Why complex products or services require more SEO work on your part.

If you have a product or service in a YMYL niche, you may need to do some aspects of SEO yourself.

YMYL stands for ‘Your Money Your Life‘ and relates to content that can significantly impact a person’s finances, health, safety, or overall well-being.

Google holds this type of content to higher standards, so it needs to be written by an expert.

The challenges of YMYL SEO.

If you are in this niche, your content can affect the lives of your audience, so it’s got to be 100% correct.

It also means that your content will be subject to far higher levels of scrutiny by the search engines.

You can add that it has to be up-to-date; legislation, facts and the science for content in this niche can change quickly, so you’ll need to ensure all your content is updated in line with other changes.

When writing this type of content, you must adhere strictly to Google’s EEAT guidelines if you stand any chance of ranking.

Content-production.

I write content for many sites on topics I can research, form an opinion on, and deliver an original factual or thought piece.

However, I can’t do that for YMYL content as I am not an expert in finance, medicine or any other YMYL sector.

This can mean choosing an SEO expert becomes quite difficult for small businesses in these niches, but there is a simple answer: write the content yourself.

This is the only option for this type of content, but it presents another challenge: you are an expert in your niche, but that’s probably not SEO, so how do you optimise the articles?

On-page SEO for YMYL niche content.

Before we get into on-page SEO, I will say that with this type of content, your technical SEO setup has to be 100% spot on.

There’s no point writing these articles if your site will let you down, so get the technical aspects of SEO nailed before you do anything.

Your site needs to be squeaky clean in this department, as good content on a crap site will get you nowhere.

So, how do you do on-page SEO for niche YMYL content?

Table tennis is a good metaphor for this process, or as the Chuckle Brothers used to say, to me, to you.

We are going to send your content backwards and forwards. It will be optimised and sent back to you for editing: rinse and repeat.

When optimisation outside of copywriting, internal linking tools like Wilo allow you to quickly find internal links from your other content (never automate this). External linking to research papers and other authoritative sites should be relatively obvious, and titles and meta-descriptions must be carefully crafted.

Never use AI-generated content for YMYL niches.

Never try to wing it with GPT for this type of stuff – you will have to spend as long checking the content as you would have done writing it, so it’s best to knuckle down and write it yourself.

Find the right SEO expert for your niche.

I do not get involved in YMYL SEO as there are experts out there for most niches who know better than me, so do a careful Google search and don’t rely on reviews; you need first-person recommendations.

I can help with the other aspects of SEO, such as getting your technical SEO 100% optimised.