YMYL, Your Money or Your Life is a term Google uses to distinguish content that can potentially impact people’s happiness, health, financial stability, or safety. Google understands that YMYL pages providing inaccurate or low-quality information have the potential to do harm to internet users. Our director Charlotte was recently interviewed by Semrush on how Google YMYL applies to financial services content marketing.
#1 What is your main approach to ensuring the quality of the content you create for clients is as high as possible?
For us, ensuring high quality content boils down to a few key ingredients. Those are strategic discussions at the start, content research and planning, and a high calibre writing and editing team. Working strategically means that we understand the client’s KPIs, tone, style, keywords, audience and brand positioning. It means we are working to a unique and structured content plan with clear objectives, SEO outlines, and timelines. So, I would say that our main approach is strategic content planning. Many new finance brands are in a hurry to publish content and want to skip the strategy part. We really recommend that they take the time at the start, to lay the groundwork for high performance content later.
#2 What would you say are the main risks of publishing inaccurate information in your areas of expertise?
Publishing inaccurate information in the financial services space has a range of consequences. These start from a loss of confidence amongst traders, investors and stakeholders which can harm a brand’s credibility. Trust is essential in the finance space and publishing relevant, accurate information contributes to building client relationships. Misinformation could also lead to poor investment decisions, resulting in financial losses for users, which might be attributed to the publisher. Large-scale inaccuracies can even affect market perceptions and influence broader economic trends or stock prices. But it can be even more serious than that. Disseminating incorrect financial information could breach regulations enforced by financial governing bodies. This can land financial services brands with hefty fines, suspension of services and legal action. We follow regulatory news and updates from bodies such as ASIC, CySEC, MFSA, FCA, FSA, FRB and SEC as well as additional frameworks like GDPR, MiCA and much more to stay updated with content and digital marketing rules.
#3 How important is it to remain current? And do you take any steps to make sure previously published content is updated to reflect more recent changes?
It’s so important to remain current and the combination of digital marketing and financial services means the current is fast flowing! When we send daily analysis to traders it must be relevant news with current tradable information otherwise it misses the mark. Because we work on a retained basis with our clients, we are also paying close attention to their published content and its relevancy. We conduct regular reviews on older content and recommend yearly rewrites of high traffic blogs, key web pages, eBooks, landing pages and education centres. We work closely with our clients to implement updates to their content based on compliance advice, regulatory changes and asset updates. Of course, keeping the client’s content updated is a two-way street. If a client chooses not to have their content updated, it is their choice and ultimately their responsibility. From our own brand’s perspective, we update all our key evergreen content every year.
#4 How do you incorporate expertise and experience into your content? Do your writers all have a finance background?
Yes, most of our writers come from a financial services content marketing background. They vary in expertise from ex traders and investors, through to those who have worked in marketing departments at brokerages and banks. Financial services writing is multi faceted and incorporates a range of writing skills. These might include technical analysis, educational content (beginner, intermediate or advanced), financial lifestyle blogging, technical eBooks and the more salesy end which is creating landing pages, video scripts, CTAs and Ads content. In our experience, a single content writer cannot excel in all these areas. That’s why finance brands outsource to our agency, empowering their internal content manager to manage a wide variety of content. My business partner Niki and myself also originate from financial marketing backgrounds and closely follow market news and updates. It’s important that those leading the content operation have a deep understanding of their sector.
#5 Are there any steps you take to publicly show the author/reviewer’s expertise? This seems difficult for an agency given writers don’t often have bylines and profiles on clients’ websites.
Usually our agency writers are ghost writers because the content is attributed to the brand and not our agency (we’re ok with that!) However, we often work with clients to attribute content to key people within their organisation – outsourced thought leadership in a sense! For example, we might work alongside the risk manager in a forex company to create a series of articles “authored by him/her”. To do this we strive to understand that person’s perspective, tone of voice and writing style. The client will always approve the content prior to publishing and of course it must pass their compliance team.
#6 Google is clear about wanting to prioritise content that includes reliable and accurate sources. How does your team approach sourcing for what they write?
Our team will always include sources in the content we deliver to clients. We annotate these in the margins to ensure that the compliance teams can check them prior to publishing. Clients often choose to remove links for SEO reasons which is their choice. But from our side, we always ensure that sources are up to date and reputable. There are some publications we won’t source from, as they can be biased, sensational or inaccurate. I won’t name names but I’m sure you can think of a few! Additionally, we won’t source from client competitors so that’s another area to watch. When the content passes through our editors, the sources will get checked again to ensure they are accurate.
#7 What are the main steps your team takes to complete a piece of content? Is there some sort of compliance review as part of the process.
Financial companies will usually have their own internal compliance officer which is needed under their regulatory rules. It is their compliance officer’s responsibility to sign off on all content and marketing materials. This includes videos, social media posts, blogs, PRs and event materials. However, we aim to make it as easy as possible for compliance officers by delivering content that we are confident is compliant. We also deliver it in advance of needing to be published. So, social media posts and PRs are created a week or two in advance where possible. The content will be approved by the company’s marketing manager prior to being passed to compliance. We rarely get content rejected by compliance officers, but if for whatever reason it happens, we simply make the edits and pass them back. We aim to build strong relationships with compliance and learn any preferences and nuances in the way they like to work. Maintaining an organised content production process with version control is important too.
Google YMYL For Your Finance Brand
Because YMYL pages have the potential to cause harm, Google watches them closely. So, people who manually evaluate content based on Google’s standards around experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T will be reviewing YMYL pages with greater levels of scrutiny. If a YMYL page doesn’t meet their high standards, it’s unlikely to rank well. That means your financial services landing pages, blogs and services pages might not be ranking.
At Contentworks Agency we understand the rules on YMYL and E-E-A-T and how to apply them to financial services content.
Book a Zoom with our team and let’s get your content Google YMYL friendly.