E-E-A-T Crisis: Boosting Site Authority & Long-Term Organic Performance
The Challenge: Significant Organic Traffic Drops
A prominent pet health website began its SEO partnership with us back in October 2019. Our relationship was strong and steady, helping them grow their organic reach. However, in Q1 of 2024, our client experienced a sudden and sizable decrease in impressions and clicks on their educational resources and blogs.
The core problem was clear: their organic results began falling dramatically and unexpectedly. As E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authority & Trust) signals were becoming more important for rankings than ever, we postulated that blank and low-quality author bios were increasingly detrimental to the authority of the articles that credit them. These pages were either blank webpages with only an author’s name — completely missing bios explaining their qualifications — or had very light content. The pet health brand owns multiple subsidiaries and had recently made a business decision to migrate content and author information to a different domain, leading to disjointed, sparse, or neglected bio pages.
We knew that, with Google’s emphasis on E-E-A-T, there was a strong need to improve the site’s authority and trust signals.
The Solution: A Strategic E-E-A-T Recovery Audit
While we had a strong theory that the organic decline in resources and blogs was strongly linked to the author bio issue we found, we didn’t want to stop there. We developed a Q1 2024 “Organic Recovery” project series, in which we crawled for technical errors and conducted a full investigation into other factors that could have contributed to the drop.
While we continued investigating other issues, our team pitched a targeted strategy to address the deficient author bios in April of that year.
The Strategy: Test, Prove, & Expand
Our approach was both data-first and highly customized, demonstrating our commitment to being effective and unconventional:
- Author Audit & Prioritization: In May 2024, we audited all 100 on-site authors, identifying top organic performers and those with completely missing or light bios. Unsurprisingly, we saw consistent organic stability in articles written or “Reviewed” by a veterinary medical professional with thorough credentials packaged in a well-developed bio page. Meanwhile, articles associated with authors whose bios were lackluster or missing primarily experienced drops.
- Competitor & Industry Research: To support the merit of the author bio optimizations, we reviewed our client’s direct competitors’ author bio pages and identified industry standards and new opportunities to stand out. We presented our specific competitive edge recommendations in June 2024.
- Specific Bio Optimization: Next, we proposed a slow rollout of improved updates, initially focusing on six authors as a test. We are firm believers in testing and making strategic adjustments based on the results, so for this first batch, we focused on consistency. We took their existing, basic bios (name, picture, brief paragraph, links to articles) and dramatically enhanced them by adding three new, critical E-E-A-T-boosting sections:
- “Education” listing their degrees, certifications, and schools attended.
- “Fast Facts” listing specializations, years of experience, and memberships to medical institutions and industry-specific organizations.
- “Experience” detailing where they’ve previously worked and major publications where they have been cited (including outbound links).
The Results: Long-Term Organic Wins
The client began publishing the optimized bios over the summer of 2024, with the initial 6 being completed between August and October 2024. The results were immediate, proving the value of our approach.
- Initial Positive Results (By December 2024):
- 5 of the 6 optimized authors saw an increase in average article sessions.
- 4 of 6 saw an increase in clicks and impressions.
- Resilience During Core Updates (December 2024 Update): When the website as a whole started losing traffic after the December Core Update, the articles with optimized bios showed remarkable resilience:
- Control authors (unoptimized bios) saw session decreases between 23% and 36%.
- None of the optimized authors saw more than a 10% decrease in sessions; one actually saw an increase.
- Client Buy-In and Expansion: Following the impressive initial results and resilience, the client decided to expand the project, optimizing the total number of authors to 25 throughout April 2025.
- Sustained Wins (Post-June 2025 Core Update): The June Core Update sent clicks rising for all authors. Over half of the authors with optimized bios began seeing more article clicks than before the December Core Update. Even with industry-wide declines in impressions later in the year, over half of the authors with optimized bios continued to see increases in their articles’ impressions, bucking the overall negative trend.
Our work provided a secure, dependable, long-term impact. By strategically integrating our SEO expertise to enhance E-E-A-T signals, we delivered a personalized strategy that not only recovered lost traffic but also created a sustainable foundation for future organic growth and helped the client weather subsequent algorithm updates.