What type of content does Google like?

The moment I speak about publishing content, I’m asked what type of content does Google like?

I have been reading an SEO site this morning and was disappointed at one of the pieces of content. It was, frankly, nothing more than clickbait. The title was deliberately alarmist. The blog was really asking you to consider what type of content does Google like and did little to answer the question, so I felt I should take a look at it today.

To provide additional value, I have curated a full PDF checklist of the questions Google advises you to self-evaluate content on.

Yes, clickbait exists in the world of SEO

This might surprise you, but even some of the world’s foremost SEO websites can’t resist posting clickbait. It irritates the life out of me, because these sites should know better, but the sad fact is that it worked – because I clicked on it and read it.

This is the article in question (please don’t click on it, I’m providing it purely to show what the title was and give you source material if you really must read it!):

Google Says Best Practices Can Have Minimal Effect

My fault for not looking more closely

You can see why I clicked on it. How could Google say that SEO best practices have minimal effect? I’ll be honest, I should have concentrated more on the title and the inclusion of the word “can”.

Once I began to read the article I could see where it was going and I exited the page. Ultimately, it is factually correct. SEO best practices could have very little effect whatsoever on your site rankings and visibility.

All it is really saying is that you can build your site on the best foundations and observe every SEO best practice barring one and you’ll probably get very little reward for your efforts.

The “barring one” part of the above paragraph is important. Yes, we’re talking about content. Google was simply reminding everyone that content is key and, if it isn’t up to scratch, all the best practices, technically, will get you nowhere.

Just because your titles, descriptions, headers and all the other on-page (and off-page) elements you’ve been told are important are perfectly tuned to your targets, and if your content is balanced and talks about what you want people to visit for, it still doesn’t mean your page will be well ranked.

If your content doesn’t score well in what Google calls E-E-A-T, you may well have wasted your time.

The E-E-A-T factor and your content

Google has used a method for assessing how valuable, and relevant, your content is to search queries for a long time. It used to be called E-A-T. They expanded what it considers and, as of today, it is known as E-E-A-T.

Google puts a lot of faith in E-E-A-T and the emphasis on it as an SEO practice that you should take very seriously has never been higher. Indeed, the latest Google Core Update referred to the quality of page content.

You’ll note I didn’t say Google uses E-E-A-T as a direct ranking factor, because it doesn’t. Why on earth does it matter then? Well, believe it or not, not everything is automated by some big bad algorithm at Google.

They use what are known as “human quality raters” (over 10,000 of them) to assess the quality of their search results. They evaluate the content that SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) produces. Their feedback is then used to fine-tune the algorithm (so I guess you could say everything is controlled by a big bad algorithm at the end of the day, but it is governed by human input).

The acronym stands for the following:

• E – Experience
• E – Expertise
• A – Authoritativeness
• T – Trustworthiness

Let’s look at each of them and why you should consider E-E-A-T when you’re curating content:

The Experience Factor

This later addition to the original E-A-T guidance was an interesting one. It tries to assess the publishers credibility, reputation and experience on a subject.

Google have recognised the fact that having real world experience of a subject is valued by readers. If you’re going to talk about the latest trends in fashion, but your website doesn’t demonstrate a great deal of experience or credibility in that area, your content may not have the impact you want.

There is a better example of why experience is important. There’s another acronym known as YMYL – it means “Your Money or Your Life“. This is used to categorise content that falls into areas such as:

• Health
• Financial advice
• Safety
• Mental well-being

If your website focuses on any of these areas, it is incredibly important that you can demonstrate experience in it. Google doesn’t want to send people to sites that might compromise their health and mental well-being, or give them poor financial advice.

What sites fall under YMYL content?

You might be surprised at how many sites Google considers as publishers of YMYL content. They include:

• News publishers
• Government sites
• Law and the legal sector
• Finance inc. banks, investment advice, etc.
• Retail – any e-commerce site on which a purchase can be made
• Safety guidance
• People related sites (any site on groups of people, such as nationalities, religions, etc)
• Health inc. fitness, nutrition, medical sites
• Other high impact advice sites: Estate agents (real estate), finding a new job, relationship advice, parenting, etc.

Yes, it’s a long list. If you’re wondering why retail sites are on the list it is because they fall under the area of a person parting with money. Google tries to ensure they part with it legitimately. Indeed, the retail category can also include any website talking about shopping related matters, such as giving advice on purchases (e.g. reviews on products).

You’re reading an example now

Take this blog as another example. I’m writing about SEO. I can, however, demonstrate significant experience on the subject. It is the core focus of my career and is what all or the majority of my blogs are about. I can demonstrate decades of experience on the subject. From an experience analysis perspective, it should score well.

If, however, I decided to write a review about a bottle of orange juice that is sat on my desk, it’ll be a different matter entirely. I never write about beverages, nutrition, or anything broadly related to those subjects. I possess very little experience on the subject and Google can assess that.

I’ve seen another good example recently. It spoke about how the experience element will gauge restaurant reviews and their credibility by actively looking to find evidence that the reviewer has been to the restaurant they’re reviewing. That’s very clever, and very powerful.

In a nutshell, whether you fall under any of the YMYL categories or not, Google likes you to show that you’re experienced on the subject your website publishes content about.

The Expertise Factor

When you come to the expertise factor, you can tie it in closely to experience. Just because someone has experience in a particular area, does it mean they possess expertise on a subject? Not necessarily, and the expertise factor goes looking for that.

Expertise assessment differs from experience in that it is looking for knowledge and expertise on a subject instead of the practical and real world experience.

For example, I might talk about SEO and possess mountains of expertise on the subject that would score me highly in the area. That doesn’t mean I have real world experience of it.

If you’re a traveler, you might score highly on experience if Google can see you have traveled widely, but your expertise on the subject could still be low if your content doesn’t demonstrate it.

If you write about medical related subjects, and you’re a consultant surgeon, Google will identify that (if you provide it) and your expertise becomes stronger than if you’re a blogger talking about a surgical procedure you’ve had.

Experience v Expertise battles

There is an interesting disconnect, and perhaps even a battle of desired results, when it comes to Experience v Expertise. Semrush, a well known SEO resource, gives a superb example of this on the subject of financial advice.

Imagine that you’re looking for investment advice. It is possible that forums could rank more highly than investment sites. You could go to an investment site for expert advice, but the forum posts on a site such as Reddit might be ranked more highly because they possess more content that is high-scoring on the experience factor – i.e. they’re real world posts and experiences.

It isn’t easy, is it? Communicating experience and expertise, in a way that will convince Google you really are the place they should be sending searchers, is not the easy task some might think.

The Authoritativeness Factor

How does Google gauge your authoritativeness on a subject? It needs to know that you’re credible and well respected, it wants to be sure it is sending people to a website that is an authority on a subject.

This factor is easier to explain. Google looks for backlinks. Yes, that old chestnut. If you’ve got lots of websites linking to your pages or articles about a certain subject or several subjects, and those websites possess high domain authority, then the chances are that it can rely on you as an authoritative source of information.

However, there is a caveat to this. Google knows that some sites might have backlink generation campaigns and that they can distort the authority of a site. That’s why they use their human quality raters to check sites and look for what people say about them. Yes, they manually intervene at times.

You can check your website authority score by using a free tool provided by Semrush. Their website authority checker will show you how many backlinks you have coming to your site and a resultant score.

The Trustworthiness Factor

The trustworthiness of your site is the cumulative effect of everything we’ve already been through.

However, there are other elements taken into account, including:

• Security – is your website secure?
• Accuracy – how accurate is your content? Is it truthful? Is it up to date?
• Support – can visitors get further assistance if required?
• Certification – do you have relevant certifications?

I find that the security of websites is far less of a problem today than it used to be. Even if I think back just 3-4 years, I can immediately recall 2 websites that had SSL certification issues (the certificate that secures a website).

One of the reasons fewer of these sites exist is because many businesses have moved to platforms that provide automatically secured domains (Shopify is a good example).

The accuracy and truthfulness of website content is a very interesting area to look at. I wrote another blog just a few days ago about misinformation in the field of SEO, and part of that was focused on out of date content or not adding to your content.

If your content is out of date, it has the potential to harm your trustworthiness. For example, if you’d written something about travel advice to, say, the USA, 4 years ago, is it still accurate? If entry qualifications have changed, your information is no longer accurate and that could give you an issue.

Equally, if you offered advice on a subject that was proven to be completely inaccurate or misleading, Google is likely to score you poorly on trustworthiness.

Now that you know what E-E-A-T is looking for, it should give you a reasonable idea about the type of content you should be publishing, but let’s look at that in more detail.

What type of content should you write?

E-E-A-T is just the entrance to the minefield of what Google wants from you.

All I’ve really covered so far is how Google will treat your content once you’ve published it, and given some guidance on what is likely to be benefit you most in your area of expertise, but wouldn’t it be nice if it ended there?

In short, Google wants high quality and original content from you. It wants it to give excellent advice, be valued by visitors, and offer them what I often refer to as a “one hit” experience. That means that once they’ve landed on your page, they don’t need to go anywhere else.

I’m going to start by giving you one piece of advice that I consider to be critical today. When you’re writing your content, beyond the title, write it as naturally as possible. Forget about SEO during the writing process. Yes, I did write that!

Google recently asked you to just that. It specifically said to write content for readers and not SEO. That is as clear an indication as you’ll ever get about what it wants to see.

They’ve also asked publishers to self-evaluate content before they press the “Publish” button, and given you a set of criteria to assess it against.

In summary (I’ll give you a reference to the full list they’ve published), you should be asking yourself this:

Content and quality questions

• Is it original information, research, reporting or analysis?
• Does it provide a complete description of a topic?
• Does it go beyond the obvious and provide genuinely useful and new information?
• If you’ve used a reference source, does your material go further than that (i.e. not just copy it) and provide new insight, adding value and with true originality?
• Does the page title and heading accurate reflect the content of the page?
• Does the page title and heading avoid being exaggerated or alarming?
• Would you want to share the page with a friend, or bookmark it?
• Is the content worthy of being in a magazine, book or encyclopaedia?
• Does it provide more value than comparable content in existing search results?
• Is it free of spelling and formatting isues?
• Does it look like it was rushed out for the sake of it and not given much thought?
• Have you used mass-issued copy that lots of other people have received too, simply regurgitating it?

Expertise questions

• Does the content make you want to trust it? Is there reference sources and evidence of expertise?
• Does it include background information or links to pages that provide credibility about you?
• If a visitor looked beyond the content, elsewhere on the site, would they come away thinking it was well trusted and an authority on the subject?
• Is the content written (or reviewed) by an expert that demonstrates they know the subject well?
• Is it free of any factual errors that could be easily identified?

People-first content questions

• Would your existing or target audience find the content useful?
• Does the content clearly demonstrate first-hand experience of the subject?
• Does your website have a primary focus or purpose?
• Will a visitor feel they don’t need to go elsewhere after reading your content?
• Will the visitor leave feeling happy/satisfied with clicking on the search result and finding your page?

SEO questions

• Have you avoided producing the content primarily to attract search engines?
• Are you avoiding publishing content on lots of different subjects?
• Have you avoided overuse of AI or other automated content production?
• Have you avoided summarising the content from elsewhere without adding much value?
• Can you say you haven’t just written about the subject because it is trending and wouldn’t have written about it under normal circumstances?
• Are you confident that your visitor won’t leave feeling like they’ll need to search again and find better content elsewhere?
• Have you written to a particular word-count because you think that’s what Google wants or prefers? (Because Google doesn’t do that!)
• Can you honestly say you’ve not written about a niche area you have little knowledge of purely to try to get search engine results?
• Have you avoided purporting to answer a question to which there is no real and definitive answer? i.e. have you just teased people for clicks?
• You can say with sincerity that you’ve not simply amended the date of the article to try to make it appear fresher and new?
• You’ve avoided adding a lot of new content and removing older content, because you think it’ll make your website seem more up-to-date?

Who, how and why questions

• Does the page make it clear who authored the content?
• Does the page have a byline, if it should, and if so can it be clicked to find out more about the author and content they’ve produced?
• If, for example, you’ve reviewed a product, does the content say how was it tested and how many others were subject to the same test?
• Where you’ve used AI or other automation, have you published a disclosure or similar comment to make the use of automation clear to reader?
• If you’ve used AI, have you explained how?
• Again, if you’ve used AI, have you said why it was necessary or useful in the production of the content, and how it added value?
• Why was the content produced? The key answer is that it was done to help, direct, advise or prove useful to people. If your answer is that it was produced for search engine purposes, Google say “that’s not aligned with what our systems seek to reward.“

Here is the link to Google’s full content guidance.

My own downloadable PDF checklist for you to use for your content is at the end of this article.

Final thoughts on content

If you consider the requirements of E-E-A-T and the questions Google recommends that you self-evaluate against, you have all the advice you need about the type of content Google likes.

Think about it – you can write about almost anything you want if you can check your content against those two sets of parameters.

Stick to what you know, what you can prove you know and what you can be a genuine authority on.

You don’t need to be the world-leading expert on a subject to rank well for it – you simply need to produce well written and naturally curated content that is of value to the visitor.

Here is the full Google content guideline checklist for download.

If you’ve any feedback, questions or thoughts, I’m always welcoming of them in the comments below.