To improve search results and overall user experience, Google is constantly experimenting with new ideas. To evaluate those experiences, Google uses feedback from Quality Raters. The input is used to make changes to make its search engine more useful. Quality Raters use Google Quality Rating Guidelines to rate searches and websites. 

Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines is a document that is updated occasionally. As the name suggests, it provides guidelines regarding the conditions and elements that raters need to evaluate when rating a website.  

Google Quality Raters and Their Influence

Google has hired thousands of Quality Raters from all over the world to rate websites and determine whether they are good or bad. While the Google employees have no impact on the site they rate, their work influences every site crawled by Google. 

A sliding scale assigns values to websites from lowest to highest. Data is collected and made available to machine learning systems that augment the algorithms based on known signal data. Signal data includes website structure, size, backlinks, author signals, navigation, and more. The global algorithms adjust rankings according to how Google Quality Raters rate websites. 

To understand how the signal data is used, you need to know the types of guidelines Quality Raters are trained to use. 

Types of Guideline Ratings 

When it comes to what Quality Raters consider high-quality, they consider what Google wants the algorithm to produce and its focus. 

Per Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines:

“As a Search Quality Rater, you will work on many different types of rating projects. The General Guidelines primarily cover Page Quality (PQ) rating and Needs Met (NM) rating; however, the concepts are also important for many other types of rating tasks.” 

To stay relevant, Google also asks Quality Raters to review the success of mobile interactions. This is particularly important for lawyers to acknowledge, as most clients retained online use mobile devices to access service information.  

Page Quality 

Page Quality ratings are based on numerous factors. The weight given to each factor is based on the type of website and query. Key factors to make a note of are E-A-T and YMYL.  

E-A-T

Raters use E-A-T as a guiding principle to rate design, content creation and supporting external signals. E-A-T is an acronym for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The categories are related to searcher intent and subject matter. While E-A-T is not a ranking factor, Google’s Quality Raters are still guided to look for it. 

Expertise 

A website’s content expertise is based on individual web pages. Expertise is about content and addressing topics to meet users’ queries. Regarding law, if a searcher were looking for information on laws and your website covered specific statutes with links to state government websites, the expertise criteria would likely be filled. 

Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness refers to the authority of the content itself and the domain. This is often based on external signals like links, link quality, brand mentions, and citations to specific content and the website as a whole. The stronger your website’s domain and content, the more authority you will be awarded.

Trustworthiness 

Trustworthiness is judged similar to authority but more specific. It focuses on signals and sites. For example, good ratings based on a significant number of clients could positively affect a website’s trustworthiness. 

Law Firm Websites and YMYL

Google labels websites that can potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, safety, or financial stability as YMYL (Your Money, Your Life). YMYL websites call into the following categories:

• News and current events
• Civics, government, and law
• Finance 
• Shopping 
• Health and safety 
• Groups of people 

Law firms are considered YMYL, so they are rated differently from other Google Quality Rating Guidelines websites. YMYL websites are divided into three main categories: 

• Main Content. The main content is any part of a page that helps it achieve its purpose. Primary practice area pages and your homepage are considered main content.
• Supplemental Content. Like blogs and practice area subpages, Supplemental content contributes to a quality user experience, like navigational ease with access links. 
• Ads. Advertisements or monetization are content or links that are displayed to make money. 

Needs Met 

Recently, Google has expanded the section as it is viewed as a significant rating factor. Needs Met refers to intent. Raters ask themselves how helpful or satisfying a website or webpage is during an assessment. The information is sent to Google about the site structure, device, demographic, and location result difference. Those ratings are then used to improve outcomes to determine which signals are common to higher ranking results algorithmically. 

Interpretation is also a key element of Needs Met. Interpretation refers to the multiple possible meanings a single query could have. Raters consider dominant, standard, and minor interpretations to ensure that pages with high intent satisfaction are more likely to appear higher in search rankings. 

One way to ensure your websites are rated high in the Needs Met category is to address multiple intents for a single query. If you do this successfully, your page will naturally satisfy more interpretations. 

Mobile User Needs 

In addition to Needs Met and Page Quality, Quality Raters are also tasked with rating mobile interaction. Google knows that people rely on their phones and other mobile devices for different tasks in different environments. They may want to search the web or tell their phone or device to do something specific. The goal is for mobile smartphones to make tasks easy, so websites must be optimized for mobile. 

Digital Marketing: Next Steps

If you are not a Quality Rater, trying to decipher Google’s 172-page guide can seem like a lot. However, it is crucial to know what SEOs should take away from the guidelines. Overall, remember to provide transparent sourcing for information, ensure your content is free from factual errors, demonstrate enthusiasm, and provide background information for the author or a link to the “about” page. 

If you are in the process of learning how you can optimize your website for Google Quality Rating Guidelines, it is normal to feel overwhelmed. It is important to remember the guidelines are important as they tell us what Google wants to see and how you can improve your website.

Annette Choti graduated from law school 20 years ago, and is now the CEO & Owner of Law Quill, a legal digital marketing agency focused on small and solo law firms. Law Quill is the only legal digital marketing agency that provides unique, SEO-optimized content, pre-packaged content, and courses for lawyers to learn SEO themselves through Law Quill Academy. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or at annette@lawquill.com.