An E-E-A-T Checklist for Medical Practice Websites
A chart note gets vetted before anybody reads the content. A patient checks who wrote it, when, and whether it was reviewed.
You run the same three checks before you sign off on a resident’s note: authorship, a date, and evidence that someone with standing looked at the work. That’s how a chart earns trust, before a single clinical word registers.
So you already run a version of the checklist below.
Your website gets read the same way, by two readers at once. A patient deciding whether to call, and Google deciding whether to show the page at all.
Google’s name for its version of the trust test is E-E-A-T – experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. It isn’t a ranking factor you can toggle on.
These are signals Google’s systems look for because patients look for them too, and a site that’s honest about who wrote what tends to satisfy both readers with the same handful of page elements.
Here they are with the jargon stripped out.
A named author on every page
The gap. A large share of practice sites publish condition pages, blog posts and FAQ answers with no author attached, or with a generic “posted by admin” line, or credited to “Our Team.”
Google can’t connect that content to a real, qualified person. Neither can the patient reading it at 11pm, trying to work out whether a symptom is worth a visit.
The fix. Every substantive page carries a named author, a specific physician or clinician with their own name on it.
A blog post about managing a chronic condition should say who wrote it, the same way a discharge instruction sheet identifies who signed it.
A real bio page for every credentialed clinician
The gap. Many practice sites run one “About Us” paragraph and call it done. There’s no dedicated page showing the physician is board-certified, where they trained, what they specialize in.
The fix. Each physician gets their own bio page. Medical school, residency, fellowship, board certification, years in practice, areas of focus.
Every byline elsewhere on the site links back to that page, and the E-E-A-T signals point back to it too, the credential file behind every note.
Reviewed-by lines on clinical content
The gap. A blog post written by a marketing contractor and never checked by a clinician is thin content in a white coat.
Patients can’t tell by reading it. They can tell when it turns out to be wrong, and Google’s systems increasingly can tell too.
The fix. Clinical content – anything describing a condition, a treatment, a symptom – carries a “Reviewed by Dr. [Name], [credentials]” line with a date, the way a chart note carries a co-signature.
If a physician didn’t actually review it, it doesn’t go up under a clinical claim.
Accurate, consistent NAP everywhere
NAP means name, address, phone – the practice’s core identity data. It sounds trivial next to clinical content.
But it works like a patient’s demographic header, and if it doesn’t match across every system that touches it, everything built on top of it is unreliable.
The gap. The practice name is formatted three different ways across the website, the Google Business Profile and a directory listing.
The phone number in the website footer is the old one. One listing is missing the suite number.
Each mismatch is small on its own, and together they tell Google (and confused patients) that the identity data can’t be trusted.
The fix. One canonical name, address and phone number, copied exactly (same abbreviations, same suite format) into every place the practice appears online: website, Google Business Profile, insurance directories, hospital affiliation pages.
Editorial dates that mean something
The gap. A page says “Last updated 2019,” or carries no date at all, on a topic where clinical guidance changes. That’s a chart with no visit date – technically information, practically useless for deciding whether to trust it today.
The fix. Every clinical page carries a real publish date and, when the content changes, a real update date.
A script that silently bumps the date every month with no edit behind it is a signal Google’s systems are built to catch, and once it’s caught it damages trust.
Update dates should reflect actual review, the same discipline as a chart amendment.
Structured markup that says the quiet part out loud
The gap. Everything above can be true on the page and still invisible to Google, because nothing in the code tells search systems “this is a physician, this is their bio page, this content was reviewed by them, this is the practice’s official phone number.”
A human infers all of it from context. A machine needs it spelled out.
The fix. Schema markup does the spelling out: Physician schema on bio pages, MedicalOrganization schema for the practice, author and reviewedBy fields on clinical content. It’s the same facts a patient can already see, filed in a format the machine reading the chart can act on, and a visitor never sees a thing.
Check your last five pages
Pull up the five most recent blog posts or condition pages on your site.
For each one, check three things: a named author, a reviewed-by line if the page makes a clinical claim, and a date that reflects real review rather than a placeholder.
The content itself is very likely fine.
If two or more of those are missing on something already live, fixing it means attaching the credential and the date that should have been there from the start, which leaves the design alone.
What’s missing is the same thing that would be missing from an unsigned, undated chart note, proof of who stands behind it.
Questions practices ask about this
Do I have to personally review every clinical page, or can I delegate that?
Any credentialed clinician in your practice can be the reviewer, as long as the name on the line belongs to the person who actually read the page. Batching helps, so set aside an hour, work through ten or twelve pages at once, then log the reviewer and the date in a simple spreadsheet so the next cycle starts from a known point.
Can my office manager handle this, or do I need a developer?
Your office manager can handle most of it, and the schema markup is the part that usually needs someone technical. Bylines, bio pages, dates and NAP corrections are content edits you can make in most website platforms and in your Google Business Profile. Schema lives in the page code, where one typo invalidates the whole block and search engines quietly ignore it.
What should I ask a vendor to include in the scope for this?
Ask for the content edits and the schema markup as separate deliverables, since they're different kinds of work and one can happen without the other. Get the page list in writing, along with who writes the bylines and reviewed-by lines, who confirms credentials are current, and whether pages you publish later get the same treatment or come back as a new request.
How long after fixing this would I see any change in search?
There is no reliable number to give you. Timing depends on how often Google recrawls your site, which varies with how much traffic and linking it already gets, and NAP corrections wait on directories and data aggregators syncing on their own schedule. Judge progress by pages corrected and dated, since that part is inside your control.
Photograph: cottonbro studio / Pexels