YMYL in 2023: How to Properly Set Up SEO and Promote a Medical Center Website
- 8 min
- 26.01.2024
About the YMYL Category: encompassing areas crucial to people’s well-being such as health, finance, and safety. Introduced by Google in 2015, it mandates that medical websites adhere to stringent quality standards due to their significant impact on users’ lives.
Content Requirements for YMYL Websites: E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is crucial for medical websites. The more a website demonstrates these qualities, the higher it ranks in search results.
Challenges in Promoting Medical Websites Due to EEAT/YMYL Ranking Factors: If the content meets the search engine’s algorithms, it will be accepted as trustworthy, and the website is more likely to be categorized as reliable. However, if the content fails to meet these criteria, the website may face ranking challenges, and traffic volume could decrease. There might also be a noticeable difference in traffic volume across different website sections. Keeping up with search engine algorithm updates is crucial for maintaining page trustworthiness and ranking.
Most traffic to medical websites comes from branded user queries (clinic name, brand name, etc.), which do not heavily depend on trust as the system naturally ranks the website high. However, general queries will only be effective if the website complies with E-E-A-T/YMYL requirements. For example, a query like «treatment [disease name] in [city]» will not lead users to a specific website if these standards are not met, as the competition will be lost.
In this article, we provide clear instructions on how to check content for compliance with E-E-A-T criteria. The success of advertising campaigns depends on how well SEO specialists can optimize the website, as organic traffic is one of the key channels through which the company acquires new clients.
1. Building Trust in the Website Through E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
Thanks to this algorithm, website content is evaluated regularly, usually quarterly. A challenge arises: the visibility of website pages may drop due to temporary non-compliance with E-E-A-T requirements.
The task of a medical center is to instill the highest possible level of trust in users. This can best be achieved by updating information about the center on the relevant website pages:
- Information about the company and the clinic’s specialization.
- Detailed descriptions of services, a separate page for each service, and a current price list.
- Essential information about the clinic’s specialists: clients trust doctors they know more about — their specialization, official experience, practical experience, educational and qualification documents, and photographs.
- Official documents about the clinic: certificates, licenses, or permissions to practice medicine in specific regions.
- Social proof such as patient reviews about the clinic and treatment results (if such data is permissible to disclose).
These elements on the pages of a medical company’s website will serve as real proof of the medical institution’s reliability for users and a strong argument for search engines to recognize them as trustworthy.
Don’t forget to check how content and individual blocks are displayed on different versions of the website — both mobile and desktop!
2. Principles of Content Quality
Carelessness and spam within website texts are unacceptable. This will immediately lead to the entire website dropping in search engine rankings. SEO specialists should pay particular attention to the following things:
- Blog materials or detailed information about a clinic’s service should be understandable and reliable.
- Articles should be written by specialized doctors or professional editors with doctors participating as invited experts.
- The language of the articles should be easy to read, as this content is intended for real people, not robots: hence, reliability is more important than keyword frequency.
- It’s always necessary to include information about the specialists who worked on the materials: when users see real people, doctors, experts, or editors behind each article, their trust in the website increases significantly.
Important: This concerns not only the trust in the medical organization’s website from users — potential clients of the center — but also from search engines!
3. Competent Approach to Semantic Core Collection
Since almost all SEO work on a website is based on semantics, follow these basic rules:
- Use synonym queries: an ordinary person might not have a medical education or understand the terms used by medical specialists.
- Use specialized SEO services to compare with competitor medical organization websites: this will help expand the list of conversion queries and distribute them effectively across the website structure.
Example: The term «hemorrhoid removal» can be substituted with «hemorrhoidectomy.» Similarly, «joint replacement» has a synonymous query «endoprosthetics.»
4. Developing All Stages of User Demand
Semantics in the medical field often follows a multi-level demand principle. Users typically go through several steps and touchpoints before becoming clients of a medical clinic. It’s crucial to address both informational and commercial traffic and related queries together. Separating them means missing potential communication points with the user.
SEO specialists must remember the lengthy decision-making cycle in this field. Some queries might be urgent, such as when a person knows exactly which problem and which doctor they need. However, a significant portion of queries is preliminary, where users want to learn more about symptoms, and diagnosis, as well as compare several clinics or doctors. Whether someone chooses a particular clinic depends on how well all stages are developed from an SEO perspective.
Key points of forming demand for medical services:
1. Individual service pages: What exactly can the client get at this clinic — diagnostics, consultations, tests, surgeries, etc.
- Example query: «abdominal ultrasound.» The person knows what they need, so create separate pages for such queries, detailing the services, costs, preparation steps, doctors involved, and any necessary preparations or side effects.
2. Disease diagnosis pages: Symptoms, diagnoses, treatment methods, and how the medical clinic conducts treatment.
- Example query: «how to treat hemorrhoids.» The person wants to learn more to understand the causes of their discomfort, disease manifestations, and treatment methods or procedures.
3. Symptom-specific materials: Detailed articles on the concerned topic, explaining complaints and how they relate to symptoms of various diseases.
- Example query: «why does my knee hurt after running.» Symptom or diagnosis articles can lead users to related service pages.
4. General medical topics: The user is not ready to use a specific medical service or does not need it yet but is interested in learning more about treatment methods or maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
- Example query: «non-surgical spinal treatment methods.» Such materials provide an overview of what the service entails.
5. Building a Strong Link Profile
A robust link profile indicates the website’s trustworthiness. The more resources that link to the medical center’s pages, the higher the site’s rating in search engines, increasing its chances of appearing in the top results.
In medical topics, the most valuable types of materials are:
- Blog publications
- Scientific publications
- Social media articles
Rely on natural links, use outreach and crowd marketing, and buy article placements. Ensure the donor resource’s thematic focus and check its content for EEAT criteria.
6. Essential Technical Hygiene
Avoid carelessness: often, SEO specialists assume minor errors like 404 responses or pages with low content value won’t hinder overall website ranking, but it’s not the best approach. The «cleaner» the website, the higher its quality index.
Consider checking the following:
- Website structure (remember to eliminate all duplicates),
- Dedicated landing pages for each target query,
- High-quality content on pages,
- Technical errors,
- SEO duplicates.
7. Increasing Traffic Through Non-Branded Queries
Consider all user queries leading to the medical center’s website. It may turn out that most traffic comes from non-branded queries, rather than branded ones.
To attract new clients and turn such traffic into requests for medical services, follow this algorithm:
- Analyze the most conversion-effective search queries,
- Set up analytics systems for them,
- Track conversion to target actions,
- Prioritize queries,
- If data is insufficient, set priorities based on demand level,
- Consider the business value of the query: e.g., «spine CT scan in [city] for cheap» is more important than a broader query like «why does my back hurt.»
SEO specialists’ advice: Always remember that the goal is not just traffic, but converting that traffic into tangible outcomes like patient visits and service bookings. This focus will help grow the business and support long-term strategic goals.
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