E-E-A-T Checklist: 8 Things to Check in (Roughly) 8 Minutes

E-E-A-T is a very hot topic in SEO. With the explosion of AI-generated content, it’s now essential that your website demonstrates experience, expertise, authority and trust. Tools like ChatGPT and Gemini mean anyone can create unoriginal (and potentially poor quality) content, at scale. The result? It’s now much harder to trust what you’re reading online.

So, to avoid low quality content taking up the top spots on search, Google looks for “helpful, reliable, people-first content”. In other words, accurate, genuinely valuable content written by individuals – not brands. This means you need to put your users at the heart of your website, SEO and digital PR strategy. You need to show them that you’re a trustworthy, authoritative expert in your niche. If you can do this, you’ve got a great chance at ranking well.

But this is pretty abstract advice, right? How do you actually demonstrate E-E-A-T? To help get your website up to scratch, we’ve put together an E-E-A-T checklist that you can run through in a few minutes.

• Our Team page and individual people pages
• About Us page
• Contact Us page
• Fix spelling and grammar mistakes
• Case studies
• Testimonials and reviews
• Links to your social media accounts
• Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions pages

One of the key things Google (and website visitors) look for? Exactly who is behind your website. They want to know who does the work, what their backgrounds are and what expertise they have. And that they’re real people!

Imagine you’re looking for advice on business funding. Are you more likely to trust content written by a business finance expert with 10 years’ funding experience, or content written by a food blogger?

Google is exactly the same. It wants to see that genuine experts (or people with genuine experience) are behind a website. So it’ll review your team pages to identify who works at your business. Then it’ll look at things like their years of experience, the sectors or brands they’ve worked on in the past, and any relevant qualifications they’ve achieved.

This is particularly crucial for businesses dealing with financial or health advice. Google calls them YMYL – Your Money or Your Life topics. Content on these topics needs to be trustworthy, so Google’s extra-stringent on how it evaluates expertise and experience.

To demonstrate exactly who your experts are, you should have an:

• Our Team page: Set out who your team is, what their roles are, and ideally include some high-quality imagery of them. Real photos of real employees only – no stock imagery here!
• Individual people pages (with bios): Bio pages for each team member, explaining their background, experience, expertise and any relevant accreditations. These should include contact details for each person (even LinkedIn accounts if possible). Also, link to these pages from any blogs they write, to clearly show who’s authoring your content.

An About Us page is crucial for your website’s user experience. It shows people who you are, what you do and what you stand for. And it helps legitimise your brand – showing you’re a real business doing real work. While it probably won’t drive any organic traffic, it plays a key role in your website’s credibility. Which makes it equally important for your SEO.

Things to include in your About Us page:

• What your brand does
• What makes it unique
• Your history
• Your values
• Your accreditations and awards
• Your mentions in the media
• Your achievements and relevant statistics

To demonstrate you’re a trustworthy brand, you need to be easy to reach. If your website visitors have any queries or issues, they should be able to contact you without hassle. This means an easy-to-find Contact Us page with multiple communication channels.

Some key details we recommend including are:

• Office(s) address – ideally including a map
• Email address – multiple emails for different user queries, if necessary
• Phone number – multiple phone numbers, if necessary
• Social accounts – more details below

But beyond this page, you should also be including contact details throughout your website. Whether on blogs, product pages or support pages – it needs to be easy to contact you, no matter which page your users are on. And make sure you’re always monitoring incoming queries. There’s no point having contact details if you don’t reply to anyone!

Spelling and grammar are great indicators of website quality. Typically, poor quality websites contain more typos and mistakes, and high-quality websites don’t: it signals care and attention for the content you’re creating. Google’s algorithms know this, so fixing typos is a quick way to ensure your website is viewed as trustworthy.

While spell checkers and AI tools can be useful, there’s no substitute for a human review. And as PRs, we’ve had a lot of proofing practice over the years. So here’s a few of our favourite tips on how to accurately and efficiently proof your content:

• Proof for one type of mistake at a time: We find that focusing on one type of issue – whether that’s typos, punctuation, structure – is the most productive way to proof. Your brain can focus on spotting each mistake and you’re much less likely to miss anything.
• Read it backwards: Sounds strange, but it works. Reading backwards stops you skim reading and forces you to focus on each individual word – which means you’re able to identify mistakes more easily. Although it definitely takes some getting used to.
• Get other people to proofread your content: Our most important tip. If you wrote it, you already know it. You know what it covers, where it goes, how it flows. But someone else won’t know the content. They’ll need to read every word to understand the message – meaning they’re more likely to spot any issues.

We’ve got more proofreading tips coming soon (keep an eye out), but we’d definitely recommend this blog from Copyblogger for some proofing guidance.

Like your website visitors, Google wants to see and understand your brand’s expertise. It wants to understand how much of an authority you are in your niche, and case studies are a perfect way of demonstrating this. Ideally, they’ll cover the various products/services you offer and the different sectors you operate in. If you can cite some well-known names, a quote from a happy customer and juicy statistics, even better.

89% of people check reviews as part of their buyer journey. And Google’s very aware of this. So if you can demonstrate positive reviews from real people, it’ll be great news for your E-E-A-T. This can be anything from Trustpilot or Google reviews to testimonials on your website. By identifying what people really think about your offering, Google can better trust what you’re saying on your site – as it’s not just you that’s saying it.

Active socials are a clear indicator of a trustworthy brand. By posting and engaging with others, you can demonstrate you’re an established brand operating across multiple channels. So clearly linking between your website and social media accounts is an easy way to improve your E-E-A-T.

If you haven’t invested in social media yet, it’s definitely something you should think about – for lots of reasons. But don’t just create social accounts for the sake of it. You need to find out where your audience is, and then ensure your brand is visible on the social channels they’re using. If you’re after more info on understanding your audience, we’ve previously written blogs on an audience-first strategy and audience research tools that could be useful.

Not the most glamourous pages, but absolutely essential. Your privacy policy and Ts & Cs should be somewhere in your footer – and should be accessible from every page on your website. And if you haven’t got any yet, you need them. ASAP.

At the end of the day, you can’t game Google. It’s continually being updated to better satisfy users’ intent, and to penalise black hat SEO. This means it’ll always beat people trying to find shortcuts to success.

So instead of focusing on what Google wants, think about what your users want. What information do they need to see? How can you gain their trust? How can you show them your expertise? This is exactly what the algorithms are designed to reward – so if you can satisfy your users, you’ve got a great chance at satisfying Google. And if you can’t, you shouldn’t be ranking well anyway!