Blog · SEO without the hype
Every B2B site has an About page nobody has touched since launch, a Contact page with a form and a postcode, and no author bylines anywhere. These are treated as administrative pages. They are increasingly the pages that decide whether Google trusts the rest of the site.
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust. It comes from Google's search quality rater guidelines, which are instructions to the people who evaluate search results, not a direct ranking algorithm.
That distinction gets used to dismiss it, which is a mistake. The guidelines describe what Google is trying to reward. Systems get built to approximate them. And the signals they describe happen to be cheap for a machine to verify: is there a named author, does the author have credentials that exist elsewhere, does the company have a verifiable legal identity, are claims sourced.
For most commercial B2B topics the bar is lower than for medical or financial content. It is not zero, and the gap between sites that clear it and sites that do not is widening.
A real About page. Not a mission statement. Founding date, ownership, size, physical location, what the company actually does and for whom. Named people with roles. This is the page most often written last and edited never.
Individual team pages, or at minimum named bios. A specialist with a page listing their background, qualifications, and a link to a professional profile that corroborates it. One paragraph is enough. What matters is that the claim is checkable somewhere other than your own site.
Author attribution on every article. Not "Admin," not the company name. A person, with a link to their bio. This is the single most common gap on B2B blogs and the cheapest to close.
A contact page with more than a form. Physical address, phone number, registered company details, VAT number where applicable. For European markets there is often a legal requirement here as well, and the same page satisfies both.
Legal pages that are actually complete. Privacy policy naming the data controller, terms, and in German-speaking markets an Impressum. These are frequently generated from a template and left with placeholder text still in them, which is worse than not having them.
Case studies with verifiable specifics. Named clients where permitted, real numbers, real timeframes. An anonymised case with concrete metrics beats a named case with vague claims.
Pricing, or an honest explanation of why there is none. "Contact us for pricing" on every page is a trust cost. A page explaining what drives the price, with ranges, does more for both conversion and perceived credibility than any amount of copy about commitment to quality.
A page can rank on domain authority and accumulated behavioural data with none of the above. Ranking is not the constraint.
The constraint is selection. When a generative system has ten ranking pages and needs three sources, it needs a basis for choosing. Author identity, organisational identity, and verifiable claims are exactly the kind of thing that is cheap to check and discriminating.
We have watched a site hold a top-three position for its most valuable commercial terms and appear in zero generated answers across every priority query. The ranking pages were fine. There was no named author on any of them, no credentials anywhere, and the organisation had no structured identity a machine could resolve.
Writing the information is half. The other half is stating it in a form that does not require inference.
Organization on the homepage or a site-wide include: legal name, logo, address, contact details, social profiles, founding date, identifiers where you have them.
Person for team members, linked from articles via the author property, with sameAs pointing at professional profiles that corroborate the claim.
Article or BlogPosting on every post, with author, publication date, and modified date populated honestly.
FAQPage where you have genuine question and answer blocks.
BreadcrumbList for hierarchy.
LocalBusiness if you have a location customers visit.
The sameAs property does more work than its obscurity suggests. It is how you connect the entity on your site to the same entity elsewhere, and entity resolution is what a system does before it decides whether to trust an attribution.
Validate what you publish. Broken markup and absent markup look identical to a parser, and the failure is silent.
The ghost author. An article signed by a name with no bio page, no credentials, and no presence anywhere else. This is worse than no attribution, because it makes an unverifiable claim rather than none.
The template legal page. A privacy policy generated from a form with the company name still reading as a placeholder in one paragraph, or naming a jurisdiction the company has no connection to. Both are common and both are visible to anyone who reads.
Publication and modification dates are structured data, and they are frequently used dishonestly. Republishing an unchanged article with today's date is a well-known tactic and a straightforward misrepresentation.
The version that works: genuinely update the article, change the modified date, and say what changed. A visible note reading "updated July 2026: revised the section on AI citations after Google's guidance changed" does more for credibility than a fresh date on unchanged text, and it is true.
Most sites fail four of these six. The work to fix them is measured in hours, not weeks, which makes it one of the few remaining places where a small amount of effort produces a disproportionate result.
Being honest about the limits, since E-E-A-T is oversold as much as it is ignored.
It does not rescue thin content. A well-attributed article that says nothing will not rank.
It does not substitute for technical health. A page that cannot be crawled has no credentials worth evaluating.
It is not a ranking factor you can point at in a report. You will not see a number move because you added an author bio. The effect shows up in whether you are selected when several pages are equally eligible, and that is hard to attribute cleanly.
Which is precisely why it stays undone. It is unglamorous work with no clean attribution, on pages nobody visits, and the competitors who have also not done it are the ones you are competing against for citations.
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Not directly. It describes what Google's quality raters are asked to assess, and the systems are built to approximate it. The signals are also increasingly used to select sources for generated answers.
A substantive About page, named team bios, author attribution on articles, a contact page with registered details, complete legal pages, and case studies with verifiable specifics.
Yes, linked to a bio page with credentials that can be verified elsewhere. An unlinked name is worse than no name.
Organization, Person with sameAs, Article or BlogPosting with author and dates, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, and LocalBusiness where relevant.
Only if the content actually changed. Changing the date on unchanged content is misrepresentation and detectable. Update the content, update the modified date, and say what changed.
Hours rather than weeks for most sites. It is the cheapest remaining work in SEO and the most consistently skipped.
We'll check indexing, speed, content and the backlink profile, name the three biggest problems and the order of work. Real findings, no filler, no strings attached — the report is yours to keep either way.