You will be able to apply Google's helpful content questions and the E-E-A-T idea to a page you own.
You search for advice on whether your child needs tuition and open two pages. The first is a list of eight general tips with a stock photo of a smiling student. The second is written by a teacher who names her centre, describes three children she has taught and admits that some of them did not need tuition at all. You trust the second page within a few lines, and you could not fully say why.
Google has tried to put that instinct into words. It publishes guidance on what it calls helpful, reliable, people-first content, and a long document for the people who test its results, the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Both are public. This lesson turns them into checks you can run on your own pages.
Google's page on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content offers a set of self-assessment questions. You met some of them in Content and copywriting that people read, lesson 6.3, Write for people first. Here we use the part of the page that is most useful for checking a business site: the questions it groups under who, how and why.
Who created the content? Google suggests making this obvious to a reader, for example with a byline where one would be expected and a line about the author's background. A page about P5 maths that says "written by Priya, who has taught upper primary maths for twelve years" answers the question. A page with no author answers it badly.
How was it created? If you tested a product, took the photos yourself or based advice on your own records, say so. Google's guidance also asks publishers to be open about the use of automation or AI where a reader would reasonably wonder whether it was used.
Why was it created? This is the question Google treats as most important. Was the page made mainly to help people who arrive on it, or mainly to attract search visits? A page written because "everyone in our industry has one" or because a tool said the keyword gets traffic usually fails this test. A page written because parents keep asking Priya the same question before they enrol usually passes.
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It comes from the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which use it to judge how much a page deserves to be relied on.
Experience means the creator has done or used the thing: taught the class, cooked the dish, filed the claim. Expertise means they have the knowledge or skill the topic needs, which may be formal training or long practice. Authoritativeness means the creator or the site is a known, go-to source for the topic, for example a centre that other schools or parents refer people to. Trustworthiness means the page is accurate, honest and safe to rely on.
The guidelines treat trust as the most important of the four. The other three support it. A page can be written by a real expert and still be untrustworthy if it hides who is selling what, has wrong prices or makes claims it cannot back up. For a small business, trust is often built by plain things: a real address, a working phone number, clear prices or a clear way to get one, honest descriptions and accurate facts.
Google employs people around the world, called quality raters, to look at search results and judge them against these guidelines. Their ratings help Google test whether changes to its systems are producing better results.
Google is clear that the raters' ratings do not directly change how any single page ranks. A rater cannot mark your page down and push it off page one. So the guidelines are best read as a description of what Google is trying to reward, not as a list of switches. That is still useful, because if your page would look trustworthy to a careful rater, you are working in the same direction as Google's systems.
The guidelines single out topics that could significantly affect a person's health, financial stability, safety or the welfare of society. They call these Your Money or Your Life topics, usually shortened to YMYL. Insurance, investing, CPF, loans, medical advice and legal questions all sit here.
For these topics, the guidelines ask raters to expect a much higher standard of E-E-A-T, because a careless page could cause real harm. A financial adviser in Singapore writing about retirement planning should name themselves, state their licence or representative status where it applies, link to official sources such as the CPF Board for any figures, and keep the page current. A page that gives retirement advice with no author and outdated figures fails on trust, however well written it is.
A tuition centre sits outside YMYL for most pages, but the same habits still help. Parents are deciding where to spend money and a lot of their child's time.
Pick the page that matters most to your business, often the main service page. Read it as a stranger would. Who wrote it, and does the page say so? How do you know the business has done this work before? Why does the page exist, and would it still be worth reading if search engines did not exist?
When Priya ran this on her P5 maths page, the who and how answers were weak. The page had no teacher names, no photos of real classes and no detail on how she tracks progress. She had twelve years of experience and none of it was on the page.
The activity below asks you to answer the who, how and why questions for your own most important page, and then write one specific change that would show your first-hand experience more clearly.
Answer Google's who, how and why questions for your most important page and write one change that would show first-hand experience more clearly.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).