Google’s “Information Gain Score” and How It Impacts Ecommerce Merchants
In 2022 Google got a patent issued on something called an "Information Gain Score", where Google can compare several pages that cover the same information and create a score based on which pages are actually adding something to the Internet as far as new information, which they're coining as creating "Information Gain". If you know anything about what is normal when it comes to content creation and publishing, this is important to know because Google is looking to reward sites that are actually publishing great new information on the internet vs just creating copy-cat content which isn't really adding much.
Why is an "Information Gain" Necessary to Assess?
Content creation and marketing is most often an initiative taken on within a marketing department or a digital marketing agency. When it comes to the writers of the content, there are levels to those writers which we detail below.
This leads to a large amount of content that is severely lacking quality and helpfulness, and most times it’s obvious to see the lack of expertise that the writer has on the topic. From Google’s perspective, this is in direct conflict with how they guide their raters to rate the content they’re reviewing. Google’s Raters Guide communicates this to their raters on how they should approach judging quality.
"For most pages, the quality of the MC (“Main Content”) can be determined by the amount of effort , originality , and talent or skill that went into the creation of the content.”
But on top of that….when it comes to determining quality based on the expertise around the topic itself, Google guides their raters to pay special attention to the following:
"Do your best to imagine that you are someone who's very interested in the topic, functionality, or purpose served by the page, then think about how satisfying the MC would be for that person.” - Section 3.2 of Search Raters Guidelines
The issue with the current content processes is that most of the effort, talent and skill is coming primarily from the writing expertise, not the expertise related to the topic.
Google’s going to continue to get feedback from their Search Raters based on the above criteria and then use that feedback to further refine their automated rankings, and in the end the content written without in-depth knowledge will perform poorly over time because it’s not helpful to the people who want to consume the content…and Google’s getting better at recognizing it.
How Does This Apply to Ecommerce Merchants?
Well, everybody has a challenge on this because you need to efficiently connect the customer's demand for information with the people within your company who have the expertise around each product. But, many ecommerce merchants have a unique challenge because they are many times selling products that they themselves do not create....so the access to the "helpful content" actually resides within product information that is being provided to you by the manufacturer. In all of these cases, it's important to make sure that you're getting information from the actual sources of expertise for each product...and ensuring that content is available and in a format that searchers are looking for it.
The ideal scenario is if you have expertise through either people in your company or your partners (for example, service providers in your customer base that you can incentivize to share their knowledge). Answerbase helps ecommerce merchants connect the request with information with the expertise. For example....we can surface common questions related to your products not only that are asked on your site but are regularly asked on Google. For questions that your marketing staff needs to supplement with additional expertise from within your organization, we have an option to submit those questions to appropriate team members within your organization who have the hands on expertise and experience, so they can contribute their knowledge as seen here:
So, you can tap the appropriate expertise within your organization and then that expertise is brought back to your marketing personnel to ensure that the expertise is appropriately optimized with the keywords and keyphrases that align with your SEO strategy. Facilitating this ensures that the value of the knowledge within our entire organization can be leveraged and can be streamlined into being useful for content marketing. If you also have expertise within your customer base or partner network, you can leverage supporting a Ecommerce Community Q&A Forum capabilities where you can have the platform not only get that expertise but publish it in a way that's available for Google's Q&A rich snippets (QAPage Schema).
To supplement your marketing team, Answerbase helps bridge this gap and enable marketing teams and agencies to be closer to "unicorns" because we are able to have a deep understanding about every product within your inventory by digesting all of the available product information, specifications, descriptions and documentation and then align that with the customer's demand for information. This enables marketers to leverage their expertise in SEO strategy and writing great content, but make sure that content is rooted in great information and put in a format that aligns with actual consumer demand.
For example.....when it comes to Product Collection or Product Category Page content, Answerbase has a deep understanding of what product information going to be useful to your audience. Answerbase understand all of the types of questions that are asked for each product and is able to service them well with great information that is both helpful to them and helps them get to the product they are looking at is a great fit for that matches . We also have an understanding of how that information is requested through searches and what information is requested enough to focus on....and ensure that appropriate keyword optimization and link building is applied.
Answerbase utilizes this approach in our category-by-category optimization work flow where we feed you with AI-Proposed Q&A threads that will accomplish these goals. The AI-Generated Q&A for category recommendations go through the common attributes of that type of product and inform the visitor about the benefits and considerations related to those attributes based on the products within your inventory. We encourage you to schedule a demo so we can speak about how we'd configure this for your site but you can see an example of what our AI-Proposed Q&A shows and includes:
As noted above, the content that Answerbase proposes for optimization of your category pages for SEO include the following:
This provides valuable information that is rooted in deep understanding of the products that the consumer will not know most of the time and creates content that leads customers to the right products that match their needs, and links building value back to the most valuable product pages. This ensures that all of the content is accurate and based on great information as the foundation, and your marketing personnel is able to ensure that the content is reviewed and published to align with your strategy.
If you'd like to hear more about how creating "Information Gain" on your pages can lift your SEO and conversions, schedule an Answerbase demo today and we'll have a product specialist talk to you about your goals.
Why is an "Information Gain" Necessary to Assess?
Content creation and marketing is most often an initiative taken on within a marketing department or a digital marketing agency. When it comes to the writers of the content, there are levels to those writers which we detail below.
- Writers & Editors: These individuals are typically working within marketing or agencies and are proficient in writing, but they don’t have much (or any) experience on the topic they’re writing about.
- Subject Matter Experienced Writer: This individual is also often within marketing or agencies and have enough writing experience on a topic to communicate effectively (or at least not sound unknowledgeable), but many times not having enough hands on experience to provide original experience and insights on that topic.
- Subject Matter “Knowledgeable” Expert: These individuals are product specialists or service providers who have in-depth knowledge and hands on experience related to the topic to contribute original content and insights, but they lack the writing and marketing expertise to generate content for the purposes of marketing on their own.
- Unicorns - Writer & Expert: These individuals are often very difficult, expensive, or seemingly impossible to find. They are proficient in writing but also have in-depth knowledge and experience on the topic to contribute original content and insights.
This leads to a large amount of content that is severely lacking quality and helpfulness, and most times it’s obvious to see the lack of expertise that the writer has on the topic. From Google’s perspective, this is in direct conflict with how they guide their raters to rate the content they’re reviewing. Google’s Raters Guide communicates this to their raters on how they should approach judging quality.
"For most pages, the quality of the MC (“Main Content”) can be determined by the amount of effort , originality , and talent or skill that went into the creation of the content.”
But on top of that….when it comes to determining quality based on the expertise around the topic itself, Google guides their raters to pay special attention to the following:
"Do your best to imagine that you are someone who's very interested in the topic, functionality, or purpose served by the page, then think about how satisfying the MC would be for that person.” - Section 3.2 of Search Raters Guidelines
The issue with the current content processes is that most of the effort, talent and skill is coming primarily from the writing expertise, not the expertise related to the topic.
Google’s going to continue to get feedback from their Search Raters based on the above criteria and then use that feedback to further refine their automated rankings, and in the end the content written without in-depth knowledge will perform poorly over time because it’s not helpful to the people who want to consume the content…and Google’s getting better at recognizing it.
How Does This Apply to Ecommerce Merchants?
Well, everybody has a challenge on this because you need to efficiently connect the customer's demand for information with the people within your company who have the expertise around each product. But, many ecommerce merchants have a unique challenge because they are many times selling products that they themselves do not create....so the access to the "helpful content" actually resides within product information that is being provided to you by the manufacturer. In all of these cases, it's important to make sure that you're getting information from the actual sources of expertise for each product...and ensuring that content is available and in a format that searchers are looking for it.
The ideal scenario is if you have expertise through either people in your company or your partners (for example, service providers in your customer base that you can incentivize to share their knowledge). Answerbase helps ecommerce merchants connect the request with information with the expertise. For example....we can surface common questions related to your products not only that are asked on your site but are regularly asked on Google. For questions that your marketing staff needs to supplement with additional expertise from within your organization, we have an option to submit those questions to appropriate team members within your organization who have the hands on expertise and experience, so they can contribute their knowledge as seen here:
So, you can tap the appropriate expertise within your organization and then that expertise is brought back to your marketing personnel to ensure that the expertise is appropriately optimized with the keywords and keyphrases that align with your SEO strategy. Facilitating this ensures that the value of the knowledge within our entire organization can be leveraged and can be streamlined into being useful for content marketing. If you also have expertise within your customer base or partner network, you can leverage supporting a Ecommerce Community Q&A Forum capabilities where you can have the platform not only get that expertise but publish it in a way that's available for Google's Q&A rich snippets (QAPage Schema).
To supplement your marketing team, Answerbase helps bridge this gap and enable marketing teams and agencies to be closer to "unicorns" because we are able to have a deep understanding about every product within your inventory by digesting all of the available product information, specifications, descriptions and documentation and then align that with the customer's demand for information. This enables marketers to leverage their expertise in SEO strategy and writing great content, but make sure that content is rooted in great information and put in a format that aligns with actual consumer demand.
For example.....when it comes to Product Collection or Product Category Page content, Answerbase has a deep understanding of what product information going to be useful to your audience. Answerbase understand all of the types of questions that are asked for each product and is able to service them well with great information that is both helpful to them and helps them get to the product they are looking at is a great fit for that matches . We also have an understanding of how that information is requested through searches and what information is requested enough to focus on....and ensure that appropriate keyword optimization and link building is applied.
Answerbase utilizes this approach in our category-by-category optimization work flow where we feed you with AI-Proposed Q&A threads that will accomplish these goals. The AI-Generated Q&A for category recommendations go through the common attributes of that type of product and inform the visitor about the benefits and considerations related to those attributes based on the products within your inventory. We encourage you to schedule a demo so we can speak about how we'd configure this for your site but you can see an example of what our AI-Proposed Q&A shows and includes:
As noted above, the content that Answerbase proposes for optimization of your category pages for SEO include the following:
- Relevant Questions (in Green): Answerbase understand what types of details that purchasers consider about a product within a product category and ensures that there is a Q&A pair about each detail and the considerations/benefits for that detail within the range of products you provide.
- Helpful Answers (in Yellow): The answer speaks to the variety of options that you have within your current inventory which satisfy the intent of the question, also highlighting the benefits of the different types of options that are available within that category of products. This ensures the customer can make an informed decision and lead to the appropriate product.
- Automated Link Building to Valuable Products (in Red): Answerbase will identify the products within your inventory that are best to highlight within the answer, speak to how those product's attributes are valuable to consider within the context of the answer, and automatically create links to those products to lead the visitor (and search engines) to the appropriate product.
- Automated Keyword Optimization (in Gray): Those questions and answers are automatically optimized to include the short-tail search queries most often used in search engines related to that specific product category . This ensures that you not only provide helpful content but can also provide position lift for your product category pages and product pages within organic results.
This provides valuable information that is rooted in deep understanding of the products that the consumer will not know most of the time and creates content that leads customers to the right products that match their needs, and links building value back to the most valuable product pages. This ensures that all of the content is accurate and based on great information as the foundation, and your marketing personnel is able to ensure that the content is reviewed and published to align with your strategy.
If you'd like to hear more about how creating "Information Gain" on your pages can lift your SEO and conversions, schedule an Answerbase demo today and we'll have a product specialist talk to you about your goals.
