Last month I was doing a website review with an electrician who’d been in business for nineteen years, and within ten minutes of talking to him I had a pretty clear picture of what made him worth hiring. He knew his stuff inside out, his customers sent him referrals constantly, and he could tell me in about thirty seconds exactly why he was a better choice than the other electricians in his area.
And yet none of that came through on his website at all. His About page was four lines long, it said he was a fully licensed and insured electrician serving the Perth metro area, and that was where the description of who he was stopped. There was no name on it, no photo, nothing about the nineteen years, no hint of the person behind the business.
When I asked him why, he shrugged. “I didn’t think anyone read that stuff.”
Most local service business owners I work with feel the same way, and I genuinely understand why. They’ve spent their energy building a business that delivers great results, not writing about themselves on the internet. But Google is actively looking for that evidence, and if it can’t find it, it doesn’t give you the credit you’ve earned. The framework behind that assessment is called EEAT, and once you understand what it’s looking for, the fix is usually a lot more straightforward than it sounds.
EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, and it’s the framework Google uses to assess whether a business deserves to show up in search results. Google added the second E (Experience) in 2022, making it explicit that hands-on, lived experience counts, not just credentials on paper.
In practice, each element means something pretty straightforward. Experience is about whether you’ve actually done this work, day in and day out, not whether you’ve read about it. Expertise is about whether you know your field at a deep level, and whether that knowledge is visible somewhere Google can find it. Authoritativeness is about whether other credible sources recognise you, things like industry directories, review platforms, and local mentions that confirm you’re a real, established business in your area. Trustworthiness is about whether someone who’s never heard of you can look at your online presence and feel confident that you are who you say you are, and that you’ll show up and do what you say you’ll do.
For a local service business, all four of these are genuinely achievable, and the challenge for most isn’t that they don’t have them but that their website probably isn’t showing them.
EEAT has always been part of how Google assesses content quality, but over the past couple of years it’s been under a much brighter lens, partly because Google has been working harder to filter out generic, low-quality content. When almost anything can be written by AI in thirty seconds, the thing that separates a real expert from the noise is specific, first-hand knowledge that only comes from actually doing the work.
For local service businesses, this is a real advantage if you use it. A physio who’s been treating sports injuries for eighteen years knows things a generic health website doesn’t. A plumber who’s fixed a hundred blocked drains in Perth’s older suburbs has a sense of which areas have the most cast iron pipes and what that means for a job. That kind of specificity is exactly what Google is looking for, and when you put it somewhere online, it counts.
If you’re also wondering how AI search tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews fit into this picture, we cover that in Does AI Search Replace Google for Local Service Businesses?.
Going back to that electrician for a moment: the interesting thing about his situation wasn’t that he lacked EEAT. He had nineteen years of experience, a long list of happy customers, a trade licence, and a reputation in his suburb built through doing good work. What he lacked was any evidence of those things in the places Google could actually see them.
This is by far the most common pattern I see when I do website reviews with local business owners. The expertise is real and the experience is there, but it’s sitting in their heads and in their customer relationships rather than on their website or their Google Business Profile. So when Google is assessing their business against a competitor who’s taken the time to document their work and showcase their experience, they lose ground they shouldn’t be losing.
The things that could be working harder for you include your years of experience and the story of how you got into your trade, your client reviews and especially the detail in them, your trade licences and industry memberships, real photos of work you’ve done, a team or About page that shows the people behind the business, and case studies or before-and-after examples from actual jobs. If any of those are missing from your website, that’s where to start.
1. An About page that actually tells your story
Generic copy like “we’re a family-owned business passionate about quality” doesn’t give Google or your potential clients much to work with. Your About page is where you put on record who you are, how long you’ve been doing this, what you’re qualified in, and why people come back to you. It needs a real name and a real photo, and it should sound like a person wrote it. The electrician I mentioned now has an About page that includes his name, his nineteen years in the industry, his licence details, and the suburb he grew up in. None of that is bragging, it’s just giving Google and potential customers something real to assess him on.
2. More Google reviews, with more detail in them
Google reviews are one of the most direct trust signals for local businesses, and reviews with genuine detail do more work than star ratings alone. A review that says “five stars, great service” matters less than one that says “called Tuesday, came out the next morning, fixed our switchboard in Floreat, incredibly tidy job.” When you’re asking customers for reviews, it helps to prompt them a little, asking them to mention what you did and where you did it. Always respond too, to the good ones and the ones that aren’t so great, because how you handle feedback publicly tells potential customers a lot about how you actually run your business. For a full walkthrough of the trust signals Google looks for on your site, see The EEAT Trust Signals Google Actually Checks.
3. Content that shows what you know
Blog posts, FAQs, and how-to guides that answer the questions your customers actually ask you are some of the most effective EEAT signals you can build over time. You don’t need to publish every week. Even one good post a month, answering something you explain on the phone regularly, starts to build a body of evidence that you genuinely know your field, and over time those posts compound, giving Google more material to work with when it’s deciding whether you’re the right result for a search in your area.
4. Mentions from other credible sources
When credible websites mention your business or link to you, it reinforces to Google that you’re recognised in your field beyond your own website. This is the online footprint side of EEAT, and it includes things like local business directories, industry association listings, community pages, and any local media coverage you might have. A consistent presence across those sources is part of what signals to Google that you’re genuinely embedded in your local area and not just an anonymous website.
5. Credentials that are visible, not vague
Most local service businesses have trade licences, insurance, and professional memberships, and most websites mention them in a general way and then move on. Putting your licence number in the footer, showing the logos of the associations you belong to, and listing your certifications specifically on your About page turns a vague claim into something checkable. Google’s guidance is consistent on this: businesses that are transparent about who they are and what they’re qualified to do earn more trust, and that trust feeds into rankings.
By the end of our review session, we’d identified about six months’ worth of things to add to his website, and almost all of them already existed in some form. His trade licence was on his phone. His before-and-after photos were in his camera roll. His happy customers were there and waiting to be asked for a review. The story of how he got into electrical work was sitting in his head.
That’s the situation most local service businesses are in. The expertise is real, the experience is genuine, and trust is being built every day through good work in the local area. The job is just making sure that evidence exists somewhere Google can see it, because if it doesn’t, you’re not getting the credit you’ve earned.
If you’d like a second opinion on how your website is performing against these EEAT signals right now, and where the biggest gaps are, that’s exactly the kind of review we do at Blue Cherry. Get in touch and I’ll tell you straight where things stand.
Karen Dauncey has been working in SEO since 2003 and is a recognised expert in Local SEO for professional and service-based businesses across Australia.
She is the founder of Blue Cherry Online Marketing, a Local SEO and Google Ads agency she established in 2008. Through Blue Cherry, Karen has optimised over 1,000 websites and managed millions of dollars in Google Ads spend, giving her a deep understanding of what drives visibility and enquiries for service businesses in a constantly evolving search landscape. Over the past two decades, she has worked with a wide range of local service businesses including trades, allied health, psychologists, childcare centres, naturopaths, accountants, lawyers and many more.
Karen is also the creator of The SEO School, an online SEO course designed to teach business owners how to take control of their own SEO. She regularly delivers educational programs for Local, State and Federal Government and was an advisor for the ASBAS Digital Solutions Program. Her passion for making SEO accessible drives everything she does, from free resources to hands-on training.
Karen has attended search engine conferences in London, Stockholm, Adelaide and Sydney, and was invited to attend a pilot Business Coaching Course at Google's Head Office. She holds a Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK.
She is also the co-owner of the Digital Experts Directory, an online directory for female service-based businesses.
To keep up to date with the latest in SEO, join her Facebook group The SEO School Community or follow her on Facebook or LinkedIn.
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