An Easy-to-Understand Explanation of What "Expertise" Means in SEO | A Wonderful Story About How Honest Effort Pays Off | Why Focusing on a Theme, Not Profiles or Titles, Is What Gets Evaluated

Those of you interested in SEO may have heard the term "E-E-A-T".

"E-E-A-T" is a metric that search engines prioritize when evaluating sites, standing for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

I will explain the details of "E-E-A-T" in another article, so in this one, I will focus on expertise, which I highly recommend, covering:

• What expertise is,

• Why it is important,

• How to improve it

and more.

What is Expertise?

You have likely seen entertainers or athletes on media like television acting as commentators on topics outside their expertise, such as the economy or politics, but I only feel a sense of discomfort with that.

If you think about it, when people want advice, it is normal to ask someone who is at least "knowledgeable" even if they are not an expert.

For example, if you don't know how to set up your internet, you would ask a friend nearby who seems knowledgeable, and you wouldn't ask someone who can't cook at all how to make curry rice.

Admittedly, in the case of mass media like television, there are factors like mass appeal, popularity, and buzzworthiness.

However, the world of search engines is not so lenient that playing expert works just because you are popular.
※There are circumstances where that might work on social media, though.

For example, if a site that has been publishing game information suddenly (for some reason) starts talking about debt collection, it will not be evaluated.

Even if it was highly evaluated as a game information site, that is.

The search engine will judge that while they might be knowledgeable about games, debt collection is outside their expertise.

Therefore, when you search for debt collection, you will not see an article on debt collection published (for some reason) by a game information site.

In this way, search engines do not display pages from sites that are unrelated to the theme.

Conversely,

if a site has a relationship with a theme, it will display the page

furthermore, if the relationship is deep, it will rank it higher

This is the concept of "expertise."

Expertise cannot be proven by "titles"

Since search engines announced that they would use "expertise" as an important metric, the number of sites posting "profiles claiming to be experts" has increased rapidly.

However, I repeat, the world of search engines is not that simple.

To avoid any misunderstanding, I am not saying that posting a profile is bad.

Introducing who is writing is actually a healthy measure from the user's perspective.

It just means that expertise is not recognized by that alone.

Expertise is determined by theme concentration

So, how can expertise be evaluated?

The answer is relatively simple.

Continue to publish information on a certain theme.

That is all.

I will explain the specific methods in another article, but that is truly all there is to the mindset.

Please think about it for a moment.

Search engines have no way of knowing directly whether the person who wrote a certain article is truly an expert.

Certainly, there are ways to verify this, such as being introduced on external sites or having a profile posted in multiple places, but

however, that can be manipulated and staged as much as one likes.

Thinking about it that way, someone with many profiles on the internet is not necessarily an expert, and real experts are not necessarily posting on the internet.

In reality, even we humans do not take the profiles of such self-proclaimed experts at face value.

Similarly, search engines also merely recognize profiles as one piece of "author information" and do not highly evaluate expertise based solely on that description.

Let me use the world of martial arts and combat sports, which I love, as an example.

A renowned master is undoubtedly an expert.

However, especially in the world of martial arts, there are not many masters who actively share information.

Even if a legendary master who has never shared any information before were to write just one article, search engines would not judge them to be an "expert in this field" based on that alone, nor would the article rank highly.

This is because the search engine has no basis for judgment.

Even though they are, in fact, thegenuine expertbeyond compare.

Rather, a blog written by a karate-loving amateur who has been writing about karate continuously for many years will be judged as, "This site focuses on the theme of karate and shares information continuously. Therefore, it must be knowledgeable."

This is both the distortion between a "real-world expert" and "expertise in search engines," and the mechanism by which expertise in search engines is evaluated.

In the world of SEO, this is a very, very important concept.

What happens when expertise is evaluated?

Why?

Because once expertise is evaluated, the scope of its effect is not on a per-article basis, but on the entire blog.

To be a little more specific, when a blog's expertise on a certain theme is evaluated by a search engine, the rankings of all articles under that blog that are related to that theme will rise.

To explain with a very rough example,

For instance, let's say you have only three pages of articles on a certain theme, and their search ranking is in the 20s.

Suppose that in order to increase your expertise on that theme, you create seven more pages that dig deeper, and this effort pays off, leading to your expertise being recognized.

Then, not only will the seven newly created pages be able to achieve rankings in the teens or single digits shortly after publication, but the three pages you originally created will also see their rankings rise.

Once you enter this state, the 11th and 12th pages on the same theme can also rank highly as soon as they are published.

In other words, regardless of whether they are existing or new articles, you end up in a very happy situation where all articles related to that theme are ranked highly.

This is also called the "lifting effect".

In this way, because measures at the individual article level, such as "adding articles," have a positive impact on the value of the entire blog, it becomes possible to achieve high rankings simply by operating a blog with a focus on expertise.

From this, you can understand how important it is to increase the expertise of your blog.

Why expertise? Why do I recommend it in particular?

In the field of SEO, clients often say to me,

"Among the many indicators, you really push expertise, don't you?"

That is correct.

Personally, among the evaluation factors that Google puts forward, I particularly recommend expertise.

Think about it carefully.

Among the factors that affect search rankings, there are many points that are difficult to differentiate because everyone can do them the same way, and everyone ends up in the same state.

The same is true for E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

For example, including company information or using SSL to increase trustworthiness, or having experts supervise content to increase authoritativeness—search engines are not so naive that you can rank highly just by doing those things. Even if they are effective, if everyone else is doing the same thing, you cannot differentiate yourself.

On the other hand, when it comes to expertise, the points of differentiation vary depending on which field and which topic you have expertise in, and the "depth" to which you delve into them, so you can do things differently from others.

* "Experience" is also like that, but that is for another time.

Moreover, writing by experts or supervision by professionals is not a mandatory requirement for increasing expertise.

If your blog articles focus on a specific theme, the expertise of your blog will naturally come to be recognized by search engines.

It takes time, but it is a wonderful story about how honest effort pays off

so it is certainly true that I like it for that reason as well.

Continuing to focus on and share information about a specific theme is something even an individual can do, and in fact, it is the only way to rank higher than famous sites or corporate blogs.

That is why I personally recommend expertise, especially among the evaluation factors that Google upholds.

There is only one question remaining.

What is considered to be "focused on a certain theme"?

That is the question.

From clients,

"I have always shared content on the same theme, or rather, I only know this theme, yet I still cannot rank high. Why?"

I often receive consultations like this.

Actually, in a sense, this is a trick.

This is because search engines do not evaluate expertise simply because you are "repeating the same things (stories)";

expertise is evaluated by "systematically covering what users are looking for, without omissions or overlaps" regarding a certain topic.

Then,

the question becomes how search engines determine that a theme is covered "systematically without omissions or overlaps",

but I would like to explain this in detail next time.