YMYL Websites: SEO & EEAT Tips [Lumar Podcast]

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YMYL Websites: SEO & EEAT Tips [Lumar Podcast]

This week on Lumar’s Human-First Digital Podcast, we’re discussing YMYL (“Your Money or Your Life”) websites and how to optimize EEAT (“Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness”) factors for better SEO results on websites that operate in YMYL industries like financial services and healthcare.

Lumar host Chris Spann is joined by Amanda Walls, Founder and Director of Cedarwood Digital, a Manchester-based digital marketing and SEO agency. Amanda shares her journey from journalism to owning a digital marketing agency and offers her insights on the evolution of SEO for YMYL websites.

Chris and Amanda discuss the significance of E-E-A-T in YMYL sectors and highlight the impact of recent Google algorithm updates. They discuss the importance of structured data and how it can enhance website authority. Amanda also shares insights on creating quality content, maintaining a strong reputation, and the role of website security.

Whether you’re an SEO veteran or just starting out, this episode offers valuable takeaways on navigating the complexities of SEO for YMYL sites. Tune in to discover how to optimize your strategies for better search rankings and user trust.

Listen to the full episode below, or read on for an excerpt from this YMYL SEO discussion.

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Episode timestamps

00:00:11 – Introducing Human-First Digital and Amanda Walls

00:04:50 – Understanding YMYL SEO

00:06:26 – The Importance of Your Web Content’s Authors

00:10:42 – Navigating Structured Data and Schema Markup

00:13:17 – Enhancing EEAT, Reputation, and Trust

00:18:17 – The Role of Website Security

00:21:16 – Lumar’s Website Optimization Solutions

Episode links

Episode Recap & Transcript

[NOTE: Episode transcripts and excerpts are edited slightly for clarity.]

CHRIS SPANN:

Hello, and welcome to Human First Digital, a Lumar podcast. My name is Chris Spann, and I’m here to present some one-on-one conversations with some of the brightest minds in SEO. This episode, we’ll be hearing from Amanda Walls, the director of Cedarwood Digital. Amanda joined me to discuss SEO for YMYL sites.

. . .

CHRIS SPANN:

So, first off, in one sentence — though nobody’s actually done it in one sentence — what do you do?

AMANDA WALLS:

Own a digital marketing agency.

CHRIS SPANN:

Well done. That’s the most succinct answer we’ve ever had. How did you get into SEO and digital marketing?

AMANDA WALLS:

My background is in journalism. I’ve actually made a career change. I grew up in Melbourne. I studied journalism and worked as a motorsport journalist for a long time there, which was great.

Then I went back and did a master’s, and I learned about the world of digital. And then I moved halfway across the world and immersed myself in the UK, which was far more digitally savvy than Australia was at the time. And I just kind of fell into it in a way. I applied for a job as a content writer because I had the journalism background, and I wanted to get in. And my job as a content writer was at an SEO agency. So, I got in, I learned about SEO. I kind of worked my way up at that agency, I learned technical SEO, I learned digital PR, I even learned PPC as well, so it was kind of a weird mix in there. And then I left, and I started my own agency off the back of that.

So I guess you could say, maybe not a traditional route.

CHRIS SPANN:

Well, to be honest with you, I don’t think there is a traditional route into SEO.

It’s been interesting; I’ve interviewed people who’ve been in the business as long as I have and others who are just getting started, and even today, I still often hear, “I got into SEO by accident, really.”

One I hear quite often — and I’m sure you see a lot of this when you get CVs and things — their first job in SEO came about because, “well, I was the youngest person in the business. I was the one who most knew how to use a computer so I had to look after the website.” And then they get a job at an agency, and then they go in-house for a bit… and I was the same. I was in music tech, or wanted to be in music tech, and got an SEO job to pay the bills — then I went massively down the technical route to the point I just do technical SEO now.

Weird life, isn’t it?

AMANDA WALLS:

I think, as well, that a lot of the time, when people are first getting into SEO, they don’t know it exists as a career — and I didn’t know it existed! When I applied for a content job at an SEO agency, I just wanted a content job. So I think it’s a good way to find out about it as well.

CHRIS SPANN:

So, you’re talking about YMYL [‘Your Money or Your Life’ websites] on the main stage at BrightonSEO.

SEO for YMYL is something very close to my heart. I work with a couple of sites that are publishers within the YMYL space and are very, very heavily influenced by that stuff.

So what are a couple of the key takeaways from your YMYL talk? What does the future of YMYL SEO look like?

AMANDA WALLS:

Yeah, sure. So, my talk falls into the EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) grouping. And I think that applies to [YMYL websites] very specifically.

But I think what we’ve seen in the last 12 months with Google is that there has been so much change in terms of algorithm updates. Really, a kind of passion [from Google] to get rid of spam and those types of things. So, I think YMYL websites are going to be hit and impacted more in the future by search algorithm updates if they aren’t doing the right thing.

And I think we’re already starting to see that in terms of SERP volatility. So one of the things I talk about is how user intent and SERPs have changed in quite a volatile manner in some industries.

I use the example of payday loans, where the SERP similarity this year to last year is literally like 10%. It’s been 15 changes in the top 10. And realistically, when you take out the feature snippets, there are probably only about 17 actual positions. It’s just completely changing. And that, I think, is because Google is very much working to make sure that those [YMYL] websites are doing exactly what they need to be doing to give that trust.

And for good reason! Because if I’m taking out a loan and it’s from a provider that’s not responsible, or dodgy in any way, shape, or form, that is going to have a really strong impact on my life. Same with anything medical, you know, anything financial, anything that falls into that [YMYL] sector. I think it’s actually quite nice to see Google taking a more stringent approach to that.

And I think they will continue to do that in the future. And especially as we look to things like SGE [Search Generative Experience] — one thing that we’ve seen come out of the SGE trials is that the websites that fall into that YMYL sector have had a label. Like a “Your Money, Your Life” label put on them. So Google is already starting to identify what content falls into that category and therefore, how it needs to treat that content.

So I think for people that aren’t doing something now, to really make those websites exhibit those EEAT signals — but more than that, [improving] the reputation of the company, what people are saying about it, what those external reviews are saying — if they’re not doing it now, they’re going to have to start doing it in the very near future.

CHRIS SPANN:

Yeah. It’s interesting because [for a client that broadly falls within the financial advice space], we did some gap analysis for one of their competitors recently and went through everything. And what came out the other side of it was that the only real difference between my client and their competitor was structured data.

We’re bad, as SEOs, about just thinking that structured data as stuff that does things to the SERP appearance, right? Review stars and FAQs and all that stuff. But as someone else who I was talking to recently said, that Google thinks of those SERP features just as ‘decoration’. They’re nice to haves or whatever, but there’s a whole lexicon and language of stuff you can mark up your pages with [via structured data / schema markup].

So when we looked at this competitor, they were using structured data to say, “this article was written by this person. They went to Harvard, they’ve got this degree, they’re part of this accredited group. The article was fact-checked by this person who’s done all that stuff as well.”

And I feel like that potentially is a big game changer — because [in this competitive study], it was the only real difference we could see. The competitor was giving Google the content, but also giving Google everything around it as well via structured data.

So, do you do much with structured data? Or, how are you working to demonstrate these things like EEAT factors?

AMANDA WALLS:

So on the authoring point, it’s quite interesting. I’ve got a couple of slides actually in the deck that talk specifically around authoring, and I think that is something that has been, you know, discussed at length, even by Google — whether you should, you shouldn’t, what the view on that is.

My personal view on it is that authoring is really important. If you look at Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, two of the five key points talk about, you know, who has created the content and the reputation of the content. The website or the individual that’s created that content. And I think the only way that Google can find that out is if you give it to them.

Otherwise, they’re looking and they’re not finding it. So having those kind of author profiles is important, even if it’s just, you know, a snippet on the page that says such and such [about the author], or, you know, “fact-checked by,” and then an external link that goes to another page on the website that talks more about their backgrounds, their qualifications, their certifications, whatever the case might be.

I think that is really important. It’s very important for just giving an understanding of who’s written that content. Because when we’re talking about this, one of the things that I mentioned [in my talk] is a blog that Google posted back in 2021, where they talked about,”why my website’s being held to higher EEAT standards” — because of the fact they have the ability to impact someone’s financial situation or their life.

Now, if someone’s creating content that’s giving, let’s say medical advice or financial advice, if that’s not being done by the right person, how do we trust it? How does Google know how to trust it?

So the authoring [of your website’s content] and the schema markup and everything that goes with it, I think does play a key role in helping Google to understand why they should trust that content and therefore why they should give it a strong EEAT ‘score’, for lack of a better term.

CHRIS SPANN:

Funnily enough, I was talking to somebody last ***** about this, especially with SGE, that eventually there’s going to be some sort of tragedy is going to occur, or there’s going to be a lawsuit. And it will be very interesting to see whether it’s Google, or where Google got the content from — especially if it comes from SGE or something like that — as to who then is ‘blamed’, for want of a better word.

So an interesting thing that a client asked me the other day — and this isn’t a test, I promise, ’cause I don’t know if there’s a right answer — but they’re a very authoritative site in their space. They have a lot of authoritative people who write for them, but obviously, these are people are writers who write for a few different places and they also write for their competitors.

So they came to me and said, “Hey, when we’re linking to people’s portfolios or CVs, you know, in the ‘same as’ sections in structured data, should we link to their other articles or profile pages on our competitors’ sites?” I’d be interested to hear what you think about it.

AMANDA WALLS:

It’s an interesting conundrum, isn’t it? Because there’s a number of concerns with that. If you’re linking to a profile page on a competitor’s site, you’re potentially making your visitor aware of a competitor’s site. They might not even know about that competitor. And then they might go onto that site, aside from the person that’s written it, to actually review it and see what their service and their product offering is. So I think from a commercial perspective, I would always try to steer away from that.

The questions that I would be asking the client is, is there a more neutral profile they could link to, maybe like a LinkedIn profile or something like that? Or would they be happy for you to create an author profile for them on your own website?

I would steer away from linking to another website. I wouldn’t even be bothered about passing the authority because you can nofollow a link. I’d be more concerned about you basically giving that competitor free traffic if they’re going to go and read about that person.

CHRIS SPANN:

Yeah, so our thinking was that basically — if we could limit [the link to an article on a competitor’s site] to just being within the actual JavaScript with the structured data in, so it was never surfaced on the actual page… Well, we know that Google likes your site. But we also know that they like this other [competitor] site because, quite frequently, this other site ranks higher than yours. So, if Google likes both these sites and we’ve got a writer who has written for both sites… it might be worth clarifying in the structured data that this writer is a known authority who has written for both of these well-regarded websites.

You know what I mean? Again, this is assuming you can keep that link just within the structured data and not visible on the page itself.

I just thought it was an interesting conundrum because it’s not often I get caught off guard by SEO questions. And because, again, in your head, as an SEO, you go, “Don’t give your competitor a link,” but it could demonstrate authority and expertise and all those EEAT factors.

AMANDA WALLS:

I think if you had an author link going through to an author profile page on your website where you said such and such also writes for this, this, this, and this publication — I think that’s hidden enough to not have a commercial impact, but it can still add benefit to demonstrating the value of that author.

CHRIS SPANN:

So, other than structured data, what other things can we do to demonstrate EEAT and benefit YMYL websites? What can you do in terms of things that are visible on the page?

AMANDA WALLS:

Sure. I mean, there’s loads. Reputation is one key area that we look at.

In my presentation, I talk about getting people to Google themselves and understand what people are saying. That’s what Google’s saying. It’s what everyone else is saying about you. Google gives guidance on what’s good and what’s bad when it comes to reputation.

So it’s helpful to make sure your business’s overall reputation is quite good and then use digital PR. So that’s the offsite, link-building side of things to build those high-quality links into the website through expertise-driven thought leadership, or newsjacking, or using data-led pieces, or creating content hubs on the website that showcase your own expertise. But also having journalists linking to you is really valuable.

From an on-site perspective, there are lots of things, so I would say creating a satisfying amount of content. That is creating really good content on the website that is truthful and fact-checked, but also not too much of it. I think a lot of the time, we are trying to create a lot of content because we think that Google loves these really chunky, long, informative pages.

And I see a lot of this analysis where they say, oh, you know, all of the pages that rank in the top 10 have a minimum word count of X amount. And I just think, you know, YMYL is about answering a user’s question and it’s about matching that user intent.

So first, you’ve got to understand what that user intent is. So you’ve got to know what people are looking for. Are they looking for an informational answer? And one of the examples that I use is with accountancy. If you are looking for an accountant to do your self-assessment, then chances are you’d be looking for an information article.

You’d be looking for information on, you know, what is a self assessment? How do I do it? But if you’re actually looking for software to do it, you wouldn’t necessarily be looking for an informational article. You’d be looking for reviews and comparisons of software with probably user-generated reviews to see. That experience side of things, how someone else has found it.

So I think you’ve got to really match that user intent and understand the type of content that you should be creating. I think it’s got to be good content. And I pull out a quote from John Muller where back in 2021, he basically said, you can create this really good content, but if it’s basically shown in an amateurish way, then that can also reflect on your website. So it’s not enough to just create good content. You’ve got to make it look professional. You’ve got to look the part, the expert part, and I think that’s very important as well.

And I think from a content perspective, you’ve got to tell people about you and why they should trust you. So it can be external reviews, you know, your Trust Pilots, etc., or something as straightforward as industry accreditations, other reasons to trust you. It could simply be you just telling them, you know, we’ve got X amount of years of experience. We give you a three-year warranty. All of these different things. Yeah.

So I think there are lots of different things you can do, but I think the fundamental and core of it comes back to understanding what the user is looking for, matching that user intent and purpose with the right amount of content, and backing it up with trust.

>>> Listen to this full conversation on YMYL SEO — including a segment on the importance of website security in establishing trust and reputation — in episode 6 of Lumar’s Human-First Digital podcast.

About Human-First Digital (HFD)

In this podcast series, website optimization expert Chris Spann (Senior Technical SEO at Lumar) speaks to the brightest minds in the world of SEO and websites. The HFD podcast is brought to you by Lumar.

Ready to take your website to the next level? Explore Lumar’s full website optimization platform and our suite of SEO, web accessibility, and site speed tools.