Date: 28/11/2024
Author: Ryan Walsh

Search engine optimisation is the art of getting a business to rank as high as possible on the search engine result pages. This description is often abbreviated to SERPs.

SEO is not a walk in the park. Many businesses mistakenly believe it’s a simple task and attempt to handle it themselves. However, the reality is that SEO is a complex and demanding process. To reach the first page of Google, you must consistently produce high-quality work, which is a long and challenging journey.

Google’s algorithm is designed to filter out spam and prioritise quality content. Simply churning out articles at lightning speed won’t get you to the first page of Google. The algorithm values high-quality, original content, and it’s essential to understand and adhere to these standards.

So, there are a lot of spam filters that are part of Google. The core algorithm of Google’s algorithm is packed full of Penguin algorithm updates the weeds out websites which have low-quality links.
There are spam filters that means that copywriters should only focus on creating and writing low-quality content and content thin websites will get pushed down Google’s SERP’s.

Google and YMYL

Shifting our focus to the core of this article, let’s delve into “YMYL”, an update introduced by Google’s quality evaluators. This update sets a higher evaluation standard for any website related to your money or life topics that are written about. It mandates that the information must be of top-notch quality, accurate, and reliable, underscoring the gravity of the content.

So, in layperson’s terms, if your solicitors practice and you write blog posts, say once a week, because you are offering legal advice, these pages are held to a higher standard of scrutiny by Google than somebody talking about dog collars and diamond-encrusted dog bowls for example.

This is why these companies, such as top law practices, turn to the best SEO consultants in the country; their content marketing to be written, because of the Google YMYL updates, the written work needs to be top-notch to get on page one Google’s SERP’s.

 

Our table of contents

• What exactly is YMYL? And what does it mean?
• Why this was a significant and important Google updates
• How their Google Quality Raters’ Guidelines transcended into the YMYL update
• This article doesn’t discuss the Google E-EAT update and why businesses need to write well-written content marketing that an expert has written.

 

What is YMYL?

First things first, what exactly does it stand for?

YMYL is simply an abbreviation for “your money or your life”. This refers to an update that Google made that said any pages related to health, law, or when writing about finance related subjects, these page and blog posts must held to a much higher standard if they are to be ranked on first page of Google’s SERP’s. In short, Google’s algorithms scrutinises these pages more to ensure the information is reliable and accurate because following that advice could directly affect somebody’s life.

For example, somebody looking for legal advice needs to make an accurate decision based on accurate information that they have read.
So these pages are, therefore, scrutinised to make sure that they are accurate and that any information can be relied upon

Therefore, Google holds YMYL pages to a much higher standard; the text and sources are scrutinised, such as whether has the author gathered their facts and statistics? This is why anybody writing work related to offering advice that can impact somebody’s life, such as providing legal advice or say advice to somebody who wants to take out a mortgage, needs to make sure that they closely follow the information set out in Google YMYL.

Can you provide us with some more examples of YMYL topics?

Many SEO agencies generally think that pages dealing with health and medical advice, financial advice, and legal advice are deemed to be YMYL topics. It is also widely believed that news topics, such as someone writing and commentating on a war, are pages which scrutinised under YMYL so that information that gets ranked on the first page of the SERP’s, that’s Google’s first page is reliable.

Why all business should know what YMYL stands for and what it means when writing content marketing
When you talk to any good SEO experts (we have many here at Walsh & Partners), they will tell you that it is more complex than ever now to get any business onto the first page of Google.co.uk or Google.com.

That’s because the businesses that are now on page one of Google.co.uk, have now got economies of scale in terms of SEO, for example an SEO consultant or team at an agency has been plugging away at improving the search engine optimisation business the say the last 10 years solid. So in short the businesses on first page of Google, have often got a head start on companies that are just starting today investing in improving their organic search engine optimisation.

 

For some businesses its much simpler to get on page one of Google

However, it is much more straightforward to take a plumber onto the first page of Google than to take a new law practice on the first page of Google. The reason for that is, simply because of Google algorithms, now have Google YMYL integrated into Google’s algorithm. So in short, if you are writing about a Google YMYL topic, these pages are further scrutinised by Google’s algorithm o ensure that it offers accurate and reliable information.

 

Trust

It all boils down to trust.

For example, should you take medical advice from a stranger as a recommendation on how to fix a bad back that you have bumped into in a local supermarket, or should you listen to your local doctor?

Well, of course your local doctor because they trust and are qualified to do so to offer medical advice.
Just as you trust your doctor for medical advice, Google’s algorithm assesses the credibility and trustworthiness of information your business offering, to put a score or weighting on how much the information can be trusted. Whether written by an expert, based on personal experience, or from a highly trusted website, the Google algorithm values the source’s credibility.

This is where Google E-E-A-T) steps in

As you might have noticed, in this article, we mention that Google E-EAT quite a lot. That’s with good reason: Google E-EAT evaluates the quality of content marketing based on the level of expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness of that particular author and how good the text is they have written.

 

Google Quality Raters’ Guidelines

These guidelines were written in collaboration with hundreds of Google quality raters employed by Google.

What we mean by this is that real human beings were given criteria to assess company websites; once they were done, they were tasked with working out how well-written, how authoritative, and trustworthy companies’ content marketing was. This information was then integrated into the Google algorithm.

So, it’s a bit like an MOT of your website; in an MOT, the car is inspected to assess all aspects of its reliability and safety, such as the cars brakes.

This is precisely how Google does it, when assessing how good your businesses content marketing is.
Google developed the Google Quality Raters’ Guidelines and Policies. This has nothing to do with the safety inspection of the car. Instead, it’s developing a way to assess how good and reliable the business content marketing is. Therefore, Google come up with quality rater guidelines.

It is basically like a tick-box exercise to determine how good an article is.

Once this tick-box exercise has been structured and created, it can be directly integrated into Google’s core algorithm.

So how do Google Quality Raters’ Guidelines evaluate pages and, more specifically, the quality of content marketing?

 

Experience

How much experience does the author talk about that particular subject? For example, do they have 25 years of experience in aerospace industry? Is it clear they have hands-on experience with what they are writing about?

They might not have directly written the article themselves, but they may have collaborated closely with a copywriter at the SEO firm to help publish it at work? Therefore, it’s clear to anybody reading it that the person writing it knows what they are talking about?

You can then have links from say “LinkedIn profiles” that say this article was written or in collaboration with this person from such, and such company. On the LinkedIn profile, for example, it is clear that they might have 25 years of experience working for an Aerospace company?

 

Expertise

This is closely related to experience, but Google wants the author to demonstrate that you have good knowledge and expertise of what you’re writing about in the written work. As we are a highly experienced marketing agency, so if we are able to speculate how Google’s algorithm works in this area, we think it used to do with the semantic web and Google Knowledge Graph.

Google has been using “Google Knowledge Graph” and the “semantic web” for a long time; basically, it knows how companies and things are connected.

Let us give you an example of how we think Google’s semantic web and Google Knowledge Graph works.

Let say you’re writing about certain celebrities, they will know that person is, say it’s a major celebrity, published many hit singles, or featured in major films they’ve starred in and also Google’s Knowledge Graph, will know major life events that have taken place such as winning a BAFTA awards in 1999 for example.

Now, all of these things are connected; the semantic web knows the name of the celebrity, their hit singles, and the films they have been part of the prestigious awards they have won.

Therefore, if an article is in-depth and has a high word count, it will often cover multiple facts (which Google Knowledge Graph can check) that are related to that particular person, product, or event. The article will cover various points that Google will fact-check, which is one way that Google will be used to demonstrate how accurate that information is. So this is how our SEO agency thinks Google uses the semantic web, plus Google Knowledge Graph and Google Knowledge Vault to check facts.

 

Authoritativeness

This has always been part of Google’s algorithm ever since the days of Google PageRank algorthim. Basically, Google knows how authoritative a business is by number of links, quality of links, and brand mentions.

 

Trustworthiness

If someone diligently sat down with a cup of tea and wrote a very long and informative article like this (evergreen content marketing), you’d expect them to cite their sources.

It’s a bit like writing a paper for University, let’s say your dissertation, you don’t just wantto hear one persons perspective rambling on for over 10,000 words.

So your going to want to know where they’ve gotten their sources and information. Have they considered the subject matter? Is the person researching to evaluating other people’s opinions and thoughts?

So many people believe that even since the day of Google PageRank, up until the present time of writing is in November 2024, you should approach writing a blog post or page a bit like you are writing a dissertation at a University.

You might want to use something like the Harvard referencing system to reference where you got your sources from. To do that, you should add an outbound backlink, going directly to the PDF page oR the page where we’ve got the information from

 

Human input and Google RankBrain

So you can write the most comprehensive article under the sun; let’s say you are writing an article on electric cars, the benefits of ownership, and the top 10 bestselling vehicles in the United Kingdom.

This article might be fabulous.

You might have a very high Google E-EAT score so much so that you have proven that you have high levels of expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness in what your writing about.

However, the article was written in a way that is not appealing to shoppers or readers; it’s sending them to sleep in matter of fact!

Then there’s no point because the article as it’s likely to have a high bounce rate.
So, the final point that we want to make is how Google is integrating artificial intelligence (A.I) into Google’s algorithm.

There was a massive update called the Google RankBrain update; most SEO agencies believe that is the third most crucial ranking factor Google now employs as part of its algorithm.

In a nutshell, Google is deciphering how engaged people are with your content marketing- is the bounce rate high or low?

Are you sending the shopper to sleep so we can leave the website in less than 60 seconds?
Or has information been put forward in an, informative, and engaging way, and you are retaining shoppers’ interest for, let’s say, over 10 minutes?

Google doesn’t want to rank pages of businesses on the first page. They want to offer engaging work.

Therefore, it is a bit like a customer satisfaction survey after you buy a product or a service.

Google is, therefore, evaluating how long shoppers spend reading the text on your website, what the bounce rate looks like for that page, and what the dwell rate works out if the pages are engaging in terms of what you have written.
Therefore, artificial intelligence (A.I)is being used to monitor on a mass scale how engaged shoppers are.

 

How engaged is the shopper?

If the pages that hold shoppers’ interest for longer, and perhaps a shopper visiting more pages and more engaged with spending time reading blog posts on those businesses website, these are the businesses that move up Google’s ranks.

The point we emphasise here is that it is not just about writing the most in-depth piece of content marketing.
While this clearly shows that you are an expert on what you’re writing about, you still have to balance this with it being engaging and informative.

Otherwise, Google algorithms will deem the work to have a low dwell time and high bounce rate, and the business could move down Google’s ranks.

 

How we can help you

We are one of the most highly experienced SEO companies in the whole of United Kingdom, and as this article illustrates, we have a strong grasp of how Google algorithms work. That’s a bold statement to say we are one of the most knowledgeable SEO agencies in the U.K, yet we can back that up with thousands, upon thousands of hours, testing, honing and perfecting our craft. This is why some of Britains best known names come to us for help and advice.

 

We employ some of the best SEO specialists in the UK, so regardless of your business sector, we can help you gain more organic visitors.