When you search for something on Google, how does Google determine the order (rankings) of the web pages listed?

It scores sites according to their E-A-T levels.

The E-A-T metric

The acronym stands for:

  • Expertise (content author’s and site owner’s)
  • Authoritativeness (e.g. other experts refer online to you and your website)
  • Trustworthiness (e.g. your practice has good reviews, your site is secure).

Because you’re a dentist, you and your site need to have very high levels of E-A-T in order for your page to appear higher in the stack of results.

Why your E-A-T levels are so important

Google likely categorizes your website as a YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) site; that is, a site offering financial, medical, or legal advice.

Since the quality and accuracy of the information in these types of sites could positively or negatively affect a visitor’s health, wealth or happiness, Google holds YMYL sites—and their content authors—at much higher E-A-T standards (than other types of sites and site-content authors).

Google is constantly changing its algorithm in efforts to improve the quality of its search results. The most recent changes seem to focus on putting even more weight on E-A-T levels.

How to improve your E-A-T

There’s a lot that can be done to improve E-A-T levels, which will consequently improve your site’s SEO/ranking in Google. Here are a few important things you need.

  • High quality content Create well-written content your audience wants and understands. Also, creating a video or podcast that allows you to demonstrate your expertise in a subject and provide answers to frequently asked questions will help establish your expertise.
  • Links to your site from other respected dental-related websites will help establish authoritativeness.
  • Lots of positive reviews (e.g. on Facebook, Google), addressing negative ones; and having a secure website domain (https) increase trustworthiness.
Get Practice Growth is a full service dental marketing agency that builds custom websites and produces videos for its clients, and offers exclusive package pricing to TDA members.
Learn more about Get Practice Growth.

Geeks can view Google’s “Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines”—what Google’s human evaluators use (to evaluate websites) for the purpose of gauging the quality of Google’s search results, algorithms.