What the four letters ask
E-E-A-T comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines — a public document written for the thousands of contractors Google pays to evaluate search results. It's not written for you, which is exactly why it's worth reading: it's the least marketed description of what Google considers a good page.
Each letter is a question about the page and the people behind it.
| Letter | What it asks | What it looks like on the page |
|---|---|---|
| Experience (added 2022) | Has this person actually done the thing? | First-hand detail: what you ran, what broke, a screenshot of your own dashboard, dates, the part that went wrong. |
| Expertise | Does the author know the subject? | A named author with a bio and a verifiable track record. Not "Admin", not "Team". |
| Authoritativeness | Is this site a recognised source on this topic? | Other credible sites citing you, a coherent body of work on the subject, third-party coverage that isn't a press release. |
| Trust | Can a reader safely act on this? | Real address and phone, clear pricing, refund and privacy policies, sources cited, nothing hidden until checkout. |
"Not a ranking factor" is the important part
Quality raters don't move your rankings. They score sample results, and those scores are used to evaluate whether changes to Google's systems made search better or worse. So there's no E-E-A-T score attached to your domain, nothing to look up, and nothing an agency can raise by 12 points this quarter.
That sounds like it makes the concept useless. It does the opposite — it tells you what to do. You can't optimise a score that doesn't exist, but you can make a page that a paid stranger, reading it cold against a 170-page rubric, would pass. That's a concrete brief.
Here's the uncomfortable version for most Indian service sites. You don't have an expertise problem. You have a trust problem: no registered address in the footer, no named humans, no pricing, a WhatsApp number and a contact form. Ten years of genuine expertise, invisible to anyone who hasn't already met you.
Trust carries the load, and YMYL raises the bar
Google's rater guidelines say it directly: Trust is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family. A page can be written by a genuine expert with real experience and still fail, if the site it sits on is untrustworthy — no contact details, misleading claims, or a checkout flow that surprises people.
The bar moves with the stakes. YMYL — Your Money or Your Life — covers health, finance, legal, safety, and major life decisions, and raters are told to apply the highest standard to those pages. That's most of what Indian medical, fintech, insurance and legal marketers publish.
For an IVF clinic or a mutual fund distributor, an unattributed 1,200-word blog post isn't competitive and shouldn't be. Those pages need a named clinician or licensed professional, stated credentials, a review date, and citations to sources you could defend to a regulator. We go through this in detail on SEO for healthcare.
The twenty-minute pass on a single page
Pick the page that matters most — usually a money page or the article you'd most like an AI assistant to quote. Work through this once and you'll have a template for the rest.
- Add a real byline linking to a bio page with credentials, years in the field, and a licence or registration number where the profession has one.
- Add one paragraph only someone who has done this could write. A specific failure, a number from your own work, the thing that surprised you. This is the whole of the first E.
- Show both dates — published and updated — visibly. If you update the page, change something real, not just the date.
- Name and link two sources for any claim that isn't yours. "Studies show" with nothing behind it is a trust deduction to a rater and to a reader.
- Put the registered business name, address and phone in the footer, and make them match your Google Business Profile exactly.
- Delete every unsupported superlative. "India's #1 agency" with no citation reads as a claim you couldn't back — which is precisely what it is.
- Publish the price, or the range, or at minimum how the price is arrived at. Nothing builds trust with an Indian buyer faster, and almost nobody in this market does it. Ours is on the pricing page.