Website Content
Why Quality Content Means Higher Search Engine Rankings
It isn't just SEO that leads to higher search engine rankings. For the professions in particular, high quality content is key to conquering Google.
Google’s mission is simple: to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Implicit in that statement is something that is of particular importance for solicitors and other professions when it comes to creating content for a website. Google doesn't just want to organise the world's information, it wants to rank it in terms of its quality. Only by ranking it will the most useful information rise to the top of Google's search results.
When a website is performing poorly in the search engines, the obvious solution is SEO. But for legal and other professions, high quality content is the key to conquering Google.
Google doesn't simply want to rank relevant information, it wants to rank correct information. This is particularly important for what Google calls Your Money Or Your Life (YMYL) web pages: pages that contain content that "could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety".
Examples of YMYL information identified by Google include:
News and current events including business, politics, science and technology, but not sports and entertainment
Civics and government including information on voting, for example, government agencies, and social services
Law including information about legal issues including divorce, child custody, creating a will, employment law, and buying a house
Finance including information about investments, taxes, retirement planning, loans, banking, and insurance
Health and safety advice including information related to medical issues, drugs, hospitals, nutrition, and emergency planning
This means that if you are a solicitor, financial advisor, health professional or similar, you must ensure that the information on your website is tailored to Google's quality guidelines for YMYL content. If it falls short, so will your website in terms of Google's search rankings. Expect to find your website languishing on page four or 40 of the search engine results, rather than competing for clients on page one.
So how do you improve matters?
A good starting point is ensuring your website displays a high degree of E-A-T - Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
For a page to be judged to be of high quality by Google, it must exude three things:
1. Expertise
2. Authority
3. Trustworthiness
And it's not just the content itself that needs to demonstrate E-A-T. The entire website must do so, as must the author of the content. It all adds up to what Google calls Page Experience.
Here are the five most important factors used by Google to arrive at a Page Quality rating for a web page:
1. The Purpose of the page and how well it achieves that purpose
2. Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness as discussed above
3. Main Content Quality and Amount - the content must not only be of high quality, but it must have be long enough and detailed enough to be satisfying too
4. Author Information - details about who is responsible for the content
5. Website and Author Reputation - whether the website and author are reputable sources for the information
There is a lot that can be done to take existing content and make sure it stacks up on all five of these fronts. Websites that have struggled for months to rank can quickly see their fortunes change.
If you are concerned by how your website is performing in Google, we would be happy to take a look to see how we might help remedy the situation. All without any obligation to use us.
Just fill in the form on our Contact page to get the ball rolling.
Brandwise offers Bloody Good Content and other online marketing services to businesses and organisations in Edinburgh, the Scottish Borers, and elsewhere in the UK.
Last updated: 12th February 2021
Implicit in that statement is something that is of particular importance for solicitors and other professions when it comes to creating content for a website. Google doesn't just want to organise the world's information, it wants to rank it in terms of its quality. Only by ranking it will the most useful information rise to the top of Google's search results.
When a website is performing poorly in the search engines, the obvious solution is SEO. But for legal and other professions, high quality content is the key to conquering Google.
Your Money Or Your Life?
Google doesn't simply want to rank relevant information, it wants to rank correct information. This is particularly important for what Google calls Your Money Or Your Life (YMYL) web pages: pages that contain content that "could potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety".
Examples of YMYL information identified by Google include:
This means that if you are a solicitor, financial advisor, health professional or similar, you must ensure that the information on your website is tailored to Google's quality guidelines for YMYL content. If it falls short, so will your website in terms of Google's search rankings. Expect to find your website languishing on page four or 40 of the search engine results, rather than competing for clients on page one.
So how do you improve matters?
A good starting point is ensuring your website displays a high degree of E-A-T - Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
Have your cake and E-A-T it
For a page to be judged to be of high quality by Google, it must exude three things:
And it's not just the content itself that needs to demonstrate E-A-T. The entire website must do so, as must the author of the content. It all adds up to what Google calls Page Experience.
Page Quality rating: How Google Judges You On Page Experience
Here are the five most important factors used by Google to arrive at a Page Quality rating for a web page:
There is a lot that can be done to take existing content and make sure it stacks up on all five of these fronts. Websites that have struggled for months to rank can quickly see their fortunes change.
Quality content means higher rankings
If you are concerned by how your website is performing in Google, we would be happy to take a look to see how we might help remedy the situation. All without any obligation to use us.
Just fill in the form on our Contact page to get the ball rolling.
Brandwise offers Bloody Good Content and other online marketing services to businesses and organisations in Edinburgh, the Scottish Borers, and elsewhere in the UK.
Last updated: 12th February 2021
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