EEAT for maritime brands: especially for compliance content

EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust) is Google’s framework for evaluating whether content should be trusted, particularly on topics where bad information could harm someone. It’s most strictly applied to medical, financial and legal content, but maritime compliance content sits closer to that bucket than most B2B sectors realise.

A wrongly-advised approach to MARPOL Annex VI compliance can cost a fleet operator millions in detention, fines and remediation. Bad EEAT signals on your compliance content reduce its visibility on exactly the queries where you want to demonstrate competence to buyers.

What Google looks for

Google’s search quality rater guidelines, which are public, give a useful picture of what EEAT signals look like in practice:

• Experience. Does the content reflect actual hands-on experience with the topic? A piece on ballast water compliance written by someone who has supervised installations reads differently to one written by a generalist content writer working from publicly available sources.
• Expertise. Are the authors credentialed in the topic? A naval architect writing on EEXI calculation has expertise that a marketing manager writing the same piece does not.
• Authoritativeness. Is the source recognised by other authorities? Citations from class societies, IMO publications, trade press and regulators all carry weight.
• Trust. Is the broader site and brand trustworthy? Identifiable company, registered address, real authors, accurate information, clear sourcing.

Where maritime sites fail EEAT

The patterns I see consistently:

1. Anonymous compliance content. A 1,500-word page on EU ETS compliance with no byline. Google has no signal that anyone qualified wrote it.
2. Made-up author personas. “John Smith, Maritime Expert” with a stock photo and no traceable history. LLMs and Google can both infer fakery from absent biographical detail.
3. Generic content with no source links. A page on MARPOL Annex VI that doesn’t link to the IMO regulation, doesn’t reference class society guidance and doesn’t cite any primary source.
4. Outdated content presented as current. A 2019 piece on IMO 2020 still reading as if the regulation is upcoming.
5. No company-side credibility signals. No trade body memberships listed, no class society approvals referenced, no recognisable personnel on the about page.

What a credible EEAT setup looks like

For a maritime brand publishing compliance content, the minimum is:

Real author bios. Each piece of regulatory or compliance content should have a named author with a linked bio page. The bio should include the author’s relevant experience (years at sea, classification society roles, regulatory positions, prior publications, university affiliations). Bonus: schema for Person with sameAs linking to LinkedIn, conference profiles, published papers.

Editorial review. Where the topic is technical, an editorial review by someone more senior, named on the page, adds another layer. “Reviewed by [Name], [Credentials], [Date]” works.

Primary sources cited. Compliance content should link to the regulatory primary source (IMO MEPC documents, EU ETS legislation, class society guidance). Linking to other secondary sources is fine, but the primary source link is non-negotiable.

Date stamps. Each piece should show publication date and last review date. For compliance content, an annual review and date update is the minimum acceptable maintenance schedule.

Schema for Article and Author. Article with author referencing a Person with proper credentials. Most maritime sites either use no schema or use BlogPosting without author detail.

Trust signals on the site overall. Companies House registration linked, trade body memberships displayed, named senior leadership, real photographs, registered office addresses, contact details. Anonymity reads as low trust.

Where it pays back

EEAT signals don’t move rankings overnight. What they do is build durable visibility on commercial regulatory queries, which is where the highest-intent maritime SEO traffic lives. A fleet director searching for advice on a compliance issue is more likely to read, trust and contact the source whose author bio shows fifteen years of relevant experience than the source with no byline.

It also matters for AI search. LLMs preferentially cite content with clear authorship and primary source linking. The same investments that improve EEAT in Google improve citation likelihood in Perplexity and ChatGPT.

EEAT investment is one of the few SEO interventions that helps both classical search and AI search at the same time. For maritime compliance content, it’s the most efficient area to fix.