E-E-A-T for Healthcare Websites: A Practical Checklist

If you market a clinic, a practice or a treatment center, you already care about getting health information right. The trouble is that care is invisible unless you show it. A patient, a Google quality rater and an AI assistant all see the same thing: a page, with or without clear signs of who stands behind it.

That's what E-E-A-T is about. In this guide I'll explain what Google's guidelines actually say about health content, map each part of E-E-A-T to the pages a clinic really has, walk through the medical review workflow I set up with healthcare clients, and finish with a checklist you can print and work through with your team.

By the numbers

Patients research care online, and they read what others say about you. These are the figures I keep coming back to:

Two notes on those numbers. The Rater8 figures come from a vendor survey of just over 1,000 US patients, so treat them as a strong signal rather than a census. And the 2015 "1 in 20" figure is old, but it tells you how long Google has treated health search as a special case.

What Google's guidelines say about health content

Google judges health content by its strictest standard because getting it wrong can hurt people. The detail lives in the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the manual Google gives the human raters who evaluate search results. The current public edition is dated September 11, 2025, which Search Engine Roundtable reported (2025) as a minor update with clarifications to YMYL rating and new examples.

Three ideas from Google matter most for a clinic.

Health is a YMYL topic

YMYL means "Your Money or Your Life": topics where content "could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society," as the rater guidelines put it (quoted in Search Engine Land's YMYL guide). Medical, mental health and addiction treatment pages are squarely inside that definition, so raters expect the highest level of trust.

Trust is the center of E-E-A-T

Google added the extra "E" for Experience in December 2022, and in the same announcement called trust "the most important member of the E-E-A-T family" (Google Search Central Blog (2022)). Experience means first-hand involvement: having actually done or lived the thing you write about.

E-E-A-T is a quality, not a setting

Google is explicit that "E-E-A-T itself isn't a specific ranking factor," but that its systems use "a mix of factors that can identify content with good E-E-A-T" (Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content). Raters don't change rankings directly either: their scores help Google evaluate whether its systems are working.

Two myths to drop before you start

Myth: "We need to raise our E-E-A-T score." There is no score. Google has said E-E-A-T isn't a specific ranking factor. You can't install it with a plugin; you build the real qualities and make them easy to see.

Myth: "The Medic update was a penalty with a fix." The August 2018 core update hit many health sites hard, which is why Barry Schwartz nicknamed it "Medic". But Google's Danny Sullivan said at the time there was no specific fix for sites that dropped (Search Engine Roundtable (2018)). The lasting answer was, and still is, better and more trustworthy content.

E-E-A-T mapped to the pages a clinic actually has

Every page type on a clinic website can show E-E-A-T, but each shows it differently. This is the table I use when auditing a healthcare site:

You don't need everything in every cell on day one. Start with the cells that are empty on your highest-traffic pages.

The medical review workflow I set up with clients

A medical review workflow is a repeatable process where every clinical page is drafted, checked by a named clinician, edited, published with visible review details, and re-reviewed on a schedule. Writing it down is what turns "we're careful" into something a patient or a rater can see.

1. The writer drafts. A health writer or marketer drafts the page from a brief, citing sources for every clinical claim.
2. A clinical reviewer checks accuracy. A named clinician with credentials relevant to the topic reviews the draft. A psychiatrist reviews medication content; an LCSW might review a page on family therapy.
3. An editor checks clarity and sources. The editor confirms the page answers the patient's question in plain language, that sources are current and that nothing promises outcomes.
4. Publish with visible review details. The page shows a "Medically reviewed by [Name, credentials] on [date]" line linking to the reviewer's bio, and the same details go into reviewedBy and lastReviewed markup.
5. Re-review on a schedule. Every 12 months is a sensible default for clinical pages, and sooner when guidance, regulations or your services change.

Here's what step 4 looks like before and after, on a real-world style condition page:

(The names above are placeholders, not real people. Use your own clinicians, with their permission.)

Dates must mean something

A review date is a promise that a clinician checked the page on that day. Changing "last updated" every week without a clinical review is a habit I see often, and it quietly undermines the very trust the date is meant to show.

My rules for clients are simple:

• Change lastReviewed only after a real clinical review, and keep a record of who reviewed what and when.
• Show "updated" separately if you made non-clinical edits, such as fixing a typo or a phone number.
• Never bulk-refresh dates across the site. If a page hasn't been reviewed in two years, the honest fix is to review it, not to relabel it.

If you work in behavioral health, the stakes here are even higher. I cover the wider setup for treatment centers in my addiction treatment SEO guide.

Reviews: trust signals you handle privately

Online reviews are one of the first trust signals patients see, and how you respond to them is part of your E-E-A-T. In the same Rater8 survey, 45% of patients said a provider's response to reviews would influence their choice, and 40% said negative reviews had led them to cancel or not book (Medical Economics (2025)).

The catch for healthcare is privacy. In the US, HIPAA generally means you can't confirm that someone is a patient, even when they've named themselves in a public review. I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice: check your response approach with your compliance team. What I recommend is a response pattern that is warm, general and moves the conversation offline:

"Thank you for taking the time to share this. We take every concern seriously and would welcome the chance to talk. Please call our patient experience team at [number] so we can help."

That reply never confirms a visit, a diagnosis or a treatment, and it shows every future reader that real people care about feedback. Pair it with a steady, consent-based process for asking satisfied patients to leave a review, since the same survey found 57% of patients rarely or never leave one on their own.

Structured data: machine-readable support, not a ranking lever

Structured data lets you describe your clinic, clinicians and review process in a format machines can read. It doesn't create trust on its own, and it won't override weak content. It simply makes the trust signals already on your page unambiguous.

Two cautions. First, the markup must match what's visible: a reviewedBy with no reviewer shown on the page is a mismatch, not a shortcut. Second, Google has no special rich result for MedicalWebPage, so adding it won't change how your listing looks. I add it because it makes the review process explicit to search engines and to AI systems that read pages as entities and relationships.

Why this matters for AI search too

The same signals that satisfy a quality rater, such as named experts, citations and visible review, are what make a health page safe for an AI assistant to quote. In my experience, assistants are noticeably more selective about which sources they cite on health questions than on, say, product comparisons. I explain the wider picture in how to get recommended by ChatGPT.

When I spoke to Peter Rota on the podcast, he put it well: "If you have a basic foundation of SEO, you're going to get 80% of the way there." For healthcare, E-E-A-T is a large part of that foundation.

What this looks like in practice

Trust work compounds slowly, and I won't pretend it's a switch. With behavioral health clients, named clinical review, honest dates, real team pages and better structure have been part of every engagement behind results like +300% organic conversions for Olympic Behavioral Health and +180% qualified leads for addiction recovery centers. Those results came from whole strategies, not E-E-A-T alone, so treat them as what's possible rather than what's promised.

The printable E-E-A-T checklist for healthcare websites

Work through this list one section at a time. Print it, assign an owner to each line and date it when done.

Authorship and medical review

• Every clinical page names its author and a qualified clinical reviewer.
• Reviewer credentials are shown (for example MD, DO, PsyD, LCSW, LCADC) and link to a bio page.
• Each clinical page shows a "Medically reviewed on" date that changes only after a real review.
• A published editorial and medical review policy explains how content is created, checked and corrected.
• A review log records who reviewed which page and when.

Accuracy and sources

• Clinical claims cite authoritative sources: government health agencies, professional bodies, peer-reviewed research.
• Statistics include their source and year.
• Clinical pages are re-reviewed on a schedule (for example, every 12 months) and when guidance changes.
• No promises of outcomes or cures; urgent-care guidance where relevant.

Experience

• Pages describe what really happens at your clinic: real schedules, rooms and staff.
• Photos are of your actual facility and team, not stock images.
• Patient stories and testimonials are used only with written consent and in line with applicable regulations.

Organization transparency

• Licensing and accreditation are displayed and verifiable.
• A real team page with names, photos, roles and qualifications.
• Address, phone and hours on every location page, consistent with your Google Business Profile.
• Privacy policy, terms, ownership and a corrections or feedback route.

Reviews and reputation

• A consent-based process for asking patients to leave reviews.
• A privacy-safe response template, approved by your compliance team.
• Every review is answered within an agreed time, without confirming anyone is a patient.

Structured data

• MedicalOrganization (or a more specific type) with sameAs links to official profiles.
• Physician markup on provider bios.
• MedicalWebPage with reviewedBy and lastReviewed on clinical pages, matching what's visible.
• Markup validated after every template change.

Where to start this month

If you can only do three things, do these: add named clinical reviewers and honest dates to your ten most-visited clinical pages, publish your medical review policy, and build a proper team page. Then work down the checklist.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes, this is the work I do with healthcare and behavioral health providers. You can also ask for a free gap snapshot on the contact page, and I'll tell you honestly where your site's trust signals stand.