Leverage Your Company’s Expertise to Create “Information Gain” for SEO
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". When you ask Google what information gain is regarding SEO, this is what they pull up as an answer in their AI Overview.
Here's how Search Engine Land defined it in their article speaking about the patent:
"An information gain score is essentially a measure of how unique your content is from the rest of the corpus. Here, the corpus would be all the potential documents that Google analyses in ranking for the particular query searched. "
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.
The Importance of Leveraging Your Expertise
Did you know that about two thirds (2/3) of the value of answering product-related questions comes after the first visitor who will ask that question? It's not just about sharing valuable information, but you need to publish that content in a way that drives future conversions and expertise both on your site and also driving organic traffic. If you're able to provide great content to your customers and leverage that "information gain", that content then goes to work for you. This is what Answerbase sees as you publish valuable information and insights on your site and make that easily accessible to future visitors and searchers.
Ecommerce merchants who are sharing their expertise effectively can leverage that content to drive maximum value. Unfortunately, the common practices of creating and sharing information do not achieve these goals and have very little (or no) attributable value to actual conversions. Worst yet, Google's focus on "information gain" and "people-first content" is no longer respecting much of that content.
Current Content Writing Practices Are Failing
Most of the time when companies are looking to write content they are doing so in order to give themselves a lift for SEO...and more times than not the process they go through is as follows:
There are agencies (that we look to partner with) that go deeper and actually dig into the actual intent of the search, but unfortunately there is a huge amount of content that is written with an oversimplified process that is summarized above. There are big issues with these common practices.
It's not really the marketer's fault, everybody has their strengths and skillsets and they are great at writing and SEO...but you need to connect them with the actual expertise within your organization. When Google is looking at content, they want to see the following which they refer to as "E-E-A-T".
The first two of "Experience" and "Expertise" where a lot of pieces of content fall short, and Answerbase can help you effectively surface that within your company and then get it to the marketing team so "people-first content" and "information gain" is built into the content....and then they can go to work and refine that gold with SEO practices and writing expertise to makes it useful to the public.
How to Connect Customer Demand for Information with Internal Expertise
You likely have people within your organization who have in-depth experience and expertise with at least some of the products within your inventory, so Answerbase enables you to leverage that expertise to fulfill the customer's demand for information around those products. For products where you may be lacking expertise, Answerbase enables you to tap other resources to fill in those gaps and ensure that you can share helpful content that provides value to both your visitors and searchers. Answerbase facilitates this in several ways.
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.
Here's how Search Engine Land defined it in their article speaking about the patent:
"An information gain score is essentially a measure of how unique your content is from the rest of the corpus. Here, the corpus would be all the potential documents that Google analyses in ranking for the particular query searched. "
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.
The Importance of Leveraging Your Expertise
Did you know that about two thirds (2/3) of the value of answering product-related questions comes after the first visitor who will ask that question? It's not just about sharing valuable information, but you need to publish that content in a way that drives future conversions and expertise both on your site and also driving organic traffic. If you're able to provide great content to your customers and leverage that "information gain", that content then goes to work for you. This is what Answerbase sees as you publish valuable information and insights on your site and make that easily accessible to future visitors and searchers.
- Leverage Published Expertise to Automate Answers & Conversions: Answerbase sees that 7.5% of customers that touch our Q&A widget and content generated through Answerbase converts to a sale. As Answerbase is able to auto-suggest answers from all of your existing information (product information, descriptions, specs, tc.) customers are able to confirm what product is a match for their needs and convert to a sale. Given that the average conversion rate for ecommerce merchnants is between 2-3%, this should be a conversion lift for your site
- Fulfill Content Gaps for Information Not Yet Available: For brand new questions that you don't yet have the answer to published on your site, Answerbase sees that 8% of newly answered questions convert to a sale which is also a conversion rate lift but over time fills in all the informational gaps around each of your products and product categories.
- Most Value Kicks In After All That: The conversion lift of the above two items are great, but Answerbase sees that 21% of Q&A pairs have conversion attribution over time. Answerbase achieves this as we're able to publish and auto-suggest those answers effectively to future customers and also ensuring the questions that have regular search volume are visible in organic search results. This makes sure that all of the "information gain" that your company is sharing is leverage to provide maximum value.
Ecommerce merchants who are sharing their expertise effectively can leverage that content to drive maximum value. Unfortunately, the common practices of creating and sharing information do not achieve these goals and have very little (or no) attributable value to actual conversions. Worst yet, Google's focus on "information gain" and "people-first content" is no longer respecting much of that content.
Current Content Writing Practices Are Failing
Most of the time when companies are looking to write content they are doing so in order to give themselves a lift for SEO...and more times than not the process they go through is as follows:
- Do keyword research to understand what people are searching for related to their products and services, and identify several keywords
- Identify what competitors have written about and what is currently ranking for those targeted keywords
- Come up with a content brief that goes over a topic that can be written about that may rank well given their research
There are agencies (that we look to partner with) that go deeper and actually dig into the actual intent of the search, but unfortunately there is a huge amount of content that is written with an oversimplified process that is summarized above. There are big issues with these common practices.
- On it's face, the content is being made for the purpose of ranking in search engines...and is therefore "search engine first" and exactly what Google doesn't want businesses to create. Google is looking for "People-first content"...of information that your customers are actually/actively asking for...and then applying SEO best practices to that people-first content. So, the process is backwards and Google is rewarding the "people-first content" vs what used to get traction with "search engine first content". The days of "search engine first content" are coming to an end....and the Information Gain Score is getting better at identifying it.
- The second problem is, even if you know the demand for actual content, the content writers are many times just that...they are writers. They have no hands-on expertise with the products or services they are writing about...so most often the articles are written as copy-cat articles of what a competitor has already covered because they research the topic through already published content on the Internet. You can see why the "Information Gain Score" is necessary, because there is no value in a bunch of different companies mimicking each others articles and try to "out SEO" the other to get a higher ranking. Google wants new insights, new information, and they recognize that through the Information Gain Score.
It's not really the marketer's fault, everybody has their strengths and skillsets and they are great at writing and SEO...but you need to connect them with the actual expertise within your organization. When Google is looking at content, they want to see the following which they refer to as "E-E-A-T".
- Experience: Does the source of your content have the experience to write about this topic?
- Expertise: Does the source of your content have the expertise and insights to write effectively about the topic?
- Authoritativeness: Does your company and writer have the authority to write about this topic?
- Trustworthiness: Is your company and writer a trustworthy source of this information?
The first two of "Experience" and "Expertise" where a lot of pieces of content fall short, and Answerbase can help you effectively surface that within your company and then get it to the marketing team so "people-first content" and "information gain" is built into the content....and then they can go to work and refine that gold with SEO practices and writing expertise to makes it useful to the public.
How to Connect Customer Demand for Information with Internal Expertise
You likely have people within your organization who have in-depth experience and expertise with at least some of the products within your inventory, so Answerbase enables you to leverage that expertise to fulfill the customer's demand for information around those products. For products where you may be lacking expertise, Answerbase enables you to tap other resources to fill in those gaps and ensure that you can share helpful content that provides value to both your visitors and searchers. Answerbase facilitates this in several ways.
- Question Distribution to Appropriate Employees: Answerbase has advanced question distribution work flows that subscribe employees to the appropriate products and topics they have expertise within, and then distribute relevant questions to them so they can provide answers. Those answers can either be reviewed and refined/approved by management before sending along to the end customer, and made available for other visitors (and Google) to access in the future.
- SEO Recommendations to Product Specialist Answers: Answerbase has a page-by-page optimization work flow and as part of those recommendations, Answerbase can surface the answers that were given by your product specialists to customers and recommend optimizations to those valuable answers to ensure they also do what they need to do from an SEO standpoint. This ensures that your foundation of content is "people-first content" that provides the necessary "Information Gain" but then has SEO best practices applied to them so they can bring searchers additional value.
- Supplement Support & Marketing Personnel with Product Information: Answerbase has the ability to recognize when customer questions have been answered with already vetted and published product information that can be found within your product descriptions, details, specifications, etc. This arms your marketing personnel with valuable content and enables them to provide the necessary in-depth product expertise they may be lacking but then adding their own personal value in customer care and marketing expertise to get the best possible content to satisfy every customer need.
- Leverage Partners and Customers: Many times merchants will have some enthusiastic customers, service partners, distributors or other people within their network of business partners who have great knowledge and expertise about their products. Answerbase has community Q&A forum capabilities which allows you to leverage the people within your network who can share very valuable insights and experience so your end--customers can have access to the best possible helpful content from your company. This is more important than most people realize when it comes to SEO, because Google considers the best quality content to be when more than one perspective is available to answer a specific query....so you can leverage your community to provide the expertise available from your company's perspective but also the perspective of other experts within your ecosystem.
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.
