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Your Money or Your Life (YMYL), as the name sounds, describes the most important and sensitive topics online. YMYL topics are broad, but generally involve information that could significantly influence consumer's health, financial situation, safety or wellbeing. There are many such topics that could influence these areas, though are most commonly found on websites that provide advice on subjects such as medicine, finance and current events. Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines include E-E-A-T, a method for evaluators to judge whether a page is providing reliable information that consumers can trust, which is never more important with YMYL topics. Google states that evaluators need to use judgement as to whether a page qualifies as YMYL, and if so, these pages need to be demonstrating the highest levels of E-E-A-T. Both E-E-A-T and YMYL are not directly SEO ranking factors, however they do influence the factors that are considered. For instance good quality content will likely attract high quality backlinks, naturally reference many of the most important concepts and keywords in context - whilst hugely influencing time on page and click through rates.

E-E-A-T for YMYL SEO is important to stop the spread of misinformation to:

• The reader of the page
• Those affected by the reader of the page
• Exponential spread of those affected by those who were affected by the reader of the page

Example YMYL topics

• Side effects of certain prescription drugs
• Safety advice for natural disasters
• Self Assessment submission dates

Tips for creating YMYL content

• • Create high quality, people first content that answers questions, provides advices and satisfies the reader’s queries.

 

• • Provide author bio information, as well as complete transparency as to where any information for the content was sourced, with references. Ensure your website has a well populated About page, with all certifications and qualifications of authors clearly displayed.

 

• • Link out to credible sources when citing statistics or relevant opinions within the content.

 

• Encourage similarly high quality publications within the industry or niche to cite your work as a source, via a backlink. This will help to build topical relevance for your page, as well as building the authority of the author to speak on the subject.

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness E-E-A-T is an updated acronym, building on Google’s 2014 update to their Search Quality Rater Guidelines ‘E-A-T’. The handbook now features the additional trust factor ‘Experience’, as of the December 2022 update, which helps Google to measure the success of its algorithm updates and search results. Google is adamant that while E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor it does want to serve results that display websites with strong E-E-A-T. In conjunction with SEO, E-E-A-T is a major focus for websites aiming to improve trust, engage customers and lead to an improved conversion rate.

E-E-A-T Timeline:

Mar 2013: Search Quality Rating Guidelines Introduced Mar 2014: E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) added to the guidelines Dec 2022: Updated to E-E-A-T, with the additional ‘E’ for ‘Experience’

Experience

Good quality content should demonstrate an expert level of understanding with subject matter, proving that insights are authentic and ‘tried and tested’. Adding ‘Experience’ to the E-A-T guidelines is a signal that consumers of the content can trust its authenticity.

Expertise

Expertise differs from experience, though there is some overlap. While experience shows a real life understanding of the subject matter, expertise demonstrates a professional connection, through credentials, qualifications and a deep level of knowledge that qualifies authors to provide reliable information.

Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness, like expertise and experience, derives from the same place of being qualified to provide reliable information on a subject matter. Unlike the previous two, however, authoritativeness is reputation based, leveraging the power of industry peers to support your credibility as a trusted source of information. In this sense, authoritativeness is sourced by backlinks and citations from other credible, reliable sources of similar information.

Trustworthiness

In essence, Trustworthiness is the combination of the above and in essence, the most important factor of the E-E-A-T guideline - especially in subjects considered to be YMYL. Raters must consider the content as a whole, the look and feel of the website where the content lives, and the author who created it. Being clear, upfront and honest about who wrote it, its sources and any other factors that may encourage a transaction of conversion from users.

Keyword research is the act of finding and analysing search terms that users enter into search engines such as Google, with the goal of finding keywords that will help direct and support decision making within SEO campaigns. Through keyword research, marketers and SEOs can better determine which kinds of search terms they should be targeting, based on their popularity, their relevance to a specific business niche, their competitiveness, and other variables. SEO keyword research is one of the most fundamental aspects of on page SEO, and makes it possible to measure the impact of SEO work.

A Brief Guide to Keyword Research

Seed Keywords

The process of keyword research begins with brainstorming broad-topic seed keywords, which will help you define the topics that apply to your site and find more developed keyword ideas. If, for example, you’re running the SEO for a tea brand, you might want to list terms such as “chamomile”, “earl grey”, or “matcha”. Though these seed keywords themselves usually aren’t worth targeting through your further SEO work, they offer an important starting point for future keyword research.

Using a Keyword Research Tool

The next step in the process is entering these seed keywords into a keyword research tool. These tools will use your searches to return lists of related keywords, showing their volume (how many searches they get per month), their competitiveness, trends in how much they’re searched over time, and other metrics pertinent to how these keywords can be used in SEO.

Sort Keywords by Searcher Intent

People enter different things into search engines looking for different results, and it’s important to bear this in mind when you’re researching keywords to use in your SEO. Going back to the tea company example, you might come across a keyword like “organic chamomile tea”, which suggests a searcher intent on buying a product, or another term like “how is tea grown?” which suggests a searcher who simply wants to educate themselves on a given topic. Understanding searcher intent is an important part of deciding which keywords should be implemented where on your site, and knowing which terms to prioritise based on the overarching goals of your business.

Sort Keywords into Topic Clusters

Finally, keyword research involves sorting these keywords into specific clusters, which will further inform your SEO strategy and align it with the way your business categorises its products or services. For example, if you’ve determined that your site is going to have a lot of content that fits into a “green tea” topic cluster, you might want to assign keywords like “green tea health benefits”, “is green tea good for you”, “does green tea have caffeine”, and other related search terms.