As a marketing discipline, SEO relies on an extensive list of tools and strategies designed to help companies and organizations of all types make the best use of search engines and the organic traffic they generate. However, certain aspects of SEO are more important for some industries. Such is the case with healthcare SEO. Healthcare is a unique industry on many levels. Therefore, how SEO is utilized within the industry is slightly different. At Webtek Digital Marketing in Salt Lake City, UT, healthcare SEO is approached slightly differently. The teams at both locations believe the starting point for successful healthcare SEO lies in two acronyms:
- YMYL – your money, your life
- EAT – expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
All the other principles common to SEO still apply. It is just that YMYL and EAT provide the foundation. These two principles set the stage for everything a company like Webtek does to improve a healthcare organization’s SEO and marketing strategies.
Your Money, Your Life
If you are confused by what YMYL might mean, it is in the name. YMYL content is online content that deals specifically with money or health in some way. Money is more about personal finances than business but it also affects enterprises. Health is pretty self-explanatory. It turns out that Google is very interested in YMYL because it strives always to give its users the most accurate results. According to Forbes contributor and Forbes Business Development Council member Timothy Carter, Google has officially said: “We have very high Page Quality rating standards for YMYL pages because low-quality YMYL pages could potentially negatively impact a person’s happiness, health, financial stability, or safety”. That just about says it all.
Content Quality Must Be Top-Notch
Given what Google has said about YMYL, healthcare organizations must be extremely fussy about their content. They need to make sure that quality is always top-notch. They need to be sure that everything they publish is accurate. Inaccurate or low-quality information could lead to unhappy web users, which doesn’t sit well with Google.
Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness
EAT is becoming gradually more important across all of SEO in general. But knowing how important YMYL is, EAT becomes more important to healthcare organizations. Healthcare SEO must be built on the EAT principle from top to bottom.
1. Expertise
When users visit healthcare websites, they expect that they will be built and maintained by experts. Even if they know that companies like Webtek do the actual work to keep the sites online, they expect that the content fed to web developers is given to them by experts.
2. Authoritativeness
Authoritativeness goes beyond expertise by putting the weight of an organization’s reputation behind its content. If website visitors trust a healthcare organization’s authority, they are likely to trust its content. But if website content turns out to be inaccurate, it harms power.
3. Trustworthiness
Expertise and authoritativeness impact trustworthiness. The less trustworthy a healthcare organization is, the less impact its website will have on visitors. This ultimately affects healthcare SEO because it harms rankings and prevents new visitors from finding the organization’s site. Healthcare SEO is somewhat different because the healthcare industry is different. SEO developers should always approach healthcare with YMYL and EAT in mind. As far as principles go, these two are the most important for building the foundation of a healthcare SEO campaign. They are the two most important acronyms in healthcare SEO, bar none.