Honcho designed an evaluation and scoring system which covered the key themes and topics mentioned in Google’s quality raters guidelines QRG.

We then created a condensed version of the QRG to instruct our raters before beginning the evaluation process and prepared the evaluation checklist for each market, including all the pages that needed to be analysed for the ECG domain and all the relevant competitors.

Once the evaluation prep was completed, we recruited suitable candidates to take part within our evaluation; they needed to be native speakers living in the country for the analysed market, have some IT literacy but not be specialists, they shouldn’t have been aware of ECG domains – it was key to follow the same criteria as Google to ensure our final analysis was as valid as possible.

The raters performed the evaluation over 1 – 2 weeks.

Once completed, we looked over the documents to ensure that all work was satisfactory and began compiling our overview and recommendations around the issues we found, the exposure to risk of penalties or opportunities for them to improve their authority and E-A-T score.