E-E-A-T for a small business owner: show that you know what you are talking about
Google judges content on experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. A small business has a head start on the first point that most owners never use.
New to this topic? Start with Building authority as a solo business: why a small company can beat a big brand
What E-E-A-T is
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
The term comes from the guidelines Google uses for the people who assess the quality of search results. Those raters do not directly decide who ranks at the top, but their judgement helps Google fine-tune its systems. What they consider important is therefore a good indication of what Google wants to reward.
In December 2022 Google added the first E, for experience. That gave weight to something that was easily overlooked before: that someone has done something themselves, rather than only reading about it.
| Letter | Question Google asks |
|---|---|
| Experience | Has the writer lived through, used or done this themselves? |
| Expertise | Does the writer have the knowledge to write about this? |
| Authoritativeness | Is the writer or business seen as a source by others? |
| Trustworthiness | Is the information correct, and is it clear who is behind it? |
Google itself calls trustworthiness the most important of the four. An expert page that cannot be trusted does not score.
Why a small business can win here
Large content sites write about everything. Their articles are often well researched, but rarely based on first-hand experience. The writer has never installed a heat pump, never guided a customer through a renovation, never sorted out a freelancer's bookkeeping.
You have. That is exactly what Google wants to see with that first E, and what AI search engines are getting better at recognising. An article that starts with "in our last twenty installations in older houses we saw..." has something a generic article never gets.
The problem is that most business owners do not write down their experience. They write the way they think a website should sound: general, cautious, without examples.
Making experience visible
Experience is not something you claim, it is something you show. A few ways:
- Real examples. Not "we help many customers", but a concrete case: what the situation was, what you did and what came of it. Customer names are not needed.
- Your own photos. Of your work, your team, your workshop. Stock photos say you have no images of your own.
- What went wrong. An honest paragraph about what did not work and why shows more expertise than ten paragraphs about what does.
- Details only a professional knows. The pitfall with a certain type of house, the question customers always forget to ask.
Demonstrating expertise
Expertise is demonstrable knowledge. For a small business, that mostly means making it clear who is writing and why that person knows.
Put a name under your articles. With a short description: who you are, how long you have done this work, what your background is.
Make an about page that says something. Not "we are a driven team", but who works there, which qualifications and certifications there are, and since when.
Refer to your certifications and memberships. Recognition from a trade association is verifiable proof.
Write about your own trade. An installer writing about marketing has no expertise. About heat pumps, they do.
Building authority
Authority is what others say about you. You cannot arrange it on your own site, only earn it: mentions in local news, a guest contribution in a trade magazine, a link from a partner's or trade association's site.
Within your own site you also build authority on a topic. One article about heat pumps is a single page. A main article with ten worked-out subtopics that point to each other shows you master the subject. That is called topical authority, and how to approach it is covered in topical authority with AI.
How to earn mentions from others without buying links is covered in earning mentions.
Trustworthiness: the base under everything
Trustworthiness is about whether a visitor can trust you. A few things that contribute:
- Complete contact details. Address, phone number, company registration number. A business that cannot be reached cannot be trusted.
- A secure site. A padlock in the address bar is the bare minimum today.
- Current information. An article about subsidies with the rules from three years ago does more harm than good. Put a date on your articles and update them.
- Sources for numbers. A number without origin is a claim. With an origin it is information.
- Reviews from real customers, visible and with your replies alongside.
Where to start
You do not have to do everything at once. This order pays off fastest:
- Put a name and short bio under every article
- Rewrite your about page with facts instead of promises
- Add a concrete example from your own work to your three most important pages
- Check whether numbers have a source and whether information is still correct
- Choose one topic you want to build authority on and plan the articles around it
How dGENIX helps
The Authority Engine builds the outline for a topic: one main article with the pieces around it that point to it. It writes the articles on experience and demonstrable knowledge instead of filler, and puts them in your CMS as drafts. You add your own examples and press publish.
GENI draws on your knowledge document, with what you have recorded about your business and your work. The more real experience it contains, the less generic the drafts become. The GEO Engine checks whether AI search engines recognise you as a business, with the schema needed for that.
The broader story is in building authority as a solo business.
Frequently asked questions
Is E-E-A-T a ranking factor?
Not as one measurable number. Google uses many signals that together decide whether content is expert and trustworthy, and E-E-A-T is the way Google describes what those signals aim at.
Does this apply to every kind of website?
It weighs most heavily on topics that affect someone's health, money or safety. But it helps an installer or a hairdresser too: a customer would rather choose someone who demonstrably knows what they are doing.
Should I use my own name if I have a business?
A name and face behind your content make experience and expertise visible. For a small business, the owner is often the strongest source of trust there is.
