How can a business improve its Google E-EAT score?

Written by: Ryan Walsh

Date: 10/02/2025

 

Table of contents:

– What is Google E-EAT?
– Why it’s more critical than ever to show off you’re an expert
– Is Google EEAT a Google ranking factor?
– How can a business improve its EEAT score?

 

10-minute read

Introduction

Improving a business’s Google E-EAT score should be a key priority when improving any company’s organic search engine optimisation (SEO).

When weighing up the general condition of a business’s SEO, the SEO consultant should first and foremost consider the companies EEAT score. An overarching question should therefore be, is this information useful and helpful?

 

Any business

It doesn’t matter if you’re selling garden sheds or high-value cars; the website must offer high quality information, in terms of the information that your business offers.

Building links, having good website design, and making sure the website is “responsive”—well, that’s just getting the basics right.

That’s like getting the ground work sorted before you go on to building and mending the rest of the structure.

EEAT is more than that, its a framework, a set of guidance that businesses should follow, which basically sets out, is the work helpful, is it useful, has it been written by an expert. Yet more on that later.

 

 

First things first, what is Google EEAT?

Google is judging the whole website in terms of how much “expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness” the business demonstrates.

For example, if you’re an expert on what you are writing about, it will come naturally to explain something clearly and concisely, and therefore, it’s important that you have experts writing your articles. It doesn’t matter if you are writing a legal article or an article on how to make a curry, its important the article gets written by an expert on that particular subject.

 

Google Knowledge Vault

Google then has a lot of points, which can cross-check with Google Knowledge Vault.

If the articles been written by an expert, this will shine though, and it also generally lends itself to the page having higher engagement metrics.

For those that don’t know, good engagement means having lower bounce rates, plus, then coupled to much higher dwell times.

SEO agencies are therefore generally monitoring this statistics using Google Analytics.

Therefore, Google E-EAT is simply a set of guidelines for how Google decides whether a page is high quality or not.

It clearly outlines the attributes that deem a page high quality—for example, is the author an expert on what they are writing about?

Does it look like they have firsthand experience of what they are talking about?

Is the business an authority?

Can this business be trusted as a source of reliable information?

These are the sort of questions which Google E-EAT ask.

 

The Google Helpful Content Update

Since Google rolled out this important update, it’s important that each page of your website is made to be as helpful as possible.

Super helpful content marketing, well this tends to rank much higher higher on Google.

 

What do we mean by helpful content?

Well, that’s simple:

– The page should offer helpful information
– An expert should write the page
– The page should also have its authority improved by building backlinks to it

 

The dead Achor effect

So, if you have 100 articles, yet only 10 are top quality, and the rest are low quality then the low quality work is acting as big fat anchor.

We always describe low-quality content marketing, such as spun content and A.I articles, as acting like an anchor.

Basically dragging all SEO efforts backwards or to a grinding halt.

 

What do we mean by this?

Google is weighing up constantly whether the website offers high quality information. Using NLP, machine learning, such as monitoring bounce rate, Google’s RankBrain quickly learns if a page is quality or not.

 

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes

For example, many businesses have a lot of content thin articles, meaning the pages sometimes lack detail.

For example, the page might have a low word count and be written by somebody unfamiliar with the service or product.

These are the types of pages that are generally of low quality.

Since the Google EEAT update, with updates such as Google Helpful Content update and ever since Google Panda, low-quality pages would act like a massive dead weight.

So, this is why, sometimes, before you work on new content marketing, its important to review older articles, and ask, can they be improved?

For example, expanding the articles and making them more detailed could improve the company’s organic traffic. Check this using Google Analytics.

 

Quality always pays

Offering first-class information is essential to climbing Google’s ranks and surfacing at the top of the pile. Don’t, therefore, use duplicate work, spun content, content-thin articles, or any type of spam. When we are talking about spam, we do not mean the pork food in a tin—we mean low-quality work.

 

Before we go any further, let’s explain what this acronym means:

All this talk about EEAT might have you thinking of strolling over to a local café for brunch, but it has nothing to do with eating.

 

Lets dive into what the individual parts of Google E-EAT mean:

 

Experience-

You need the author to show they have real-life and real world experience with what they are discussing.

Whether its recommending fireworks or which car to buy next, the page, the content marketing need to show Google that you have real-world experience of what you are talking about.

For example, people often have problems or pain points when buying a product or service.

If you can help them, if you can help the customer, by showing you are an expert and offering helpful advice to the consumer, its these pages which then surface to the top of Google’s SERP’s. The on-page SEO must be good, sure, but just as important is the advice, your offering is it helpful?

 

Expertise

This is closely linked to demonstrating experience, so what we mean by that is simply that the content marketing needs to show expertise.

So, the author needs to be an expert on what they discuss.

This is often why you have different staff contributing or completely writing various articles for the business.

A brief example would be a leading law practice that offers different legal advice. Different solicitors, for example, may write the article each month depending on whether they are an expert on property, employment, or commercial disputes.

Therefore, within a business, you will have staff with different expertise, and you should use their knowledge to write more detailed and in-depth articles.

Google will notice that the work is comprehensive, thorough, and well-written, and your business will then move up Google’s organic ranks.

 

Authoritativeness

Most businesses need to do a lot of work here, and its the hardest aspect of improving the SEO.

You could be the world’s best expert on a particular product or service; however, if your website lacks authority, (Links and brand mentions) the business won’t rise up Google’s ranks.

Therefore, for Google to start noticing a business, it needs backlinks and some mentions.

But here’s the thing: there are backlinks- then there are backlinks.

What we mean by that is that today’s link needs to be extraordinarily good- exceptional quality.

They need to be top-quality, powerful links from good-quality businesses.

Ask any SEO agency, and they will tell you that this is, by a country mile, one of the most complex parts of improving a business’s Google EEAT: improving authority.

You need to think of the semantic web and gain backlinks from a website with a high Google DA score.

 

Trustworthiness

You can improve the trustworthiness of your business, for example, Google reviews on Google Business.

 

Take a bird’s eye view.

Create a picture: a hawk flying over a city, which is Cardiff City.

This means considering the website as a whole, taking a bird’ s-eye view.

Therefore, you must look back at older blog posts and pages and see if they need improvement.

For example, is the page content thin?

For example, does the website offer quality advice to customers?

It could be that the business had been adding thin content for many consecutive years or, even worse, duplicate work!

When we meet with clients, we say this is like having a big fat anchor on your company’s website.

Business owners now need to ask themselves: Can we make our website more helpful? (Google Helpful Content Update)

Since the Google Helpful Content update launch, helpful pages have surfaced higher in Google’s SERPs.

The pages will need substantial off-page work to support the page, such as incoming links; however, it’s now crucial that the content marketing is helpful and well-written.

 

More information on Google EEAT

Google EEAT is a set of guidelines that is published by Google.

In summary, the advice is that Google rewards high-quality content marketing and wants the business to show it’s an authority.

Therefore, the EEAT guidance determines how good a page is. Googlebot crawls and indexes the page as it always has, yet now, many factors are used to decipher how good that page is. For example, Google’s vast Google Knowledge Vault that can be used to see how detailed the answers and pages are.

Traditional ranking factors still matter. However, so does the quality of the advice your business offers.

Therefore, you can’t ignore more established ranking factors like links. Yet now, even more effort and time must be put into ensuring that content marketing is of the highest quality.

“For those not in the know, Google E-EAT is simply an abbreviation for “Experience Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.”

 

In summary:

Therefore, Google E-EAT is an overarching framework that Google uses to determine how good a website is.

Google will, therefore, ask if the page offers helpful advice.

Or is it half-baked?

 

Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

 

We might think of mind-bogglingly complex mathematical formulas when considering Google’s algorithm.

These formulas are often so long that even some of the best mathematical minds might struggle to decipher how the algorithm works.

Well, sure, Google does use complex mathematical formulas to make its algorithm work. Since the early days of Google PageRank, Google has used formulas to determine where businesses should rank in the results pages.

However, recent algorithm updates, such as The Helpful Content update, have moved towards a general quality score.

For example, how helpful and sound is content marketing?

However, web marketing agencies have to work on optimising ranking factors.

Now, a massive part of this is ensuring that content marketing offers the following:

– Well-written content marketing
– The work must be helpful
– Have a high Google E-EAT score
– And meets Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

 

Tell me more about Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.

Is this where Google employs actual humans rather than mathematical formulas to determine what makes a page or blog quality?

For example, is there an author?

Is the work helpful and well-written?

Does the page have good-quality incoming backlinks

And so on and so on.

So, think of it as a tick-box set of criteria that stipulates, which works out a way of deciphering, well, is that page high quality or not?

 

 

Spam

Google created its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines to reduce spam and has rolled out many updates to its algorithm to remove spam pages.

For example, some businesses put tremendous effort into creating quality advice.

On the other hand, businesses always want to try to get their companies ranked high on Google but sometimes don’t want to work hard on their SEO.

Therefore, they try using spam or what are called “black-hat” methods, and these methods don’t work.

Therefore, they try to cheat, and this is called spamming.

So, an example of spam could be content-thin content marketing, which involves pages that don’t offer much advice. Alternatively, it could be using “spun” or duplicated content, which can damage a company’s organic search engine optimisation, well, massively sometimes if used.

 

The problem with AI

The main issue with AI, which stands for artificial intelligence, is that it cannot relive experiences like a real person. So, for example, if you’re writing a piece of content marketing, the author can offer their expertise.

So, for example, a plumber can offer expertise, such as good brand taps, what causes leaking taps in the first place, and other recommendations, such as which taps last the longest. AI might offer this because AI cannot change a set of taps.

 

How to demonstrate experience on your company website:

Real rather than stock

At our SEO agency, we always advise that real photos be taken if possible. For example, show pictures of the step-by-step process when repairing or replacing a tap.

Don’t use a stock photo.

This is because Google will know it is a stock photo of a plumber replacing taps. It might have been used on 1,000 other plumbers’ websites.

Whereas if you had used an actual image, it would be unique and more helpful to the customer, as it would give a better idea of how to fix the taps.

 

 

YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) topics

Some businesses are in the YMYL group for those who do not know. This means that they are talking about or offering a service that is deemed to impact your money or your life.

Let me give you an example: A solicitor’s website will likely contain many blog posts and content marketing related to the divorce process for example.

If the reader were to base decision-making on the advice, it’s likely to impact their life significantly.

Therefore, this business and the content marketing will be deemed YMYL content marketing.

This means that, for example, it’s not talking about a football match; it’s talking about and offering advice about YMYL, which means the advice needs to be of good quality.

Google algorithm: Therefore, if the business is deemed a YMYl category, Google goes the extra mile to ensure accurate information.

So, the point is that if your business is a YMYL-type business, you must ensure that the content marketing is of good quality and offers helpful information.

 

How to demonstrate expertise

We recommend adding the author’s name and a link to the author’s LinkedIn page at the start of an article. This will help Googlebot follow the link to the author’s LinkedIn page and crawl and index the LinkedIn page.

This will then provide Googlebot and the algorithms with more details about the author, such as employment history, qualifications, and areas of expertise.

 

Helpful content

By publishing a lot of helpful content marketing, you, as a business, and your employees can show how you’re an expert on the subject.

You can show your expertise by offering helpful advice. Then, for people reading this advice, if the page has high dwell time and low bounce rate, the engagement on the page is high. These are blog posts or pages which Google moves up the search engine result pages.

Schema

Schema markup, a type of structured language, can be used to mark up the text, for example, to make it clear to Googlebot who the author is.

 

Authoritativeness, Backlinks and Semantic Web

So, let’s say you’re the world’s expert on a particular subject. Other businesses and websites will want to link to you because you’re the best.

This attracts a mixture of do-follow and no-follow links. The companies that are recognised as the best in the business will have a lot of links.
T

his means that whether you’re looking to buy a kitchen blender or find the best solicitor, the companies at the top of Google typically have the best links.

 

Trustworthiness

Trustworthy pages, however, are a combination of being written by an expert, having good links, and being often mentioned, so they have a high authoritative score. Then there’s experience. If the author can show real-life experience and show they are experts on what they are talking about, the business will be more trustworthy.

 

Google, to deem a blog post/page trustworthy, it must be:

– Written by an expert
– Must be well researched
– Should have links
– Must show that the author has in-depth expertise in what is being discussed.
– Link to reviews, for example, a direct link to businesses trust pilot account
– Website should use SSL encryption or HTTPS.

EEAT is not a Google ranking factor; however, it provides us, SEO agencies, and any business looking to improve their SEO with guidance. That guidance sets out exactly what Google uses to deem a website high quality or not and how Google differentiates a quality page from one that might get deemed spam.

 

Google rewards quality and hard work

If you were to ask our agency which SEO work gets the best results, the answer would be simple: often the fast and quick methods don’t work, such as “buying links,” which most definitely doesn’t work!

What works is when a lot of effort has been put into the work, when it’s high quality, and when it offers top-quality, beneficial advice to the customer.