Have you read your entire website lately? Google has, and it doesn’t always like what it sees. That’s part of the reason why it instituted the “Medic” update in 2018. If you don’t follow Google’s guidance, you risk becoming irrelevant in Google search results.![]()
Google search works hard to understand your content, but now (since the Medic update) it’s imperative you help Google.
There was a day when you could just be a website writer and worry about sentence structure and the flow of your copy. Today, you still need to understand how to write to humans and you must also understand how to write for robots like Google. This last part may require some technical know-how.
Schema structure copy and Google’s E-A-T
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthy. Google states that E-A-T is among the top 3 considerations for page quality. Google also states that a page or site found lacking in E-A-T is a “sufficient reason to give a page a low-quality rating.” Serious stuff if you want to be discovered by Google.
Structured data is a system of pairing a name with a value that helps search engines categorize and index your content. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. For example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories and so on. Then you must connect or link your claims to other sources to back up your copy assertions.
So why is having expertise, authority and trust so important? There is a debate about the significance of E-A-T in search, and Google quality rater guidelines don’t always directly determine a page’s rankings. However, E-A-T determines a website’s value. You can think of E-A-T as the reason why users would choose your site over others. So E-A-T could have a direct impact on how Google ultimately ranks your website.
Remember, websites are what they EAT.
