Apply Google's helpful content questions and the idea of E-E-A-T to a page you own.
Most people decide within a few lines whether to believe a website, and they rarely notice themselves deciding. Business owners face a different problem. They know their own work so well that they can't see which parts of it never made it onto the page. Words for what makes a page trustworthy give you a way to check.
Picture a parent searching for advice on whether their child needs tuition. They click on two results. One page offers eight general tips next to a stock photo of a smiling student. The other is written by a teacher who gives the name of her centre and describes three children she has taught (also invented). She also says plainly that some of them turned out not to need tuition at all. A few lines in, the parent trusts the second page more, though they would struggle to explain why.
Google has published two documents that try to describe this reaction. One is its guidance on what it calls helpful, reliable, people-first content. The other is the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, a long document written for the people who test Google's search results. Both are public, and you can turn both into checks for your own pages.
Google's page on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content includes self-assessment questions. Some of them came up in lesson 6.3, "Write for people first", in the course Content and copywriting that people read. Here the focus is the group of those questions organised under who, how and why, because it is the most useful group for checking a business site.
The who question is about authorship. A reader should be able to tell at once who created the content. Google recommends a byline wherever a reader would expect one, plus a short line about the author's background. A page with no author answers this question badly. Take Priya (an invented example), a tuition teacher who has taught upper primary maths for twelve years. On her P5 maths page, the line "written by Priya, who has taught upper primary maths for twelve years" answers the who question in one sentence.
The how question is about method. Tell readers how the content came about. Perhaps you tested the product, took the photos yourself, or based your advice on your own records. Where a reader would reasonably wonder whether automation or AI was used, Google's guidance asks publishers to say so openly.
Google gives the why question the most weight of the three. It asks about purpose: was the page created mainly to help the people who arrive on it, or mainly to bring in search visits? Pages that exist because "everyone in our industry has one" usually fail it. So do pages written because a keyword tool said a phrase gets traffic. If Priya writes a page because parents keep asking her the same question before they enrol, it usually passes.
E-E-A-T is a term from the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which use it to judge how far a page deserves to be relied on. It has four components.
Experience means first-hand involvement: the person behind the page has taught the class, cooked the dish or filed the claim. Expertise means the knowledge or skill the subject calls for, gained through formal training or long practice. Authoritativeness means the creator or the site is a known, go-to source on the topic. A centre that other schools or parents refer people to is one example. Trustworthiness means the page is accurate, honest and safe to rely on.
The guidelines rank trust highest of the four and describe the other three as supporting it. Real expertise doesn't make up for a page that hides who is selling what, lists wrong prices or makes claims it cannot back up. Small businesses usually build trust through ordinary details: a real address, a working phone number, clear prices or a clear way to get one, honest descriptions and accurate facts.
Google employs quality raters in many countries. They review search results and judge them against the guidelines, and Google uses their ratings to test whether changes to its systems are producing better results. Google states clearly that the ratings do not directly change how any single page ranks. No rater can mark your page down and push it off page one. Read the guidelines as an account of what Google is trying to reward, and don't expect any single item in them to work like a switch. A page that a careful rater would find trustworthy is moving in the same direction as Google's systems.
The guidelines single out topics that could significantly affect a person's health, financial stability or 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 fall into this group. On YMYL pages, raters are asked to expect a much higher standard of E-E-A-T, because a careless page on these subjects could cause real harm.
Consider a financial adviser in Singapore (an invented example) who writes about retirement planning. To meet that standard, the adviser puts their own name on the page and states their licence or representative status where it applies. They link to official sources such as the CPF Board for any figures and keep the page current. A retirement advice page with no author and outdated figures fails on trust, however well it is written.
Most tuition centre pages sit outside YMYL. The same habits still help there, because parents are deciding where to spend their money and a large share of their child's time.
When Priya checked her own P5 maths page, her answers to the who and how questions came out weak. The page named no teachers, showed no photos of real classes, and said nothing about how she tracks progress. She had twelve years of experience, and none of it appeared on the page.
To run the same check, choose the page that matters most to your business. This is often the main service page. Read it the way a stranger would, then work through the three questions. For who: who wrote it, and does the page say so? For how: how can a reader tell the business has done this work before? For why: why does the page exist, and would it still be worth reading if search engines did not exist? Finish by writing down one specific change that would show your first-hand experience more clearly.
For the activity below, answer the who, how and why questions for your own most important page. Then write one specific change that would show your first-hand experience more clearly.
Pick your most important page, answer Google's who, how and why questions for it, and write down one change that would show your first-hand experience more clearly.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).