commerce, recruitment, legal, etc., then I am sorry to say that Google won't automatically trust you.

In this post, I’ll share the digital PR tactics you can use to help to improve your E-E-A-T signals, explain why building trust and credibility needs to be at the top of your list if you want to have greater visibility in the SERPs, and share success stories that showcase how these tactics have led to commercial gains for brands in typically untrusted sectors.

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and these are the four qualities that your brand should have if you want to have the best chance of ranking well and providing the best experience for your audience.

Experience

Experience is the newest addition to E-E-A-T, highlighting the need for brands to demonstrate experience in whatever topic or subject matter the brand wants to be known for.

Digital PR is one of the most effective ways for brands in any sector to demonstrate experience, by securing coverage on external, topically-relevant websites showcasing your first-hand experience. This can be done through thought leadership articles, supplying journalists with insight into relevant news stories and even sharing brand-owned data to showcase credibility in a subject area.

Expertise

Expertise is one of the most important attributes for brands to demonstrate to Google, and digital PR is the perfect vehicle for doing this.

If your CEO has been interviewed, or has written an article, for a key trade publication, these can help you establish credibility through expertise. However, brands need to be mindful that they only comment and contribute to the industry areas where they are true experts, otherwise they run the risk of diluting their credibility and destroying the hard work they are putting in.

Authoritativeness

Backlinks and brand mentions can supercharge your SEO strategy and are an incredibly effective way to build brand authority.

By earning links and brand mentions in relevant, credible, and well-respected media titles, you’ll be showing Google that you’re the most authoritative brand to include in their search results.

Relevance is key when it comes to building topical authority via digital PR, so it’s important to focus on the quality of the backlinks that your brand is earning, compared to the sheer volume of them.

Let’s use the Moz Blog as an example here. As you’d expect, it’s a very high authority website, with a domain authority of 91. For the digital PR agency I work for, JBH, writing content for Moz will ensure that Google understands that JBH has the approval from a high authority, credible domain and, in turn, should reward us through increased organic search engine visibility.

However the content I produce for the Moz blog on behalf of JBH needs to reflect our collective expertise, which is digital PR. It wouldn’t make any sense (or help with our topical authority) for me to write an article about PPC on the Moz Blog, for example.

Trustworthiness

Google now places trust at the heart of its algorithm, with experience, expertise, and authority all feeding into it.

Using digital PR can help brands do this really effectively by earning backlinks from relevant, credible and established publications. We know earned media is far more valuable than paid media as it is secured on the basis of expertise and experience.

Journalists hold the keys to the publication they write for, and will only mention a brand, or reference an expert if it adds value and credibility to whatever they are writing, and provides additional value to their readers.

How can digital PR help brands demonstrate each of the E-E-A-T criteria?

Now that we’ve unpacked what E-E-A-T stands for and why digital PR is the perfect vehicle to deliver each of the key elements, we’re going to look at a range of digital PR tactics and how they can be repositioned to demonstrate each one.

Tactic 1: Using thought leadership to demonstrate experience and expertise

When Google sets out to discover whether a site is to be trusted or not, they will crawl the web looking for signals that demonstrate experience and expertise. This can be in the form of interviews, articles in industry publications, or commentary on news events in relevant niches, amongst many others.

But these pieces of content don’t happen by accident — they should be carefully crafted in order to showcase the experience and experience of the person behind them.

Joel Kurtzman, founding editor of Strategy+Business magazine, explains that, “A thought leader is recognised by peers, customers and industry experts as someone who has distinctly original ideas, unique points of view and new insights.”

Meaning that not everyone can (or should) be a thought leader. A thought leader needs to provide relevance and engagement in order to demonstrate experience and expertise properly.

Success story: How thought leadership digital PR activity improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare space

For a brand in the addiction recovery space, we identified that they needed to improve their E-E-A-T signals in order to be able to compete with more well-known brands dominating the search results AND to prove to Google they were a brand trustworthy enough to include in the search engine results pages.

This healthcare brand had tons of experience and expertise in-house: mental health nurses, addiction therapists, and psychologists were just some of the experts we had access to for this activity. What’s more, the founder had been through the addiction recovery process, so they were perfect candidates for our thought leadership activity.

We used the principles of thought leadership to build digital trust by:

1. Identifying the best people within the business to be our thought leadership champions.

2. Interviewing them to discover what they are most passionate about.

3. Uncovering the most interesting parts of their job role and started thinking about PR stories we could create around those things.

The result? We found that journalists from relevant publications (e.g. health editors) were excited to use our experts to add credibility to their editorial.

How does this promote experience and expertise?

• The content sits within the relevant sections on large publications (e.g. the health section),

• The keywords we want to rank for are used within the content.

• Any links we generate point back to the relevant service page on the site — a vote of trust through the link.

Tactic 2: Earning regular backlinks from relevant titles to demonstrate authoritativeness

One of the oldest and most well-known E-E-A-T signals are backlinks from high authority third party sites pointing into the page you want to rank in the search engine results.

This isn’t necessarily new information, but the type of links that demonstrate the authority of your brand might be different to what you first thought.

Many times in my career I have been told by a client that they need brand new referring domains and they need to be from top tier national publications. There is a time and a place for those types of links (you might be trying to create or close a link gap, for example), but if we look at how Google has told us they judge websites placing high importance on trustworthy and helpful content, I would argue that regular links from hyper-relevant titles have just as much impact, if demonstrating authority in a niche is our end goal.

Success story: How regular links in hyper-relevant titles improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare software space

In 2022, a B2B healthcare software provider asked us to help with their digital PR. We earned six links to their software product page, from three hyper-relevant publications.

The impact was huge. We saw a 219% increase in traffic to the page year-on-year and the client reported back that they had increased leads through that page.

By getting repeat coverage on a topically relevant site you’re proving you’re a trusted expert to audiences and to Google. Your audience is likely to be more engaged and spend longer reading the content and an engaged audience is more likely to convert, proving the commercial value of digital PR.

Demonstrating authority isn’t about ego. It’s about giving a platform to knowledgeable professionals who are passionate about what they do and proving to Google that the information you supply is helpful, credible and authoritative

Tactic 3: Data-led digital PR campaigns to demonstrate trustworthiness

Brand-owned or proprietary data helps demonstrate trustworthiness. Whether you’re using anonymised customer data or other methods, original research reports are always a sign of quality.

Data-driven PR campaigns build trust with potential customers, journalists and Google by going the extra mile. You’re not just providing an opinion, you're providing evidence to back up why you’re saying what you’re saying.

This type of content is perfect for attracting relevant, high quality backlinks at scale which in turn leads to more eyeballs on your research, increased brand awareness and therefore votes of trust through those links.

Success story: How brand-owned data drove trust for a money saving website

For a global money saving coupon brand we used brand-owned data to tap into a trending pop-culture moment - the ‘House of Gucci’ film starring Lady Gaga and Adam Driver.

One of our priority pages was the Gucci landing page on the site, so we were able to place our client, the page and their data-backed insights at the heart of the trend.

Capitalising on the buzz surrounding the much-anticipated release of the movie, we attributed a spike in user traffic from customers looking for vintage Gucci discount codes. Alongside this statistic we included commentary from our client to explain the increase in demand.

Brand-owned data is great for building trust, but only if:

• The data can be fact-checked and verified by the journalists who want to use it.

• It supports and adds credibility to the story being presented.

• Has a sound methodology to show how you sourced the information.

Digital PR is just one part of the E-E-A-T puzzle

Digital PR isn’t just about building a volume of links anymore. Repositioning your digital PR activity to focus on the key elements of E-E-A-T is a sure-fire way to generate impactful results without needing to focus on volume.

The brands who invest in trust-building techniques and follow the principles of E-E-A-T will overtake the brands who do not. Google has been quite transparent with what they expect from brands and their websites.

SEOs and PR professionals need to use a blend of techniques that match the brand they are working for. Not every brand has a credible expert, but might instead have some great brand-owned data that can be used to build credibility.

How to Use Digital PR to Improve E-E-A-T Signals

If there is poor quality information being served up in the SERPs, Google will have a big problem: Users will stop searching, and this hits Google where it hurts — in their advertising revenue.

So it makes sense that Google is keen to push forward authoritative and trustworthy sites when it comes to ranking in the results. Towards the end of 2022, Google updated three key areas of the algorithm that it uses to judge where it ranks websites within search engine results pages. The helpful content update, link spam update, and E-A-T — which is now known as E-E-A-T.

Distrust is now our default emotion

Nearly six in 10 consumers say their default tendency is to distrust something until they see EVIDENCE it is trustworthy. If you’re working with brands in typically untrusted verticals, such as health, finance, banking, lending, e-commerce, recruitment, legal, etc., then I am sorry to say that Google won't automatically trust you.

In this post, I’ll share the digital PR tactics you can use to help to improve your E-E-A-T signals, explain why building trust and credibility needs to be at the top of your list if you want to have greater visibility in the SERPs, and share success stories that showcase how these tactics have led to commercial gains for brands in typically untrusted sectors.

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and these are the four qualities that your brand should have if you want to have the best chance of ranking well and providing the best experience for your audience.

Experience

Experience is the newest addition to E-E-A-T, highlighting the need for brands to demonstrate experience in whatever topic or subject matter the brand wants to be known for.

Digital PR is one of the most effective ways for brands in any sector to demonstrate experience, by securing coverage on external, topically-relevant websites showcasing your first-hand experience. This can be done through thought leadership articles, supplying journalists with insight into relevant news stories and even sharing brand-owned data to showcase credibility in a subject area.

Expertise

Expertise is one of the most important attributes for brands to demonstrate to Google, and digital PR is the perfect vehicle for doing this.

If your CEO has been interviewed, or has written an article, for a key trade publication, these can help you establish credibility through expertise. However, brands need to be mindful that they only comment and contribute to the industry areas where they are true experts, otherwise they run the risk of diluting their credibility and destroying the hard work they are putting in.

Authoritativeness

Backlinks and brand mentions can supercharge your SEO strategy and are an incredibly effective way to build brand authority.

By earning links and brand mentions in relevant, credible, and well-respected media titles, you’ll be showing Google that you’re the most authoritative brand to include in their search results.

Relevance is key when it comes to building topical authority via digital PR, so it’s important to focus on the quality of the backlinks that your brand is earning, compared to the sheer volume of them.

Let’s use the Moz Blog as an example here. As you’d expect, it’s a very high authority website, with a domain authority of 91. For the digital PR agency I work for, JBH, writing content for Moz will ensure that Google understands that JBH has the approval from a high authority, credible domain and, in turn, should reward us through increased organic search engine visibility.

However the content I produce for the Moz blog on behalf of JBH needs to reflect our collective expertise, which is digital PR. It wouldn’t make any sense (or help with our topical authority) for me to write an article about PPC on the Moz Blog, for example.

Trustworthiness

Google now places trust at the heart of its algorithm, with experience, expertise, and authority all feeding into it.

Using digital PR can help brands do this really effectively by earning backlinks from relevant, credible and established publications. We know earned media is far more valuable than paid media as it is secured on the basis of expertise and experience.

Journalists hold the keys to the publication they write for, and will only mention a brand, or reference an expert if it adds value and credibility to whatever they are writing, and provides additional value to their readers.

How can digital PR help brands demonstrate each of the E-E-A-T criteria?

Now that we’ve unpacked what E-E-A-T stands for and why digital PR is the perfect vehicle to deliver each of the key elements, we’re going to look at a range of digital PR tactics and how they can be repositioned to demonstrate each one.

Tactic 1: Using thought leadership to demonstrate experience and expertise

When Google sets out to discover whether a site is to be trusted or not, they will crawl the web looking for signals that demonstrate experience and expertise. This can be in the form of interviews, articles in industry publications, or commentary on news events in relevant niches, amongst many others.

But these pieces of content don’t happen by accident — they should be carefully crafted in order to showcase the experience and experience of the person behind them.

Joel Kurtzman, founding editor of Strategy+Business magazine, explains that, “A thought leader is recognised by peers, customers and industry experts as someone who has distinctly original ideas, unique points of view and new insights.”

Meaning that not everyone can (or should) be a thought leader. A thought leader needs to provide relevance and engagement in order to demonstrate experience and expertise properly.

Success story: How thought leadership digital PR activity improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare space

For a brand in the addiction recovery space, we identified that they needed to improve their E-E-A-T signals in order to be able to compete with more well-known brands dominating the search results AND to prove to Google they were a brand trustworthy enough to include in the search engine results pages.

This healthcare brand had tons of experience and expertise in-house: mental health nurses, addiction therapists, and psychologists were just some of the experts we had access to for this activity. What’s more, the founder had been through the addiction recovery process, so they were perfect candidates for our thought leadership activity.

We used the principles of thought leadership to build digital trust by:

1. Identifying the best people within the business to be our thought leadership champions.

2. Interviewing them to discover what they are most passionate about.

3. Uncovering the most interesting parts of their job role and started thinking about PR stories we could create around those things.

The result? We found that journalists from relevant publications (e.g. health editors) were excited to use our experts to add credibility to their editorial.

How does this promote experience and expertise?

• The content sits within the relevant sections on large publications (e.g. the health section),

• The keywords we want to rank for are used within the content.

• Any links we generate point back to the relevant service page on the site — a vote of trust through the link.

Tactic 2: Earning regular backlinks from relevant titles to demonstrate authoritativeness

One of the oldest and most well-known E-E-A-T signals are backlinks from high authority third party sites pointing into the page you want to rank in the search engine results.

This isn’t necessarily new information, but the type of links that demonstrate the authority of your brand might be different to what you first thought.

Many times in my career I have been told by a client that they need brand new referring domains and they need to be from top tier national publications. There is a time and a place for those types of links (you might be trying to create or close a link gap, for example), but if we look at how Google has told us they judge websites placing high importance on trustworthy and helpful content, I would argue that regular links from hyper-relevant titles have just as much impact, if demonstrating authority in a niche is our end goal.

Success story: How regular links in hyper-relevant titles improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare software space

In 2022, a B2B healthcare software provider asked us to help with their digital PR. We earned six links to their software product page, from three hyper-relevant publications.

The impact was huge. We saw a 219% increase in traffic to the page year-on-year and the client reported back that they had increased leads through that page.

By getting repeat coverage on a topically relevant site you’re proving you’re a trusted expert to audiences and to Google. Your audience is likely to be more engaged and spend longer reading the content and an engaged audience is more likely to convert, proving the commercial value of digital PR.

Demonstrating authority isn’t about ego. It’s about giving a platform to knowledgeable professionals who are passionate about what they do and proving to Google that the information you supply is helpful, credible and authoritative

Tactic 3: Data-led digital PR campaigns to demonstrate trustworthiness

Brand-owned or proprietary data helps demonstrate trustworthiness. Whether you’re using anonymised customer data or other methods, original research reports are always a sign of quality.

Data-driven PR campaigns build trust with potential customers, journalists and Google by going the extra mile. You’re not just providing an opinion, you're providing evidence to back up why you’re saying what you’re saying.

This type of content is perfect for attracting relevant, high quality backlinks at scale which in turn leads to more eyeballs on your research, increased brand awareness and therefore votes of trust through those links.

Success story: How brand-owned data drove trust for a money saving website

For a global money saving coupon brand we used brand-owned data to tap into a trending pop-culture moment - the ‘House of Gucci’ film starring Lady Gaga and Adam Driver.

One of our priority pages was the Gucci landing page on the site, so we were able to place our client, the page and their data-backed insights at the heart of the trend.

Capitalising on the buzz surrounding the much-anticipated release of the movie, we attributed a spike in user traffic from customers looking for vintage Gucci discount codes. Alongside this statistic we included commentary from our client to explain the increase in demand.

Brand-owned data is great for building trust, but only if:

• The data can be fact-checked and verified by the journalists who want to use it.

• It supports and adds credibility to the story being presented.

• Has a sound methodology to show how you sourced the information.

Digital PR is just one part of the E-E-A-T puzzle

Digital PR isn’t just about building a volume of links anymore. Repositioning your digital PR activity to focus on the key elements of E-E-A-T is a sure-fire way to generate impactful results without needing to focus on volume.

The brands who invest in trust-building techniques and follow the principles of E-E-A-T will overtake the brands who do not. Google has been quite transparent with what they expect from brands and their websites.

SEOs and PR professionals need to use a blend of techniques that match the brand they are working for. Not every brand has a credible expert, but might instead have some great brand-owned data that can be used to build credibility.

How to Use Digital PR to Improve E-E-A-T Signals

If there is poor quality information being served up in the SERPs, Google will have a big problem: Users will stop searching, and this hits Google where it hurts — in their advertising revenue.

So it makes sense that Google is keen to push forward authoritative and trustworthy sites when it comes to ranking in the results. Towards the end of 2022, Google updated three key areas of the algorithm that it uses to judge where it ranks websites within search engine results pages. The helpful content update, link spam update, and E-A-T — which is now known as E-E-A-T.

Distrust is now our default emotion

Nearly six in 10 consumers say their default tendency is to distrust something until they see EVIDENCE it is trustworthy. If you’re working with brands in typically untrusted verticals, such as health, finance, banking, lending, e-commerce, recruitment, legal, etc., then I am sorry to say that Google won't automatically trust you.

In this post, I’ll share the digital PR tactics you can use to help to improve your E-E-A-T signals, explain why building trust and credibility needs to be at the top of your list if you want to have greater visibility in the SERPs, and share success stories that showcase how these tactics have led to commercial gains for brands in typically untrusted sectors.

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and these are the four qualities that your brand should have if you want to have the best chance of ranking well and providing the best experience for your audience.

Experience

Experience is the newest addition to E-E-A-T, highlighting the need for brands to demonstrate experience in whatever topic or subject matter the brand wants to be known for.

Digital PR is one of the most effective ways for brands in any sector to demonstrate experience, by securing coverage on external, topically-relevant websites showcasing your first-hand experience. This can be done through thought leadership articles, supplying journalists with insight into relevant news stories and even sharing brand-owned data to showcase credibility in a subject area.

Expertise

Expertise is one of the most important attributes for brands to demonstrate to Google, and digital PR is the perfect vehicle for doing this.

If your CEO has been interviewed, or has written an article, for a key trade publication, these can help you establish credibility through expertise. However, brands need to be mindful that they only comment and contribute to the industry areas where they are true experts, otherwise they run the risk of diluting their credibility and destroying the hard work they are putting in.

Authoritativeness

Backlinks and brand mentions can supercharge your SEO strategy and are an incredibly effective way to build brand authority.

By earning links and brand mentions in relevant, credible, and well-respected media titles, you’ll be showing Google that you’re the most authoritative brand to include in their search results.

Relevance is key when it comes to building topical authority via digital PR, so it’s important to focus on the quality of the backlinks that your brand is earning, compared to the sheer volume of them.

Let’s use the Moz Blog as an example here. As you’d expect, it’s a very high authority website, with a domain authority of 91. For the digital PR agency I work for, JBH, writing content for Moz will ensure that Google understands that JBH has the approval from a high authority, credible domain and, in turn, should reward us through increased organic search engine visibility.

However the content I produce for the Moz blog on behalf of JBH needs to reflect our collective expertise, which is digital PR. It wouldn’t make any sense (or help with our topical authority) for me to write an article about PPC on the Moz Blog, for example.

Trustworthiness

Google now places trust at the heart of its algorithm, with experience, expertise, and authority all feeding into it.

Using digital PR can help brands do this really effectively by earning backlinks from relevant, credible and established publications. We know earned media is far more valuable than paid media as it is secured on the basis of expertise and experience.

Journalists hold the keys to the publication they write for, and will only mention a brand, or reference an expert if it adds value and credibility to whatever they are writing, and provides additional value to their readers.

How can digital PR help brands demonstrate each of the E-E-A-T criteria?

Now that we’ve unpacked what E-E-A-T stands for and why digital PR is the perfect vehicle to deliver each of the key elements, we’re going to look at a range of digital PR tactics and how they can be repositioned to demonstrate each one.

Tactic 1: Using thought leadership to demonstrate experience and expertise

When Google sets out to discover whether a site is to be trusted or not, they will crawl the web looking for signals that demonstrate experience and expertise. This can be in the form of interviews, articles in industry publications, or commentary on news events in relevant niches, amongst many others.

But these pieces of content don’t happen by accident — they should be carefully crafted in order to showcase the experience and experience of the person behind them.

Joel Kurtzman, founding editor of Strategy+Business magazine, explains that, “A thought leader is recognised by peers, customers and industry experts as someone who has distinctly original ideas, unique points of view and new insights.”

Meaning that not everyone can (or should) be a thought leader. A thought leader needs to provide relevance and engagement in order to demonstrate experience and expertise properly.

Success story: How thought leadership digital PR activity improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare space

For a brand in the addiction recovery space, we identified that they needed to improve their E-E-A-T signals in order to be able to compete with more well-known brands dominating the search results AND to prove to Google they were a brand trustworthy enough to include in the search engine results pages.

This healthcare brand had tons of experience and expertise in-house: mental health nurses, addiction therapists, and psychologists were just some of the experts we had access to for this activity. What’s more, the founder had been through the addiction recovery process, so they were perfect candidates for our thought leadership activity.

We used the principles of thought leadership to build digital trust by:

1. Identifying the best people within the business to be our thought leadership champions.

2. Interviewing them to discover what they are most passionate about.

3. Uncovering the most interesting parts of their job role and started thinking about PR stories we could create around those things.

The result? We found that journalists from relevant publications (e.g. health editors) were excited to use our experts to add credibility to their editorial.

How does this promote experience and expertise?

• The content sits within the relevant sections on large publications (e.g. the health section),

• The keywords we want to rank for are used within the content.

• Any links we generate point back to the relevant service page on the site — a vote of trust through the link.

Tactic 2: Earning regular backlinks from relevant titles to demonstrate authoritativeness

One of the oldest and most well-known E-E-A-T signals are backlinks from high authority third party sites pointing into the page you want to rank in the search engine results.

This isn’t necessarily new information, but the type of links that demonstrate the authority of your brand might be different to what you first thought.

Many times in my career I have been told by a client that they need brand new referring domains and they need to be from top tier national publications. There is a time and a place for those types of links (you might be trying to create or close a link gap, for example), but if we look at how Google has told us they judge websites placing high importance on trustworthy and helpful content, I would argue that regular links from hyper-relevant titles have just as much impact, if demonstrating authority in a niche is our end goal.

Success story: How regular links in hyper-relevant titles improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare software space

In 2022, a B2B healthcare software provider asked us to help with their digital PR. We earned six links to their software product page, from three hyper-relevant publications.

The impact was huge. We saw a 219% increase in traffic to the page year-on-year and the client reported back that they had increased leads through that page.

By getting repeat coverage on a topically relevant site you’re proving you’re a trusted expert to audiences and to Google. Your audience is likely to be more engaged and spend longer reading the content and an engaged audience is more likely to convert, proving the commercial value of digital PR.

Demonstrating authority isn’t about ego. It’s about giving a platform to knowledgeable professionals who are passionate about what they do and proving to Google that the information you supply is helpful, credible and authoritative

Tactic 3: Data-led digital PR campaigns to demonstrate trustworthiness

Brand-owned or proprietary data helps demonstrate trustworthiness. Whether you’re using anonymised customer data or other methods, original research reports are always a sign of quality.

Data-driven PR campaigns build trust with potential customers, journalists and Google by going the extra mile. You’re not just providing an opinion, you're providing evidence to back up why you’re saying what you’re saying.

This type of content is perfect for attracting relevant, high quality backlinks at scale which in turn leads to more eyeballs on your research, increased brand awareness and therefore votes of trust through those links.

Success story: How brand-owned data drove trust for a money saving website

For a global money saving coupon brand we used brand-owned data to tap into a trending pop-culture moment - the ‘House of Gucci’ film starring Lady Gaga and Adam Driver.

One of our priority pages was the Gucci landing page on the site, so we were able to place our client, the page and their data-backed insights at the heart of the trend.

Capitalising on the buzz surrounding the much-anticipated release of the movie, we attributed a spike in user traffic from customers looking for vintage Gucci discount codes. Alongside this statistic we included commentary from our client to explain the increase in demand.

Brand-owned data is great for building trust, but only if:

• The data can be fact-checked and verified by the journalists who want to use it.

• It supports and adds credibility to the story being presented.

• Has a sound methodology to show how you sourced the information.

Digital PR is just one part of the E-E-A-T puzzle

Digital PR isn’t just about building a volume of links anymore. Repositioning your digital PR activity to focus on the key elements of E-E-A-T is a sure-fire way to generate impactful results without needing to focus on volume.

The brands who invest in trust-building techniques and follow the principles of E-E-A-T will overtake the brands who do not. Google has been quite transparent with what they expect from brands and their websites.

SEOs and PR professionals need to use a blend of techniques that match the brand they are working for. Not every brand has a credible expert, but might instead have some great brand-owned data that can be used to build credibility.

How to Use Digital PR to Improve E-E-A-T Signals

If there is poor quality information being served up in the SERPs, Google will have a big problem: Users will stop searching, and this hits Google where it hurts — in their advertising revenue.

So it makes sense that Google is keen to push forward authoritative and trustworthy sites when it comes to ranking in the results. Towards the end of 2022, Google updated three key areas of the algorithm that it uses to judge where it ranks websites within search engine results pages. The helpful content update, link spam update, and E-A-T — which is now known as E-E-A-T.

Distrust is now our default emotion

Nearly six in 10 consumers say their default tendency is to distrust something until they see EVIDENCE it is trustworthy. If you’re working with brands in typically untrusted verticals, such as health, finance, banking, lending, e-commerce, recruitment, legal, etc., then I am sorry to say that Google won't automatically trust you.

In this post, I’ll share the digital PR tactics you can use to help to improve your E-E-A-T signals, explain why building trust and credibility needs to be at the top of your list if you want to have greater visibility in the SERPs, and share success stories that showcase how these tactics have led to commercial gains for brands in typically untrusted sectors.

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and these are the four qualities that your brand should have if you want to have the best chance of ranking well and providing the best experience for your audience.

Experience

Experience is the newest addition to E-E-A-T, highlighting the need for brands to demonstrate experience in whatever topic or subject matter the brand wants to be known for.

Digital PR is one of the most effective ways for brands in any sector to demonstrate experience, by securing coverage on external, topically-relevant websites showcasing your first-hand experience. This can be done through thought leadership articles, supplying journalists with insight into relevant news stories and even sharing brand-owned data to showcase credibility in a subject area.

Expertise

Expertise is one of the most important attributes for brands to demonstrate to Google, and digital PR is the perfect vehicle for doing this.

If your CEO has been interviewed, or has written an article, for a key trade publication, these can help you establish credibility through expertise. However, brands need to be mindful that they only comment and contribute to the industry areas where they are true experts, otherwise they run the risk of diluting their credibility and destroying the hard work they are putting in.

Authoritativeness

Backlinks and brand mentions can supercharge your SEO strategy and are an incredibly effective way to build brand authority.

By earning links and brand mentions in relevant, credible, and well-respected media titles, you’ll be showing Google that you’re the most authoritative brand to include in their search results.

Relevance is key when it comes to building topical authority via digital PR, so it’s important to focus on the quality of the backlinks that your brand is earning, compared to the sheer volume of them.

Let’s use the Moz Blog as an example here. As you’d expect, it’s a very high authority website, with a domain authority of 91. For the digital PR agency I work for, JBH, writing content for Moz will ensure that Google understands that JBH has the approval from a high authority, credible domain and, in turn, should reward us through increased organic search engine visibility.

However the content I produce for the Moz blog on behalf of JBH needs to reflect our collective expertise, which is digital PR. It wouldn’t make any sense (or help with our topical authority) for me to write an article about PPC on the Moz Blog, for example.

Trustworthiness

Google now places trust at the heart of its algorithm, with experience, expertise, and authority all feeding into it.

Using digital PR can help brands do this really effectively by earning backlinks from relevant, credible and established publications. We know earned media is far more valuable than paid media as it is secured on the basis of expertise and experience.

Journalists hold the keys to the publication they write for, and will only mention a brand, or reference an expert if it adds value and credibility to whatever they are writing, and provides additional value to their readers.

How can digital PR help brands demonstrate each of the E-E-A-T criteria?

Now that we’ve unpacked what E-E-A-T stands for and why digital PR is the perfect vehicle to deliver each of the key elements, we’re going to look at a range of digital PR tactics and how they can be repositioned to demonstrate each one.

Tactic 1: Using thought leadership to demonstrate experience and expertise

When Google sets out to discover whether a site is to be trusted or not, they will crawl the web looking for signals that demonstrate experience and expertise. This can be in the form of interviews, articles in industry publications, or commentary on news events in relevant niches, amongst many others.

But these pieces of content don’t happen by accident — they should be carefully crafted in order to showcase the experience and experience of the person behind them.

Joel Kurtzman, founding editor of Strategy+Business magazine, explains that, “A thought leader is recognised by peers, customers and industry experts as someone who has distinctly original ideas, unique points of view and new insights.”

Meaning that not everyone can (or should) be a thought leader. A thought leader needs to provide relevance and engagement in order to demonstrate experience and expertise properly.

Success story: How thought leadership digital PR activity improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare space

For a brand in the addiction recovery space, we identified that they needed to improve their E-E-A-T signals in order to be able to compete with more well-known brands dominating the search results AND to prove to Google they were a brand trustworthy enough to include in the search engine results pages.

This healthcare brand had tons of experience and expertise in-house: mental health nurses, addiction therapists, and psychologists were just some of the experts we had access to for this activity. What’s more, the founder had been through the addiction recovery process, so they were perfect candidates for our thought leadership activity.

We used the principles of thought leadership to build digital trust by:

1. Identifying the best people within the business to be our thought leadership champions.

2. Interviewing them to discover what they are most passionate about.

3. Uncovering the most interesting parts of their job role and started thinking about PR stories we could create around those things.

The result? We found that journalists from relevant publications (e.g. health editors) were excited to use our experts to add credibility to their editorial.

How does this promote experience and expertise?

• The content sits within the relevant sections on large publications (e.g. the health section),

• The keywords we want to rank for are used within the content.

• Any links we generate point back to the relevant service page on the site — a vote of trust through the link.

Tactic 2: Earning regular backlinks from relevant titles to demonstrate authoritativeness

One of the oldest and most well-known E-E-A-T signals are backlinks from high authority third party sites pointing into the page you want to rank in the search engine results.

This isn’t necessarily new information, but the type of links that demonstrate the authority of your brand might be different to what you first thought.

Many times in my career I have been told by a client that they need brand new referring domains and they need to be from top tier national publications. There is a time and a place for those types of links (you might be trying to create or close a link gap, for example), but if we look at how Google has told us they judge websites placing high importance on trustworthy and helpful content, I would argue that regular links from hyper-relevant titles have just as much impact, if demonstrating authority in a niche is our end goal.

Success story: How regular links in hyper-relevant titles improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare software space

In 2022, a B2B healthcare software provider asked us to help with their digital PR. We earned six links to their software product page, from three hyper-relevant publications.

The impact was huge. We saw a 219% increase in traffic to the page year-on-year and the client reported back that they had increased leads through that page.

By getting repeat coverage on a topically relevant site you’re proving you’re a trusted expert to audiences and to Google. Your audience is likely to be more engaged and spend longer reading the content and an engaged audience is more likely to convert, proving the commercial value of digital PR.

Demonstrating authority isn’t about ego. It’s about giving a platform to knowledgeable professionals who are passionate about what they do and proving to Google that the information you supply is helpful, credible and authoritative

Tactic 3: Data-led digital PR campaigns to demonstrate trustworthiness

Brand-owned or proprietary data helps demonstrate trustworthiness. Whether you’re using anonymised customer data or other methods, original research reports are always a sign of quality.

Data-driven PR campaigns build trust with potential customers, journalists and Google by going the extra mile. You’re not just providing an opinion, you're providing evidence to back up why you’re saying what you’re saying.

This type of content is perfect for attracting relevant, high quality backlinks at scale which in turn leads to more eyeballs on your research, increased brand awareness and therefore votes of trust through those links.

Success story: How brand-owned data drove trust for a money saving website

For a global money saving coupon brand we used brand-owned data to tap into a trending pop-culture moment - the ‘House of Gucci’ film starring Lady Gaga and Adam Driver.

One of our priority pages was the Gucci landing page on the site, so we were able to place our client, the page and their data-backed insights at the heart of the trend.

Capitalising on the buzz surrounding the much-anticipated release of the movie, we attributed a spike in user traffic from customers looking for vintage Gucci discount codes. Alongside this statistic we included commentary from our client to explain the increase in demand.

Brand-owned data is great for building trust, but only if:

• The data can be fact-checked and verified by the journalists who want to use it.

• It supports and adds credibility to the story being presented.

• Has a sound methodology to show how you sourced the information.

Digital PR is just one part of the E-E-A-T puzzle

Digital PR isn’t just about building a volume of links anymore. Repositioning your digital PR activity to focus on the key elements of E-E-A-T is a sure-fire way to generate impactful results without needing to focus on volume.

The brands who invest in trust-building techniques and follow the principles of E-E-A-T will overtake the brands who do not. Google has been quite transparent with what they expect from brands and their websites.

SEOs and PR professionals need to use a blend of techniques that match the brand they are working for. Not every brand has a credible expert, but might instead have some great brand-owned data that can be used to build credibility.

How to Use Digital PR to Improve E-E-A-T Signals

If there is poor quality information being served up in the SERPs, Google will have a big problem: Users will stop searching, and this hits Google where it hurts — in their advertising revenue.

So it makes sense that Google is keen to push forward authoritative and trustworthy sites when it comes to ranking in the results. Towards the end of 2022, Google updated three key areas of the algorithm that it uses to judge where it ranks websites within search engine results pages. The helpful content update, link spam update, and E-A-T — which is now known as E-E-A-T.

Distrust is now our default emotion

Nearly six in 10 consumers say their default tendency is to distrust something until they see EVIDENCE it is trustworthy. If you’re working with brands in typically untrusted verticals, such as health, finance, banking, lending, e-commerce, recruitment, legal, etc., then I am sorry to say that Google won't automatically trust you.

In this post, I’ll share the digital PR tactics you can use to help to improve your E-E-A-T signals, explain why building trust and credibility needs to be at the top of your list if you want to have greater visibility in the SERPs, and share success stories that showcase how these tactics have led to commercial gains for brands in typically untrusted sectors.

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and these are the four qualities that your brand should have if you want to have the best chance of ranking well and providing the best experience for your audience.

Experience

Experience is the newest addition to E-E-A-T, highlighting the need for brands to demonstrate experience in whatever topic or subject matter the brand wants to be known for.

Digital PR is one of the most effective ways for brands in any sector to demonstrate experience, by securing coverage on external, topically-relevant websites showcasing your first-hand experience. This can be done through thought leadership articles, supplying journalists with insight into relevant news stories and even sharing brand-owned data to showcase credibility in a subject area.

Expertise

Expertise is one of the most important attributes for brands to demonstrate to Google, and digital PR is the perfect vehicle for doing this.

If your CEO has been interviewed, or has written an article, for a key trade publication, these can help you establish credibility through expertise. However, brands need to be mindful that they only comment and contribute to the industry areas where they are true experts, otherwise they run the risk of diluting their credibility and destroying the hard work they are putting in.

Authoritativeness

Backlinks and brand mentions can supercharge your SEO strategy and are an incredibly effective way to build brand authority.

By earning links and brand mentions in relevant, credible, and well-respected media titles, you’ll be showing Google that you’re the most authoritative brand to include in their search results.

Relevance is key when it comes to building topical authority via digital PR, so it’s important to focus on the quality of the backlinks that your brand is earning, compared to the sheer volume of them.

Let’s use the Moz Blog as an example here. As you’d expect, it’s a very high authority website, with a domain authority of 91. For the digital PR agency I work for, JBH, writing content for Moz will ensure that Google understands that JBH has the approval from a high authority, credible domain and, in turn, should reward us through increased organic search engine visibility.

However the content I produce for the Moz blog on behalf of JBH needs to reflect our collective expertise, which is digital PR. It wouldn’t make any sense (or help with our topical authority) for me to write an article about PPC on the Moz Blog, for example.

Trustworthiness

Google now places trust at the heart of its algorithm, with experience, expertise, and authority all feeding into it.

Using digital PR can help brands do this really effectively by earning backlinks from relevant, credible and established publications. We know earned media is far more valuable than paid media as it is secured on the basis of expertise and experience.

Journalists hold the keys to the publication they write for, and will only mention a brand, or reference an expert if it adds value and credibility to whatever they are writing, and provides additional value to their readers.

How can digital PR help brands demonstrate each of the E-E-A-T criteria?

Now that we’ve unpacked what E-E-A-T stands for and why digital PR is the perfect vehicle to deliver each of the key elements, we’re going to look at a range of digital PR tactics and how they can be repositioned to demonstrate each one.

Tactic 1: Using thought leadership to demonstrate experience and expertise

When Google sets out to discover whether a site is to be trusted or not, they will crawl the web looking for signals that demonstrate experience and expertise. This can be in the form of interviews, articles in industry publications, or commentary on news events in relevant niches, amongst many others.

But these pieces of content don’t happen by accident — they should be carefully crafted in order to showcase the experience and experience of the person behind them.

Joel Kurtzman, founding editor of Strategy+Business magazine, explains that, “A thought leader is recognised by peers, customers and industry experts as someone who has distinctly original ideas, unique points of view and new insights.”

Meaning that not everyone can (or should) be a thought leader. A thought leader needs to provide relevance and engagement in order to demonstrate experience and expertise properly.

Success story: How thought leadership digital PR activity improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare space

For a brand in the addiction recovery space, we identified that they needed to improve their E-E-A-T signals in order to be able to compete with more well-known brands dominating the search results AND to prove to Google they were a brand trustworthy enough to include in the search engine results pages.

This healthcare brand had tons of experience and expertise in-house: mental health nurses, addiction therapists, and psychologists were just some of the experts we had access to for this activity. What’s more, the founder had been through the addiction recovery process, so they were perfect candidates for our thought leadership activity.

We used the principles of thought leadership to build digital trust by:

1. Identifying the best people within the business to be our thought leadership champions.

2. Interviewing them to discover what they are most passionate about.

3. Uncovering the most interesting parts of their job role and started thinking about PR stories we could create around those things.

The result? We found that journalists from relevant publications (e.g. health editors) were excited to use our experts to add credibility to their editorial.

How does this promote experience and expertise?

• The content sits within the relevant sections on large publications (e.g. the health section),

• The keywords we want to rank for are used within the content.

• Any links we generate point back to the relevant service page on the site — a vote of trust through the link.

Tactic 2: Earning regular backlinks from relevant titles to demonstrate authoritativeness

One of the oldest and most well-known E-E-A-T signals are backlinks from high authority third party sites pointing into the page you want to rank in the search engine results.

This isn’t necessarily new information, but the type of links that demonstrate the authority of your brand might be different to what you first thought.

Many times in my career I have been told by a client that they need brand new referring domains and they need to be from top tier national publications. There is a time and a place for those types of links (you might be trying to create or close a link gap, for example), but if we look at how Google has told us they judge websites placing high importance on trustworthy and helpful content, I would argue that regular links from hyper-relevant titles have just as much impact, if demonstrating authority in a niche is our end goal.

Success story: How regular links in hyper-relevant titles improved E-E-A-T signals for a brand in the healthcare software space

In 2022, a B2B healthcare software provider asked us to help with their digital PR. We earned six links to their software product page, from three hyper-relevant publications.

The impact was huge. We saw a 219% increase in traffic to the page year-on-year and the client reported back that they had increased leads through that page.

By getting repeat coverage on a topically relevant site you’re proving you’re a trusted expert to audiences and to Google. Your audience is likely to be more engaged and spend longer reading the content and an engaged audience is more likely to convert, proving the commercial value of digital PR.

Demonstrating authority isn’t about ego. It’s about giving a platform to knowledgeable professionals who are passionate about what they do and proving to Google that the information you supply is helpful, credible and authoritative

Tactic 3: Data-led digital PR campaigns to demonstrate trustworthiness

Brand-owned or proprietary data helps demonstrate trustworthiness. Whether you’re using anonymised customer data or other methods, original research reports are always a sign of quality.

Data-driven PR campaigns build trust with potential customers, journalists and Google by going the extra mile. You’re not just providing an opinion, you're providing evidence to back up why you’re saying what you’re saying.

This type of content is perfect for attracting relevant, high quality backlinks at scale which in turn leads to more eyeballs on your research, increased brand awareness and therefore votes of trust through those links.

Success story: How brand-owned data drove trust for a money saving website

For a global money saving coupon brand we used brand-owned data to tap into a trending pop-culture moment - the ‘House of Gucci’ film starring Lady Gaga and Adam Driver.

One of our priority pages was the Gucci landing page on the site, so we were able to place our client, the page and their data-backed insights at the heart of the trend.

Capitalising on the buzz surrounding the much-anticipated release of the movie, we attributed a spike in user traffic from customers looking for vintage Gucci discount codes. Alongside this statistic we included commentary from our client to explain the increase in demand.

Brand-owned data is great for building trust, but only if:

• The data can be fact-checked and verified by the journalists who want to use it.

• It supports and adds credibility to the story being presented.

• Has a sound methodology to show how you sourced the information.

Digital PR is just one part of the E-E-A-T puzzle

Digital PR isn’t just about building a volume of links anymore. Repositioning your digital PR activity to focus on the key elements of E-E-A-T is a sure-fire way to generate impactful results without needing to focus on volume.

The brands who invest in trust-building techniques and follow the principles of E-E-A-T will overtake the brands who do not. Google has been quite transparent with what they expect from brands and their websites.

SEOs and PR professionals need to use a blend of techniques that match the brand they are working for. Not every brand has a credible expert, but might instead have some great brand-owned data that can be used to build credibility.