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E-E-A-T is crucial for achieving optimal SEO on Google, as the search engine has emphasized time after time; creating high-quality content that demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) is essential if you want to gain optimal rankings.
But one crucial aspect of E-E-A-T some SEO writers underestimate is plagiarism in their content. Without plagiarism-free content, you can’t possibly master E-E-A-T and increase your rankings through it.
Plagiarism-free content is considered unique and original, and is integral to check your E-E-A-T checklist, especially in today’s AI-driven internet where AI-generated content has given a surge to plagiarism.
Let’s explore how focusing on originality can help you build strong E-E-A-T, one by one, and succeed in SEO.
1. Experience: Demonstrating Unique Insights
Experience in E-E-A-T means your content shares insights and knowledge from your unique experiences that users can relate to, trust, and rely on.
But plagiarism in content can undermine these qualities and make the content look unoriginal, even if it’s based on your lived experiences.
If this is the case, your readers — both humans and search engines — can sense the lack of uniqueness, which can have a negative influence on your SEO.
So, make sure you’re sharing your original experiences and genuine thoughts on a topic, or, ensure it is based on original findings.
For example, if you’re writing about a diet plan, share how your diet plan helped you or someone you’ve trained or know personally that practices that diet.
2. Expertise: Establishing Authority Without Copying Others
Displaying expertise is paramount for E-E-A-T in content. It demonstrates your depth of knowledge and establishes your business/site as an authority.
On the other hand, plagiarized content can make your expert insights look like a potential copy-paste, which is obviously undesirable.
That’s why originality in writing matters because your content doesn’t just need to reflect your understanding or knowledge, but also make sure it is authentic and coming from you, not an existing source (unless it’s a reference). But even if you have to cite a source, you should try your best to avoid plagiarism through paraphrasing.
To avoid plagiarism here, you should strive to explain your expert opinions in your words to make them unique. Focus on speaking your heart, and not imitating someone else. And while you’re at it, stop for a pause and ask if your words really sound yours — if this is how you’d say what you said.
3. Authoritativeness: Using a Strong and Unique Voice
Authoritative content means it offers expertise and knowledge that make it credible and reliable for people to trust, rely on, and even share with others. But would your content feel authoritative if it looks like a copy-paste?
Of course not. The content may actually be written by an expert and knowledgeable person, but it needs to appear original too. You don’t even have to invent a theory for this, that’s not what we mean. Suppose you rely on existing research for content creation. You can do make your content unique and authoritative by:
adding your fresh perspective to existing research material, and offering unique insights,
comparing multiple sources and summarising insights in your own words, and
auditing your existing content with a plagiarism checker to maintain originality.
4. Trustworthiness: Honesty and Originality
The T in E-E-A-T stands for trustworthiness. It is one of the crucial aspects of marketing, and businesses know it.
However, a simple flaw of plagiarism can break this fragile quality of your content, because duplicated content (plagiarism) is seen as a dishonest practice. Some even consider it a theft of intellectual property, regardless of whether it occurs intentionally or unintentionally.
If your readers find a brand’s content to be untrustworthy, they might fall prey to doubts and question the brand’s credibility, before potentially losing trust in its services or products.
What’s worse still is that search engines can damage your rankings as well.
That’s why you must appear trustworthy in your content, which can be achieved by:
citing your sources when referencing data,
maintaining a transparent editorial process and showing that your content is fact-checked, and
running your finalized drafts through reliable plagiarism detection tools to ensure zero plagiarism.
How to Avoid Plagiarism in Content
E-E-A-T demands originality in content through and through. So, you need a proactive approach to avoiding plagiarism in your content. Here are some actionable steps you can take to avoid it:
Paraphrase the Sources: Paraphrase your articles thoroughly; change the wording properly while making sure the original meaning and context remains intact.
Run the Content through Plagiarism Tools: Use a reliable plagiarism checker and remover like PlagiarismRemover.co to ensure your content is fully original before publishing.
Add Original Insights: Removing plagiarism is important, but it isn’t the only thing you need to focus on in E-E-A-T. You need to ensure your content shares valuable and original insights too — insights that are coming from you — so that it is helpful for readers.
Establish Your Unique Voice: Work on enhancing your personal voice, whether you do it as an individual or as a brand, so that your content reflects your opinion with much more impact and originality. This makes your content stand out as unique and ensures it doesn’t overlap existing pieces.
Following these practices to avoid plagiarism will help you make your content E-E-A-T–friendly, so that it earns readers’ and the search engine’s trust and ranks well.
Conclusion
Avoiding plagiarism is crucial for SEO and meeting the E-E-A-T guidelines set by Google, because duplicated content can hurt all E-E-A-T qualities: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This is why you should strive to avoid plagiarism, whether it is through manual paraphrasing of the referenced materials or by using a plagiarism remover tool. This will help you create content that’s original and unique and trustable by readers and Google.
