How to Write Effective Mental Health YMYL and EEAT Content

More than half of the trending TikTok content giving mental health advice has been found to contain misinformation.¹ So with people increasingly turning to the internet and social media to learn about mental health, the need for quality, accurate information is higher than ever.

This sentiment is shared by search engines like Google. With their guidelines for identifying website content that is safe and reliable, it’s clear that Google wants to protect its users from potentially harmful information. These are known as ‘Google’s EEAT guidelines,’ and they’re most stringently applied to content that could affect ‘your money or your life’ (YMYL).²

Fortunately, for website owners who produce YMYL content (such as those in the mental health field), these guidelines are relatively clear. We’ll explore EEAT guidelines in this article, helping you to create EEAT content that informs your website visitors and ranks well on Google.

What Are Google’s YMYL and EEAT Guidelines?

These acronyms refer to two important elements of producing SEO-friendly content. Here’s what each of them means and why they matter:

What Is YMYL Content?

‘YMYL’ stands for ‘Your Money or Your Life’. For Google, YMYL pages are those that handle topics that could significantly impact the reader’s physical or mental health and financial stability, or the safety, well-being, and welfare of society.²

For example, YMYL topics would include guidance or advice on:

Mental health and relationships
Medications and treatments for physical and mental health conditions
Buying a house
Family planning
Investing and saving money
Taxes and other financial topics
Legal rights, government policies, and social services
Disasters, politics, and current events

Since these topics require trust and sensitivity, YMYL SEO is a different ballgame compared with SEO for less-serious content. Therefore, YMYL websites must be more rigorous in adhering to SEO best practices if they’re going to perform well in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

One way they can do so is by following Google’s EEAT guidelines.²

What Is EEAT?

“EEAT” stands for ‘Experience’, ‘Expertise’, ‘Authoritativeness’, and ‘Trustworthiness’.

These values are used by Google to determine which content should be prioritised at the top of its search results. They shouldn’t be seen as explicit ‘ranking factors’, as Google considers other things, such as technical site organisation and keywords. However, EEAT provides a neat set of values for website owners to keep in mind. (And, as mentioned, the EEAT values are most relevant to websites publishing YMYL content.)

Google advises that ‘Trustworthiness’ is the most important value. While the other three contribute to trust, content needn’t necessarily demonstrate all of them.

So, what does EEAT mean for SEO? Here’s how each of these values could be demonstrated in your content:²

Experience: The content could indicate lived experience, whether it’s of using a product or delivering a service.
Expertise: The webpage could contain the author’s name and credentials, providing explicit proof of their expertise to speak on a particular topic. The content could also demonstrate their knowledge and skills in the subject area.
Authoritativeness: Similar to ‘Expertise’, the content author and website should be recognisable as reliable experts. As well as credentials, this could be evidenced by testimonials and backlinks from other reputable websites.
Trustworthiness: This means that content must be accurate and honest. In other words, it should be referenced and not contain misinformation. Trust can also be indicated by website security, customer reviews, an ‘About Us’ page, and a lack of intrusive pop-up ads.

Now that you know what EEAT and YMYL stand for, it’s time to explore how to apply them to the field of mental health writing.

How to Write Effective YMYL and EEAT Mental Health Content

Health misinformation can cause significant harm; it can lead people to try unproven treatments or convince them they don’t need professional support.³ So it’s crucial that people can access evidence-based and up-to-date health information from trustworthy sources.¹

If your business publishes mental health content, you’ll want it to be accurate and informative for readers but also optimised for SEO. Here’s how you can write effective YMYL content that meets EEAT guidelines:

1. Self-Assess Your Content

Asking yourself the following questions can help determine how helpful and reliable your content is:^{2, 4}

Does the content contain original information or research?
Does it provide a complete and comprehensive answer or description for the topic?
When drawing on other sources, does the content avoid simply rewriting them?
Do the headings avoid being shocking or exaggerated?
Is the content written or reviewed by an expert?
Does the content meet Google’s ‘good page experience’ guidelines?⁴

Another way to self-assess is to identify which of your webpages are negatively impacted after Google updates. Even though Google doesn’t tend to give explicit details about what it’s looking for, these performance dips can provide clues.

These approaches can help you redesign your content strategy, indicating the areas that need improvement and the ones that are already working.

2. Focus on Who, How, and Why

Google recommends evaluating content in these terms as a simple way of staying on track with what their systems reward and prioritise. This means:²

Make it clear who created the content by including author bylines that indicate their background and credentials.
Indicate how the content was created, such as including research variables, information on AI generation, and the journal articles that have informed the piece.
The why element is more for your own self-reflection as a website-owner or writer. Why are you producing this piece of content? What is your intention? After all, Google wants content to be made with the intention of helping people, not for manipulating its search engine.

These three focus points can help by encouraging you to include signals of trust and to put your target audience at the centre of your efforts.

3. Make Some Small Adjustments

If you feel your content is already quite trustworthy, it might just need tweaking. This could mean adding citations, author bylines, or making lived experience more explicit. Furthermore, you could make small adjustments around ethics and accountability.

For instance, introducing an expert to review and edit your content, and crediting them with a byline. You can also increase the trustworthiness of your webpages by adding medical disclaimers, such as ‘This content is not meant to replace formal diagnosis or medical advice.’

These small changes might just be what’s needed to elevate your content to the next level.

4. Hire a Clinical Writer or Content Agency

Another way to build an ethical and effective mental health content strategy is to hire an expert team or individual.

For example, here at PsychWrite, our writers are also mental health professionals. An agency like ours can create a head-to-toe content strategy, conducting the planning, writing, and SEO-optimisation. When you hire an outside team that specialises in mental health, YMYL, and EEAT content, you gain several benefits.

Not only does this option provide you with a specialist YMYL content writer, but these teams can often help with additional SEO activities, such as internal linking strategies.

YMYL Mental Health Writing Services at PsychWrite

If you want to find a YMYL and E-E-A-T mental health writer and get support for your SEO content strategy, get in touch with us here at PsychWrite. Both small and larger organisations can benefit from:

Our team: Made up of clinicians and mental health professionals, our specialist mental health writers also work in mental health and psychology. This means they have the knowledge, skills, and experience to write on sensitive topics.
Credibility: By hiring a team with mental health experience, your organisation can protect its credibility, reputation, and authority.
Easy scaling: Hiring an external content team makes it easy for your strategy to scale without a drop in quality.
Eased workloads: Similarly, outside support can reduce the workload and pressure on your internal teams.
More than writing: As well as writing YMYL mental health content, our team also has a great deal of experience with SEO, research, and creating bespoke psychological assessments.

Get in touch with our team today to discuss your content needs.

References

Hall, R., & Keenan, R. (2025, May 31). More than half of top 100 mental health TikToks contain misinformation, study finds. httpss://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/31/more-than-half-of-top-100-mental-health-tiktoks-contain-misinformation-study-finds
Google. (2025, February 4). Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content. httpss://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
Abrams, Z. (2024, November 5). Addressing Misinformation about Mental Health with Patients. httpss://www.apa.org/topics/journalism-facts/misinformation-mental-health
Google. (2025). Understanding Google Page Experience. httpss://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/page-experience?_gl=1