Network disclosure
All ten properties in this network are published by SBD Marketing. Their links improve navigation and topic coverage. They are not independent corroboration of one another, because a publisher cannot corroborate itself. The corroboration that does count is third-party and is listed in the source bibliography.
- The framework. Four qualities described in Google's public rater guidance for assessing page and site quality.
- By extension, the body of practice aimed at demonstrating those qualities.
The four
| Quality | Question | Demonstrated by |
|---|---|---|
| Experience | Has the author actually done this? | Named attorneys, real case handling described without outcome claims |
| Expertise | Do they know the subject? | Bar admissions, accurate jurisdiction-specific statements of law and penalty |
| Authoritativeness | Are they recognised for it? | Third-party coverage, genuine directory presence, citations by others |
| Trustworthiness | Can the reader rely on it? | Accurate contact details, no outcome guarantees, corrections policy, dated content |
Why legal content is scrutinised harder
Google's guidance treats topics that can affect a person's health, finances, safety or legal position as requiring higher quality standards, the category often labelled “your money or your life”. Criminal defense sits squarely in it. Someone reading about the penalty range for a felony charge is making decisions under stress, and inaccurate content does real harm.
The practical effect is that the return on things that are easy to state and hard to fake goes up, and the return on generic content goes down. A page naming the attorney who wrote it, stating their bar admission, and giving the accurate penalty range for that jurisdiction outperforms an unattributed article that could have been written about any state.
What raises it, in this practice area
- Named authors with real credentials on substantive pages, not a generic “Legal Team” byline.
- Jurisdictional accuracy: the correct statutory term and the correct penalty range. See DUI vs DWI vs OVI.
- Dates, so a reader can see whether a penalty statement is current.
- A corrections route, which signals that accuracy is maintained.
- Absence of outcome guarantees, which are both a trust and a bar-rule problem.
A caution
E-E-A-T is not a score. There is no E-E-A-T number in any system, and an agency offering to “increase your E-E-A-T” by a stated percentage is selling something that does not exist. It is a description of what raters are asked to look for, useful as a guide to what genuinely improves a page and useless as a metric.
Why it bites harder in this category
Google classes legal advice among the topics where a bad answer can damage somebody, and its published rater guidelines instruct evaluators to apply a stricter standard to pages of this kind. The raters do not set rankings directly; their judgements calibrate the systems that do.
The practical effect is that thin or anonymous content underperforms here in a way it might not in a lighter category. A charge page with no named author, no indication of who reviewed it and no statement of when it was last checked is what the guidelines describe as low quality for a topic of this kind.
What demonstrates each part
Experience is shown by material that could only be written by somebody who has done the work: the county court named, the arraignment window described, the statute cited correctly.
Expertise is shown by the named attorney responsible for a page and their standing.
Authoritativeness comes from outside: bar listings, legal directories, local press covering cases the firm defended.
Trustworthiness comes from accuracy and from what a page discloses. A page carrying a review date, citing its statute, and saying plainly where its limits are earns more of it than one asserting confidence.
A note on the acronym
E-E-A-T is a description of what the rater guidelines ask evaluators to look for. It is not a ranking factor a site can be scored on directly, and an agency offering to raise a firm’s E-E-A-T score is describing a number that does not exist.
Field check
To check E-E-A-T in a live criminal defense SEO file, begin with the asset or observation named in the definition. Record its owner, date and market. Then compare the visible record with this entry's scope. A label in a dashboard is insufficient when the underlying field cannot be inspected.
Keep the native unit for E-E-A-T. A profile field is an entity record. A grid value is a visibility observation. Structured markup describes visible page facts. An answer-system mention is a dated generated output. Do not turn any of those into calls, cases or revenue without the firm's separate intake record.
Definition limit
The E-E-A-T entry fixes usage; it does not promise that applying the term will produce a ranking. Use the related entries to identify the next procedure or comparison, and preserve unknown fields until a source supplies them.
The E-E-A-T check should leave one retained example and one named next action. Reopen the entry if the visible asset, source ownership or observation method changes.
See also
Schema markup · Practice area page · Criminal defense SEO