Today, a lot of travel bloggers, food reviewers and other luxury content creators online reach their audience through search.
Together, they have created a whole industry that makes the luxury lifestyle more accessible to viewers.
As Google focuses on boosting expert voices, they have now added support for those content creators who have proven experience in a field.
Finding Expertise Online
Anyone can publish content online, which is why Google and its users prefer it when experts hit the top of search results pages. That’s why Google have their E-E-A-T system in place, which judges content by its experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. This, combined with determining a user’s search intent, is the backbone of Google’s algorithms.
Search intent is self-explanatory, being the reason why a person made the search. Keywords like ‘how’ or ‘buy’ differentiate a research-based search from a user looking to buy a product. Likewise, words like ‘play’, along with the name of a particular slot or table game clearly demonstrate intent to find an iGaming site. In response, Google will push its best, most relevant search results to the top of the page to recommend the most fitting casino online. To satisfy the user, that casino would have to offer a variety of games, including the one that had been searched for, and it would pass in expertise, authority and trustworthiness.
This all means that a search for a place or a dish might indicate the user wants travel blogs or food reviewers. However, until now, Google has had an understandable bias toward more official, mainstream sources. This means that news media, travel agents and the occasional celebrity chef will top search results because they are the experts. Now Google has recognised there are a lot of self-made experts in these niches, so they have created a system where these content creators can appear in search more.
Recognising Content Creators
So far, this new recognition of content creators revolves almost entirely around knowledge panels. They are the distinct, non-search information boxes that appear beside popular people, places and events. They are there to provide users with answers at a glance and often contain a variety of links to get to know the person/place/topic better. These panels draw information from Google’s sophisticated knowledge graph.
Using our celebrity chef example, searching ‘Gordon Ramsay’ will bring up a knowledge panel stating his name, age, social media links and the label ‘British celebrity chef and restauranteur.’ It’s that label, describing the person’s occupation or claim to fame, that Google has amended to show grace to content creators. Prolific content creators often lack an official job title and business acumen to draw from, yet they still have experience and expertise in their chosen topics, and so can add value in search. Travel bloggers are a great example of this, having travelled more than most, yet they are just ordinary people with no official job title.
To remedy this, established content creators will find themselves labelled as just that – ‘content creator’ – with their niche included in brackets next to the title. As for those identified niches, they include travel, food, dancing, art, fashion, finance, history, interior design, painting, real estate, skincare, shopping and vegetarianism, among many others. For as many content creator labels Google has recognised so far, there’s no doubt that the list will get even longer in the future.
By recognising content creators as an expert in their respective fields, they will show up more for certain search terms. It could be revolutionary for reviewers, as they’ll get some much-needed legitimacy in the eyes of Google’s reviews system. Bloggers often make articles, videos and other content out of their lifestyle, so they’re model candidates to fulfil that experience metric in Google’s E-E-A-T system.