How to leverage subject matter experts to create EEAT-boosting super content
This article is based on a talk given by Rin at brightonSEO in April 2024. You can watch the recording below.
Sex therapy. Embedded finance. And buying land. At first, these subjects don’t appear to have anything in common. But actually they do – they’re all subjects the RH&Co team have helped our clients rank for on Google.
Is that because our writers are experts in the subject? No – though they know a lot more about them now than they did before! Instead, we leveraged our clients’ subject matter experts and combined their knowledge and insights with our own expertise in communicating complex information in a way that is engaging, valuable and generates results.
Over the last two decades – since the advent of content marketing in the early noughties – expertise has, if anything, become more important. Why? Well, there are many reasons, but this article is about SEO and that means we need to look at EEAT.
TLDR:
- What is EEAT and why does it matter for SEO?
- What is expertise and how does it relate to EEAT?
- How to work with subject matter experts on SEO content
- Beyond EEAT – maximising the ROI of expertise
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What is EEAT and why does it matter for SEO?
It was around 10 years ago that Google introduced EAT, very quickly adding another E to form EEAT, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. Here’s how they define these attributes:
- Experience: who are the real people behind the content?
- Expertise: do they know more than the average person?
- Authoritativeness: why should your readers listen to you?
- Trustworthiness: can they trust you?
Strictly speaking EEAT isn’t a ranking factor. However, it is used to guide Google’s Page Quality Raters – the people who assess content and judge how useful it is. These individuals judge individual pages, websites as a whole, and content creators, and they’re looking at literally everything from whether there are SSL certificates to whether the content is actually any good.
This information helps Google to understand whether its algorithms are doing their job. So feedback from Page Quality Raters is likely to have gone into the August 2022 Helpful Content update, which was all about penalising pages that are designed for clicks rather than to inform readers. And the March 2024 Improved Quality Ranking update, which was all about reducing unoriginal content.
Ultimately, Google’s mission is to “organise the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful”. That’s what EEAT is about and that’s why it’s important for SEOs. So how do subject matter experts fit in?
What is expertise and how does it relate to EEAT?
We’ve written a lot about what expertise is, why its important and how buyers perceive it. If you really want to dive into the subject, we’d also recommend reading two fantastic books (and giving them to your subject matter experts while you’re at it):
- Expert by Dr Roger Kneebone, which is all about understanding the “path to mastery” ie how one becomes an expert
- The Business of Expertise by David C Baker, which looks at “how entrepreneurial experts convert insight to impact and wealth” ie how to build your authority and reputation as an expert (and make money from it)
For SEO purposes, it’s worth looking at what expertise is as Google would, based on the EEAT definitions in the previous section. In this case, an expert is someone who has real life experience, knows more than the average person, and can demonstrate why we should listen to them and why we should trust them.
Expertise as a positioning strategy
It’s worth stressing that expertise is not a quick fix – it’s a positioning strategy. It takes planning and effort and commitment to get it right and to get results. You can’t simply stick a subject matter expert’s byline on a piece of content and hope that works. Remember, this isn’t about fooling an algorithm, it’s about providing genuine value to your audience and building a reputation over the long term.
Internal vs external experts
Another thing to remember is that expertise exists in many places. Hopefully you will have subject matter experts within your business – your consultants, your CTO, your product leads, even your head chef, if you run a restaurant. Internal experts allow you to own that knowledge, experience, authority and trust as a brand.
But there are external experts that can be worth tapping into as well. These could be your partners, industry influencers, even your own users. Drawing on their knowledge and experience for your content makes you an expert by association.
How to work with subject matter experts on SEO content
So if you’re a marketer tasked with building a reputation for your brand, where do you start with EEAT? How do you actually work with your subject matter experts to create content that works for both your readers and for Google? Broadly speaking, there are three approaches.
Get your experts to create content for you
Advantages:
The advantage of this approach is that it takes less of your time – in theory, at least (see disadvantages). As a result, it’s scalable: lots of experts = lots of content. And it’s pretty low cost because you’re not having to bring in any professionals to create that content for you.
Disadvantages:
Unfortunately, the reality is that coordinating experts whose main role (and skill) is not content creation is a lot like herding cats. Your experts – whether internal or external – are busy people with their own agendas, so content is likely to slip down the ‘to do’ list.
They’re also not marketers. They aren’t trained to look at what an audience will engage with, they don’t understand tone of voice, they’re not used to seamlessly weaving in appropriate keywords. As a result, you could end up with copy that needs so much rewriting you may as well have done it yourself.
How to do it:
If you are going to get experts creating content for you, the first thing you’ll need to do is to sell the benefits of them getting involved, or even incentivise them, especially if they’re external.
You’ll also need to create some sort of editorial guidelines – tone of voice, content length and so on. And you’ll need decent briefs that explain exactly what you want each piece of content to contain, to achieve etc.
And you’ll still need that internal content champion – whether it’s you or someone else – who can do the “cat herding” and can also look after edits and amends to ensure that the content is consistent, that it’s on brief, and that it achieves its objectives.
Create content and get experts to sign it off
Advantages:
At the other end of the scale, this method involves writing the content yourself and simply getting your experts to approve it, which has some very attractive benefits.
First, you have full control of content. You can make sure it’s on brief, on brand, that it ticks the right keyword boxes and so on. You’re also not reliant on anyone, except in the final approval stages, which can be tricky still but not nearly as tricky as getting a busy subject matter expert to write something for you.
Disadvantages:
The downside is that unless you’re also a subject matter expert, any content you create is likely to contain little genuine and unique expertise – things like real life anecdotes or analogies that only someone deeply rooted in the subject would come up with. That means the content will probably be easily replicable. And if you want to increase the volume of content, you’ll need more writing resource.
How to do it:
Despite its limitations, this method of creating EEAT content for SEO purposes can be very effective. It’s how we helped our client Blueheart, a health tech scale up, increase their site visits by 300% within 6 months.
If you do go down this route, you’ll need to develop really good research skills. You’ll need to be able to sift the wheat from the chaff, especially when it comes to credible sources and authoritative citations – no linking to a Wikipedia page as the source of your knowledge.
And ideally, draw on case studies so at least you’ve got some unique brand stories in there, even if you haven’t got personalised insights directly from your experts.
Work collaboratively with your experts
Advantages:
This is how we most often work with our clients – from global consultancies like TPC Leadership to fintech scaleups like Weavr. It allows us to get the best blend of our client’s expertise in whatever it is that they do, and our expertise as content creators.
Speaking directly to subject matter experts not only allows you to get factual insights but the juicy nuggets that make the best content uniquely appealing and valuable – experiences, anecdotes and analogies that bring those facts to life.
Disadvantages:
On the downside, it does take more time. You will need more writing resource, you’ll still need to convince your experts to prioritise time to give you their insights, and it may well be that the approval process is challenging, especially with internal experts.
How to do it:
As with getting them to do it themselves, you’ll need to sell the benefits and potentially incentivise your experts. You’ll also still need to create some sort of ‘prebrief’ so that they’re prepared and bring the right information to the interview process.
Speaking of which, you’ll need to develop your interview skills because, just as not all experts are great content creators, they’re not all great communicators either. Some will give too much detail, some not enough. Some go down rabbit holes and need constant pulling back to the subject at hand.
This is often why our clients call us in – it’s not just because we write well, it’s because we know how to wrangle subject matter experts and get the best out of them.
Beyond EEAT – maximising the ROI of expertise
So we’ve looked at three different ways to involve experts in creating content for SEO and you can see that what we said at the beginning is true – expertise is a positioning strategy. It’s not an easy-fix to all of your SEO problems. The good news is that there are so many added benefits to leveraging subject matter experts beyond SEO, especially if you’re using internal ones.
By helping them to clarify their thinking, you prepare them to do all sorts of things – take part in webinars, speak to the press, give talks at conferences. And you can repurpose that content on social media, in emails, in ABM campaigns.
Whether it’s sex therapy, embedded finance, buying land or any other subject that’s relevant to your brand and your audience, by leveraging subject matter experts you can create not only EEAT-boosting super content but an awful lot more besides.
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