You are what you EEAT

A healthier ‘Experience, Expertise, Authority & Trustworthiness’ for your nutrition brand

Worth an estimated $305.8 billion in 2023, the nutrition market is booming and with an expected compound annual growth rate of 15.49% between now and 2030, it is expanding at a rapid pace. Following the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, there was a 19% increase in people taking nutritional supplements, and 58% of global nutritional supplement users want to see these supplements available online. Though supplements are only one subsector of the nutritional industry, these statistics highlight the general public’s desire for an increasingly virtual shopping experience, and we are seeing similar patterns of want and behaviour for a variety of nutritional products.

Growing alongside the market for nutritional products, are the digital marketing efforts of nutrition companies looking to grow their brand awareness and increase their online sales. In some industries consumers are more willing to make ‘risky’ purchases because if products are not what they expected it has no real impact on their wellbeing. This is not the case for Health and Wellness brands, where products and services are directly related to wellbeing; being a subsector of this industry, nutrition brands need to ensure they are digitally marketing themselves in a way that showcases their Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (EEAT) but that also makes them relatable to their target audience.

What is EEAT?

EEAT is a digital marketing term used to evaluate online content against how it demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.

Benefits of EEAT

Due to the nature of nutritional products being made for consumption, customers need to trust that they are not going to experience, or at least be aware of, any potential side effects. For this reason, as previously mentioned, consumers are unlikely to make a purchase from a nutritional brand they don’t trust – as this would mean potentially consuming a dodgy product that could have an impact on their health. A benefit of meeting the EEAT requirements is therefore the ability to showcase to your customers that you are a trustworthy brand, and have expertise within your niche.

Content that both showcases brand expertise, and incorporates elements to display your relatability or trustworthiness as a company (in other words, content that meets EEAT requirements) is the most likely to resonate with your audience – encouraging them to delve further into your brand, and eventually make a purchase.

A further benefit of meeting the EEAT requirements is its positive impact on your SEO rankings. Automated programmes known as Search Engine Robots (or GoogleBots) will scan your content to evaluate whether it is interesting, and useful to humans – or in other words, that it meets EEAT requirements. Then these robots will decide what content to display following the input of a certain search query, based on the bot-evaluation. This means, if your content scores highly against the EEAT requirements, that you will also rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs).

How to improve your EEAT

Continuously improve and update your content

For a website that meets the EEAT guidelines, a strong content strategy is vital. As a foundation, you will want to create a wealth of varied pieces of high quality content. For this, you are going to need a team of expert copywriters and designers to create a wide range of written, visual, and video content.

Once you have your expertly crafted, varied bank of content you will need to make sure that this remains up-to-date and inline with industry news and trends. Altering or creating new content to accommodate fluctuating trends, news, and tech within the industry will help you maintain your expertise within your niche – and pave the way for you to become a trustworthy brand – helping you meet the EEAT requirements, even as the industry evolves and shifts over time.

As an extension of this you will want to keep an eye on any updates in industry research, and update any facts and statistics you have used in your content with the new information. This will increase your standing as a leading authority in the field – encouraging your target audience to look to you for accurate statistics and information, helping to build both your credibility as a brand, and their trust in you.

Building a bank of backlinks

A backlink is when your content or your brand is named or shared on an external platform, and hyperlinked back to your website. Having your content backlink on other websites tells the search engine robots that your content is being used to ‘back-up’ other information, strengthening your position as an expert. For this reason, by securing backlinks on high authority websites will help strengthen your EEAT criteria.

Staying on top of the industry narrative

As an extension of the previous point, you can continue to build an online presence by contributing to the industry narrative through comments, quotations and social media posts. The more you are seen online publicly speaking about industry trends, sharing the latest information or statistics, and commenting on industry news, the more you are going to appear as a trustworthy, industry professional to your audience.

Another thing to consider is what platforms to share your content on; publishing content in external but related publications, across social media platforms, and on streaming platforms (such as YouTube or Spotify) expands your audience reach, and helps you reach members of your target audience you might not have by just publishing on your website.

External Publications

There are several online magazines, blogs, or websites that share a niche and audience with you. Oftentimes, although you share an audience, these publications are not your competitors since they offer a different service [offer readable content, rather than a product]; these types of companies are great to form partnerships with, because they are beneficial to both parties. The publisher will receive both payment, and a piece of content they can share on their website – and you will get the benefits of being able to market to a group of people in your target audience you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to reach – building up a larger customer base.

Many external publications already have established themselves as an expert within their niche – and will have a large following that will actively visit their site to find accurate and trustworthy information on the topic they are researching. By forming a relationship with such publications, and publishing your own content on that platform, you will essentially be borrowing their ‘authority and expertise’ establishing yourself as a brand that also has these elements. In this way, aligning yourself with external brands that have pre-established expertise can boost your EEAT.

Social Media

In the digital age, social media has boomed – giving businesses the opportunity to connect with their target audience in a way that has never been historically possible before. Using the platform’s many ways of interacting with customers on an individual basis (polls, interaction with stories, reposting content, competitions, asking questions etc.) you are able to give your brand a more personal feel that your customers will relate to. Alongside this is the ability to share educational content across these platforms; educational, and professional content on social media has skyrocketed in recent years with many doctors, and other medical professionals using social platforms to share opinions on topics, debunk or confirm myths, and comment on current affairs in the industry. A balance of the two across social media can increase EEAT because it is another external validation that you are an expert in your niche.

Social media also gives you the opportunity to work with ‘influencers’ or other brands and, in the same way as with using external publications, you are able to ‘borrow’ their authority. Other brands, and influencers, will have established their own expertise and trusting following within their niche – and therefore aligning yourself with them will extend that authority and trust to you, and consequently boosting your EEAT.

Strong author profiles

Having each written piece of content on your website related to an author is also beneficial to your EEAT. The more an author is seen online talking about a certain topic, the more they will appear to be an expert. In a similar way to ‘borrowing’ the expertise or authority of external publications or influencers, your content will then be associated with the perceived authority or expertise of the author.

It is also important to ensure that any authors providing content for your website have a strong author bio, preferably that appears at the end of each of their written pieces. A strong bio should include:

• An introduction to the author
• A summary of their experience
• Where their expertise sits
• A summary of their relevant educational background

Your first step to healthy EEATing

EEAT is a vital part of an organic digital marketing strategy, particularly for nutrition brands where customer trust is essential due to the products’ direct relation to health and wellbeing. There are several strategies that digital marketers can implement to boost their EEAT including keeping content updated with new research, building a bank of backlinks, and creating strong author profiles to associate with website content.