E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

E-E-A-T is a quality framework that lives inside Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines. The raters are real people Google pays to judge whether search results are any good, and their scores feed back into how the ranking systems are tuned. The acronym used to be E-A-T. Google added the second E, for Experience, in late 2022 because firsthand experience turned out to matter as much as formal credentials.

Experience asks whether the person behind the content has actually done the thing. A roofer writing about ice dams has experience a generalist copywriter does not. Expertise asks whether they know the subject deeply. Authoritativeness asks whether the wider web treats the business as a known source. Trustworthiness, which Google calls the most important of the four, asks whether the site is honest about who it is, gives a real address, and does not mislead.

Google weights E-E-A-T heaviest on pages that can affect somebody's health, money, or safety. A page about a medication, a tax strategy, or whether a foundation crack is dangerous gets held to a far higher standard than a page about which paint color to pick. For a Michigan contractor, dentist, or accountant, that means the trust signals on the site are not optional polish. They are a ranking factor.

For a local service business, the practical version of E-E-A-T is simpler than the jargon suggests. Show that a real, named business with real people is behind the site, that those people have done the work, and that customers vouch for them.

You do not earn E-E-A-T by stuffing the word expert onto a page. You earn it by giving Google and visitors concrete reasons to believe you. The list below is most of the work for a typical local operator.

The two gaps we see most are anonymity and thin trust signals. A site with no named owner, no photos of real work, and a generic stock-photo About page reads as low trust to both Google and a cautious customer. Adding a genuine About page and a steady flow of reviews usually moves the needle within a couple of months, because it lifts every page on the site at once.