How to be Known as an Expert in Your Field: What’s Your N-E-E-A-T-T?

What’s Your N-E-E-A-T-T? Wait! I thought it was E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Yes, but the evolution of AI Search expanded it. Getting recognized as an expert in your field is especially crucial in the age of AI Search. E-E-A-T is Google’s guideline for content credibility and getting indexed in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). However, the folks at White Scholars and Kalicube added the “N” and the additional “T”.

Where do the AI Answer bots get their information?

The AI search bots grab EVERYTHING from EVERYWHERE for information. This data changes constantly, so this is just to give you an idea of where the AI bots go to find information.

Blue is ChatGPT, pink is Perplexity, and orange is Google AI Overviews. Look at Reddit. LinkedIn is crucial for building credibility. Wikipedia, which is 25 years old, is cited mostly by ChatGPT. The problem with it is that people write what they want, and it’s hard to verify. Notice the other 2 barely cite it. Lastly, there’s YouTube. It’s owned by Google, so it makes sense that Google AIOs cite it a lot. Click here for more on YouTube.

If you’ve been doing SEO content marketing correctly, then adapting to AEO is easy; it’s basically long-form SEO. In other words, people are asking questions. You need to provide the answers.

Therefore, you need to get your N-E-E-A-T-T act together.

What does N-E-E-A-T-T stand for?

N-E-E-A-T-T stands for Notability, Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness, and Transparency. It is a holistic approach to proving to Google, the AI Answer Engines, and your audience that you are a legitimate, recognisable voice in your specific niche. Adding the “N” and the extra “T” to Google’s E-E-A-T sharpens your credibility.

• Notability: This isn’t about being famous. Also, it’s not what’s on Wikipedia. Notability is a hyper-niche. Notability is having enough impact within a specific field, industry, or topic for a very specific audience to warrant recognition. For instance, one of my clients is on the Arizona board of the association in his medical field.
• Experience: This is something AI can’t provide — YOUR personal experience on a subject. Demonstrate first-hand knowledge and practical involvement with a topic.
• Expertise: Possessing a high level of knowledge or skill in a particular field or industry.
• Authority: Are you the go-to person on this subject? If your website is seen as the authority in your field or industry, potential customers and the AI answer bots are more likely to trust the information you provide. Thus, it will lead to purchasing your products or services. Blog posts should be published first on your website to gain that authority.
• Trustworthiness: The reliability, accuracy, and safety of the content, site, and author. Can you be trusted? Can this information be trusted? Are you a trusted source? Are you legit? Remember this! It’s important! This is what both Google and the AI bots look for, as well as potential customers. In fact, this is a huge issue right now. The searcher doesn’t know who to trust.
• Transparency: To be trusted, you must be transparent. That means you have to be transparent in your About page on your website and your social media profiles. No more hiding behind avatars or fake names. If you’re legit, you need to show who’s behind the brand.

So, how do you get known as an expert in your field?

The first thing you need to do is clearly define and understand who your target audience is. Once you get to know your target, you need to determine what their burning questions are. And sometimes, the questions are the most basic you could ever think of, like, “What is a blog?” or “What is SEO?” or “What is Social Media?”

To you, the expert, they may seem stupid, but to the clueless person, they want to know. They’re asking Google. They’re asking ChatGPT, Grok, and Perplexity.

Sharpen Your LinkedIn Profiles

As you can see from the image above, LinkedIn is a valid place to. Your personal profile should be up-to-date, and there should be a recent, professional-looking headshot. Moreover, use all the space in your summary to highlight your expertise, experience, publications, certifications, and education.

There are TWO PROFILES! First, update your individual, personal profile, which highlights your education, experience, expertise, and anything else you want to show off. If you are a business owner, your LinkedIn profile should not sound like you’re looking for a job.

Second is your Company Profile. This is where you brand your business and build that trust and credibility.

LinkedIn also has its own publishing platform that anyone can contribute to. You can publish as yourself or your page. Which one depends on your branding. Make sure to always add a call-to-action (CTA) at the end with a link back to your website. Also, link certain keywords and phrases back to your blog on those topics.

One of my time-saving tricks is to repurpose my blogs from my site to LinkedIn. Just add a line at the bottom that this article originally appeared on… with a link to the original article. That tells Google to give the original post more authority in searches.

Optimize Your YouTube Channel

This may take a little time, but it’s sure worth it in the long run! I highlight what you need to optimize your YouTube channel in this article.

So how do you justify the time involved?

Think of it as sweat equity and part of your marketing. You may not see results right away, but you’ll be surprised one day when you’re asked to speak at a group or get hired for a job because someone was impressed by your answers and what came up when they Googled you. I can help you re-strategize your content marketing so that your chances of being cited will increase. Book a FREE Zoom call now!

Giselle Aguiar

Giselle Aguiar is a social media, inbound and content marketing strategist and trainer helping business owners learn how to leverage the power of social media marketing, increase traffic to their websites, generate leads, increase brand awareness and establish themselves as experts in their fields.

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