A homeowner about to let a stranger into their house is asking a short list of questions. Are these people real? Do they know what they are doing? Has anyone else used them? Will they still be here if it goes wrong?
Search engines are asking the same list. The letters E-E-A-T are just the shorthand for it: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
None of it is a setting you switch on. It is whether the evidence exists and whether anyone can find it.
Experience: show the work
The thing a contractor has and a content farm does not is jobs actually completed.
- Photograph the work. Before, during, finished. The messy ones are more convincing than the tidy ones.
- Describe what the problem actually was. What you found, what you did about it, what it took. That is the detail nobody can invent.
- Film the occasional short clip on site. A technician doing a normal check says more than a paragraph claiming you are thorough. The filming checklist covers how to get something usable on a phone.
Expertise: show who is behind it
- Put a name on the advice. Pages written or checked by whoever actually holds the licence, and say so on the page.
- Write about the things you get asked. The repair people misunderstand, what makes a quote go up, what a code change means for them. Narrow beats broad.
- Keep it current. Anything referring to a code or a standard needs revisiting when the code changes.
Authoritativeness: show that others vouch
This is the slowest one and there is no way to buy it that does not eventually cost you.
- Trade bodies, suppliers, and local organizations. A mention from a supplier you actually buy from is worth more than a directory nobody reads.
- Say something useful where your trade talks. Local press and trade publications need people who know the work and will explain it plainly.
- Be findable as a business, not only as a website. A profile that is kept current is itself evidence somebody is still running the place.
Trustworthiness: remove the reasons to hesitate
The easiest of them, and the one most often left undone.
- Say who you are and where you are. A real address, a real phone number, and the area you actually serve.
- Publish the licence and the insurance. The numbers, not a claim that you hold them.
- Make the site secure. The padlock in the address bar, on every page that has a form on it.
- Show the reviews and answer them. Including the poor ones. The reply is read more carefully than the review.
- Say who will turn up. A name and a face beats a stock photograph of somebody else’s crew.
What this is not
It is not a checklist you complete once. It is not something a plugin adds. And it is not a promise about rankings, because nobody outside the search companies can make one honestly.
What it does reliably is remove doubt, and doubt is what loses the job between the search and the phone call.