How do you know what to trust on the internet? It's a complicated question that gets more complicated by the second. Good news for you is that with SEO there are some guidelines and best practices. Remember, trust is subjective overall but what we need to care about most as we’re creating content is effort. How hard are you working to show your audience that what you’re putting out is helpful and trustworthy? So we’ll go over several factors to building trust in your content. Some we’ll get right from the Google Quality Rater Guidelines and others we’ll just get from plain ole common sense.
Let’s start by pointing out that the QRG are largely about Your Money Your Life topics which is broad but doesn’t include everything. So you can think about it plainly and simply as health and financial advice (again, not limited to that but we can use that as a basis). However, everything they lay out can be considered a best practice when writing about anything that you have a subject matter expertise about.
KNOW YOUR SUBJECT MATTER
Don’t write what you don’t know. I’m not an expert at gardening. So building trust in that subject matter would be a large task, probably larger than I could accomplish. You need to have true knowledge in a subject to build trust. And if you are faking it, the audience is going to know. We’ve all been on a blog where we hoped the article would provide quality information and it become clear that the author didn’t understand the subject. So if you want to build trust stick to places where you believe readers can trust you in the first place.
STAY TRUE TO YOUR HEADLINE
Google says this in it’s quality rater guideline under consideration(p.20):
The Title of the Page
The title of the page is considered part of the MC. Descriptive MC titles that
summarize the page allow people to make informed decisions about what
pages to visit.
And:
Quality of the MC
Consider the extent to which the MC is satisfying and helps the page achieve
its purpose.
What this is saying is your headline should let the reader know accurately what the page offers. If your page title is about how to fix a pool pump then you should consider what the reader would want to see in the MC(main content) of the page. Do they want to hear about the history of the pool pump? Why you should upgrade to a variable speed pool pump? Probably not.
This might seem like obvious stuff but I’ve run into so many people and websites that don’t do this. They promise one thing but deliver an experience that isn’t that. The most important thing you can do is give the reader what they want and in a way they’d be happiest to get it.
SHOW EFFORT
Google talks about this on P.21
Consider the extent to which a human being actively worked to create satisfying content. Effort may be direct, such as a person translating a poem from one language to another. Effort may go into designing page functionality or building systems that power a webpage, such as the creation of a page that offers machine translation as a service to users. On the other hand, the automatic creation of thousands of pages by running existing freely available content through existing translation software without any oversight, manual curation, etc., would not be considered to have human effort.
While I don’t hold the opinion that your content has to be a certain length to satisfy the algorithm I do believe that your content should satisfy the query completely. If you were to talk about how to fix a pool pump and you simply had 5 steps that totaled 50 words that’s not great effort. If your competitor has a blog post that’s 1000 words that gives detail on how to do it, and includes areas where you might run into trouble, the effort is there so the experience is better. Which would you rank higher?
Taking the time to write a better piece of content will almost always yield better results. Usually content wins if it’s first, best or different. It’s unlikely you’ll be first so focus on being best or different.
SHOW YOUR REPUTATION
On Page 22 of the guidelines they discuss reputation for the author:
An important part of PQ rating is understanding the reputation of the website. If the website is not the primary creator of the MC, it’s important to research the reputation of the content creator as well. Reputation research should be performed according to the topic of the page. For example, if the page contains medical information, research the reputation of the website and content creator for providing medical information. It's possible for a website to be a go-to source for one type of content (e.g., humorous videos), but an untrustworthy source for a different type of content (e.g., financial information).
So this can be tricky. Not every gardener has a degree in it or has won awards. We know a doctor has different certifications and professional accreditation but for the rest of us there’s a couple things to consider.
- Is your website about the subject matter? If your site is a general blog about anything and everything it’ll be hard to make the case that you’re an expert in one specific area so be sure that your site reflects your expertise everywhere.
- What can you tell the reader about your own experience? I like to have author bio pages and bios at the bottom of blogs when possible to show the user that you aren’t a person who just picked up this subject matter today. If you are a gardener, how long have you been doing it for? Where do you work? What in the gardening realm is your particular expertise?
The more you can promote your own reputation the easier it’s going to be.
GET PERSONAL
On Page 26 they mention experience, which is a new addition to the guidelines:
Experience : Consider the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic. Many types of pages are trustworthy and achieve their purpose well when created by people with a wealth of personal experience. For example, which would you trust: a product review from someone who has personally used the product or a "review" by someone who has not?
The guidelines make a good point: it’s easier to take advice from someone who has been there and done that. So if you’re a professional talk about your experience. If you’re walking someone through fixing a pool pump let them know that you’ve fixed them before. Let them know about a time you encountered a problem in fixing the pool pump. Get personal.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Building trust isn’t honestly complicated. If you can get specific about what you know and create content that shows real effort and insight then you’re going to be okay. I think we often spread ourselves too thin as content creators and it ends up hurting us in the long run. Just drill down and focus. The readers will find you.
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