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High Compliance Content & How to Work With Legal To Venture Into New Topics

Written by: Adrienne Kmetz Tags: content

Published: Jun 27, 2025

As search professionals, we already know that "risky" content is anything that impacts Your Money or Your Life. These topics require subject matter experts, expertise from a range of trusted sources, and a generally high bar for content quality, transparency, and balance – because they have real impacts on our life. 

I’ve worked in regulated industries where legal teams have strong opinions about what can and can’t be said in public, which includes your website. It's a natural tension: Marketing's job is to create momentum and find opportunities, and legal wants to minimize risk.

Oftentimes, it's easier for legal to flat out start with "no" – even when it's your own inhouse counsel – than to open the door to any risk at all. 

What are they saying "no" to? Certain types of content (like "best" pages); certain topic areas altogether ("we don't write about gambling sites"); certain words like "better" when it's in relation to a competitor. 

Getting to yes requires diligence, alignment, and a little code switching. Here’s what’s worked for me.

Principles of content compliance

1. Compliance documentation: Create comprehensive documentation that shows your rigorous fact-checking process and commitment to accuracy. Use the "c" word (compliance) in addition to "fact-checking", as there is a distinct difference in meaning to a lawyer. 

2. Designated compliance point person: While "compliance is everyone's job," appoint a specific point of contact in the documentation (or in the form of a RASCI) so there is one line of communication and this person also becomes your internal compliance SME.

3. Compliance is #1: If a page is not accurate and it could impact someones Money or Life (YMYL), it should come down until it is. 

Gather legal context to understand their goals

Legal and content have different goals. I spoke with Erika Vangouli, a member of a community I belong to called the Brand Authority Club. 

Erika says, "I think you want legal to ensure you're not breaking any rules, but their role and contribution is very different to yours. So, like you don't have a say in how you deal with legal issue, equally they shouldn't be defining your marketing. But inform and support it, yes."

In heavily regulated sectors like finance, healthcare, and cybersecurity, expanding content into new topic areas means learning a whole new set of regulations. 

1. If you haven't already, start by gathering as much information as you can about the legal context, regulations, and trigger words for your industry. File all of this in a dedicated Compliance folder, and add to it as you find new information. You can find a lot of information on the FTC website by industry. 
2. Erika suggests to ask your legal experts about the "red, grey, and white zones" to understand where the no-go areas and phrases are. 
3. Make sure your briefs clearly reflect and explain the key guardrails.
4. Then do the same with Editing – Adjust your Editing process to reflect checking for compliant language on top of fact-checking. 
5. Use shared language and ensure that your processes and plans have no need for additional clarity. 

Digital privacy and protection laws you'll want to know depending on the industry you're in: 

• COPPA and FERPA = Having to do with writing toward minors and students. 
• FTC disclosures and the difference between an Advertiser disclosure – they're two different things!
• HIPAA for medical-related content privacy laws. 
• USDA and FDA for wellness, agriculture, and food.

The SEO Community member and SEO consultant Kelly Stanze has decades of working with agricultural organizations online. She says:

"Every industry has a potential compliance consideration, but agriculture is unique in its diversity and the number of oversight organizations in play. A single project in the ag industry might have to pass compliance for USDA, FDA, EPA, and others, while others may have no legal requirements. It's always important to ask your clients, partners, and other involved parties what stakeholders may need legal input. Better yet if the company or organization has their own compliance pros on-hand!" -Kelly Stanze

Create a compliance SOP for writing, maintaining, and fixing compliance issues

To truly "bake" compliance into the ethos, it needs to have both a dedicated space for compliance processes, as well as baking it in to every existing process so it is prioritized throughout your operations.

Remember, you're not inventing something entirely new — you're mostly "rebranding" the Editing Stage to the Compliance Stage, and including editing, fact checking, and compliance as all part of this step, regardless of what you name it. -Adrienne Kmetz

Include: 

1. Your detailed, rigorous fact checking process step by step. 
2. Your compliance principles, like:
   1. Every article goes through compliance review before publishing
   2. Pages out of compliance come down until they are updated
   3. We use clear, non-guaranteed language, like "could, may, can, consider" instead of "should, must, will, do"
   4. We provide information, not advice. 
   5. We do not report on "the best" or what the best is. 
   6. We monitor to maintain high compliance and accuracy rates with a goal of under X flags per quarter.
3. A compliance editorial guide: For your writers and editors specifically, this is where you translate the rules legal just gave you, into a guide for writers. Outline explicitly what "guaranteed language" to avoid, phrases that trigger review or regulatory investigation, and how to talk about competitors, products, and sensitive content. 
4. A disclosure library that shows all of them in one place, also for writers or pubtech tools to be able to grab + insert the right disclaimer at the right time. For example, I always offer the number to the suicide hotline when I am writing about anything having to do with mental health. 
5. Competitor examples for setting precedent and comparing implementation.

Presenting your case to legal – and leadership – using data and precedent

While you're doing your due diligence on making sure your process is writer-friendly, lawyer-approved; you can start to build your case for the projected business impact of what you're trying to do. Socialize your data before the meeting to mentally prepare everyone for what they're going to see. 

For example, when we wanted to explore a higher-risk content area, we’d start by looking at our most successful competitors:

“Here’s what competitors like Nerdwallet or Credit Karma are already doing.

Here’s how much traffic and visibility they’re gaining.

Here’s what we could be leaving on the table.”

Then we’d bring in projections: potential incremental revenue, PR opportunities, market data:

• Competitor benchmarking: Identify leading competitors who are successfully producing content in new areas. Document their approach, disclaimers, and content style. What do they avoid altogether? 

• If there's no clear frontrunner, it could be you. Find a parallel industry and tell a story around the one that ventured out and defined + then won the category, versus the one that played it safe and got passed.
  
  
• Revenue opportunity: Clearly articulate the incremental revenue or growth opportunities that compliant content can unlock. Quantify the potential market size, so leadership understands what we're giving up to competitors. This creates a little FOMO, which hopefully helps seal the deal: 

• In some scenarios, the decision may need to come from above, rather from them agreeing on their own accord. If direct discussions with legal aren't moving forward, a strong, data-backed case to the decision-maker can inspire my favorite phrase: "find a way to make it work".

There is a reason legal would rather just not go there sometimes

• Some regulatory fines can be in the $10,000-$250,000 range if you are egregiously disregarding online advertising laws. And the resulting PR can be unflattering at best.
• Privately, it can get you fired by a client in absolutely no time, as they don't have a lot of time to deal with publishers who can't keep product information accurate. Affiliate programs are notorious for highly detailed, extremely accurate compliance requests, and little tolerance for wrong numbers. 
• Internally, as a content creator and marketer you are the SME and should be kinda pumped to build your knowledge in this way. Be informed and you'll build better relationships and hear fewer "blanket no's."

Maintaining compliance harmony and high rates of accuracy requires:

• Designated compliance responsibility: Serves as the primary liaison with legal, manages documentation, and ensures consistent application of guidelines.

• Review processes: Every piece of content, regardless of perceived risk, goes through a compliance check. Sounds complicated, but you should already be setting aside time for this during an editorial fact checking pass, so this is more like a reassurance than a process change.

• Automated alerts: Scan, alert, flag, and audit for consistency across all content variants and briefs.

Monitor with pubtech and tools

Show that youve talked to product about creating some pubtech that scans for trigger words, so you can also say you have bots on the job 24 hrs a day with alerts.

• AI for initial review: An accurate AI tool could be able to perform a first-pass review of content against established guidelines, to flag issues, in addition to but not in lieu of a human reviewer.

• Scanners and alerts: Platforms like Performline continuously scans live content for compliance issues and sends alerts. Typically it's expensive, extensive, and the big players use it quite a bit in affiliate. You can re-create it "cheap and cheerful" with a plugin, a tool you can build inhouse, or even some timed scripts in a sheet. Let us know if you find anything or build anything like this. 

What's your investment in compliance in relation to your return on investment from the content?

Does the additional maintenance and review costs make it worth publishing the content? Sometimes risky areas are the ones with the most reward, so many feel it's worth it especially if that topic is core to your business. You'll find out straight away if the juice is not worth the squeeze. 

• Continue to monitor all the way through to revenue to get an idea... Is this worth it in it's current configuration? Sample a few pieces and measure Cost-per-piece all the way through. Is your most successful piece returning leads yet? How long is your sales cycle or time-to-revenue on top of that? Put this all together in a spreadsheet tab. 

• Track data on rates: Track the percentage of content pieces that pass compliance review on the first attempt, or the number of flagged issues per content piece, and the trends over time, so you can address specific patterns in the brief or in trainings.

• Review cycle time to understand areas for streamlining or eliminating steps. 

• Stakeholder pulse check: Check in informally. Do you need to address bottlenecks or communication issues?

• Process improvement: Analyze recurring compliance issues or frequently flagged phrases to refine your writing guides and internal training. 

Every year or even 6 months, refresh your documentation and make sure it reflects the newest changes in laws.