Google Runs a Credentialing Process on Your Website. Most Practices Fail It on Paperwork.
Before you ever saw a patient, a committee verified your degree, your residency, your board status, and your references against primary sources. Tedious, but you understood the point: in medicine, claims get verified before trust gets extended.
Google does the same thing to your website. For health topics, it applies a stricter quality standard than it applies to nearly anything else it ranks, because a bad answer to a health question costs the searcher more than a bad restaurant recommendation. Internally the framework has a jargon name, E-E-A-T, but you can ignore the acronym. The four things it checks are things you already understand: has this person actually done the work, are they qualified, do independent sources vouch for them, and is the record clean. What trips up most practices is that Google can only verify what is on the page. A board-certified physician with fifteen years in practice whose website never says so is, to Google, indistinguishable from an anonymous content farm. The failure is clerical.
First-hand experience: does the page sound like someone who does this work
Google’s newest criterion looks for evidence that content comes from someone with direct experience of the subject, and on a practice website the difference is detectable. A service page written by the physician who actually provides that service contains things a hired writer never includes: what patients consistently misunderstand at the first visit, which questions come up in the room, where the textbook version differs from the Tuesday-afternoon version. You would spot the difference in thirty seconds reading a colleague’s patient handout next to a content mill’s. Google is getting steadily better at the same distinction. The practical implication: the pages describing what you treat should be written or substantively reviewed by you, and should say at least a few things only the person who does the work would say.
Stated qualifications: the fastest fix on this list
Every page describing your clinical services should carry a name: yours, with credentials, linked to a real biography with your training history. A remarkable number of practice websites publish this content anonymously or under “Our Team,” which discards the practice’s single strongest trust signal. You would never submit an unsigned journal article. Do not publish unsigned service pages. This is usually an afternoon of work, and it is the highest-yield item here.
Outside verification: what other sources say about you
A credentialing file built entirely from self-attestation would go nowhere, and Google weighs your own website’s claims about you the same way. Independent confirmation comes from your hospital affiliation page, your specialty board’s directory, professional society listings, claimed profiles on Healthgrades and Doximity, coverage in local press, and any published research linked to your name. These live outside your website, which is exactly why they get skipped: they feel like someone else’s paperwork. They are also what separates a site Google trusts from one it merely tolerates. If you have publications, make sure they are findable and connected to your profiles. Most physicians with a research record have never linked it to their practice’s web presence, which leaves credibility on the table for no reason.
The clean record: trust erodes faster than it builds
The last layer is mundane hygiene: accurate contact information everywhere it appears, a working secure connection, a real privacy policy, reviews that look organic, and pages that reflect the practice as it exists today. One conspicuously outdated page, a departed provider still listed, a service you no longer offer still advertised, works like a discrepancy in a chart audit: it casts doubt on everything around it. Before adding anything new, fix what is stale.
The audit, in one sitting
- Open your three most important service pages. Does each carry your name, credentials, and a link to a real bio?
- Search your name plus your specialty. Does anything you do not own confirm your qualifications: board directory, hospital page, society listing?
- If you have published, check whether any of it is linked from your site or your claimed directory profiles.
- Read one of your own service pages cold. Does it sound like you, or could it hang on any practice’s wall?
- Find your most outdated page and update or remove it.
You already hold the credentials. This is the paperwork that lets Google see them.