How to optimize your wellness and health content for E-A-T and Google
Wellness and nutrition brands must put a priority on content that demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T).
As a YMYL or Your Money Your Life website, Google holds your website and content to higher standards than non-YMYL websites. Websites that sell products or provide services or information that can impact the happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users are categorized by Google as YMYL.
Wellness, nutrition, health, and supplement websites are examples of YMYL sites. As the owner of such a website, you need to make sure your content and website meets Google’s expectations for quality, research, and authorship.
It is important as an YMYL site, your content clearly demonstrates E-A-T.
What is E-A-T?
E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness:
- Expertise: you need to demonstrate your expert skills or knowledge in the wellness, nutrition, health, or supplement domain.Expertise To Do’s: Make your contact information easy to find. Include a link to your About Us and/or Contact Us page in either your main menu or footer navigation.
- Authoritativeness: you need to demonstrate that the person writing your content is an authority in your field and the content subject matter.Authoritativeness To Do: Identify your authors with a byline and bio.
- Trustworthiness: Google measures your website trustworthiness by analyzing the quality of your backlinks.Trustworthiness To Do’s: Focus on creating high-quality, well-researched content that other sites will want to link to or use as research sources. Use endnotes to reference supporting research and content.
What is YMYL?
YMYL stands for Your Money Your Life. Websites that sell products or provide services or information that can impact the happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users are categorized by Google as YMYL.
Google categorizes the following websites as YMYL sites:
- News and current events
- Civics, government, and law
- Finance
- Shopping
- Health and safety
- Groups of people
- Other (fitness and nutrition, housing information, choosing a college, finding a job, etc.)
While Google expects all websites to have a beneficial purpose – it’s extra critical for wellness and nutrition websites to clearly prove the purpose or reason behind every page on the website.
Google states in section 2.2 of the Google Quality Rater Guidelines:
Websites and pages should be created to help people.
How Wellness and Nutrition Brands can Optimize for E-A-T
Wellness and nutrition brands can optimize for E-A-T with these 9 steps:
- Review your content for quality – make sure you can answer yes to these Google content and quality questions:
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- Does the content provide original information, reporting, research or analysis?
- Does the content provide a substantial, complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
- If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide substantial additional value and originality?
- Does the headline and/or page title provide a descriptive, helpful summary of the comment?
- Does the headline and/or page title avoid being exaggerating or shocking in nature?
- Review your content for expertise – make sure you can answer yes to these Google expertise questions:
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- Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?
- If you researched the site producing the content, would you come away with an impression that it is well-trusted or widely-recognized as an authority on its topic?
- Is this content written by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well?
- Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues relating to your money or your life?
- Make sure it’s clear who wrote your content. Every single blog or article on your website needs an author bio.Here is my bio, it clearly communicates expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness:Jane Phelps is the CEO/Partner at Know Agency. Jane leads client SEO strategy and handles all aspects of in-house SEO demands. This includes providing SEO training, competitive analysis, keyword research, algorithm analysis, and the review of all new content to ensure SEO best-practices are followed. Jane holds a Master’s Certificate in Online Marketing from the University of San Francisco and is BrightEdge Certified.
- Update your About Us page. Your About Us page should clearly explain what you do, why you do it, and why you’re qualified to do it.Include reviews and testimonials from customers and clients.
- Make it easy for people to contact you. Include your contact information, including email address and phone number in the footer of every page. Include a Contact Us link in your main menu.
- Prove trustworthiness with endnote or inline links to your research and content sources. Every statement about health, wellness, or nutrition needs to have a research reference. This blog from Pure For You, is a great example of how to use endnotes.
- Audit your content for information quality. Remove filler content, pages with thin content, and misleading page titles and headings.Read section 4.1 Characteristics of High Quality Pages in the Google Quality Rater Guidelines, and pay attention to this sentence:A high-quality page should have a beneficial purpose and achieve that purpose well.Use our Website and Content Quality Checklists to make sure your content meets Google’s standards for content quality, expertise, presentation and layout, and quality when compared to your competitors.
- Refresh and update your content for search intent and keywords. Google likes to rank and trust content that is up-to-date and relevant.Search intent is the problem, question, or query a person wants solved. This determines what they ask Google and the type of device they use to ask their questions. Create content that meets search intent – remember this can change based on the season, trends, and news cycle.Read Your Complete Guide to Search Intent to learn how to optimize for search intent.
- Create content hubs or topic clusters to demonstrate expertise. A content hub is a collection of blog posts about a specific topic. This Ahrefs article explains how to create content hubs.
As a wellness or nutrition brand, your priority is on creating informative high-quality content that demonstrates E-A-T.
Our team is here to help you with this. At Know Agency we specialize in organic search and paid search marketing expertise and leadership for health and wellness brands.
Contact Know Agency for professional advice you can count on.
About the author
Jane Phelps is the CEO and co-founder of Know Agency, a specialist in organic search and paid search marketing expertise and leadership for health and wellness brands. Jane started Know Agency in 2010 focused solely on the nutritional supplement space. With her hands-on experience working in the health and wellness space, Jane is a public speaker and conference presenter at industry trade shows, networking events, and conferences on search and digital marketing strategies for wellness and nutrition brands. Jane and her team are instrumental in creating results for leading companies including Pure Encapsulations, Garden of Life, Learning Tree, Avocados From Mexico, Susan G. Komen Foundation, Jabil, and many start-ups and entrepreneurs.
