Google Reads Your Entire Website
Have you read your entire website lately? Google has, and it doesn’t always like what it sees. That’s part of the reason why it instituted the “Medic” update in 2018. If you don’t follow Google’s guidance, you risk becoming irrelevant in Google search results.
Google search works hard to understand your content, but now (since the Medic update) it’s imperative you help Google.
There was a day when you could just be a website writer and worry about sentence structure and the flow of your copy. Today, you still need to understand how to write to humans and you must also understand how to write for robots like Google. This last part may require some technical know-how.
Schema structure copy and Google’s E-A-T
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthy. Google states that E-A-T is among the top 3 considerations for page quality. Google also states that a page or site found lacking in E-A-T is a “sufficient reason to give a page a low-quality rating.” Serious stuff if you want to be discovered by Google.
Structured data is a system of pairing a name with a value that helps search engines categorize and index your content. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. For example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories and so on. Then you must connect or link your claims to other sources to back up your copy assertions.
So why is having expertise, authority and trust so important? There is a debate about the significance of E-A-T in search, and Google quality rater guidelines don’t always directly determine a page’s rankings. However, E-A-T determines a website’s value. You can think of E-A-T as the reason why users would choose your site over others. So E-A-T could have a direct impact on how Google ultimately ranks your website.
Remember, websites are what they EAT.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.