EAT Google Strategy every Freelancer and Client should know! + Free download!

EAT - The Google Strategy

EAT? Eat what? No, no not food. Though, if you want, grab a snack and sit down for this one. Janine and Carol are explaining all about this Google EAT strategy, what is means, who it's for and why health companies need to consider it.

Mentioned in this episode:

• YOUR FREE DOWNLOAD : EAT Worksheet 1 & 2
•  Blog post explaining EAT

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Carol & Janine

Welcome to the Savvy Scribe Podcast, I'm so glad you're here! Before we start the show, if you're interested, we have a free Facebook group called "Savvy Nurse Writer Community"

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:28

Welcome to the savvy scribe, a podcast for freelance healthcare and medical writers who want to start or grow their business. Your hosts, Carol Bush and Janine Kalbach will help you build a profitable health writing business without having to spend years figuring it out on your own. Now let's join the conversation

Speaker 2: 0:48

[inaudible]

Speaker 3: 0:52

hey guys, Janine here, just popping in. I wanted to let you guys know about strategic coaching program called the stabby scribe growth lab that we have going on right now. If you are a healthcare writer that is ready to start Nastrain those foundational skills needed to focus and land your first paid writing Gig, join us in less than eight weeks. That is our goal for you. Carol Bush and I are the hosts on this podcast are ready to support you with some Group Training, coaching, and coworking sessions along with a lot of accountability. If you go to savvy scribes, growthlab dot fright RN, like you're writing to something, rn.net you will see our landing page and everything that's included. Come join us. We're excited to have you add that to the show.

Speaker 4: 1:42

Hello Savvis cries and welcome to eight, another podcast episode. And today it's just Carol and I talking all about strategy. We want to bring forth to you guys talking about eat or eat a tea. And what the heck does that mean? Well, we're going to have an awesome Freebie for you guys. Download it. We're going to talk about it now. So first, here's Carol. Say Hi Carol.

Speaker 5: 2:10

Good morning actually here in Kansas. Good morning. Um, and you, you guys know Janine and I are morning people. We have a lot of energy. So you might be listening to this podcast episode while you're driving, as you're walking, um,

Speaker 4: 2:25

I am whatever you want. You can go whenever you want, but right now it's morning. The Sun is shining here in Ohio, which is a rare, but hopefully we have some spring weather coming our way.

Speaker 5: 2:39

I'm really excited, uh, Jeanine, that we're bringing this topic to our tribe and to our clients. And I'm even more doubly excited that we got together and decided, hey, let's not just do, um, you know, as a result of research into the Google eat rating, let's not just share the podcast, let's develop something that's going to be helpful for our tribal savvy scribes are high performing health writers, um, our clients and their clients as well. So I'm really excited to dig into the topic today.

Speaker 4: 3:20

So be aware you guys, when you go down, you'll see the transcript from the show, the show notes today and that downloadable, feel free to

Speaker 5: 3:28

send that to your potential clients as an introduction and how to, um, why they should hire you in a sense as a healthcare writer. And I really just quickly want to touch on the background. You said we, you were researching for one of our clients, Carol. Yes, exactly. So we were, you know, we get approached all the time by some really awesome clients because um, through the healthcare marketing network we are a talent pool and a collective connecting high performing health writers to help brands that need awesome copy. And we were working with a client proposal and they had shared with me that in the recent, uh, Google updates, so they released in, um, I believe it was July or August, 2018 and update to what's called their search quality evaluator guidelines. And these actually are guidelines that are meant to share with people what does quality look like according to Google's algorithm. And this client shared with us that as a result of the fact that they are, um, obviously writing about it, health related information, so a medical condition and they are marketing to a, B to c. So directed consumer that because of some of their content was not written, uh, by a healthcare professional or a reviewed by that they were getting every duction a big reduction in their Google eat rating. And so that really led me to do a lot more research about it. And again, like I said, I'm originally Janine, I learned that Google actually originally released this search quality evaluator guidelines in 2015 and in um, on August 1st they really shared in that update. Um, some more information about how eat means. E stands for expertise, a stance for authoritativeness and t stands for trustworthiness in this Google update. They were just really demonstrating that those are three important characteristics for high quality content, especially for websites or industries that are tagged as y m y l or your money or your life. So you might think about this, okay. Websites where we are writing content or sharing content that deals with, um, life decisions. So especially when you're thinking about health and you know, health care, our industry, but think also about the finance industry like Janine, your husband's in banking and finance as well. Um, so those are really where, um, the eat or eat rating are really critical in that branded content, especially for those your money or your life websites. And um, I just thought it was really fascinating.

Speaker 4: 6:57

It is very fascinating. And for those of you who haven't heard about this, this is kind of new in a sense to me. When I, when I read the article, I had no idea what they eat, what they meant by that until, you know, obviously I read it, but this is beyond keywords. This is beyond SEO. This has nothing to do with any of that. What it's telling us is that these your money, your life articles. So if you're, you know, say you're one of us, you're a healthcare provider or you're just a random person and you want to find information about lawyers or something, you have to do legal, well that's your life, right? So you want a lawyer to write it. You want somebody in that industry to write about it because that means it's creditable knowledge. That means what you're receiving from them makes sense and is the truth. So what does that mean? That means somebody who has no idea about healthcare probably should not be writing about healthcare. Could they? Sure. Why not? We can all search and research. If you want to me write something about legal stuff, I can research it all day long, but Google isn't gonna recognize me as an expert and authoritative and trustworthy in that area. So think about it. Even financial stuff, like Carol said, those big life changing decisions, buying a house, you want advice from a realtor, you want those people in that industry. You know, working on your retirement, you want information from an investor person or financial advisor. So when you're looking at healthcare advice or healthcare content in general, you're gonna want a healthcare writer. So that's, that's the, the big idea behind all this. This isn't to improve your website traffic for keywords and SEO and all that kind of stuff. This is giving your customers the right knowledge. And that's a huge thing behind the healthcare marketing network. And the reason we really establish this is because a lot of our patients come to us with the wrong information. They got it off someone's blog somewhere in space and they might've hired someone who's not a healthcare person writing it. So that is what this is all about today. And that is why we have this downloadable for you guys because what it is going to go through is first, it gives you a little breakdown of the each strategy, um, for you to be able to perform a audit. So this is for clients and our writers, like you guys go on your own website and make sure what you have out there is, is following that each strategy. Um, is your messaging clear? You want to make sure you're honest and transparent with all your messaging. Um, what else Caroline, your home and about page. We can, we go through a bunch of little checklist for you to, to go through that and a content audit for yourself. Um, and when you look at all this, it does score for, so Google's going to look at you and score you, not just, well, this person has five articles that are like this, but the rest are not. So they're not gonna get anything. No. It's going to look at your whole website as a whole and put you in those readings for your IIT score. So ideally as a client, you y Kellogg client, customer, you want a good eat score, especially when you have customers that are looking for care and things like that. In the healthcare industry.

Speaker 5: 10:21

And I love Janine Day. You mentioned, hey, this is exactly, um, and this is why it hit me with a light like a lightning bolt. Liz, this is exactly why we founded the healthcare marketing network because we firmly believe that, um, how high performing health writers, so health journalists and healthcare professionals who are, uh, freelance health writers, uh, can provide the best expertise, authenticity and of course trust because the most trusted professions according to the u s world and news report for how many years, you know, like 18 or more years. Um, the top most tragic professions are nurses, physicians, um, all the licensed health care professionals. So automatically the thing I saw right away was, um, it's great opportunity. Um, this is really a market differentiator for a high performing health writer. So I think maybe it would be kind of fun for us to talk about in that download, Jeanine mentioned that we walked through, um, how you can conduct really an audit and that could be for your own writer website for your clients or our awesome clients out there. This is a tool that we use as well, um, to help elevate your eat rating as well. So we could probably go through a few things about how to establish notes. So one of the questions you might have is, well, how in the heck do you establish eat and your content? And Janine mentioned in the downloadable looking at really that expertise. So you might want to ask yourself who are the experts? And just as Janine mentioned, the people who know the most about your content topics are your industry should be the ones creating and reviewing that content or at the very least they should be cited as a source. So one of the, in my research Janine, that I found out was according to those Google search quality guidelines, there are two types of expertise and this is formal. So you might think about this in a way of specially for, uh, the health related or medical, financial and legal industries. Also, the second type of expertise is everyday expertise. And when you're thinking about, um, this could be people sharing their own life experiences. So in our industry, healthcare patient advocates or our own stories as clinical professionals, we're sharing that information on our personal blogs, on forums, reviews and discussions. So Google considers that type of expertise to be acceptable for a lot of topics such as you might think about, um, how tos and recipes from that personal experience. So a lot of the wellness sites as well. It's really critical that in our, um, your money and your life industry or brands, we need to make sure the every day expertise is awesome, but we want to make sure that formal expertise is there. And a couple of ways that you can do that. Actually, their theory recruit health writers or journalists, professional journalists are trained and high performing health care writers are trained to find an interview sources that are going to bring you that expertise and the evidence. And just like in the healthcare marketing network with our talent pools, some of our high performing health writers are ready, have that clinical expertise and research or they're a pharmacist or a physician. They're a nurse, they're a social worker. They have that expertise already for your industry. Um, the second thing that you can do is to recruit an editor. So even the most reliable writers can make some typos or possibly attribute the, um, an inaccurate source. So it's really important that, uh, you recruit an editor. And then the third thing is that you can look at training your content team. And that's what we do within not only as our peer group that we, you know, our philosophy, Jeanine is rising tide lifts all boats that we share resources just like this downloadable and we share information. Um, so we're really looking at focusing in even in our own work flow, when we're working with clients, we provide sources and help people learn to write for our clients brand voice for example. And we, uh, use our style guide. So we developed that, how to write for the health clients, um, the style guide. And then also we do look at focusing on some SEO best practices. So, like Jeanine said, these guidelines are not meant to keyword stuff, everything, but it's important that as a foundation in our craft that we do understand good SEO practices and how to use the expertise of our, um, health writers and their clinical expertise in that as well.

Speaker 4: 15:50

It sounds like another podcast episode, SEO basics or something like that for our writers. So that, because I remember too, when I was first starting out, that was a hard thing to kind of understand. Not so much hard. It's just a lot of research. So stay tuned you guys. I think we might have to bring you that in a quick win or something like that.

Speaker 5: 16:08

Oh yeah, definitely. I know even the Janet, you know, Janet Kennedy, our buddy, she knows everyone in the world. I think her next one is there is an SEO guru. I'm pretty sure we can get into, uh, join us on upcoming podcast.

Speaker 4: 16:27

That'd be awesome. That'd be awesome. So, um, I really liked that you said, I'm going to talk to like the content directors, the business developmental people, the marketing people that are working inside a company. So I'm going to talk to you guys really quick about are you going to fire all of your current writers? No, you're not. But what you can do is start to recruit some health care professional writers to review your current content to make sure that those people are using those writers. I shouldn't say those people, those other writers are using some creditable resources and that they're giving the correct knowledge out there. Um, and also have people write stories, personal stories, because that is going to help that eat rating as well, that score. Um, and then for you writers out there, really tune yourself into what you're an expert in. We all, you know, if you're a nurse, I'm speaking for the nurse point of view. We know nursing, right? So we can write a lot about nursing, but you don't want Janine, the ob nurse writing about cardiology. You just don't want to, could I look it up? Sure. Do I know credible resources? Sure. I'd be a good reviewer for that. But as for starting it off, probably not. Um, it's a really know yourself. Know that you cannot be a superhero and write everything. So if you guys want this downloadable and all these show notes are there, so you guys can go do an audit on your own website and look about your samples, look at, look around your samples that you've written and make sure that those clients that you've written for are putting a little byline in their articles saying that this was written by a healthcare professional. Whatever your licensed credentials are.

Speaker 5: 18:40

And I, I love that you pointed out, um, that the, uh, importance to conduct and site research. So again, just like you said, Janine, even if your current content creators don't have the clinical expertise, they definitely care about delivering accurate information as we know. Um, another thing I think is important as we're talking about the eat, um, some strategies to elevate your eat rating and in the downloadable, it's not just about your content creation, it's also about, um, really reinforcing trust and focusing on your user. So who are the people, your audience, again, you'll always hear us talking about who are you writing for or who are we creating content for your audience. So again, just reinforcing right your content, um, not just to be found in search, but you really need to prioritize what are your audience or your users w um, looking for. Um, one question I always like to help people ask is does this help my user or my audience and would I do this or would I write about this or would I write about this topic even if search engines didn't exist? So I think, um, definitely that's really important. Another thing is, um, make it easy for folks to contact a human on your website that that actually really underscores trust. So what's the biggest frustration when we're on a website and maybe we have a question where a customer or a client and how can I find people and how can I talk to a real human? Janine, you pointed out that this relates right back to what you said about a company's about us page. It's a great opportunity to explain to your readers whether it is on your own writer website or for your client about who you are. Um, introduce some of your team and the photos and that really helps, um, reinforce trust and make us all, uh, be humans. Uh, another thing I think that the downloadable also goes into, and this relates to trust. We want to help our users or our clients, our audience feel safe when they're contacting us. So this is very, very key, especially if you are, um, in the your money or your life brand or any ecommerce site. Make sure you have a lock and key in the URL bar and that you have a safety certificates. So I'm also looking at using the, you know, air quotes here, h t t, p. S. So we do still see Geneen many, many websites that do not have the SSL or safety certificate. So it's really important,

Speaker 4: 21:45

um, to update, make sure your website is safe and also to include any other type of certificates, um, for safety or HIPAA, HIPAA guideline hit. Yeah, hit the guidelines if you are like doing telehealth, etc. So I think those are some things. What the heck is Carol talking about? What's an SSL? I thought it was just h TTP. What's this s you'll know those websites, if you've ever gone to research, whatever, or you're just looking at me. It would be the pet store down the road and you're looking for dog food and you go on their website and it says, do you want to proceed because your, your browser is stopping you because it's a safety thing. And you're like, yeah, it's just a pet store down the road. Sure I'll proceed. But if you didn't know who that was, that could be some sort of spammy intruder, internet crime kind of stuff going on. So most websites when you start to set up a website, I think it's defaulted to make it safe. But you should know if you've ever gone to your own website, outside of your own computer, it should stop you if it's a safety concern. So if you don't have it, you might already know that. But just to make sense of the Internet Jabber for you guys. And I also think as well that in the show notes you'll want to, um, take a look on our website because we will include links to some information about some of those key topics as well. So always the podcast is fun to listen to, but one of our goals in the show notes is really to link to additional resources externally as well as elsewhere on the healthcare marketing network blog where some of our high performing writers have written some really key and helpful information in a lot of these topic areas as well. And one more thing I want to go back to is talking about the human side of things. So have links to our calendars. If you just want to talk to us for 20 minutes, book a Free Co call with us, just go to our website, you'll see our calendar link, um, or the Facebook group. You can easily contact us where we're here all the time. So feel free to reach out. We're here to answer any of your guys' questions. Um, if you have any questions about this, each strategy will be more than happy to address them. But you'll get your free downloadable five ways to establish credibility and strengthen, eat, eat. Perfect. I think, Janine, I'm very excited to hear from people after the listened to the podcast and download that. Eat a little a checklist. I'd love to hear from people and see how are they using it. Did they find it valuable? I'd love to even hear if they used it in their own

Speaker 5: 24:43

website and how that helped or if they were able to use it with a client and we'd love to hear from you. So there's a couple of ways that you can definitely get ahold of us and share that information. And that's number one. Like I said, just go to our website on the home page actually any page, click on the right hand side. There's a little Mike, leave us a message about feedback related to the eat downloadable or any questions that you have about SEO we'd love to hear. Awesome. Awesome. All right, well I think we could probably wrap it up for today. If you guys really love what you're hearing, we would love to hear from you. If you go to the iTunes link and leave us a five star review, we'd probably be your best friend forever and we are so cite because people we're engaging with people from all over the world. Jeannine, um, within our Facebook community, we love, love, love having new high performing health writer members, so love for you to join our community on Facebook and we are getting a ton of emails, those five star reviews, of course we love, we want to reach more high performing health writers. Thanks so much to all of you for listening and Jeanine, I think I'll just let everyone know they need to now go, go get Sharon.

Speaker 3: 26:16

Hey Janine, pop it in here. I wanted to let you guys know if you didn't know how to get ahold of us to work with us, you can always just send us an email@savvyscribeswithansattheendatgmail.com. We're willing to help you find a freelance writer for your business. We are willing to answer any questions that you might have. Just shoot us an email, and Carol and I will get back to you probably within the next 24 hours. Savvy scribes@gmail.com back to the show.

Speaker 1: 26:46

That's a wrap for today's episode of the savvy scribe. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy today's show, we'd love for you to subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. Until next time.