As a healthcare professional, your life is driven by one mission: To do no harm. It touches every aspect of your patient and client care, as well as how you do business for those same people. 

Your marketing plan, including a professionally created business website, can reinforce that mission through Google’s E-A-T algorithm update. In fact, E-A-T was originally dubbed the “medic update” because of its impact on those in the medical industry. 

Even though Google didn’t create this algorithm specifically for the healthcare field, it turns out that your business will be impacted by it more than many other industries.  Just make sure the impact is a strong, positive one for your company.

So, what is E-A-T and why should you care at all?

What Is E-A-T?

Your website is a key piece of your marketing puzzle so it is critical that the site conveys your personal vision and your brand. But that in itself isn’t enough, and this is where many business owners miscalculate what–and how much–they dedicate to their website.

What does your website convey to potential patients about your Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness? If the site is simply pleasing to look at and easy to navigate but doesn’t convince anyone to trust your experience and knowledge, your practice won’t grow naturally or within the search engine results. 

Expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are three parameters that Google uses to determine how worthy your site is. They use that information to rank websites that will provide the most useful and accurate results from a user search. If someone searches online for an experienced plastic surgeon for rhinoplasty, Google will use the search results to point them in the direction of doctors who clearly highlight the E-A-T characteristics on their website. 

If you are a healthcare professional and a business owner, you may be wondering how this ties into traditional SEO? 

Improving SEO

Most business owners today know the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) by now. Incorporating E-A-T into your overall SEO strategy simply means grasping this: E-A-T doesn’t directly affect your SEO standing the same way your site speed or headings usually do. So, you don’t want to eliminate those core parts of your strategy. 

What your webmaster does need to do, with your E-A-T, is make sure all content on your site is accurate and dense enough to provide a great deal of information to your reader. Long-content blogs often rank higher but only if each blog is high-quality content backed up by sterling sources. So, the message is clear: Write longer blogs on your site and offer a great deal of expert knowledge and supporting data. But, longer in itself isn’t enough anymore for SEO rankings.

Your site’s SEO strategy still needs to heavily focus on:

• Specialized local SEO strategies
• Utilizing relevant target keywords 
• Optimized headlines within the text
• Keyword optimized metadata
• Optimized images
• Reducing load time as much as possible

These are good SEO practices for any website, so have your team or a local SEO expert (like My KPI) spend some time re-evaluating your site and making the necessary tweaks to ensure it is strong. 

Now, let’s find out what the E-A-T acronym actually means and also how to weave it into your updated SEO.

Expertise

The plastic surgeon who states on their website they are an expert in rhinoplasty must have the experience, credentials, and education in reconfiguring the shape of the nose. Someone considering this procedure must feel certain that the doctor they choose has the expertise and has done many such surgeries with good results. That certainty has to be evident on the website so that Google will rank the practice high in the search results. 

Authority

More and more people searching on the web are interested in what others who have used a service or product think about it. Reviews have become extremely important in establishing authority. 

In the case of a healthcare professional, would the patient recommend the doctor to their friends and relatives? This means that a website’s reputation and the doctor is based on what real users–the experts–have to say. It is also based on the opinion of other professionals–more experts–in the same field. The creator of a website can say great things about the doctor, but if reviews don’t concur, the doctor’s authority is tarnished. New patients heed reviews, not canned web content.

Trustworthiness

As you search for an orthodontist for your child, you read the blogs on the doctor’s website. The more you read, the more it seems as if it is all merely a sales pitch. There isn’t any source information to back up claims made or the source information is sketchy when you follow the links. 

In other words, there doesn’t really seem to be any interest in providing detailed information or data on either the doctor’s expertise and authority in orthodontia. There is only a sales focus. Also, the website doesn’t seem very professional and pops up with a warning that it is not a secure site. With a website like this, potential new patients who are viewing the site will wonder if the doctor can really be trusted.

Google’s E-A-T focus is designed to serve the public by ranking websites based on how much those sites lead to reputable, seasoned professionals that can be trusted. How do you make sure your website meets the test?

Mastering E-A-T For Your Business

We have already discussed making sure any content on your website is of the highest quality.  Hire someone to do it if you need to; it’s that important. But what else can you do to weave your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness into your marketing plan and your website?

• Focus on the quality of your website’s blog articles from a content perspective, not just the keywords.
• Stay focused on your patients, not your ranking.
• Audit past content for E-A-T and update if necessary.
• Keep your website fresh, engaging, and interesting.
• Re-evaluate your “About” page, it plays a huge role in establishing E-A-T. 
• Focus on your niche to establish authority.
• Share your blog stats on your blog page and the number of email subscribers.
• Share your accomplishments: reviews, recommendations, quotes from customers, mentions in medical journals, etc.
• Make sure your site is secure
• Guest post on other experts’ websites.

Here at My KPI, we specialize in helping healthcare providers utilize strategies, like improving E-A-T, to rank higher in search engine results. We have the knowledge and expertise to get more prospective patients to your site. 

Contact My KPI today!