If you’re invested in improving your website’s SEO, you may have heard the acronyms “EAT,” “EEAT,” and “YMYL” thrown around before. Even if you aren’t, it’s important to understand what these acronyms stand for and why they’re an important tool when it comes to assessing the quality of your website content, especially since Google utilizes them as it crawls your website. Here’s what you need to know.
What is “YMYL?”
Content may be king, but some types of content are more important than others. YMYL stands for Your Money or Your Life, and it refers to any content that deals with financial or health advice. Theoretically, these topics could cost readers their money or their life, so it’s incredibly important that the information offered is correct.
What is “EAT” vs “EEAT?”
Originally, EAT stood for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The acronym then expanded to include Experience too. How does Google define each of those words?
Experience was added by Google in December of 2022 as a way to gauge how much credibility the author of a piece of content has. Writers who have experience with a topic, such as someone reviewing a product who genuinely used it, or a journalist who covers a topic frequently, are considered to have lots of experience.
Expertise probably seems very similar to experience, and it is. In fact, these two terms are used interchangeably by Google. Life experience can make someone an expert, but formal training and winning awards in a field are certainly considered expertise as well. The difference between the two becomes especially important if you’re publishing YMYL content, which Google considers best left to the experts. If you’re offering advice on topics that fall under this category, make sure your website clearly demonstrates that you know what you’re talking about and are qualified to speak on the subject.
Authoritativeness looks at the site, the author, and the organization as a whole, zooming out a bit. Do well-regarded businesses link to you? Are you considered an authority on the subject?
Trustworthiness zooms out even further to look at each of these components, plus more technical components of a website that indicate trustworthiness, such as Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certification indicating that a website can handle sensitive information, as well as more abstract concepts like how a company responds to reviews and what is being said in online discussions about a brand.
We Can Help
Looking to improve your website’s SEO and your content’s trust signals? Contact one of our MyAdvice’s digital marketing experts to see how we help businesses like yours create smarter, more robust SEO.
