When I first got into digital marketing and SEO, the formula for success was pretty straightforward. An SEO specialist would identify a high-volume keyword that would be passed on to a content creator. That person would write a comprehensive post that strategically utilized the keyword in title, subtitles, and body text. Finally, the SEO team would concentrate on creating as many backlinks as possible.
Sound familiar? If so, did you know that the formula created copycat SEO and marketing strategies that no longer work? More importantly, copycat SEO and marketing is now a liability. It is more important that marketers, web development teams, and SEO providers chase the new SEO gold: information gain. It will be the most important metric for the next decade.
What Is Information Gain?
Information gain is not a new principle introduced by digital marketing and SEO. The principle is actually rooted in data science. It is most often integrated into decision trees to improve classification accuracy. Its role in SEO and digital marketing is quite different.
Within the context of SEO, information gain refers to the amount of new information a piece of content offers. Search engines classify new information as data that does not appear on other comparable sites of similar authority. They appreciate this new information because it helps them point users to things they cannot get from other sources.
When Google announced its information gain patent a few years ago, their intent was made clear. They want their algorithms to be able to rank subsequent sets of web pages that predict a user’s next information need. In other words, Google wants its algorithms to anticipate what users will need in the future by analyzing current searches.
With that in mind, algorithms are designed to look for and prioritize new information. Whatever is new acts as the hook that keeps users on Google rather than using an alternative search engine.
A Real-World Example
A real-world example explains how information gain works in SEO and digital marketing. Assume a business owner is looking for a San Diego web development company. All the pages that come up in a standard search say the same basic thing. There is nothing there to allow Google’s algorithms to anticipate the next user need.
Now let us say one particular site, the Pixsan Solutions site, offers unique information that the others do not. That information can be included in Google’s summary. More importantly, that new information is likely to catch the user’s attention. Google can then pose additional questions to keep the conversation going.
Why Information Gain Matters to Marketing
Google made a smart move when it modified algorithms to eliminate internet junk created through black hat practices like content spinning and keyword stuffing. But what was known as the Panda update back then created another problem: content homogenization. New content was created by scraping content from similar posts to create what our industry jokingly refers to as the ‘franken-post’.
Though you might think the AI-driven search solves that problem, it does not. AI does what human content creators do – scrape and curate information found online – just at a much faster rate. Information gain changes everything by giving AI-driven search engines new information they cannot find anywhere else.
Information gain increases an organization’s chances of its website being cited in an AI summary. It also boosts brand authority and reliability. So for web development teams, digital marketers, and SEO providers, information gain represents the gold that buys their clients much-coveted online exposure. Without information gain, a website owner’s online presence will languish in the arena of homogenization.
