What is YMYL content?

Did you know that a lot of financial content is essentially struck off Google for not being compliant with Google’s SEO guidelines?

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) content is a form of content that has been flagged by Google to require extra scrutiny. These are pages that could have a serious impact on a reader’s financial stability, health or overall well-being.

According to Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (SQEG), “YMYL topics can directly and significantly impact people’s health, financial stability or safety, or the welfare or well-being of society”. This is based on the content either being dangerous in itself, or “causing harm if the content is not accurate and trustworthy”.

Essentially, YMYL must be accurate, or it will be punished in the rankings by Google. The job of a financial copywriter is to ensure that a brand is compliant with Google’s guidelines.

What industries are affected by Google's YMYL update?

There are many types of industries that are consider to have YMYL content, and Google only provides a guideline for what it determines to be YMYL.

Here are 5 examples of YMYL content:

1. Financial content

Financial articles and information are often classed as YMYL. Any advice on investments, financial products, or wealth planning will be considered pivotal for a user’s financial stability – in short, if the information is wrong, they could end up bankrupt.

Even though financial advice must be certified, anything that provides information on finance is considered to be YMYL, as someone could read it and then make a buying decision.

Financial decisions are often made after online research

2. Medical content

Content that gives medical advice, recommends medical products or devices, or gives information about diseases, symptoms or treatments would be considered YMYL.

Google must ensure that any medical advice online is scrutinised heavily, and somebody could make an incorrect move with their health and cause themselves further injury.

3. News & current events

News or information about current events is considered YMYL. A reader of this information could act in a certain way that could impact their health, for example, information about a natural disaster or an international incident. Google will need to verify that this information is correct before promoting it in the rankings.

Public information or advice would also be considered YMYL content.

4. Shopping & ecommerce

It might surprise some people, but shopping and ecommerce pages are often flagged as YMYL content, for similar reasons that financial content is flagged as YMYL.

If there is an article that recommends a buying decision, or advertises a certain product, this could potentially impact someone’s financial situation and as a result, their wellbeing.

5. Legal advice

Any form of legal advice is clearly YMYL content. An article or page could influence someone’s behaviour, not only with their own actions, but perhaps even the actions around obtaining a lawyer or legal advice, which could impact their financial situation and also their health.

YMYL content within finance

YMYL content is particularly important in finance as there are so many ways in which financial advice can appear. This could be advice about stock picks, an article about mortgages, or even news about small businesses.

Accuracy across the board is incredibly important, as particularly with the rise of AI and Google’s influence, AI hallucinations are likely to spread false information. It is the job of a financial copywriter to ensure that this does not happen, and all financial content online is accurate.

Improving financial accuracy

A financial copywriter will be able to ensure the accuracy of your work, and thorough checking from other financial experts will also ensure that your content meets the requirements of YMYL.

Having an expert author bio underneath your articles is another way to ensure you are meeting Google’s requirements. On December 15th 2022, Google added an extra ‘E’ to its Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (EAT) acronym, which stands for ‘Experience’.

This added metric of Experience means that an article which has an author who is an expert in that particular field will be promoted above others. As the guidelines state: “For example, if you're looking for information on how to correctly fill out your tax returns, that's probably a situation where you want to see content produced by an expert in the field of accounting.”

Google’s recent leak showed that they are tracking author’s names and bios, which suggests they are increasing the importance of who wrote the article.

FCA’s financial promotions

In March 2024, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) released its Finalised guidance on financial promotions on social media, often abbreviated to ‘finprom’. This outlines the FCA’s stance on “communicating financial promotions on social media”.

These guidelines operate in a similar way to YMYL, whereby the accuracy of the financial content is incredibly important, and has an overall benefit to the market. Making your content YMYL compliant will likely make it compliant with the finprom guidelines, and vice versa.

Conclusion

YMYL content is crucial for the safety of users on Google. It ensures that false or unreliable information is pushed to the bottom of the pile, and accurate, verified content is brought to the top.
If you need financial content that is YMYL and FCA-compliant, then contact us at Finnus and see what we can do for you.