What are the Brand factors that impact SEO? What is branded search?

22:15 How do you approach positioning with Google’s EAT (Expertise, Authority and Trustworthy) on About us or a team page? 

22:20 Itamar Blauer: For EAT, Google wants to see the person who created that piece of content. This situation is especially important for blog pages. If the content is interlinked to the author’s name but not a general term like “Admin”, Google sees that person as an expert. Therefore, creating content consistently with the same name and even with the same picture is a good practice to follow. Because “Admin” is a vague term and does not specify any person or expertise in that field, it does not represent any brain behind the content. Besides, suppose your site serves and creates content on Your Money Your Life (YMYL) niche such as personal finance, health, or accounting. In that case, Google scrutinizes more and more to understand your expert level. “So what I would suggest is that you get different users set up within your CMS and you create offer pages for them and include a bio and include some actual substance about why these people are qualified to write about whatever they’re writing and the more you do this, the more Google will be able to access this content and understand it.”

24:55 Similarly, Kyla Herbes is adding an author box to all her blog posts with a little blip on her name, stating the exact expert identification, which media she has been featured in, and who she is. This repetition on every piece she writes tells Google that: Yes, Kyla is an expert. That’s seemed to help her jump up in SERPs.

25:15 Firuze Gokce: There is another aspect when you look at startups’ point of view: SEO as a long-term and costly strategy. What they don’t understand is that creating content builds up their authority and expertise. It is essential to build up a credible and trustworthy brand name, and it starts from day one. It’s not something that “We’ll deal with it later”. When they launch after six months, 1 or 2 years later, it’s already been too late for being an authority because credibility is earned over time, and it’ll take a few more years to achieve it.

By the way, you can find what was discussed at the SEO Fundamentals Room every week at firuze.blog. You can also listen to replays of the room from the Clubhouse page.

28:00 Renee Bigelow gave an example of the “About us” page in terms of EAT and Firuze’s point. One of Renee’s clients did not mature themselves digitally until they had some sales. “They had several years where they were building their company, but they had the equivalent of a brochure website. So, they had to prove that they were a legitimate company and that they have lots of values.” It took some time and effort to show that they were legitimate. On their About page, they needed to explain how they had started with channel sales versus open to the public. They clarified that consultants purchased the software they developed. When they began appearing on SERPs, there was some history on why they didn’t exist before. Then they justified why they evolved from step one to step two by including years, people, the company executives, board of directors, and Advisory Board members who have author bylines on the blog posts. They connected everything all together to help build EAT algorithm for people.

If we want to recap what was talked about “About” pages in terms of EAT, these elements are the most important:

• Business address, phone number and email
• Testimonials
• Positive Press coverage
• Awards that were nominated
• Awards won
• Individual executive people pages
• Endorsements
• Academic degrees or certifications
• Conferences attended or speaking engagements
• Articles published on press
• Guest posts