A former senior SEO executive at Hims has shared a detailed breakdown of how a structured EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) overhaul lifted keyword rankings for the telehealth brand's blog by 34% in just three weeks - without publishing a single new article or building a single new link.

Mike Anderson, founder of consultancy Automattik and former SEO leader at Hims and SurveyMonkey, shared his findings on LinkedIn this week. The post, which gathered 94 reactions and prompted nine comments from practitioners including Lily Ray, VP of SEO & AI Search, and SEO consultant Andrew C. of Optimisey, outlines seven specific interventions. Taken together, they offer a rare, numbers-grounded account of what EEAT implementation looks like in practice inside a regulated health content operation.

The timing is notable. Health publishers have faced severe visibility losses following Google's December 2025 core update, with authoritative medical information sites that had held dominant positions for years seeing steep declines across multiple tracking platforms. Anderson's account arrives as practitioners are actively searching for signals about what, precisely, Google rewards in the YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) category.

The seven interventions, in order

Anderson frames the result as an operating model rather than a campaign. Seven changes were made, and he is explicit that no new content and no link building accompanied them.

Named physician bylines were the single largest driver of the 34% lift, according to Anderson. Hims replaced "Written by our Editorial Team" attributions with named physicians and their credentials. This change alone, he states, moved the needle more than any other element in the program. The implication for health content teams is significant: anonymous or collective authorship appears to carry substantially less weight than individually credentialed attribution, at least in Google's evaluation of telehealth content.

The second change was an editorial standards box placed in the footer of every blog post. According to Anderson, both patients and search engines need visible evidence that content is reviewed and how that review occurs. The box makes the process legible to readers, which he frames as a trust signal functioning at the page level.

Third came a structured medical review workflow. The sequence Anderson describes runs from draft to medical review to editorial quality assurance to publication. Every health claim, according to his account, was touched by a credentialed specialist before going live. "This is the system that lets you scale content without scaling risk," he wrote in the post. The phrase captures a genuine operational tension in health content: the pressure to produce at volume versus the liability and quality costs of errors in medically sensitive areas.

Author and reviewer profile pages formed the fourth element. Anderson draws a clear distinction between short bios and full credential pages. The pages he describes include training history, specializations, and links to every piece of content the individual has contributed to or reviewed. Each profile links from every associated article. This creates a crawlable graph of credentialed contribution across the site - a structure that allows search engines to verify the relationship between claimed expertise and actual content output.

The fifth intervention involved pruning low-authority content. Hims consolidated and removed content that, according to Anderson, was built to drive traffic rather than build trust. If a page did not meet the credibility threshold, it was taken down. Fewer pages, he concludes, produced stronger signals overall. This aligns with patterns documented by SEO expert Lily Ray, who has observed that content created primarily to serve search engines - rather than readers - now actively triggers Google's enforcement systems.

Sixth were what Anderson calls trust assets: a rewritten About page and a dedicated editorial process page that walks readers through how content is created, reviewed, and approved. He is explicit that these pages do not drive traffic. Their function is to build the trust that makes everything else convert. The editorial process page in particular is structured to demonstrate systemic rigor - not just the existence of review, but the specific stages and criteria it applies.

The seventh and final element was cited sources on every clinical claim. Published research, clinical data, and authoritative references were required for every factual assertion. If a claim could not be sourced, according to Anderson's account, it was not published.

Why this matters in the current search environment

The practical details Anderson shares sit in a specific and intensifying context. Google's AI Overviews now correlate with a 34.5% reduction in organic click-through rates across 300,000 keywords studied by Ahrefs. For health queries specifically, research has found that YMYL content achieves 52% average scroll depth inside AI-generated summaries - meaning users consume a substantial portion of an AI's answer before deciding whether to click through to the underlying source. The pressure on health publishers to remain visible, and to qualify as cited sources within AI Overviews rather than simply ranking organically, is intensifying.

This structural pressure intersects with what Anderson's post demonstrates: that trust signals legible to both humans and algorithms require systems, not one-off optimizations. His phrasing - "Medical credibility in health content isn't a one-time project. It's an operating model" - reflects a view that has gained traction among practitioners working on YMYL categories.

PPC Land has tracked the broader consequences for health publishers who lack this kind of foundational credentialing infrastructure. The December 2025 core update affected multiple established medical information websites that had held dominant positions for years. Lily Ray, who flagged the severity of those declines in a January 20, 2026 social media post, observed: "Really wild to see authoritative health publishers who have dominated in SEO for many years get hit so hard by this last core update."

The visibility losses documented across that update align with a pattern Ray has described more broadly: that the tactics which produced results between 2018 and 2022 now actively harm rankings, and that Google began adjusting its systems in 2022 to target content created primarily for search engines rather than users. Recovery from penalties of that kind, Ray has noted, can take two years of sustained effort.

Anderson's account suggests a different trajectory is possible when the foundational work is done before a penalty occurs - or, if it has already occurred, when the remediation addresses the structural cause rather than surface symptoms.

The schema and sameAs dimension

The LinkedIn comment thread surfaces a technical detail that Anderson's post does not cover but that practitioners regard as a complementary signal. Muhammad Kamran, an SEO specialist focused on Shopify stores, flagged what he described as a commonly overlooked discrepancy: on health e-commerce properties, the person who publishes or uploads content is frequently marked as the author in schema markup, while the live page shows a different actual author. "That creates a mismatch, and ideally the schema author should [match the on-page author]," Kamran wrote.

Anderson confirmed in his reply that schema-to-on-page author consistency is easy to miss, particularly in content management system environments where publisher and author fields are decoupled. "A mismatch in signals can work against you in regulated categories - every trust indicator matters," he noted.

A second commenter, Dimitrios Mytilinaios MD, PhD, Executive Manager at Kenhub, raised the sameAs property in schema markup as an underused signal. The property allows a profile page to be explicitly linked to the same individual's profiles on LinkedIn, Google Scholar, PubMed, and other authoritative third-party platforms. Anderson described this as "worth adding to any EEAT checklist."

These schema-level details matter because they create machine-readable connections between on-page claims and verifiable external identities. In a content category where the authenticity of credentials is a ranking factor, those connections reduce the gap between what a site claims and what search systems can independently verify.

Anderson's background and the Hims context

Mike Anderson's LinkedIn profile documents a trajectory through product-led SEO roles. At Trulia, he served as Director of Product Management for SEO from March to October 2019, leading technical SEO efforts through a migration of Trulia.com to a modern technology stack. That migration, carried out in close coordination with engineering, product, and design teams, incorporated SEO requirements and A/B testing across the transition - and drove more than 2 million additional annual visits.

A subsequent role as Head of SEO at another property from October 2019 to November 2020 involved overseeing three SEO managers, onboarding an SEO agency, and developing a multi-year SEO roadmap spanning technical, content, and user experience dimensions. Accomplishments from that period documented in his profile include developing and implementing an international domain strategy with hreflang tagging across 17 domains; retiring more than 90 domains to eliminate duplicate content, which produced a 12% lift in page-one rankings; and establishing an international content program that generated 33,000 organic clicks per month within the first year, growing to 100,000 within 18 months.

At Hims, the telehealth brand, Anderson applied this background to regulated health content - a category that carries distinct challenges because of the potential consequences of inaccurate medical information. The EEAT program he describes was built, according to his account, precisely to address those challenges systematically. His current consultancy, Automattik, focuses on organic growth strategy for what he describes as "the era of AI discovery."

The broader question of content pruning

The pruning element deserves particular attention given its counterintuitive character. Reducing the number of pages on a site - removing content that exists and is indexed - runs against the instinct of most content teams to accumulate rather than eliminate. Anderson's framing is that content created to drive traffic, not to build trust, dilutes the credibility signals of the pages that remain.

Google's search systems have increasingly applied this kind of evaluation at the domain level, with John Mueller, Google's Search Advocate, describing LLM-generated topic clusters as "liability" - a characterization that implies potential algorithmic treatment affecting site performance broadly, not just the individual pages in question. Mueller's guidance draws a distinction between human-authored content that provides genuine value and automated content designed for search engine optimization. The distinction becomes operational when sites carry large volumes of content that fails the genuine-value test.

In regulated categories like telehealth, that liability can be amplified. A page making health claims without adequate sourcing or credential verification creates risk not only for search visibility but for the readers it reaches. Anderson's decision to remove content that did not meet the credibility threshold is consistent with a view of SEO in health contexts as inseparable from editorial standards.

What the practitioner response signals

The reaction to Anderson's post, while not large in raw numbers, is qualitatively notable. Lily Ray responded with a sequence of raising-hands emoji - a signal from one of the more closely watched EEAT analysts in the industry that the framework described is directionally credible. Andrew C., founder of Optimisey, observed: "It's almost like creating great, useful content requires effort, planning and expertise, rather than a few well sculpted prompts."

Sandeep Kelvadi, who works on automating marketing services for higher education using customized approaches, described the systematic approach as "essential when you do SEO at scale." Mikael Araújo, an SEO editor focused on international SEO, content marketing, data science, and AI, called it "amazing work."

The responses collectively reflect a practitioner community that is navigating a moment of significant structural change. AI search visitors convert at substantially higher rates than traditional organic traffic - 4.4 times higher according to Semrush research published June 9, 2025, and 23 times higher for signups in a separate Ahrefs study published June 16, 2025 - but reaching those visitors requires being cited within AI-generated answers, which in turn requires the kind of credibility signals Anderson's program was designed to establish.

The question practitioners are working through is whether the investment required to build these systems - credentialed author profiles, structured review workflows, sourced clinical claims, pruned content libraries - produces returns that justify the operational cost. Anderson's 34% ranking lift in three weeks, achieved without content production or link acquisition, offers one data point in that direction. Whether the result is reproducible at scale, across different health categories and regulatory environments, remains to be seen.

Timeline

  • October 2013 - December 2013: Mike Anderson completes Lean LaunchPad Business Concept project at Arizona State University, including consumer research for an insurance product aimed at high-income professionals
  • November 2017 - March 2019: Anderson serves as Digital Outreach Chair for Our Revolution Arlington
  • March 2019 - October 2019: Anderson serves as Director, Product Management - SEO at Trulia, implementing hreflang tagging for 17 domains and retiring 90+ domains for a 12% page-one ranking lift
  • October 2019 - November 2020: Anderson leads SEO at a subsequent role, establishing an international content program generating 33k organic clicks per month in year one and 100k within 18 months
  • August 2018: Google's "medic update" core algorithm adjustment heavily affects health websites and introduces explicit emphasis on E-A-T signals - a pattern documented by Lily Ray
  • May 2022: Anderson obtains WSET Level 3 Award in Wines from the Wine & Spirit Education Trust
  • 2022: Google begins adjusting its systems to target content created primarily for search engines rather than users
  • May 2024: Google launches AI Overviews, beginning a documented reduction in organic click-through rates
  • June 9, 2025: Semrush publishes research showing AI search visitors are worth 4.4 times more than traditional organic traffic
  • June 16, 2025: Ahrefs publishes research showing AI search visitors convert 23 times higher than organic traffic, representing 0.5% of visits but 12.1% of signups
  • July 16, 2025: SEO analyst Dan Callis publishes warning about AI Overviews reducing organic clicks by 34.5%across 300,000 keywords
  • August 27, 2025: John Mueller warns against LLM-generated topic clusters as site "liability"
  • December 11, 2025: Google announces December 2025 core update, which begins devastating health publisher rankings
  • December 26, 2025: Lily Ray discusses how excessive SEO causes ranking losses in regulated categories including health and finance
  • January 20, 2026: Lily Ray documents dramatic health publisher visibility losses following the December 2025 core update
  • March 2026: Mike Anderson shares the Hims EEAT case study on LinkedIn, documenting a 34% keyword ranking lift in three weeks from seven foundational credibility changes

Summary

Who: Mike Anderson, founder of Automattik and former SEO leader at Hims and SurveyMonkey, shared the case study. Commenters include Lily Ray (VP, SEO & AI Search), Muhammad Kamran (SEO specialist), Dimitrios Mytilinaios MD, PhD (Executive Manager at Kenhub), Andrew C. (SEO consultant, Optimisey), Sandeep Kelvadi, and Mikael Araújo.

What: Anderson documented seven EEAT-focused changes made to Hims' health blog content - named physician bylines, editorial standards boxes, structured medical review workflows, full author and reviewer profile pages, content pruning, trust asset pages (About page and editorial process page), and cited sources on every clinical claim - that produced a 34% keyword ranking lift in three weeks with no new content and no link building.

When: The LinkedIn post appeared this week in March 2026. The Hims work described in the post occurred during Anderson's tenure there. The post attracted responses within 1 to 3 days from practitioners across the SEO industry.

Where: The case study was shared on LinkedIn and relates to work carried out at Hims, a telehealth brand operating in regulated U.S. health content categories. Anderson currently runs Automattik, a consultancy focused on organic growth strategy.

Why: The account matters because it provides a specific, metrics-backed example of EEAT implementation in a regulated health content environment at a moment when health publishers are losing substantial search visibility. Google's quality rater guidelines emphasize expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness for YMYL content, but documented examples of what implementation looks like in operational terms - with associated ranking outcomes - remain rare. Anderson's seven-step account fills part of that gap.

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