What is FOOD? Why it’s important to local SEO.
“EAT” (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) has been a trending topic in search engine optimization for several years. I love this AHREFS chart that shows how hundreds of new articles are published on the same topic every month.
Many thanks to Joshua Hardnick for the idea.
Much of the SEO literature on EAT focuses on “reputable” YMYL categories like Health & Finance, but a review of Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines (yes, I read them so you never have to – here’s mine) GoFundMe link) implies that EAT is relevant to pretty much any type of search. Who should say what is more or less important to others? Maybe we should change “your money or your life” to “your life”? And if EAT applies to everything, then it stands to reason that EAT should apply to local SEO, and hence we should all do this, as at LSG we are pretty much convinced that everything, at least in search, will sooner or later go local Apply EAT techniques to our local SEO campaigns. And if so, how?
Historically, LSG’s POV on EAT is that we don’t talk about it a lot. It’s way too squishy and implies that an algorithm is borderline sentient. We prefer to discuss EAT-like things as technical terms. When we think about them like this, we get ideas on how to work with them for our customers. It also helps us avoid very helpful recommendations like “create good content”. As the master himself said almost a year ago, EAT is not an algorithm, but EAT signals should match what the algorithm is looking for:
Our systems don’t look for EAT. Our reviewers use this to determine if our systems are working well, to display good information. There are many different signals that, if we get it right, will be consistent with a good human EAT rating. See also: https://t.co/1fs2oJ9Gtl pic.twitter.com/GBbnYEjJUV
– Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 19, 2020
And a year earlier, Google announced that it would apply BERT to local search:
In early November, we started using neural matches as part of the process of generating local search results. Neural matching helps us better understand how words relate to concepts, as explained in more detail here: https://t.co/ShQm7g9CvN
– Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison), December 2, 2019
And Danny followed with a little more nuance on how this might work:
It’s about language, not closeness. To the extent that language can help us understand something related to a place, it can have an impact.
– Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 2, 2019
This led us to think that we could possibly use EAT concepts to increase relevance at the local level.
WHAT IS FOOD FOR SEO?
Before we can figure out what EAT LOCAL is, let’s lay out a baseline of what EAT for SEO is overall. Great SEOs like Marie Haynes and Lily Ray have put a lot of time and effort into figuring out how Google might define EAT. In reviewing some of the key posts and presentations on this topic, EAT for SEO says consensus can be defined as follows:
- Current content
- Objectively correct content
- positive reviews
- Content created by experts
- Content that helps ensure that your experts are, in fact, experts
- Content on third party websites that suggests your experts are experts
- Content on third party websites that indicates that your experts and / or your website are authorities (e.g. a Wikipedia page, a knowledge panel for the author, etc.)
- Links from relevant urls on other websites
There’s nothing amazing here, and you can see how you can put these concepts into a tactical campaign – make sure your content is accurate and up-to-date, use “known” authors, get positive reviews, and get natural some links. But Local SEO has always been a slightly different game and it is obvious that EAT for Local should also have its own specifics.
WHAT IS FOOD FOR LOCAL SEO?
TL: DR (IMO of course): EAT for local SEO is a collection of attributes that a search engine can use to rate the awareness, proximity and relevance of a local business unit in order to rank it for a specific search query.
Now let’s try to break down EAT LOCAL into “technical” terms.
HOW DO WE DEFINE LOCAL COMPETENCE, AUTHORITY AND TRUST?
If I were a Google search engineer, I would be wondering how a search query could express a query for “local expertise”. In English this could mean, “A shop near me that sells cakes.”
I could define “local authority” as “a company near me that sells great cakes according to the wisdom of the crowd”.
And I could define “local trust” as “a store near me that sells great cakes and is not a Q-anon front”.
Aside from the EAT factors listed above, some local variables can affect your site’s EAT. Let’s start with the obvious using our cake example:
- Google My Business categorization and services
- Local quotes
When Yelp says you bake cakes, who can’t Google agree with? - Physical location
Is the bakery “near me”? The location of a company supports the “local” part of the “local knowledge” just as the fact that it is a bakery supports the “knowledge” part. - opening hours
Now that you are open, you may be more of an expert on some questions. - Old GMB Post content
Post content can appear as “justifications” in your Local Pack results. If you post about cakes, there’s a good chance you’re selling cakes. - Presence of the topic on the bakery’s website
You may want to use some words on your website that mean you are selling cake. In industries with low competition, this is really one of the keys. - Check the content
According to the guidelines, a lack of verification should not necessarily be a sign of poor page quality. However, positive ratings with words that match your target queries definitely support authority. - GMB images
In some industries, people really want to see pictures. They absolutely help sell the clicks. GMB reports about it. Adequate images included with your GMB can be a good sign of expertise. User photos could be a good sign of authority. - Structured data
If you tag your company with the LocalBusiness schema and your authors with the people schema, Google can more easily link them to other entities in its knowledge diagram to determine eligibility. I particularly like the knowAbout property in the scheme to underline the specialist knowledge. - Links / quotes from other local and national EAT sites
The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. The same applies to links. In our experience, once you’ve got your site up and running on site, it is crucial that other websites that show up in Google are relevant to your targeting queries, or at least just mention that you are establishing your website as an authority and just ranking better. In fact, you can potentially ignore most of the points above and focus on them for any number of verticals.
FUZZIER EAT LOCAL SIGNALS
Now that we’ve got the obvious out of the way, I thought I’d add a few ideas that are definitely on the “fuzzy” side of SEO theory. What more abstract ways are there that Google can algorithmically get an EAT sentiment from your brand?
- SERP clicks for non-brand queries
Click behavior affects rankings has been reported many times. We saw this have a dramatic effect in the early COVID days as online retailers ran out of hand sanitizer, searchers pogo noted the results to find out who had them in stock, and Google reordered the search results on a minute-by-minute basis . Certainly these clicks are a signal of authority. - Search query for brand + service / product
We see similar behavior when people are looking for a brand and a topic en masse. This is another signal that the brand / domain is an authority on the matter. - Pedestrian traffic
There’s a reason Android is chasing the crap out of you. - Local business license
This is sketchy. If it mattered, how could so many spam sites rank well in the pack? However, it should be relatively trivial for Google to know that you are actually a legitimate company in the state, and it may be a minor signal of “local” expertise. - Answers to GMB Q&A / Reviews
This could definitely help with both expertise and authority. Whether it does that or not, of course, is a different story. - Social media activity
I’ve seen some people say this is absolutely critical to EAT. I could see Google pull down Twitter data and maybe some other social networks, but I’d narrow this down to something if you’re a baker, then share things about cakes on social media and make sure your accounts are linked. - Participation in relevant local and industrial communities
Not just the participation, but also the participation of experts. Google’s patent for ranking search results based on trust states, “Some vertical knowledge pages now offer different types of indicators or proxies of the trustworthiness of certain people participating in the site.” So it seems like a pretty solid way to be active on community websites that rank well on Google for relevant terms and get recognized as an expert on those websites to help get your local EAT activity going.
DON’T EAT LOCAL JUST BASICALLY GOOD LOCAL SEO?
Relevant content, clear position and categorization, good ratings and relevant links largely agree with the EAT concepts. Maybe you’ve all been doing EAT LOCAL the whole time and you didn’t even know it. Congratulations, now you have a brand new acronym for your presentations like this one I just gave at SEMpdx:
