What E-E-A-T is, and what Google can verify
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, and it comes from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the manual human reviewers use when assessing search results. It is not a score your site carries around. Google's ranking systems instead look for proxies they can verify: who wrote a page, what evidence it contains, whether the author demonstrably exists and knows the field, and what the rest of the web says about them.
Small businesses often assume this is a game for big publishers with famous columnists. In practice the opposite holds. A five-page site by a Gas Safe registered heating engineer who photographs their own installations can demonstrate first-hand expertise far more convincingly than a hundred anonymous articles. The working rule for everything below: every claim of expertise should be checkable somewhere.
Author pages that do real work
Most small-site author pages are two sentences and a stock photo, which persuades nobody. A page that genuinely supports authority includes:
- Full name, current role, and a specific description of what the person does day to day
- Named credentials: the qualification, the awarding body, professional memberships (CIM, ICAEW, Gas Safe, NICEIC, whatever fits your field)
- Years in practice and concrete experience: sectors served, types of work handled, not vague "passionate about" filler
- A genuine photograph of the person
- Links out to their LinkedIn profile and any other professional presence
- A list of every article they have written on your site, automatically updated if your CMS allows
Then use it: every article gets a byline linking to the author page. For technical or regulated topics such as finance, health, law or safety, add a "reviewed by" credit from whoever holds the relevant qualification.
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Person schema: the technical layer
Structured data lets you state the facts on the author page in a machine-readable way. Add JSON-LD Person markup including jobTitle, worksFor (linking to your Organization), knowsAbout for their specialisms, alumniOf where relevant, and sameAs pointing to their LinkedIn and other verified profiles. If they hold formal qualifications, hasCredential can express those too.
In your Article markup, reference the same Person entity as the author using its @id rather than repeating a bare name string. This connects every article to one well-described person, which is exactly the entity-level consistency search engines reward. One warning: keep it truthful. Markup that inflates job titles or invents credentials is worse than no markup, because it turns a trust signal into a trust liability.
Show first-hand experience inside the content
The first E, experience, is judged from the page itself. Generic content reads like a summary of other articles; experienced content contains things only a practitioner would have:
- Original photographs of your own work, premises, tools or team, not stock imagery
- Screenshots of real dashboards, settings or results, redacted where needed
- Specifics from actual projects: timelines, obstacles, what you would do differently next time
- Dates, versions and prices that show the content reflects current practice
- Honest limitations: when your approach does not fit, and who should not buy the service
This has a second benefit beyond rankings. It is the material AI assistants and prospective customers cannot get from anyone else, because it only exists inside your business.
Build the footprint beyond your own site
Authoritativeness lives mostly off-site. For each named author, work through a simple external checklist:
- A complete LinkedIn profile with matching name, title and work history
- Entries in the directories of relevant professional bodies
- One or two guest articles or expert comments in trade publications or local press; journalist request services and direct pitches both work
- Podcast or webinar guest appearances in your niche
- Speaking or contributing at local business events, chambers of commerce and industry meet-ups
Keep the name and job title consistent everywhere, and link each new profile or mention from the author page via sameAs. You are building a corroborated identity: anyone, human or algorithm, who checks whether this person is real and expert should find the same story wherever they look.
Key Takeaway
Make every expertise claim verifiable. Build full author pages with named credentials, mark them up with Person schema linking to external profiles via sameAs, add first-hand evidence such as original photos, project specifics and honest limitations to your most important pages, and grow each author's footprint through LinkedIn, trade directories and guest contributions. A small team that documents real experience consistently outperforms anonymous content produced at scale.
A 90-day plan for a small team
- Weeks 1–2: write full author pages for everyone who publishes, add Person schema, and byline every existing article
- Weeks 3–6: rework your ten most important pages to include first-hand evidence: photos, project specifics, honest caveats
- Weeks 7–10: fix LinkedIn profiles, join one professional directory, pitch one guest contribution
- Weeks 11–13: add reviewed-by credits to technical content and diarise a quarterly authority review
None of this requires a big team, only consistency and a willingness to put real people behind your content. Authority compounds: each verifiable credential, photo and external mention makes the next one more credible. If you want help with the schema, the author pages or the content itself, our team does this work for small UK firms regularly.