What is YMYL?
Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) is a term from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, that refers to webpages that cover topics that could potentially impact on a person’s happiness, health, financial stability or safety.
Google has a group of people that they call Quality Raters, based all over the world, who complete evaluations set by the search engine on the web pages that search results lead users to. The feedback from this group helps to shape changes and algorithm updates in Google Search to make results continually more accurate and useful. Google gives this group of raters very structured guidelines on how to evaluate results and YMYL forms part of this.
YMYL is not new. Google first introduced it as a category for raters in 2014, and rolled out a YMYL core algorithm update in 2018 (nicknamed the ‘Medic Update’ at the time). Google’s search engine is always evolving and there have been many updates since which aim to offer users continually more accurate and relevant results in YMYL topics.
Some examples of what kinds of content might be classed as YMYL include:
- Healthcare, fitness and nutrition
- Safety advice
- Financial services or advice e.g. investing, pensions
- Civic matters, such as voting and public services
- Legal services
- Politics, science, international events or news
Essentially, Google treats these kinds of pages differently because they could potentially cause harm to people in various ways, so there are higher standards that need to be met.
Healthcare is one area in which there is a lot of scope for potential harm if the Google search results lead people to poor information. It stands to reason that Google want to ensure that only trustworthy and reliable websites appear in health-related search results.
How does YMYL tie in with where websites rank in search results?
To get to grips with what YMYL has to do with the way Google ranks search results, you may find it useful to read our guide to Google E-E-A-T. This overviews the framework Google has put in place to signal that a web page contains quality content that is written by someone who genuinely knows about the topic and the information can therefore be trusted.
From a healthcare industry perspective, it essentially means that if a brand publishes content that they want to rank well in organic search, the webpage will need to provide strong evidence of the below:
- Experience – showcasing the writer’s own experience of the topic.
- Expertise – displaying depth of knowledge on the topic.
- Authoritativeness – highlighting the reputation of the writer in this topic area.
- Trustworthiness – being transparent about the content, your reason(s) for publishing it and using credible sources.
Websites that publish content demonstrating a high level of E-E-A-T are significantly more likely to perform better in organic search than those which display low (or no) E-E-A-T characteristics.
How does YMYL apply to healthcare ecommerce?
If you have a website in the healthcare ecommerce niche, you may think that YMYL isn’t likely to have an impact on your rankings, because you consider yourself a shopping website rather than an information website.
The reality is that the user journey for online shopping often includes browsing several pages of a website before making a purchase. Most successful healthcare ecommerce websites understand the value of content marketing and create useful resources such as blogs, guides and other content that informs the target audience and helps to drive sales too.
Having useful and relevant content ranking well for terms that your audience are likely to search, because you’ve taken YMYL and E-E-A-T into account, can make a tangible difference to your organic visibility and the online revenue you generate.
E-E-A-T and YMYL are not direct ranking factors, but taking steps to demonstrate experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness in your content and SEO strategy tends to correlate with improved organic performance.
The potential consequences of getting your YMYL strategy wrong
The Google ranking algorithm is constantly evolving as the search giant aims to deliver more and more accurate and reliable results for users, which means that the ‘medic’ update of 2018 was just the beginning. Since then, Google has released dozens of ‘core updates’, many of which have included tweaks to the ways in which YMYL pages are assessed or treated.
Alongside this evolution, healthcare ecommerce brands that have failed to demonstrate high levels of E-E-A-T in their website content, as well as following many other areas of organic search best practice, may find that their organic visibility (and thus traffic) takes a significant hit. While it’s impossible to attribute 100% of drops in organic performance to a consequence of not approaching YMYL in the right way (as Google don’t give that much info away about their algorithm), the correlation of drops with algorithm updates is usually a pretty reliable sign.
As an example, looking at the nutrition brand ZOE, the SEO tool Sistrix indicates that their organic visibility took a huge hit in summer 2024, just as the August 2024 Google Core Update completed its roll-out. At the time of writing, it doesn’t look like they have yet started to recover that visibility and resulting traffic.
ZOE.com has implemented some things that could demonstrate E-E-A-T on their website (more on this later), but the level of this is nowhere near some other healthcare ecommerce brands.
Another example is online pharmacy brand, Pharmacy2U, who also experienced a drop at the same time (although not as drastic).
At the other end of the scale, another online pharmacy, Chemist4U, has seen no such drops. In fact, their visibility has noticeably grown since the August 2024 core update.
With high levels of E-E-A-T demonstrated throughout their content and wider site, it’s probably fair to assume that they are taking a more proactive approach to pages that fit the YMYL criteria.
What does good E-E-A-T look like on healthcare ecommerce websites?
There are a few different ways to highlight how your ecommerce healthcare brand fits into the E-E-A-T framework, but some of the most common implementations include:
Authorship
A way in which websites in the healthcare ecommerce space can demonstrate that the individual responsible for writing YMYL content has experience, expertise and authority in a particular area/field/topic is through implementing authorship on published content.
This usually involves creating author pages, with detailed information about the individual’s relevant qualifications, experience and links to any papers or published articles on the same topic that can help establish they are an authority in the field.
On the published content page itself, there can be a short author bio citing relevant information and linking to their longer author page.
Alongside this, and especially in healthcare, it’s useful to have an extra layer of authority and expertise with a ‘checked by’ or ‘reviewed by’ named individual as well. This is important in cases where the actual writer of the piece is someone from the marketing or content team rather than a qualified health professional in their own right.
A great example of this done well in healthcare ecommerce is on Chemist4U, as seen below.
The fact that the page has been reviewed and fact-checked by a Superintendent Pharmacist helps to build trust with the audience and provides a signal for search engines to take into account too.
Product reviews and seller testimonials
Positive product reviews are a great trust signal for potential customers and search engines. They show that you deliver on your promises and sell quality products that meet the needs of your audience.
Positive testimonials about your online store as a whole (rather than about individual products) can also carry plenty of weight in demonstrating that you are a trustworthy company that values customers and provides a good experience for shoppers.
Building up Google reviews on your Google Business Profile, along with a well-known solution such as Trustpilot, can help add to other site-wide trust signals that can feed into your demonstrations of E-E-A-T.
Backlink profile
Links from other relevant websites that point to yours, often called backlinks, can act as ‘votes of confidence’ that your site has useful information and can be trusted. When a website with strong authority in its own right links to one of your pages, it sends a strong positive signal to search engines. Our Digital PR services deliver this and more.
A healthy backlink profile, where great websites that are known in the healthcare space are linking to various content on your website (rather than just your homepage) and citing you in their own content, is evidence that your content is trustworthy, useful and respected by others in the field.
Creating great unique content
Producing truly useful content, which takes Google’s helpful content indicators into account, is the most important factor when you’re publishing on a YMYL topic.
Utilising that experience, expertise and authority can be demonstrated through thought-leadership content and in-depth pieces that are well-researched, reference your (credible) sources properly and bring something a bit different to the table, so it’s not just another version of what everyone else is producing.
Use this quick checklist to ensure you stay on track with the content you create.
Website trust signals
Along with the reviews already mentioned, other website best practices that can help build trust with potential customers and search engines include:
- A valid SSL certificate – so no warnings appear saying your site might not be secure.
- A well-designed website with navigation and UX that makes sense to your audience
- Clear and obvious NAP details (Name, Address, Phone) so you can be contacted if needed.
- Clearly displayed badges and accreditations that relate to your field and ecommerce essentials e.g. payment types accepted, company registration number and any relevant certifications.
An example of this is Lloyd’s Pharmacy’s online doctor website:
Your approach to YMYL
When it comes to YMYL and healthcare ecommerce, both you and Google want essentially the same things:
- To provide website users with the most accurate and useful information possible.
- To avoid spreading misinformation or anything that could potentially harm anyone.
By incorporating the E-E-A-T framework into your SEO and content strategy, you can ensure that you not only provide the high-quality, evidence based and accurate content that your customers need in order to make informed decisions about their health and wellbeing, you also follow search engine best practice for the high standards needed in this industry.
If you’d like to know more about how we can help healthcare ecommerce brands to increase their online visibility through SEO, Content and Digital PR, take a look at how we boosted organic traffic and revenue for Taking Care.
We’d love to chat if you want to find out more. Get in touch using the form below.
