If you want to succeed in marketing, your target audience has to be able to trust you, your brand, and your business.
If they don’t, there isn’t much chance that they’ll choose to work with you; especially since they have so many other options when it comes to choosing a real estate agent to work with.
The same applies when it comes to building a solid SEO strategy that gets results; you need to be trusted. How trustworthy you and your website appear is a big factor in determining how your website will perform in search results, and ultimately, if your target audience will find you online.
Just like Google needs to be able to trust your website for your SEO strategy to perform well, your target audience also needs to be able to think they can trust you based on your website and your overall online presence for them to want to work with you. The two go hand-in-hand.
★ Want to learn more about online presence? Have a look at these posts:
- How to Build an Online Presence Strategy for Your Real Estate Brand
- How Your Real Estate Referral Business is Tied to Your Online Presence
- Planning an End-to-End Brand Experience for Your Real Estate Business
You need your target audience to trust your website so they’ll use it, return to it, link to it, and convert on it; and you need Google to trust your website so that it shows up in search results for the right people, at the right time, as part of a strong SEO strategy.
And while we don’t know every single detail about how Google determines what to show in search results, they have said (as part of their recently updated search quality rating guidelines) that building a trustworthy website and strong online presence is a key factor in SEO success (you can learn more about right here).
Building Trust Means Building Success
One of the search ranking factors Google uses to determine how trustworthy a website appears is called EEAT.
To rank in search results, and to have a strong organic SEO strategy, you must demonstrate EEAT.
EEAT stands for: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and most importantly, Trust. You can see an example of what that looks like (and the importance of trust) right here.
- Experience: Your content demonstrates first-hand experience and/or knowledge about a topic.
- Expertise: Your content is written by someone that’s knowledgeable and has relevant experience to write about that topic.
- Authoritativeness: Your content is written by an authoritative source with a good reputation in their industry.
- Trustworthiness: This is an aggregate of the previous 3, and works towards proving that your content is reliable, transparent, and accurate.
However, trustworthiness is still the most critical component of EEAT; if your website appears untrustworthy, then it will have a low EEAT overall, no matter how experienced, expert, or authoritative it is.
★ Want to learn more about building an SEO strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Understanding SEO Titles and Meta-Descriptions on Your Real Estate Website
- Building a Well-Rounded Search Strategy Using Both Organic and Paid Sources
- How to Start Building a Solid Real Estate Local SEO Strategy
- Why Building Trust is a Key Part of a Successful SEO Strategy
Demonstrating and Earning EEAT
So how do you work towards demonstrating EEAT, and ultimately, building a more trustworthy digital strategy that search engines and humans both like?
1. Focus on High-Quality Content: When it comes to EEAT, producing high-quality content is one of the most crucial components; quantity is never better if you’re sacrificing quality.
High-quality content brings people back to your website, helps show your authoritativeness, builds trust with your audience, and improves your overall SEO metrics.
But what exactly is high-quality content?
- It’s well-written, well-constructed, well-planned content that brings actual value to the person reading it.
- It’s content that informs the reader by answering whatever question brought them to your piece of content in the first place.
- It’s content that’s well-formatted and stylized so that it’s enjoyable to look at and read.
- It’s content that provides links to additional, related content that can provide more value to the person that’s reading it.
Ensuring you’re producing high-quality content is extremely important if you want to rank online, be found by search engines, and work towards demonstrating EEAT.
★ Want to learn more about building a quality content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- How to Plan Content that Attracts and Engages
2. Focus on Optimizing Your Overall User Experience: If your website is ugly, disorganized, and difficult to use or find information, it will affect your EEAT (and your entire digital strategy overall). The bottom line is, that no one wants to spend any time on a website that they don’t like or they don’t find useful, and search engines know that.
The less time people spend on your website (especially after arriving their organically), the more it will affect your overall EEAT. The two are directly related.
★ Want to learn more about user experience and website design? Have a look at these posts:
- Who Are You Really Building A Real Estate Website For?
- Why Real Estate Agents Should (Usually) Avoid Templated Websites
3. Focus on Backlinks: Backlinks have always been an important part of an SEO strategy because they help show your website’s authority (which is part of demonstrating EEAT).
The more reputable websites that link to your content, the more reputable your website will be to search engines, and the more you’ll be demonstrating EEAT.
★ Want to learn more about backlinks? Have a look at this post called: Why You Need an External Link Building Strategy for Your Real Estate Website.
4. Focus on Building Reputation: How reputable you, your brand, and your website are seen online also contributes towards your EEAT.
Your reputation is related to your brand’s online presence, meaning, how reputable you appear when someone searches for you. One of the best places to focus on showing you and your business are reputable online is through your online review strategy.
If you were thinking about working with a real estate agent, and you did a Google search for them, and they had 11 Google reviews with an average rating of 3.5, would you work with them to buy or sell a property? Of course not. You’d work with an agent that has 150+ Google reviews averaging 5 stars. All of that happens in the background, behind the scenes, without you even knowing it, and it all works towards showing your online reputation.
★ Want to learn more about building your reputation online? Have a look at these posts:
- How Your Online Reputation Can Lose or Win You Business
- How Case Studies Can Boost Your Online Review Strategy
- Why Every Agent Needs an Online Review Strategy
Be Authentic, Be Yourself
There are a lot of factors at play when it comes to demonstrating EEAT; and if you’re solely focused on it, it can become overwhelming.
At the end of the day, quality content always wins. If you’re being authentic, being yourself, and writing high-quality content that’s enjoyable to read and that your target audience finds valuable, you’ll still be demonstrating EEAT, as well as building a solid SEO strategy that will benefit you and your audience far into the future.
Want to learn more about SEO and get more traffic to your website? Our SEO Strategy Building Guide is a mix of curated content and self-guided workbook that will help provide insight on how you can build and implement a modern SEO and overall search strategy.
