NerdBrand Podcast
The NerdBrand Podcast is at the intersection of nerd culture, branding, and advertising. Nerd culture is no longer an isolated subculture; it’s THE culture of the day and makes its way into our daily lives through the entertainment we seek and the technology we rely upon. Listen as we discuss our views on visual design, branding, and advertising for movies, comics and novels, video games, technology, and other nerdy passions.
NerdBrand Podcast
SEO Alphabet Soup: Making Sense of Google's E-E-A-T Without Losing Your Mind
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Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the NerdBrand podcast. It didn't go out on Friday. What happened? Why Cause storms, no power and tornadoes and all kinds of things, but on this episode, we're going to talk about EAT and Googles. On this episode of the NerdBrand Podcast, we're going to talk about EAT's relation to quality raters and YMYL websites. Now you're probably thinking what the crap are you talking about? We already have an alphabet soup to deal with when you talk about SEO and SEM. What is SEO Search Engine Optimization what is SEM Search Engine Marketing? Are the two related? Kind of Kind of so? But let's talk about EAT E-E-A-T.
Speaker 1:Now, what this means is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. I know it's another thing, but you got to think like Google thinks and this is something they've made and it's actually quite old. It's actually just not new. I think I first heard of this in 2017, I believe. But Google's John Miller offered an overview of it and, yeah, you really can't make your site this. So they started diving into that in a discussion recently at an event. Now I thought it was interesting that finally, someone came out and said and this is what he said EAT is one of the ways that we look at page quality. Eat is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and this is something that we tell third-party quality raters to watch out for when they're doing page quality evaluation and something that we take into account when we think the query or the set of pages on a specific topic where it's more critical, where we call them to your money, your life pages, where we think that the actual user, that the user actually needs to have something that they can rely on and some signs that they can rely on the content that is present. So that's a lot. That's a word sandwich right there if I've ever read one. And so basically, look, I have hammered home I don't know how many times about how important quality is with regards to content.
Speaker 1:When you have a website and you're going to do SEO, I always find it funny how people will go into businesses that we work with like literally door knock and show up and say, hey, are you doing SEO? And it's sort of like, look, man, this is not. You're not selling vacuum cleaners or phone books, like, if that's how you're selling SEO, you're doing it wrong. It's kind of a bad example. And so content is anything you interact with. Like trying to figure out what is content is, like you know, trying to figure out what is water when somebody gives you literally a cup of water, like you have to understand that.
Speaker 1:A podcast, a video blog, I don't care what it is open up the internet and search for something, congratulations. You're interacting with content, now that's that should set the standard to go. Yeah, but're interacting with content Now that should set the standard to go. Yeah. But what is good content? That's a really good question, because some of that stuff is just flat out garbage and we all know it. We don't want to call it out because we all try to be nice, but honestly, I mean I have said over and over again and I will always say if you say something once or twice, you've not said it enough. And so we talk about SEO a lot on this podcast, because everything is starting to get around that where it's not necessarily SEO related, it's just content related.
Speaker 1:And creating content for a business is not something that can be done isolated by one agency and one person that's on that staff with a Android or iPhone device. It's just not going to happen. You need a team effort here. Whether you go to an event, that's an opportunity to create content, if you're going to sponsor something, that's an opportunity to create content. Now is that an opportunity to post about it, to start getting leads, and blah, blah, blah? No, that is just the very tip of the iceberg and you need to really think about your business's brand strategy. Like an iceberg, what is above the water is nothing compared to what's below it, because what's below it is the depth of that.
Speaker 1:When you look at the qualifications of EAT and how you have to have, what the first thing is is experience. So what is your experience in the business, in the area, in the field that you work in, and how is that going to be useful? Because the next thing is the expertise that you have, and then, followed by that is authoritativeness and trustworthiness. But on the experience, it's not necessarily how long you've been doing a thing. It is how many instances have you actually successfully done or failed at something to be able to show and teach a lesson, to have the expertise and I think that experience is very important when it comes to doing the role of a content marketer.
Speaker 1:You know, when you walk in, like if you're a photographer, you're going to be taking pictures. The moment you walk through the door, you're just going to be taking pictures, because you may have shots planned in a shot list, but those candid photos they'll pop up any moment, the beginning of the shoot to the end of the shoot. So as many photos as you can get, that's how many You're not purchasing from that photographer. 17 shots, photographer. 17 shots you're purchasing from that photographer, their eye, their expertise to walk in and constantly use the camera and take shots and then later figure out what is the best ones out of all of those hundreds of photos that'll be qualified to use. And that is the expertise. They have the eyeballs to be able to look at a picture and go that is relevant to the brand, that is relevant and doesn't make the subject matter or the subject look incompetent or to look non-authoritative in what they're doing. Set up versus what's been candid, and candid is always, always, always, in my opinion, the best. And I can always tell candid shots I love. When we do headshots and we have the candid photo, I mean we want to get that personality out and the only way you're going to get that personality out in that way is just is the candid shots right? So, anyways, off that subject expertise.
Speaker 1:I remember back when the floods there was like the snowstorm that happened in Austin power went out and you know a lot of plumbers, I think, were worried and trying to tell people what to do to avoid their pipes breaking. But there was one plumbing company that talked about how to flush toilet without being able to, you know, flush the toilet right. Flush the toilet without being able to, you know, flush the toilet right. So you know, there's things like that that you can share. That could be a gateway to the next thing, which is authoritativeness, because you've done this for so long but also leads right into trustworthiness. So all of these things are not individual and of themselves to target. So you don't want to like target experience and then put on the back burner these others. You don't want to like target experience and then put on the back burner these others. No, you want to capture all of these.
Speaker 1:We always say things are holistic at Nerdbrand and our approach and what we do. So you have to have a strategy where, if you're going to put content out, that's what you want to focus on. You want to try to at least work in this framework, because obviously Google is telling us they look at this and it's very important your money, your life pages are pages that are. It's your pitch. I mean, why should I hire you for that specific service? A lot of companies make the mistake of trying to put everything in front of the user at once and, unlike the movie, this isn't going to get you an Oscar. This is just going to confuse people as to what's important to you. Therefore, it's just not important to me, and that's sort of the rule. Don't make me think is a really old philosophy when it comes to websites.
Speaker 1:And how does websites relate to SEO? Directly because you have the content. You have the technical part of the site which is telling Google and the search engine, through the quality of the coding and maybe even schema data, that this is what the site's for, this is what's on the page, but also just the fact that you have so many words versus so much HTML. There is a balance there between that. And then you have the readability of the copy on the page.
Speaker 1:Hiring a professional copywriter it's okay if you use AI for copy. I use AI for copy. However, it's usually generated off of something else. It's not a draft that I just copy paste into my blog and then put it out there for everybody to consume, half is not even used. So for me, I think that if you're offering help to someone and I'm not afraid to do this, as many can tell I'm just going to smack you a bit and tell you that you know you have to stop it. Don't become a part of the machine that's generating garbage. Offer good stuff to really help people, and you're going to have to spend a lot of time listening before you write, and that's just the way I think it goes. So if you hire an agency, let them do their job. It's going to take a couple months or longer for them to get their heads around what's actually being said.
Speaker 1:We always say advertising makes a lousy mirror because we all think that we look great. We have to have somebody else on the outside listen, interview and kind of take a look at an audit of things and say, well, this is really what's being said, this is the perception and this is what we think needs to happen, and you'll start to see your content need changing. For that You'll have to probably rewrite your paragraphs. Maybe your tone in the paragraphs and in every single piece of material you have in sales, whether if it's digital or print, has to be rewritten in order to fit this, and EAT from Google is a really good way to start to frame that up, because sometimes we just say stuff that's completely useless to the large audience at scale, and so you want to add this to your webpages. You want to add it to everything if you can. Now you don't want to become obsessed with it, because the thing about SEO that I've seen over the years is that everybody treats a new thing or a thing as the thing that will get them the answer to fix their business and make all kinds of money from it, and that is not how things work. That is how you start going down the rabbit hole of pissing money away and then wondering what happened when you get your balance sheets at the end of the quarter. So you really don't want to just focus only on this. You're going to have to focus on multiple, multiple channels and things.
Speaker 1:Omnichannel marketing has been around for many, many years. I can tell you from experience every customer we have, we do this for them. Now, does that mean that we do every channel for the sake of every channel? Absolutely not. It's very strategic on what we do. Some businesses we work with should not be on TikTok? Heck, they shouldn't even be on Facebook. But then some have a need to understand well, how do we get to the customers that we want to talk to? Well, not everything is social media, not everything is Google ads, so sometimes you have to get really creative and find those channels. If you want to know what some of those channels are that could be explored, that maybe you're finding untapped revenue from blind losses, as I say, then you can contact NerdBrandAgency at NerdBrandAgencycom and we'll go ahead. Come in, do an audit, take a look at what you got, and we hope that you are stable enough Now.
Speaker 1:If you're on your back foot already on revenue, you're not ready to hire an agency. You're just going to be perpetuating another problem. But if you're actually seeing a surge in revenue, if you're seeing expendable cash in your business coming in, now's a pretty good time to start investing in marketing. Because if you try to invest in marketing when you're at a loss, you're just going to continuously operate out of a loss. You can't pour out of an empty cup. So try to remember that.
Speaker 1:But SEO is always, always nonstop, and you know if you try to add, you know, eat to your website, um, just just not how it works, it's. It's always going to be a content thing. So you know if eat is, you know they'll say if that's part of what you do for SEO, stop. Well, I disagree, because anytime you're adding content or you're spreading a message, you're creating, you're doing what Google's looking for on this metric. So I would approach and say, if you're very, very myopic on this approach and not in considering of your audience that you're talking to, then yes, I agree, you should stop and not try to force this in, because nobody likes to be force fed anything. So be careful on how you implement.
Speaker 1:Strategy is always going to help you figure out how to implement something, not just what to implement, and that's very, very, very important. A lot of times, people just kind of want to jump into things because they need their phone to ring, and I understand that. But that's what I mean about being on your back foot. We at NerdBrand have a really hard time helping businesses perform that are already on their back foot and so, unfortunately, it just makes it a very difficult situation to help them get on the right path again. Some agencies are really good at that and I would encourage you can contact those people, but at the end of the day, you're going to be operating out of a loss, so I hope you have the capital to be able to fund that, because it's going to be necessary.
Speaker 1:You know another thing Mueller said over Google sometimes SEOs come to us or like mentioned that they've added EAT to their websites. That's not how it works, sorry. You can't sprinkle some experiences on your web pages. It's like that doesn't make any sense, and he's right. Yet you can't really kind of retroactively go back to your website and start rewriting everything and think that's going to fix it. You have a history and you also need to be careful, and adding a new topic to your website could be detrimental as well. You think that it's expanding the content.
Speaker 1:Another tactic of SEO was to fill out content. Let's say you have a blog post on something and you want to expand on it and you're like oh, that's a really great idea. Let's make five more articles on that. Let's do this, let's run some ads and then get people to no, don't. That may not be a great idea. That actually may hurt in the long run. That may hurt you Because, at the end of the day, as business owners, we're all trying to get new customers. We're all trying to work with the customer base we have. It's very dangerous when you try to shotgun something out there and hope that it lands you new business. It may not be business. You want Things you say could attract an audience you do not want or cannot serve, and so you definitely need to be careful about what you're doing. And finally, eat is not needed on these your money, your life pages and the reason is that it's obviously the content if it has great expertise, trustworthiness, whatever but algorithmically it's not needed. So here's what he said on that.
Speaker 1:From a practical point of view, it's important to look at this, especially if you're publishing things on these critical topics, and to look at how, if you can highlight what it is you're already doing so that it's clear for users. But if you're creating a recipe for cookies, you don't need to have the sidebar with like. This author created cookies for 27 years. I think most people are going to understand, and so that is probably the best advice I think is that don't oversell what you're doing, and you'll find that the people that understand what you do and the people that get your experience and get your trustworthiness, those are easier conversions and those are easier people to maintain as accounts and to work with.
Speaker 1:And if you're one of those people, go to nerdbrandagencycom and if you love this podcast, tune in every Friday at nerdbrandagencycom. And you can find us on Spotify and Apple. And everybody always asks me, like, where do I listen to your podcast? And I'm like anywhere. You have an app on your phone. If you want, go get it, download it. You'll find it. Go Google it and you'll find it. But it's nerdbrandagencycom slash podcast and we hope to see you next week and everybody's trying to stay afloat and not with the water and everything. We hope everybody's staying safe. We are very sad. We just found I just found out that the Kentucky Derby is canceled under Louisville, so hopefully some other Derby Festival related activities will stay on schedule. Looks like they are and if you guys are around some of those events, I may see you there. And so, with that, remember, keep your nerd brand strong.
