EAT: Google’s Most Elusive SEO Metric

Google uses a variety of criteria to determine which web pages will be most useful to a user, based on that user’s search query. Some of these are easier for the creators of web content to appeal to than others. For example, including a keyword in a blog post is a very simple manner. The user’s time on page is not entirely within your control, but there are actions you can take to increase the chances that users will spend a substantial amount of time visiting your site instead of clicking away quickly. For example, you can make your content longer and ensure that it is interesting enough that users will want to read it all the way to the end; you should also invest in web design that gives you a user interface free of annoying glitches that might cause visitors to give up on your site quickly. By contrast, EAT, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, is not something you can easily optimize. The good news is that your legal blog content, seeing as it appears on a law firm website, probably has more EAT than you realize it does.

Google Scholar Is the Key to a Law Firm’s EAT

Google is tight-lipped about the details of how it measures EAT, but it appears that Google can tell that you are a genuine expert on the subject of your content based on several factors:

· Your identity is independently verifiable. For example, if your law firm’s website says that you graduated from a certain university, it can verify this by going to your university’s website and viewing the program of your graduation ceremony.

· You only write about a small group of related subjects (for example, personal injury law and criminal defense law, or whichever practice areas your law firm works with), instead of being a generic Internet loudmouth.

· Other people link to your content.

In this regard, Google Scholar works in favor of lawyers in pursuit of EAT. Every appeals court decision in which you or your law firm is mentioned enhances your EAT, as does every article you have written for a law journal accessible through Google Scholar.

Leveraging Other People’s EAT to Enhance Your Site’s Content

Simply because your website belongs to a law firm, its EAT is already considerable. To enhance it even more, stand on the shoulders of giants. Link straight to the source of the topics you mention in your law firm blog posts; in other words, cite statutes and published court decisions directly, instead of citing secondhand accounts of them, such as the blogs of other law firms. This way, Google knows that you are not simply repeating Internet gossip.

Law Blog Writers Can Optimize Your EAT

Your EAT is already there; now, you need readable content that will help Internet users and Google’s search engine bots appreciate it. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will write interesting, readable content that showcases your expertise.

Don’t Entrust Your Law Firm’s SEO to the Lowest Bidder

If you want to improve your law firm’s website to increase your visibility on Google searches, but your marketing budget is very limited, you have two options. You can devote a portion of your modest marketing budget to paying a content marketing firm for search engine optimization (SEO) services, or you can do it yourself by assigning the task of adding content to your website to employees of your law firm. With digital marketing, as with so many other aspects of business, the saying is true that you have to spend money to make money, although it does not cost a fortune to get high quality SEO services. It is worthwhile to invest in high quality legal blog content from a reputable content marketing firm instead of paying for bottom-of-the-barrel content from content mills or asking your overworked employees to devote their non-existent free time to learning content marketing for no additional pay.

Dirt Cheap SEO Is Reactive Instead of Proactive

When you ask a content mill or your own employee to produce blog content for your site for little or no pay, you are not thinking about the big picture. Yes, updating your site frequently with new content helps your SEO, but you should think about long-term strategy, not simply about writing something instead of nothing. Cheaply written content often resembles the final exam essay of a student who goofed off all semester and then attempted to study for the exam the night before. In other words, most of it is made-up fluff. Your own employee knows about your practice area, but her knowledge of SEO is limited to a Wikipedia article she read when you gave her the assignment. The content mill writers can plug your keywords into grammatically correct sentences that show Google that your website exists, but they provide little to no valuable information for readers.

Dirt Cheap SEO Is Superficial

If you pay for dirt cheap SEO content, you are paying for grammatically correct drivel with the requested number of keyword incidences. The writers know nothing about your law firm’s brand identity or overall market strategy. They have not researched your competitors to find out what makes you different from them.

Dirt Cheap SEO Might Even Be Shady

Inexpensive SEO providers sometimes resort to questionable tactics to make your site appear to perform well. For example, they might purchase links from third-party services, or they might give you content that has a big word count and includes all your keywords, but is repetitive and offers little value to prospective clients. If Google catches on to what they are doing, these shady tactics could even make your website less visible.

High Quality Content Is Worth the Investment

One informative, well-written blog post per month will attract more prospective clients to your site than daily updates full of thousands of words of the blog content equivalent of spam. The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will deliver well-researched content that serves your law firm’s mission and marketing strategy.

Yes, You Can Write Law Firm Blog Posts That Please Everyone

Adding a blog to your law firm’s website and regularly adding new posts to it is not the newest or fanciest content marketing strategy, but it is one of the most reliable ways to ensure that your law firm’s website remains on the first page of Google search results. It is also an effective way to attract new clients to your law firm. This might seem counterintuitive, since people increasingly look for information in videos; in the age of YouTube and Tik Tok, you might be skeptical that anyone still has the attention span to read blogs. The beauty of a well-written blog post is that it simultaneously meets the needs of three categories of audience members, namely the researchers who read every word, the bar hoppers and distracted drivers in search of a quick answer, and Google’s bots. In other words, you do not need to write three times as much legal blog content to make your blog serve all of these purposes.

Know Your Audiences

All writers should write for a specific audience, but writers of legal blog content should keep three audiences in mind. These are the three audiences of a law firm blog post, along with what they are looking for when they access your blog post:

· Information Seekers – They want to know the details about some aspect of your practice area. They are not trying to make a quick decision, but if your post is successful, they will read more content on your site, or even contact you. They need you because they are trying to accomplish a task related to your practice area (such as filing an insurance claim or applying for summary administration of an estate). If their situation turns out to be so complex that they need a lawyer, they will contact you.

· Multitaskers – They access your site while they are in the middle of something else. They have a quick question while they are in the middle of work or a social conversation, and your blog post can answer it. Unlike information seekers, multitaskers do not read the entire blog post; they can find the answer by reading a Google rich snippet or scanning the subheadings of your post. An example of a multitasker is a freelance writer who needs to submit a 200-page romance novel by Friday night and needs to know whether New Jersey law calls drunk driving DUI or DWI.

· Search Engine Bots – They read your entire post in a fraction of a second. They decide that the post is relevant based on the presence of keywords that relate to the search query. They also determine that your post is credible based on its freedom from grammatical and spelling errors.

Choose Content Writers Who Can Write for Multiple Audiences

The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can write blog posts that are easy for search engine bots and multitaskers to understand at a glance, but interesting and informative enough that information seekers will want to read them multiple times or share them.