E.E.A.T. stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. This is a framework that is used by Google, assessed and updated by thousands of human reviewers (quality reviewers), to assess content quality. The 2018 ‘Medic Update’ marked a huge shift in how Google’s rankings have matured to favour search intent and content and away from a reliance on keywords. This is particularly important for ‘YMYL’ (Your Money, Your Life) content. These guidelines (Quality Raters Guidelines) do not have a direct impact on search engine rankings, but by indirectly assigning your website as a more trustworthy, valuable source for the reader, it can impact how Google perceives your content.

Keywords help pages rank. A page can be optimised for and rank for multiple keywords. It is important to avoid keyword stuffing, thus as a rule of thumb, a given keyword shouldn’t appear more than once per 200 words. The use of synonyms and semantically related keywords helps Google understand the context of the page. It also shows that the writer is knowledgeable about the topic.

Readability is a major factor in online content and can greatly increase your site's search engine optimization (SEO) levels. Readability is the practice of making your writing understandable and easy to digest for your target audience. Marketing to your audience is critically important.

A ratio of anywhere between 25 to 70 percent is considered to be a good text-to-HTML ratio. The percentage determines the visible text content ratio as opposed to HTML elements and other non-visible information of the website. Most of the websites with high search engine rankings have a large amount of visible text. It is OK for the text to HTML ratio to vary on a website, however for important pages which are supposed to rank, we will flag this as important when the ratio is 10% or below.

Keyword cannibalisation can cause confusion among search engines. For example, if you have two pages in keyword competition, Google will need to decide which page is best.

When multiple pages on a website are competing for the same keywords, this actually lowers the rankings for all pages and can negatively affect click rates.

Zombie pages are the pages that generate little to no traffic and affect the website's search rankings. Businesses should regularly conduct SEO audits to improve the ROI of their SEO efforts and enhance their site's search rankings.

Featured snippets are the holy grail of search results. These are highlighted excerpts from a web page that appear at the top of Google search results in a larger font to provide, quick, to the point answer’s to a user’s query.

Optimising for these includes excellent, well-structured, and concise content that is produced for specific search results. It also requires optimising for mobiles and incorporating structured data like schema markup to help Google understand your content’s format.

However, AI overviews have quickly replaced a huge amount of these, making it harder to achieve.

Two of the most important metrics for SEO are the time users spend on your page or site and the number of backlinks referring back to your domain, and video almost always improves both of these figures. It's more likely for websites displaying video content to rank on the top of Google's search results.

While social signals are not a direct ranking factor for major search engines like Google, social media helps SEO by increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, and generating backlinks. A strong social media presence can also lead to more brand searches and shares, which can improve your site's credibility and search performance over time. It is therefore important that your social media strategy is in syzygy with your SEO and wider marketing strategy.

Google maps out the intent for each keyword and optimises their SERPs by linking to pages that users are most likely to find useful. These keywords will fall under four main categories in relation to search intent:

• informational

• navigational

• transactional

• commercial investigation.

This means that the content you can serve for a specific keyword is limited to its intent. For example, when there is a clear informational intent, there is little point trying to rank with a shop or product page, which is transactional. For example, if informational, optimise with FAQ style questions, h2 and h3 tags etc.

Google’s algorithm have increasingly become favourable of high-quality, human-led content that satisfies the user’s search intent in as comprehensive and efficient manner.

What this means for SEO is that thin, AI-generated, and generally low-quality content is being down-ranked. Even though AI and search engine developments are becoming more sophisticated, its actually moving away from lazy content designed to catch a few keywords, and more than ever it takes a well thought-out, skilled content writer who knows what they’re talking about to rank well in SERPs.

Synonyms and LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords are important for SEO because they trigger related topics and related phrases for your top-ranking keywords, and help provide extra content for both the user and search engine.

Tangential content is content that is not directly related to your service or the product you’re offering. The benefit of this strategy is to attract a wider audience who may find your content useful even if it is not the primary purpose of your content. While not directly related, tangential themes can provide additional information and may help provide context and extra value to your content. And while the user may not have initially sought out your product, maybe they’ll interact with your service or buy your product while stopping by.

For instance, a budget supermarket might want to make content about recipes that are cheap and easy to make, or write about ways to prevent wasting food at home. By doing so, they are appealing to internet users who may be searching for this content and find themselves interacting with the brand, creating a stronger connection, and possibly leading to interacting with the supermarket’s actual products. Another such example could be a highly stylised brand that focuses on aesthetics and emotional marketing. A clothes brand may choose to create content that ostensibly is irrelevant but evokes similar feelings and connotations (but be careful with this when it comes to SEO).

-       Google doesn’t want people ‘pogo-sticking’ around between the search results. Instead, it wants people to click on a result and find their answer on that page. This is why it’s important to optimise a page for the user’s intent. A page should give users the information they need and shouldn’t obstruct their journey. Obstructions for example could be popups, text without subheadings, no use of bullet points.

Provide value with high-quality, well-structured content and not obstructing the user’s journey to obtaining the objective with annoying pop-ups, bad formatting etc.

Navigation is an important part of any SEO strategy since the UX design directly affects sites’ SEO rankings through user engagement metrics. By taking the time to improve UX design, sites will also see improved SEO rankings, increased brand credibility, and better audience retention. The menu structure and pages the main menu links to are important as well. This way, the website is easy to navigate and users will flow to the most important pages on the site. Google follows users, so it is important to make their journey, and Google’s, as easy as possible.

Breadcrumbs are a simple but very useful tool to improve website navigation, by helping user’s find their way back to topics when browsing blogs, information and product pages etc.

You can have the best content on the internet for a specific topic, but if you don’t use CTA’s properly, you will struggle to convert visitors to your page. Proper usage of CTA’s are essential to moving your audience through whichever stage of the sales funnel they are at. They are also key to reducing bounce rates.

It’s important to consider the number, variety, and positioning of your CTA’s to ensure you’re not confusing your audience.