EEAT, One Letter at a Time: Experience

Of the four components that make up EEAT, Experience is a recent addition. Google added it in late 2022, separating it from Expertise to make a distinction between knowing about or being trained in something and having true, actual experience in it. Think about a stodgy archaeology professor who knows a ton about the subject from their studies or books but has never conducted a site survey or been on a dig. That is Expertise. Now think about Indiana Jones, not only an expert in archaeology, but a man who has extensive experience in the field finding and acquiring artifacts, conducting digs, and running from giant boulders. That is Experience, however admittedly fantastical it appears in the films. Both are important, and the distinction Google created by adding Experience to the framework makes a lot of sense when considered in this way.

Experience is a great boon for small businesses. Large corporations and content farms can create the appearance of expertise by pumping out large volumes of information. Any person using AI can let it dredge the internet and sound like they know what they are talking about, whether or not they do. Firsthand experience is hard to fake, and it’s what small local businesses have because they’re out there doing the work. The challenge for them is showing it in a way that enables Google to recognize it.

What the Heck is Google Looking For?

When Google evaluates Experience, it’s looking for evidence that the person or business behind a piece of content has direct, personal involvement with the subject. Google’s own quality guidelines describe this as content that could only have come from someone who has genuinely been there: made the thing, done the work, lived the situation being described.

This matters because the internet is full of content assembled from other content. Anyone can write a passable article about pool maintenance by reading ten other articles about pool maintenance. What they can’t replicate is the knowledge that comes from opening up hundreds of pools at the start of a Colorado season, seeing what goes wrong, and knowing which problems are common and which are genuinely unusual. That specificity is the signal Google is looking for.

The practical result is that Experience rewards businesses that talk about their work the way people who do it every day talk about it, with real details, observations, and perspective.

Does It Matter What Kind of Business I Own?

Experience signals will show up differently for different types of businesses, but the underlying principle is consistent across the board. You must show the work, not just describe it.

For a pool and spa company, Experience means more than just listing its services. It might mean posting photos from actual installations with context about what made that project interesting, challenging or enlightening. It might mean writing about what customers in a specific region consistently get wrong about opening their pool every year, because that’s the type of knowledge one gets from doing so repeatedly. It might mean a service technician explaining what they saw on a job last week, why it’s important, and doing so in plain language that anyone can understand.

For a real estate agent working in a specific geographic area, Experience means content that clearly comes from a person who knows those streets. What makes one neighborhood different from the one two miles away? What do potential buyers consistently underestimate about owning property in the mountains? What has changed in that realtor’s market over the last two years that only they would know? These are things only a realtor in that market can say, and Google knows it.

For a home services company, whether plumbing, electrical, landscaping, or HVAC, Experience might mean documented evidence of completed jobs. Before and after photos, descriptions of solved problems, and customer testimonials that are more than just generic five-star review. This is content that shows someone was there instead of just being generic industry speak.

Common Mistakes

One common mistake businesses make is publishing content that describes a type of work rather than documenting actual work. A roofing company whose blogs only cover things like “five signs your roof needs repair” might be useful, but it shows the same level of experience as any other roofing company’s blog might. Google can see that pattern across millions of sites, and it won’t distinguish one generic article from another.

A second mistake is letting work speak for itself without any context. A gallery of project photos with no captions, descriptions, or commentary may be better than nothing, but it’s not doing the kind of EEAT work that the same photos with explanatory content would do. Google can’t fully evaluate an image, but it’s very good at evaluating the text around it.

The third most common is consistency. A business that published detailed, specific content about its work three years ago and has posted nothing since is sending a dated experience signal. Google weighs how recent content is, and a pattern of regular, specific content about current work is more valuable than something from 2021.

What Makes for a Strong Experience Signal?

Strong Experience signals share some characteristics:

• They’re specific to a real situation.
• They include details that only someone performing the work would know.
• They show an ongoing pattern of active work over time.
• They’re written in a voice that sounds like a real person talking about their own work.

For most small businesses, the best content for demonstrating Experience is a short, honest account of something that happened recently, written the way you’d describe it to a client in conversation. What did you do this week that was interesting, challenging, or different? What did you see that you hadn’t seen before? What question did a customer ask that made you think?

Those are the posts that increase Experience signals over time. They’re also the posts that build relationships with the people reading them, which is another great reason you should write them.

How Does Experience Connect to the Rest of EEAT?

Content that demonstrates Experience also contributes to Expertise, because showing specific knowledge about work also demonstrates depth of understanding. It contributes to Trustworthiness, because content that reflects real situations is more credible than content put together from other sources. And over time it supports Authority, because such a body of consistent content builds a reputation that other sites will reference and link to.

The components of EEAT aren’t separate boxes to be checked. They’re interconnected and reinforce each other when underlying content is genuinely good. Experience is the most foundational of the four because it’s the one that improves and makes the others possible.

Up Next: Expertise

In the next part of this series, we’ll take a close look at Expertise, what Google means by the term, how it is different from Experience, and what it takes to demonstrate it effectively.

At Wild Iris Marketing, we help businesses build content strategies that reflect their real experience and make it visible to both search engines and potential customers. If your current content isn’t doing that job, we’re happy to talk about why and what we can do to help.