EAT, YMYL, & Beneficial Purpose: What Do They for Search?

SUMMARY: Find out how to fix your pages and improve your quality standards. Get help from an organic SEO company.

Do you know what EAT or YMYL stands for? Do you know what these acronyms mean and what they’re for? EAT is “Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness” and YMYL is “Your Money or Your Life.” These two, along with beneficial purpose, make up the guidelines or three golden keys to how Google pages must be.

They are essentially quality standards. And work as a reference for the company’s human search evaluators. The evaluators are people who rate how well the algorithm is working. Is it doing its job, for instance? That’s why these three are also tools that give insight into what a high-quality web page should look like. Here’s why you need to know each one.

Understanding Quality for Google

The Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines or SQEG matter as the latest core updates incorporate practices on how you need to understand E-A-T and YMYL. Just keep in mind, though, that the evaluator guidelines only hand out clues. There aren’t any definite answers here, but we can analyze the data and infer enough from it to know what they mean. If you’re at a loss, though, consulting with an organic SEO company or hiring one to help you through this will make it easier for you to understand what these quality standards mean and how they affect your website.

Beneficial Purpose

What is the purpose of the page? If you’ve ever been to a site with pages that you weren’t sure why they’re there, that’s the kind of problem that this quality standard seeks out to eliminate. When you create a website, every page must have a purpose. If that purpose isn’t clear or if its intent is to harm users or deceive them or there to make money off users, then the page will get the lowest PQ rating. Websites must be created to provide help and assistance. Anything that goes against that will be penalized.

YMYL Content

Your Money or Your Life content could impact the safety, healthy, and happiness as well as financial stability of a user. That means the stakes are high for this content. If you’re creating these pages and handing out bad advice or erroneous information, then you’ll need to maintain the highest quality standards. If you so much as attempt to use your pages to spread misinformation, then you’ll get penalized by Google as well. Your page quality or PQ will go down in flames. That’s why pages with YMYL content need to maintain the highest levels of E-A-T.

E-A-T Standards

E-A-T is for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Every site must have these characteristics. If you want your page to score high on the rankings, if you want to get to the top of the SERPs, then you’ll want to increase E-A-T levels of your pages. Create content that helps you build your reputation as a trustworthy market leader.

Hiring Help

This is where pros come in. If you’re quite sure how or where to get started on fixing your pages, or how to increase the E-A-T of your sites, talk to a digital marketing service provider.