Creating YMYL and EEAT Content for Pharma and Healthcare Brands

15th Feb 2024

With many years of experience in helping medical copywriters and pharma brands to navigate search engine optimisation requirements, at Varn Health we can help demystify the content requirements laid out by Google for health web copy

What does EEAT mean?

EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and is a set of guidelines created by Google to judge whether web content is of a good quality. Search engines like Google want to ensure the pages they list at the top of their search results are useful to their users, so they create frameworks to help judge whether websites and individual webpages are offering relevant and helpful content.The EEAT framework (previously just EAT) prioritises content that is credible and legitimate by asking questions like:

• Has the content been created by a person or organisation with relevant experience of the topic? In a healthcare context, this could be an interview with a real patient telling their unbiased, personal story of receiving a treatment.
• Does the content demonstrate expertise? In the world of pharma, this could mean a video narrated by a healthcare professional with years of experience working in a particular field, noting their professional accreditation and achievements.
• Are the sources of information shown authoritative? Here in the UK, the NHS website would be considered an authority in the arena of healthcare, as would established healthcare charities and professional bodies. Blog posts written by lay individuals, on the other hand, would be unlikely to be considered to have authority on the subject (despite potentially demonstrating personal experience, as noted above).
• Ultimately and most importantly, can the website and the content shown be trusted? As web users, we constantly make assumptions about whether a website is legitimate and trustworthy, based on an array of factors – and search engines do the same. Factors at play here would range from whether it is easy to first identify and then contact the organisation who has made the content, to whether the site loads quickly and smoothly. 

What does YMYL mean?

YMYL takes the principles of EEAT one step further, and is highly relevant for websites that touch on topics relating to health and medical care. YMYL stands for “Your Money or Your Life” – so called because it relates to any subject matter which could have an impact on the readers’ finances, health, wellbeing or livelihood. Google understands that a website providing information about healthcare treatments or disease diagnosis could have a significant impact on the lives of those reading. There is a significant likelihood that harm could be done if incorrect information is distributed. It is important that the content is both comprehensible and correct. YMYL content is therefore scrutinised to a higher degree and held to a higher standard than the everyday EEAT criteria. 

What industries are impacted by YMYL?

Google’s search quality rater guidelines state that they have stringent standards for YMYL content “because low quality pages could potentially negatively impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society.” 

It stands to reason that any industry which directly relates to the categories of health, finances or safety should be concerned about YMYL within their web presence. However, even for a pharma company, not every single page on a website may be considered YMYL – only those with the potential to do harm to an individual or society if they were to contain incorrect information. ‘About us’ pages, company updates or other niche content could fall outside the YMYL bracket, for example. On the other hand, industries which do not directly relate to the above topics may find themselves drifting into YMYL territory if they create content that touches on a sensitive niche – such as a restaurant giving nutritional advice. 

How does YMYL relate to pharma and healthcare?

As has been explained, the majority of content created by a healthcare or pharmaceutical organisation will fall within the YMYL bracket. It is essential that all content of this kind is therefore scrutinised to ensure it is true, reliable and supported by credible sources. Luckily, these items tend to go hand-in-hand with the legal compliance checks that most medical copywriters will run as they produce individual new items of content. However, there are many additional factors that a healthcare website should ensure are in place to signal to Google that their content is legitimate, credible, reliable and trustworthy, as shown below. 

YMYL Checklist: SEO guidelines for pharma brands

Ultimately, both EEAT and YMYL are attempts by Google to ensure they are promoting quality content from legitimate organisations, backed up by relevant trustworthy sources. Healthcare and pharmaceutical companies must ensure first-and-foremost that they fit this description in order to achieve SEO success. But it is not enough to simply be a legitimate and credible organisation – you must also demonstrate this fact. When we optimise content for a medical website, we therefore follow initial guidelines to align with the principles behind Google’s search quality rater guidelines:

At the website level:

• Make it easy to discover which organisation is responsible for the website – especially if this is different to the brand name of the site
• Demonstrate the qualifications and professional credentials of the organisation responsible for the website
• Ensure organisation contact details are easy to find
• Where possible, outline the website’s editorial process to demonstrate that due diligence has been taken in regards to content creation
• Follow User Experience best practices to create a site that runs quickly and smoothly, and is easy to navigate and use. Make sure all functionality works, accessibility principles are adhered to, and data protection principles around cookies are followed
• Implement Organization schema on the most suitable page on your website, to provide contextual information about your organisation to Google

Within individual content pieces:

• Make sure every page is unique, high quality, accurate and reliable
• Use keyword search intent modelling to identify the topics and queries that your market are looking for, and create content which directly answers their search queries
• Explicitly note sources behind information wherever possible, including linking to external references if relevant
• Explicitly reference individual experts related to content, where possible – for example, linking to a separate author page with details of the person’s accreditations and experience
• Regularly check all content to ensure it is up to date and still correct

Still not sure how to make sure you are following YMYL and EEAT best practices? SEO can be overwhelming, as it comprises both offsite content considerations and onsite technical implementation. As experts in both search engine optimisation and pharmaceutical digital marketing, the Varn Health team are well placed to help. Get in touch to find out how we can work with you to optimise your healthcare website for SEO success.