Is Your Startup EAT-Ing Right and How Can You Make Sure?
It’s the first month of the new year and you may be making lifestyle changes in way of a resolution, things like exercising more or eating right.
Did you know the same can be applied to content marketing for your startup? It’s true, perhaps not exercising more, but making sure your startup is EAT-ing right can help your SEO and SERP rankings.
So, what on earth does it stand for?
It’s actually three factors used by Google to measure how much trust it should place in a website or brand, and thus show to their users to give them the best experience. Those factors are Expertise, Authority, and Trust, and represent a measurement of your right to be considered a leader in your field.
Let’s look into these a bit further…
Expertise
When your startup offers a particular product or service relating to the field you’re in, say finance or food, it usually means you’ve got a deep level of knowledge surrounding said field. Your target audience wants to know that they’re supporting a business that knows what they’re talking about, and the same goes for Google.
If you can display a higher level of expertise compared to your competition, your website will be picked out and promoted higher than your competition.
Authority
This is all about how well your branding, startup, website, and content stand apart from the other options users have. Users want to know they’ve come to the absolute best source of the information they’re looking for, and Google wants to give them that.
Google will be measuring whether your content is both expertly written and the leading authority of all content out there. Also, check our top branding agencies for startups article to learn more about.
Trust
You could easily make up things about your startup – maybe you’ve won awards that don’t exist or gained millions in funding from an unknown source – but that won’t make you very trustworthy to your customer base. If they can see through you, they’ll go and support your competitor instead.
It’s a hard one to measure but Google has found a way. Google will measure trust based on the backlinks it detects from other domains. The higher the trust in the linked domain, the higher the trust in the linked-to domain.
How Can You Make Sure You’re EAT-Ing Right?
If your website lacks in any of, or all, of these three factors, users are likely to search for an alternative. The same goes for Google itself, if it finds that another website promotes a better customer experience and delivers it, that website will be promoted above others. So, taking some time to focus on how you’re EAT-ing will do your startup some good.
What better resource to see how well you’re doing than your current customer base? Finding out how people are talking about your startup through reviews, on social media, or by sending out a survey, can highlight the areas you’re excelling in and the ones where you may need to work on.
Look at the home page on your website – does it clearly show off who your startup is as a company? Is it displaying why you’re the best at what you do? Visitors to your site want to know they’re in the right place so subtly tell them why that’s you as soon as they’re in.
Next up is the content itself. It’s most likely there is content up on your site which is years old and is no longer aligned with your brand. It’s worth combing back through your content and either updating it so that it fits with what your startup is now or removing it completely. Don’t be scared to get rid of content, there are always opportunities for new, better content to come around.
Possibly the most important: make everything on your site easy to access. Users are going to be visiting your website on the go, on their phones, tablets, or computers. If things take too long to load, or they have to jump through lots of hoops to get to what they need, they’ll go somewhere else.
Don’t forget that it’s always a great idea to get some help for your startup in the digital marketing field. You can check out list of startup marketing companies.
