Google elevates content creators: What your business needs to know

Google is now clearly recognising individuals it identifies as trustworthy and authoritative content creators in specialist fields, meaning their content is more likely to show in search results. 

This is a big jump in E-E-A-T and really exciting for SEO and users alike. What it essentially means, is that Google has taken huge leaps in how it identifies credible content creators, looking at a range of sources to unearth true experts in specialist fields. 

As Jason Barnard explains in his SearchEngineLand article, this also means that these content creators are more likely to feature in AI-powered assistants. 

How does this connect to E-E-A-T? 

It’s a big step forward for how Google assesses E-E-A-T signals, it places much more emphasis on the actual content creator – the expert behind the content – rather than just the content itself.  

Google is now looking at a range of different sources – including third party websites and social profiles – to identify whether that author (content creator) is truly a trustworthy expert on the topic they are connected to, rather than just the website.  

What this now means, is that we need to be optimising the content creator, just as much (if not more) as the publishing website.  

How can we better optimise the content creator?  

This is where SEO needs to be inextricably linked to wider facets of marketing. Reputation-building activity needs to already be in place for key spokespeople / experts within your specialist areas.  

What credible sources are there for a user, and therefore Google, to recognise your experts as just that? I’m talking commentary in third-party articles, relevant news coverage, LinkedIn thought-leadership posts, awards and accreditations, podcasts or events they’ve appeared in, and so on.  

The key is then to ensure that this activity has a clear relationship to the individual, either through a personal website or a page dedicated to them on the organisation website. 

As Jason Barnard notes, building and strengthening this reputation needs to be a consistent and continual strategy, and tracking elements such as entity-to-reference relationships and knowledge panel inclusion needs to be part of your ongoing maintenance. 

How can businesses harness a content creator’s reputation? 

There are plenty of sectors and organisations where individual reputation plays a strong role in lead generation / sales. Particularly when we think about the legal sector. Lawyers and partners build up their own individual reputation over time – various qualifications and accreditations, case coverage and publicity, reviews and so on.  

In the legal sector, there is a higher propensity for users to search for individual lawyer names rather than just the firm alone. So, how can the firms capture this interest and traffic? 

Firstly, support the individuals within your organisation who are true experts in their field – recognise that within your sector there are specialist areas, and try to own those with relevant specialist knowledge across a variety of sources. Don’t dilute someone’s profile by trying to be a general expert, focus on an area they are a true expert in. 

Remember that the whole point of this update is to identity and elevate genuine experts so that users are seeing the most trustworthy and expert content, there’s no way to game the system.  

As mentioned above, make sure that these individuals have a profile page on the organisation’s site, and include all relevant third-party links – social media profiles, articles they’re featured in, accreditations they’ve received etc.  

But externally, when the individual is with your organisation – make it part of your strategy to ensure the firm’s name is mentioned and associated with that individual wherever you’re getting coverage. This is something you can’t do retrospectively, so it has to be a part of your ongoing digital PR strategy. This then ensures that the association with this expertise isn’t just attributed solely to the individual, but to the company as well. 

What happens if a content creator leaves your company? 

This will be a genuine concern for many organisations; what happens when you’ve been supporting building the reputation of an individual, only for them to take that reputation to another company? 

As above, make sure that when you’re actively building the reputations of experts within your company through your digital marketing strategy, you’re building the association of your company with their expert content, too.  

If you have an author profile for that person, don’t change the author to someone else in the company as this will take away the legitimacy of the content. You will have to remove the profile page but keep the links to the content they created in the time with you on another page – perhaps a general “In the Press” page for your company or something similar.  

Importantly, moving forward make sure that when an individual with a strong reputation joins your business, you review the third party sites they’re mentioned on as there may be opportunities for you to update the association with your company; for example, they may have author profiles on other relevant sites, or a profile on an accreditation site. 

Moving forwards 

This is a breakthrough for E-E-A-T, as without being able to identify genuine and authoritative content creators, all of the signals we’re putting in place for E-E-A-T were futile. 

It allows much less room for companies and publishers to cheat the system, and genuine specialist experts to really shine.  

This is a key development which further reinforces the necessity for SEO to be connected to the wider marketing and brand strategy; without it, SEO success will always hit a glass ceiling.