Demonstrate first-hand, real-life experience to set your content apart from AI

Gemma says: “Use first-hand and real-life experience to make your site content stand out, and differentiate you from AI-generated content.

Experience was the latest addition to the EEAT family, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. They are a mixture of factors that, as defined in the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, help Google to decide if the content of a site is relevant for users and helpful enough to prioritise in the search results.”

Why is experience so important?

“As Google defines it, experience is when a content creator or site owner shows that they have first-hand and real-life experience on the topic.

For years, showing experience has been very important for YMYL topics – those that can directly affect people’s lives, such as health, education, finance, news, etc. Today, with the rise of generative AI, showing experience is important for all kinds of websites.

The fact is that, now, creating valuable content is important because you need to go beyond the generic if you want to stand out from AI-generated content. If you want to rank well on Google search, it’s important that you show the experience that you have about your products.”

How do you demonstrate experience?

“You can demonstrate experience in two different ways: through your customers and through your own content.

First, in order to demonstrate experience through your customers, you need to leverage product reviews. These are the reviews that users leave on your site when they have experience using your product. Usually, if you provide a good purchase experience and offer high-quality products, you’ll naturally get better reviews – whether on your website, in directories, or on your Google Business Profile. However, collecting reviews is just the start of this strategy. It’s important not only to collect them but also to share them with other users.

For example, you can create testimonial pages where you show users’ experiences and opinions about the product. You can show this in different formats, either via images, video, or text. However, depending on the type of business you are in, it’s important to focus on promoting some relevant aspects more than others.

If you run an international e-commerce business, it’s important to stay up to date on shipping times, peak demand periods, and global logistics. You need to communicate this properly to your users to offer them a good experience and, therefore, get better reviews.

However, if you offer software products, you might care more about features such as language options, pricing, customer support, and localisation. Then, you would need to focus your efforts on providing this kind of good experience to your users to get proper reviews.

You want to provide a great experience that aligns with your business’ priorities, and then actively encourage users to leave their reviews. You can ask for reviews through post-purchase emails, offer incentives for reviews, or engage users via other platforms. Engaged users tend to leave more reviews, then you can gather them together.”

How do you know which websites to ask users to write a review on?

“Of course, you can’t ask people to leave a review on every site. That’s impossible.

First of all, develop your competitor analysis. See what your competition is doing and see what’s working for them. Then, analyse the different options that you have, depending on your business. If you are in e-commerce, you might get inspiration from Etsy or Amazon, but it would not be the same if you have an international site or if you are a B2B business.

Analyse your online competition, see what kind of directories there are, and focus your energies on some priority targets.”

Should you encourage customers to leave a certain type of review, talking about a certain type of product, to demonstrate to search engines what your business is about?

“I would recommend trying to do so, although I know it’s difficult.

You can perform analysis through some marketplaces that classify the types of reviews into different categories. They have some reviews that are related to shipping, some reviews that are only related to product, some reviews that are related to customer experience, etc.

If you have the option, you need to analyse what’s important in your business and try to facilitate users to leave reviews depending on the categories that are a priority for you. You might not be asking them to mention something super specific about the experience or product, but a category – like shipping, customer service, or product quality.

It’s important to leverage product reviews but also, in order to leverage experience within a website, it’s also important that the content you create that’s showing your experience is not just about how others use the product. It should also be about how you create the product and the knowledge that you have within the product or service.

As a content creator, you can develop how-to pages, and you can use videos, images, and guides that teach users how to use a product and also show how you created that product – which is the best way to use that.

You can also work with bloggers, influencers, and even staff members to show how they are using the product, and include that within this kind of content creation that you develop on your website.”

Should you embed reviews from third-party platforms on your own website? Or should you focus on publishing other content instead, like case studies?

“I wanted to focus more on the kind of content that you can create besides what you can get from other sites.

If you sell sports products, for example, you can have football players or basketball players using your product, record videos with them and the product, and use images. What you can create depends on you, as the content creator of your site, not on your users.

Unlike in reviews, this is where you can show what you know about your product, and it’s content that you can control.

Google crawls third-party sites and understands that it’s your brand, and they make sense of what the reviews are saying. They understand the context and what positive things users are sharing about your brand, which helps them gain confidence about what your brand is about and what you’re good at.”

How is the best practice for garnering the best possible type of review continuing to evolve, with AI and new opportunities to feed reviews into different discovery points online?

“We don’t really know what the final model will look like. However, just this week, Google announced that AI overviews are now available for all users in the United States.

Generative AI is here. What we need to try and do is focus on the content that will really help differentiate us from that. What is the kind of content that we, as content creators, can create that AI cannot? We can show off our real-life, first-hand experience. Therefore, we should try to do everything related to experience, not only via text, but through all kinds of other formats as well.

If you write something about travel and you want to show experience, write personal anecdotes. Put first-hand real-life experience in. Don’t just describe the route; show yourself as a person who has already travelled this route before. Demonstrate the experience that will help the user have a better journey on their own trip. It’s important that you use your knowledge and share it.”

You mentioned the importance of sharing how you put a particular product together, how it evolved, how it was created, etc. Can you think of a brand that’s done this particularly well?

“I cannot think of a concrete example, but there are a lot of brands that are doing this.

For example, lots of furniture brands will show how they construct a table, chair, or whatever. Instead of only writing guides on how to construct that table, it’s important to also show it now.

Explaining the process is something that AI can already do but, for now, they cannot show it.”

How do you measure and track the impact that demonstrating experience is having on the bottom line?

“It’s difficult to measure, but I have three concrete tips that can help you.

First, it’s important to monitor the review page’s performance. You can do this via GA4. In Google Analytics 4, you can filter by individual URLs or by the taxonomy of the category, and analyse the metrics of these pages. That might be through the number of sessions, average session duration, or more relevant aspects related to events that happen on these pages. This will help you analyse the engagement on these pages and the conversion rates.

On the other side, it’s also important to monitor user reviews. I have two different tips for doing this.

You can monitor user reviews that happen on your website. Usually, the easiest way to do this is via Google Tag Manager. Depending on how your site is built, you can track and measure some different patterns that will help you analyse whether users are engaged with these reviews or not.

You can also monitor traffic from other sites or directories where your reviews are found. You can see what happens to the traffic that comes from these sites, how they engage within your website, and the conversion rate from these sites.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“From what we’ve seen, AI-generated content is here to stay. Right now, it’s important that we stop doing what we have already done: doing things automatically and creating content without a large vision.

You need to look within your website, look at long-term strategies, and see what you really want to create.

Try to develop content strategies based on experience, expertise, and trustworthiness – because these are the things that will really help differentiate you from AI-generated content.”

Gemma Fontané is Co-Founder at Orvit Digital, and you can find her over at OrvitDigital.com.