E-E-A-T for European companies
E-E-A-T is not a score you can raise directly. It is a set of things assessors and systems look for: named people with real standing, first-hand accounts of work actually done, verifiable corporate identity, and dates that show somebody is still paying attention.
The acronym comes out of search quality guidelines and it gets treated as a mysterious ranking factor. It is neither mysterious nor a factor. It is a description of what a careful assessor looks for when deciding whether a page deserves to be believed, and most of it is straightforwardly publishable.
Experience: did you actually do this?
The addition of the first E was the most consequential change, and it is the one European professional firms are best placed to answer. First-hand accounts of specific work: what the situation was, what you did, what happened, what you would do differently. Not case studies written as advertisements — accounts written as records.
This is also the material that is hardest for a competitor to copy and most likely to be quoted, because it contains specifics nobody else has.
Expertise: who is saying it?
- A named author with a real role, not "the editorial team".
- A page about that person: their background, their qualifications where relevant, what they have worked on.
- Their presence elsewhere: a professional profile, talks, publications, professional register entries.
- Author markup connecting the person to the article and to the organisation.
A page published by nobody in particular is harder to believe, and it is treated that way.
Authority: does anybody else say so?
The part you least control. It accumulates through being referenced by others: trade press, associations, partners, clients, registers. In a European context, membership of a professional body, an entry in a chamber of commerce register and citations in sector publications carry weight that a directory listing does not.
The workable version of this is not link building. It is doing things worth referencing and making them easy to reference: publishing the data, the method, the position, at a stable address, under a name.
Trust: can somebody verify you exist?
| Signal | What to publish |
|---|---|
| Corporate identity | Registered name, registration number, registered address, VAT identifier |
| Reachability | A real address, a real phone number, a named contact |
| Legal pages | Terms, privacy notice, processor list, complaints route |
| Currency | Visible revision dates on anything that can go out of date |
| Consistency | The same facts in the markup, the footer and the register |
European companies have an advantage here and frequently waste it. A chamber of commerce number, a VAT identifier and a registered address are independently verifiable in a way that most of the world's trust signals are not. Putting them in the footer and in the Organization markup costs nothing.
What does not work
- Invented author personas with generated portraits. This is detected, and the cost when it is detected is the whole site's credibility.
- Badges and seals that link to nothing.
- A trust page that asserts trustworthiness rather than showing anything checkable.
- Review markup on your own pages about yourself.
Questions this settles
Not directly. It describes what quality assessment looks for, and systems are built to approximate those judgements. You cannot set it; you can publish the things it is looking for.
Every page carrying advice, figures or a position does. Product and legal pages are published by the organisation and that is appropriate.
A short professional page with role and background is enough; it does not require a personal presence elsewhere. Anonymity on advice pages does cost something, and that trade-off is worth stating to them plainly.