Most conversations about SEO start with keywords. Which ones you're going for, how competitive they are, whether you've got a realistic shot at ranking. But before you get into that next keyword-focused conversation, there's another question worth answering first: how strong are your credibility signals?
Website credibility basically boils down to whether a person (or search engine or LLM) landing on your site can work out who you are, what you do and if you know what you're talking about.
TL;DR
Credibility signals are the things that tell a reader (and a search engine) who's behind your content and if you're trustworthy.
Five of the easiest credibility signals to address: author information, internal links, homepage clarity, your about page and structured data.
Google's own guidance for content creators asks whether it's obvious who authored your content. It's a stated expectation, not an SEO theory.
Fix these and you improve how people, search engines and AI tools read your site, all at once.
Why website credibility is a search problem, not just a brand one
Google's guidance for content creators asks site owners to consider the Who, How and Why.
The Who is the one that matters most. Is it obvious to your visitors who wrote your content? Do your pages carry a byline where a reader would expect one? Does that byline lead anywhere useful? Google's self-assessment questions specifically name author pages and about pages as the places people go looking for background.
None of that is a ranking factor you can tick off. It's a description of how a trustworthy site behaves.
It's also doing double duty now. The same signals that help a reader decide if you're legit help an LLM decide if you're worth quoting. If ChatGPT can't work out who's behind a claim on your site, it's got no good reason to repeat it.
Here's where to start.
1. Tell people who wrote it
Anonymous content is the most common credibility gap I see, and it's almost always accidental. The blog gets set up, the theme doesn't display an author by default, nobody notices and three years of posts go live with nobody attached to them.
The more established your brand, the more likely you are to get away with this, but crediting your authors is best practice.
The fix:
- Put a byline on every post. Name, title and ideally a photo. Not “Admin”. Not “The Team”.
- Link the byline to an author page with a short bio and relevant experience. Two paragraphs is plenty.
- In that author page, say why that person is qualified to write about this. Fifteen years in commercial construction, a decade running a vet clinic, whatever it is. Specific beats impressive.
- Add a LinkedIn link. Cheapest verification signal going and it takes thirty seconds.
If your content genuinely is a team effort, say so, and name whoever reviewed it for accuracy. A named reviewer beats "our experts" every time.
One thing: if you're going to have bios, keep them current. A bio referencing a job someone left in 2021 is worse than no bio at all.
2. Fix the links that go nowhere
Broken internal links make a site feel neglected. Nothing's wrong with your content, but people start wondering how long it's been like that.
They pile up quietly. A page gets renamed, a service is retired, an old post is deleted and every link pointing at it starts throwing a 404. Your visitors hit a dead end and draw their own conclusions.
To find them:
- Run a crawl. Screaming Frog does 500 URLs free, which covers most small to medium-sized business sites. Go to the Response Codes tab and filter for Client Error (4xx).
- Check the Pages report in Google Search Console for “Not found (404)” to see which URLs are still being linked to.
- Fix it or delete it. Don’t leave broken links live thinking you’ll “get to it later”. You won’t.
While you're updating your internal links, have a look at your anchor text. "Click here" and "read more" say nothing. Descriptive anchor text helps your readers and search engines and is one of the levers for fixing keyword cannibalisation.
3. Make it obvious who you are on the homepage
Try this. Ask someone who knows nothing about your business to look at your homepage for five seconds, then close the laptop and tell you what you do.
A lot of homepages fail this. They open with a value proposition so abstract it could belong to a fintech, a hardware store or a yoga studio. "Empowering ambitious teams to unlock what's next" sounds good, says nothing.
What needs to be obvious, fast:
- What you do, in the words your customers use. Plain beats clever.
- Who it’s for. Industry, business size, location, whatever the qualifier is.
- Where you are. A real location or service area. Australian buyers look for this.
- How to reach a human. Phone number or email in the header or footer, not just a form.
I get the instinct to be aspirational in your hero copy. Just get the specifics on the page too, ideally before anyone has to scroll.
4. Give your about page a job to do
Your about page is visited more often than you’d expect. It’s the first page a journalist, a potential hire or a Google quality rater goes looking for. On most sites it's three sentences about being passionate, generic mission and values, and a photo of the last team offsite.That's a wasted asset.
Give it something to do:
- The origin. When you started, why and what you were trying to fix. Dates are trust signals.
- The people. Real names, real photos, real roles. Even if there are only two of you.
- The proof. Years in business, clients served, accreditations, memberships, awards, your ABN. Only what you can back up. Vague claims are worse than none.
- How you work. Your process, your standards, what you won’t do. This is where real expertise shows.
- Contact details. Physical address, phone, email.
Write it like someone's deciding whether to trust you with a serious budget.
5. Add structured data (less technical than it sounds)
This is the one people skip because it sounds like a developer job.
Structured data (or schema) is a standard way of labelling what's on a page so machines don't have to guess. Google calls it giving "explicit clues about the meaning of a page". You're not adding new information. You're tagging what's there so it can be read properly.
What you want:
- Organisation or Person schema on your homepage and about page. Business name, logo, location, contact details, social profiles.
- Article schema on blog posts. Headline, author, publish date, updated date.
- LocalBusiness schema if you’ve got a physical location or a defined service area.
FAQ schema is no longer worth adding. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026 and dropped support from the Rich Results Test in June, so it won't change how you appear in search.
On WordPress, an SEO plugin like Rank Math or Yoast handles most of your schema through a settings panel. Shopify, Squarespace and Wix output basic structured data by default, with apps for the rest. Google's own documentation points CMS users to plugins rather than editing HTML. If the free version of your plugin only lets you add one schema to a page that needs two, ask Claude Code or ChatGPT to write you the JSON-LD, then add it as an HTML snippet in the page head with something like WPCode.
Two rules:
- Only mark up things that are visible on the page. Google explicitly says not to tag information users can’t see.
- Validate what you’ve added: the Rich Results Test covers the types eligible for enhanced search results, and schema.org covers everything else, including Person schema.
Your credibility checklist
Roughly easiest to hardest.
- Every blog post shows an author name that links to a bio.
- Bios include relevant experience and a LinkedIn link.
- Your homepage says what you do, who for and where, before anyone scrolls.
- Contact details are in the header or footer, not hidden behind a form. (To be fair, I don’t do this, but I don’t have a team answering calls and emails for me.)
- A crawl comes back with no internal 4xx errors.
- Anchor text describes the destination. No “click here”.
- Your about page covers origin, people, proof and process.
- Organisation or Person schema is live on your homepage and about page.
- Article schema is live on blog posts, with accurate dates.
- Everything you’ve marked up is visible on the page.
If you want a broader read on how your site's holding up for AI search, my AI Search Readiness Scorecard covers this and a few other pillars. It's free and you don't have to hand over an email address to see your results.
FAQs about website credibility
How long before this improves my rankings?
It's not a switch. Credibility signals work by making your site easier to understand and trust, so you'll usually see it in engagement and conversions before you see it in position or citation. Fix them because they should be fixed, not because you're expecting a massive jump in qualified traffic.
Do I really need a photo of myself on the site?
No. I’m camera shy so I don’t have one either. But a real photo of a real person does more for credibility than almost anything else on this list. If a headshot isn't happening, a named byline linking to a decent bio still does most of the work.
Is structured data worth it on a small site?
Yes, and it's less work than you'd think. On a five-page site you're looking at one Organisation schema block plus Article schema on your posts, and a plugin will handle both. It makes your business details machine-readable, which matters more every year.
I'm a one-person business. Doesn't putting my name everywhere look small?
It looks specific, which is the point. Sole traders and small teams have a credibility advantage that big companies pay agencies to manufacture: an actual human standing behind the work. Use it.
Want someone else to look for you?
Credibility gaps can be hard to spot on your own site because you already know who you are and what you do. If you'd like someone to go through yours properly (trust signals, technical foundations, search intent alignment and the rest), get in touch and we'll talk scope and timelines.
And if you're in a fixing mood, have a look at my post on title tags, meta descriptions and alt text – another one you can finish in a single sitting.