Episode 27: Advice For Building Authority as a YMYL Site
Greetings anon,
We hope your new year got off to a good start. This episode is a niche post on some specific things we have done in order to build our authority as a “Health Site.” For those unfamiliar with YMYL sites, (Your Money & Your Life), it includes any website that covers topics related to health or finances.
These types of sites have additional scrutiny placed on them by Google because consuming incorrect info could potentially have disastrous consequences. Google prefers older sites, sites that have provably certified experts creating content, and sites that are referenced as “authoritative” by other trusted sites.
Reading this, you may think to yourself, “doesn’t Google treat all sites like this?” The answers is yes and no.
As an example, if your trust score from Google needs to be at least a 4 to rank for pickleball equipment reviews, it needs a trust score of 7 to rank for Crypto tax questions and a trust score of 9 to rank for supplement advice during pregnancy. This is a generalization, but you get the idea.
Everything covered in this article can be used by any website to perform better, but the topics covered today are much more critical for YMYL sites to implement as a part of their baseline.
In this post, we have outlined different technical and content initiatives we have undergone to build trust and maintain a competitive advantage in this arena. As a side note, my 9-5 is a finance-related site, so I have experience in both the “health” and “money” niches which gives us a pretty solid reference point to talk about this stuff.
Below is a short outline of what we will cover today. As a side note, we have implemented all of these in some for or fashion on our site)
Reviewed by schema
Author Pages
Editorial Guidelines
Affiliate disclosures
Contact information
Reviewed By Schema (With Love From BowTiedPlug)
If you have a health site, one of the biggest “trust signals” you can send to Google is to get a doctor on your about page and have them “medically review” articles on your website (see Healthline example)
While sites like Healthline and Forbes can custom-build anything they like, there is not an easy out-of-the-box solution for WordPress users, specifically with Yoast.
Below is an outline of how we implemented Reviewed by schema on our site
Using ACF to map out the fields and field types needed
Tapping into Yoast Schema API to pass through fields
Showing reviewed by on front end
Adding reviewed articles to the reviewer archive page
Sidenote: ReviewedBy schema does not have great documentation. Find a legit competitor or another site that is similar to yours and copy theirs. That’s what we did to figure out the fields and structure.
Using ACF to map out the fields and field types needed
I recommend most sites have Advanced Custom Fields for custom functionality, as it gives you more flexibility and removes work from a developer. Having ACF allows you to have a prototype of the functionality you are building from an admin perspective.
There were two groups that I needed to create:
Additional User Fields: These are additional fields to pass through to schema that are not already part of the default fields. I used some default fields such as Biographical Info and Name.
ACF View
Admin View
Reviewer Field on Posts: This one is simple, and all it does is create a drop-down on posts with the option to select a Reviewer. I set it up to where any content role can be a reviewer. I did not bother to create a custom reviewer user type.
ACF view:
Admin Post View:
Tapping into Yoast SEO API
Yoast plugin has a schema API to edit and manipulate the output of the out of the box schema which is extremely clutch and cool.
You can find the documentation here: https://developer.yoast.com/features/schema/api/
For this part I worked with a developer that was able to write a 25 line PHP function to inject the ReviewedBy schema and the additional fields.
Front End
I made sure to keep this simple and show Medically Reviewed By below the author in archives and on the post. Nothing crazy, but it works.
Author Archives
The last step was making sure that if an editor or author reviews a post that it shows up in their Author page. This was also handled by the developer with a few lines of code.
I wish I could provide more information on what the Devs wrote, but I just write detailed requirements, and they do the coding aspect.
Final Schema
If you would like something like this implemented, please feel free to reach out! We have done a few custom builds for other websites looking to improve their E-E-A-T
Author Pages
Author pages are one of the most neglected things we see when evaluating a site. A good author profile should be 300-500 words and ideally have multiple entity relationships. This means an author lists the website on their Linkedin, blog, or other social media. Google doesn't just rely on text now. They are much more entity driven and want to look for proof outside of your site that authors are real and know what they are talking about.
Editorial Guidelines
Editorial guidelines are another brand signal most niche sites tend to ignore. Basically, it is a one-page document that explains your journalistic integrity and research standards. It’s pretty much complete B.S. these days, as mainstream media has 0 integrity. But it’s still effective in Google’s eyes and separates the rookies from the veterans. See this example from Healthline
Contact Information
This is about more than just creating a contact form or listing an email. Real businesses have real addresses, phone numbers, and working hours of operation. They also have pictures of their office on the website. This may seem silly, but every little bit of authority counts, especially when you are trying to convince Google you are worthy of being shown as the #1 answer to health and finance questions.
Wrapping it all up
Our site rebounded, but we used the kitchen sink method, so it’s impossible to know if something “worked” or Google just apologized for being a dick in November. These posts are slowly gaining traffic, and overall, our organic search traffic has been climbing. 2,000+ clicks is now the norm, and we are pushing full speed ahead to make 3,000+ clicks a day our new normal.