What does YMYL mean in terms of SEO
Written by: Ryan Walsh
Date: 10/11/2023
There many articles written, okay let’s reword that, there are millions of blog posts and pages written everyday that relate to YMYL.
But what does this mean?
Well, YMYL simply stands for “Your money or your life” which means that pages which may impact a person’s health and finances and could have a impact on their life.
So, what this means is Google takes extra care to make sure this information is factual, is well written, and can be relied upon.
It does tie in to Google’s guidelines on EEAT, which simply means that the work should show expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, which in a nutshell, means the person writing the work, well they need to know what they are talking about.
“Tell them anything, sell them anything”
Sadly, some businesses still use these sales tactics, that is, to tell the consumer a bunch of lies, to sell a product or a service.
It’s the YMYL updates, and many other updates, that aim to weed out such pages, to get them removed from Google’s serps, so instead the shopper is presented with more reliable, trustworthy information they can rely upon.
Quality and trustworthiness
So, when we first start working with clients over 10 years ago, many businesses would write “content thin” pages, which were complete waffle, with the sole aim of just trying to plug the keyword they wanted the business to rank for. So, for example in the text, the author may just keep writing the words “car wax” over and over again, not only would the sentences not read naturally. It would simply waste the readers time, because, quite simply put, they may have clicked on a link, with a meta title, something like “how to remove key scratches from your car door”.
Yet then the reader starts to read a lot of waffle about car waxes.
So, its Google’s continuous effort through the Panda updates, the YMYL updates, the EEAT guidelines, to always aim to improve the quality of the answers shoppers get to their queries.
So how do you optimise for YMYL?
Produce top quality work every time
So okay, granted this is easier said than done, but instead of generating say 4 blog posts a month, which are not very well written or researched, instead just write one really good one.
The work should be well researched, original and well written- and written by an expert.
Don’t just hand all seo work over to your marketing agency, the really good, top quality digital marketing agencies now instead work with people within your company that have a lot of experience, insight into your business sector, to help create content marketing, YouTube videos and to better optimise the onsite seo.
So, for example your company might install and service lift shafts and elevators, so you will have a team of employees, some of which may have been working for the business for over 10 years.
So, its possible, to put there knowledge and expertise, into YouTube videos, content marketing and to improve the onsite seo, to the point where the seo starts to improve greatly.
We can therefore work with staff within your company to create high quality content marketing.
