Blog Authorship for Ecommerce SEO & E-A-T
Blogs are one of the most effective tools for expanding your ecommerce brand’s reach. They provide a unique opportunity to discuss relevant product-related topics using target keywords that you may not be able to utilize on your category and product pages. For instance, you might target terms related to product usage, such as styling tips for fashion retailers or recipe ideas for food and beverage retailers. This can help drive fresh targeted traffic to your site.
Blogs also help your brand stay top-of-mind among consumers, and demonstrate your industry knowledge. That said, anyone has the ability to publish a blog—including users who are not truly credible sources. Google knows this, which is why demonstrating your blog’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) is essential for boosting your SEO ranking.
Blog authorship is an important part of any holistic content marketing strategy, but it needs to be done correctly in order to achieve the desired results (better search engine rankings). In this article we will explore the ins and outs of blog authorship, including why it is important for Google in fulfilling their E-A-T requirements, how it affects ecommerce SEO, and tips for improving your Google reputation score.
Google’s Medic Update
In August 2018, Google rolled out a new update (nicknamed the Medic update) that focused on three factors used to determine whether or not a webpage is high-quality: expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Initially this Google algorithm update only applied to websites offering medical advice (hence the name), but it was soon expanded to include any site under the acronym YMYL, also known as Your Money or Your Life.
What is YMYL? In short, it refers to any website that competes for users’ money or has the potential to impact their happiness, health, or wealth. Google wants to be certain that it is only recommending pages that offer a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, while actively protecting users from low-quality content that could be harmful to their health, wealth, or happiness.
And yes, YMYL definitely includes ecommerce sites!
What is E-A-T?
E-A-T is an acronym that stands for expertise, authority, and trust—the three factors related to the Medic update that we discussed in the above section. Google evaluates E-A-T both in terms of blog authorship as well as the website as a whole.
Expertise: For all YMYL site content, Google wants to see a high level of expertise on the subject matter. Not only does the blog author need to be knowledgeable about the topic, they need to communicate that information in a clear, concise, and engaging way. In other words, your content should strike the right balance of thorough and digestible. Although the algorithm is still a machine, it is continuously getting better and better at detecting both high-quality and low-quality blogs.
Authority: This refers to the website or blog’s reputation. Google determines how authoritative your ecommerce website is based on the number of other web users (especially fellow experts) referencing your brand on social media or other websites. Links, mentions, and shares all indicate high authoritativeness.
Trust: How trustworthy is your website, including your blog? For ecommerce sites, is the checkout secure? Is there easy access to the brand’s contact information? Within the content itself, are citations or links to reputable outside sources included? All of these factors are used to determine a site’s trustworthiness. Displaying genuine positive reviews on your site can also help to boost its trustworthiness.
How to Increase E-A-T for Your Ecommerce Website
Although E-A-T isn’t a “ranking factor” according to Google, it is included in the Quality Raters Guidelines. Google’s Quality Raters are essentially human fact-checkers responsible for evaluating the quality of ecommerce and other websites, including their E-A-T levels.
A website with high E-A-T is more likely to be approved by Google as a high-quality resource, and will almost always rank higher on the search engine results pages than a website with low levels of E-A-T.
If you want to boost your organic ecommerce SEO rankings, then improving your expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness is an important step. Here are some ways your brand can level up your blog’s E-A-T:
Build quality backlinks. Nothing communicates trust and authoritativeness to Google better than earning high quality links to your ecommerce website. Not only do backlinks offer the benefit of earning new referral traffic from the linking website, they also indicate to Google that your site is reputable and trustworthy enough to be referenced by other users and experts.
Fact check (and cite your sources). Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines say that news articles should be “produced with journalistic professionalism” and “contain factually accurate content.” In other words, sharing inaccurate information is a huge red flag to Google. Fact checking is the best way to avoid inadvertently sharing bad information. Be sure to cite your (reputable) sources within the body of the content. On a related note...
Keep content fresh. Any and all YMYL content should be maintained and updated regularly, especially if you are publishing blogs with specific statistics, data, or claims. Keeping outdated information on your blog while other sites are publishing updated news could hurt your E-A-T reputation. When updating content, be sure to display the date of when your content was last modified.
Pile up the reviews. Having reviews for your ecommerce site as a whole as well as on your individual product pages can communicate trust to Google and other search engines. For retailers on Shopify, adding review functionality to your site can be as simple as installing a plug-in.
Create a secure, trustworthy website. Sites that look like a scam have very low E-A-T. When users land on your website, they should have zero concerns about their personal information being compromised, or about your company’s ability to fulfill orders. That means your website design should be polished and professional, and you should use HTTPS (rather than HTTP) to secure data transfers. Adding the logos of key clients or partners can further increase your site’s trustworthiness.
Blog Author Pages Can Boost E-A-T
Another highly recommended method for increasing E-A-T is creating a blog author page that links directly from your published posts. Create a separate blog author page for anyone who publishes posts on your brand’s blog, including guest posters.
This page can be as simple as just a few paragraphs summarizing the author’s background and credentials. If the author is an employee of your brand, be sure to include their position and perhaps number of years with the company or relevant past work experience. Consider linking to the author’s own website or LinkedIn profile as well.
If the author has demonstrated expertise or authority in their field in other ways, such as speaking at conferences, winning industry awards, or earning advanced degrees, be sure to include these details as well. Be careful not to embellish or overstate any accomplishments, as Google is likely to fact check this information.
You can achieve some extra ecommerce SEO juice from your blog author pages by including a photo with keyword-optimized image alt tags. Make it even easier for Google to read your blog authorship information by tagging the page with schema markup so your credentials are presented in a more structured way.
Hire an SEO Expert to Level Up Your E-A-T
If your ecommerce blog covers YMYL topics, it is important to operate from a framework of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Demonstrating and improving E-A-T via blog authorship is no small task. Like most strategies related to ecommerce SEO, it requires a consistent, long-term plan—and sometimes an overhaul of your digital marketing strategy
An SEO expert can help ensure that your blog content is up to par on E-A-T, while simultaneously optimizing the rest of your website for organic search. There is no shortcut to high-quality blog authorship, but the rewards for doing it the right way—growing your brand, improving your rankings, and reaching new audiences—is well worth the investment.
Ready to level up your blog authorship E-A-T, along with ecommerce SEO potential? Contact Whitecap SEO for more information and a free quote.