

To write truly SEO friendly content, you’ll need to consider several important factors. We’ll get to our four top tips soon, but first up, let’s cover the type of content that needs special attention: YMYL content.
YMYL content
“Your Money or Your Life” content is taken incredibly seriously by Google. If your product or services fall within that YMYL category, your site and its content needs to meet very high quality standards to rank well organically. There’s no glib undertone here, Google means business with YMYL content so you’ll need to double down on your SEO content writing.
Topics that fall within that YMYL category include news and current events, financial advice, legal advice and health and safety advice, as just a few examples. As a business, there’s two things to consider when you’re talking about YMYL content. First, does your business fall within that YMYL category? And second, if it does, how are you going to create effective YMYL content?
So let’s talk about what YMYL content is and four ways you can write effective YMYL content.
E.E.A.T content
Before we can talk about YMYL content, we need to talk about E.E.A.T, once simply called E.A.T, a key criteria used by Google to determine the quality of content. E.E.A.T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
Expertise relates to the content creator, the person actually writing that content. You need to determine whether that person has the experience, the knowledge and the credentials to be talking about a particular topic. Think Norman Bates writing about serrated edges, but less so about mindfulness.
Authoritativeness relates to the content creator, the content itself, and the site on which that content sits. So, would the peers of the content creator look to them as an expert in that industry? Would they agree with what that content creator is saying? And does the site as a whole relate back to that topic to make it relevant?
Trustworthiness comes down, essentially, to whether or not people would turn to your site as a source of accurate and honest information. Get your facts straight hun.
E.E.A.T is incredibly important when we’re talking about YMYL content. YMYL literally stands for Your Money or Your Life. It’s a form of information that, if presented inaccurately or untruthfully, can have a direct impact on a person’s happiness, health, safety or financial stability. It’s proper serious. You might even need an SEO agency.
Here are our 4 tips for writing SEO Friendly blogs:
SEO content writing can often be about establishing the basics before you begin the writing process itself. To do this:
1. Be the expert
The first thing you want to do is ensure your content is written by an expert that has relevant expertise on the topic that you’re writing about. If you’re publishing health advice, you might want to talk to a nurse, a doctor or a health practitioner who works within that field. If you’re publishing information about vitamins and supplement advice, you might talk to a dietician. If you’re publishing recipes, you might rely on a nutritionist.
You can, of course, still publish content if you’re not an expert within that field but, ideally, you should consult an expert instead. Make sure that you quote them, cite their data or sources, add links to relevant resources, and link to a bio page that highlights the expertise of the consultants. Whilst this might not carry the same level of expertise as the expert writing the copy first hand, it shows that you have done your research and the content is trustworthy.
2. Prove you’re an authority
The second thing that bolsters your YMYL content is providing proof of a writer’s experience via a by-line and a separate bio page. The by-line should cover their full name, their job title, and any key credentials. That bio page, which you’ll link to from the by-line, will then go into more depth about their expertise. You might include their qualifications, their education, and any key experience.
You might also consider adding their contact information or link to their social media handles. All of this helps to signal to users, and to Google, who has written that content, and demonstrates their individual E.A.T.
3. Be fresh and topical
Our third tip is to keep your pages up to date. Say you write an article about a report that is released annually, you’ll obviously use the most recent data to write that report. You want to make sure that every year you’re revisiting the latest data and updating that page. So, the following year you’ll come back to that page and update it with the new information. At the top of that article, explain when and why that page was updated.
All of this signals to both the user and Google that you’re keeping up to date with the information and are working hard to provide the most accurate and most relevant information to them. An seo content audit can spew up any out of date articles that need an overhaul.
4. Clean up old poor quality content
The last tip for achieving good SEO content, is to remove or improve low quality content. If you have content that’s no longer useful or relevant sitting on your site, consider removing it altogether. This should be a last resort, as most content can be optimised or repurposed, but if it’s total dross with no value whatsoever, get it in the bin.
If you have valuable topics on your site but the article that covers it isn’t adequate, you just need to improve it or, in SEO content speak, optimise it. You should do this by commissioning an expert to re-write the content or working in conjunction with an expert to get quotes. Be sure to add as much relevant information as possible from trustworthy sources, and include links back to where the data came from. External links are the secret handshake of SEO content writing, giving a nod between sites that you can be trusted.
YMYL content, when done right, will really give your site some clout, so don’t scrimp on the SEO here. Take time to research, write and optimise your YMYL content.
If you’re looking to develop a YMYL content strategy but don’t know where to start, or just need a leg up with your SEO content, speak to Dark Horse.