Key Takeaways

• Google’s ranking systems are user-focused. The acronym EEAT is a helpful metric for creating user-focused content.
• The EEAT metric is even more important to medical businesses because of the YMYL concept.
• Subpar medical content may save time and money upfront but in the long run, it costs you not only money but reputation and brand identity.
• You can improve the quality of your medical content by investing in regular content auditing and SEO audits, developing a solid content strategy, and hiring a medical writing expert.

A business blog page has a lot of advantages. It is a great space to demonstrate domain authority, connect with your audience, and drive traffic. When done right and consistently, its benefits can snowball into leads, conversions, and loyal subscribers.

As a marketing tool, blog pages require significant investment in time and money before you see results. Semrush says SEO takes about 4 – 12 months to see results (1). Why this much time though? There are many factors to consider: your niche, content relevance, webpage experience, page traffic, amongst others.

Some businesses, in a bid to save time and money, dabble into black hat SEO techniques. People use these techniques to “beat the algorithm” and increase a website’s ranking on the search engine page (SERP) (2).

Some of these techniques include:

• Excessive repetition of keywords, especially in a way that does not provide value to the user
• Publishing duplicate content either from other people’s websites or from your webpage (i.e. self-plagiarism, content cannibalism)
• Using hidden text to cram in keywords
• Creating doorway/gateway pages to drive traffic
• Using manipulative guest links to drive traffic
• Publishing sub-par content

EEAT – How Google’s user-centric algorithm affects your medical business

Google’s ranking systems are user-focused. They investigate billions of web pages, rank them based on certain criteria, and present the most ranked pages to a user, all in less than a second. It’s a highly sophisticated algorithm that is becoming harder to “game”. For example, Google currently uses highly advanced systems like RankBrain, MUM, BERT, Neural Matching, etc. These systems can match keywords, predict search queries, and understand words in context (3).

You don’t have to research all the various ranking systems to publish high-ranking content. In fact, Google discourages creators from creating search engine-first content and encourages them to focus on “people first content.”

But what does “people first content” look like? The acronym EEAT is a helpful metric (4).

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. The concept of experience was added in 2022 when Google decided to factor in the impact of first-hand experience on content quality (5).

Experience

Google’s search quality evaluators prefer content generated from people with first-hand experience. This is because such forms of content are often trustworthy and valuable to users. For example, users are likely to value a cosmetic webpage created by a cosmetician or dermatologist.

Expertise

Google also values content created by experts. For example, a webpage on insomnia written by a sleep expert or a neurologist is more valuable.

Authoritativeness

This metric measures how much a website is known as the “go-to” source for a topic. Authoritativeness is a culmination of experience and expertise over time. It is also a result of uniqueness. For example, government websites with “.gov” domain names have more authority in civil issues like say, getting a passport for example.

Trust

How verifiable or factual is your content? Google wants to know. According to Google, trust is the most important metric in EEAT because untrustworthy pages will have a low EEAT score, regardless of how much experience, expertise or authoritativeness it demonstrates.

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Topics – why Google holds Medical Businesses to Higher Standards

The EEAT metric is even more important to medical businesses because of the YMYL concept. YMYL topics are topics with a great risk of harm to the user either because the topic itself is harmful or dangerous (i.e. terrorism or extremism), or the topic can cause harm if it is inaccurate or untrustworthy (in the setting of healthcare and medicine) (6).

For medical businesses, it is very important to Google that your medical content is accurate and trustworthy. There is proof that Google reduces the visibility of medical websites to curb medical misinformation.

For example in 2018, researchers observed the visibility of 21 health and medical websites from 10 European countries. They discovered that the search visibility of these websites decreased with time (7).

What Does Sub-par Medical Content Look Like?

With the concepts of EEAT and YMYL, we can identify sub-par medical content. Subpar medical content can include these and more:

Incorrect medical information – this also includes exaggerations, half-truths, or partially correct information.

Plagiarism – plagiarizing content from other websites, and self-plagiarism. Plagiarism does not affect the original author. This is because Google has an algorithm that ranks original content higher than the duplicates.

Content by non-expert authors – it is quite easy to detect medical content written by a non-expert. Most times, these pieces of content are incorrect. They may also be written in a way that is hard to understand. These forms of content may also be plagiarized. Lastly, authors may reference content from non-authority sites like Wikipedia, or articles written by other non-experts.

Fluff content – this includes stuffing blog pages with filler content as a way to meet word count requirements. Creators can stuff content with keywords, plagiarized sentences, redundant adverbs, long-winded descriptions, acronyms, and so on.

Keyword stuffing – in this case, writers stuff their content with keywords to increase ranking. For example, a writer who wishes to use a keyword like “business associates HIPAA” in a sentence may use it to make sentences that don’t sound natural.

What are the Costs of Publishing Sub-par Medical Content?

The costs of sub-par content are not just financial costs. Here are some ways subpar medical content can cost you and your followers.

Negative impact on patient outcomes

False medical information can hurt your followers. Imagine exaggerating the benefits of a supplement to the point that buyers stop their prescription medicine. A post on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Business discussed the dangers of purchasing drugs from online social media influencers on TikTok, Instagram, and others (8).

The FTC has a lot of cases in which companies have made false or bogus health claims. For example, in 2021, the FTC sued the founders of Stem Cell America for making false claims that stem cell therapy could cure arthritis and joint pain. Also, some of these companies use social media influencers to influence sales. For example, Teami used popular celebrities to promote bogus claims of their detox teas (9).

Educational harm

Apart from causing direct harm to followers, subpar medical content can cause educational harm. For example, during the COVID pandemic, some online influencers promoted the use of bleach to treat COVID. While research has shown that people didn’t drink bleach, medical information however caused educational harm and insulted people’s sensibilities (10).

Damage to reputation and credibility

Search engines and social media sites can take down content repeatedly flagged for misinformation. This act can damage the reputation and credibility of creators. For example, in this post, the Readers Digest ranked the best and worst websites for health information (11).

High-authority websites like WebMD, Merck’s Manual, and Cochrane Review received good rankings. Webpages of ecommerce sites however did not. Imagine the size of the audience that read this post. Do you think this rank will affect their choice of medical website in the future?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Loss of audience engagement and trust

Websites with a bad reputation will not only fall out of favor with search engines but also fall out with their audience. A website without an audience is basically dead, with no hope for growth, collaboration, or monetization.

Costly corrections and damage control

Sub-par medical content can cost you money directly in the form of fines and sanctions. For example, in 2021, the FTC fined six CBD sellers $30,000 each for claiming that their supplements cured cancer, hypertension, heart disease, and other chronic conditions (12).

In another case, the FTC fined BASF SE and DIEM Labs $416,000 for making false claims that dietary fish supplements reduced liver fat in people with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (13).

One of the biggest sanctions by the FTC is a fine of $930,000 on Teami, for falsely claiming that their teas could help with weight loss, fight cancer, treat migraines, and clear up clogged arteries. According to the report by FTC, Teami relied heavily on social media influence from popular people like Cardi B, Jordin Sparks, and Brittany Renner (14).

Increased regulatory scrutiny

Apart from sanctions and fines, offenders are heavily scrutinized for non-compliance. Webpages that have also been penalized by Google and other search engines should expect scrutiny for non-compliance.

4 Tips to Improve the Quality of Published Medical Content

As a business owner, if you have been publishing subpar medical case reports, white papers, and other forms of medical content, you should make the necessary changes before incurring costs. Our step-by-step plan can give you clarity on how to make these changes.

1. Content audit

Start with a thorough audit of your website’s content. Use the EEAT metric to assess your current ranking. An objective audit may be uncomfortable in the beginning but it sets the foundation for an effective pivot. And ensure that the medical keywords you’re focusing on land well with your target audience.

A trend we frequently see is that a keyword may be popular, but it doesn’t mean that it’s what healthcare providers or patients specifically are searching for (B2C vs B2B).

Don’t have time, and just want us to do it? Contact Us and we’ll get right on it!

1. SEO audit

An SEO audit typically includes a content audit. While a content audit focuses on the quality of your content based on the EEAT/YMYL metric, an SEO audit goes further to assess the structure of your content. For example, an SEO audit considers all these:

• Onsite SEO – keyword optimization in headers, meta tags, alt descriptions, and meta descriptions.
• Technical SEO – pillar pages, site maps, redirects, page speed, mobile friendliness, breadcrumb navigation, and so on.
• Offsite SEO – this includes all extra-website activity you do to drive traffic to your website i.e. social media posts, backlinks, social media ads, influencer marketing, and so on.

There’s a lot to talk about in an SEO audit, and we will dedicate a post to that.

1. SEO strategy

After an audit, the next step is to develop a sound SEO strategy. This strategy must factor in your current needs and challenges. For example, if your website has duplicate content, manipulative links, and other black hat techniques, you must get rid of these first before working out an SEO strategy.

1. Hiring a medical expert

We highly recommend hiring a medical writer for all your medical content. Medical writers are professionals who abide by the ethics of medical marketing. For example, medical writers are expected to:

• Source medical information from high authority sources like textbooks and peer-reviewed journals
• Use a consistent style for referencing all sources
• Avoid exaggeration and bogus marketing gimmicks
• Adhere to regional guidelines when writing about medical devices and technologies