Last week I shared with you the first thing I am highly focused on for content creation in 2024, which was designing content to end the user’s search journey.
The second thing is…
Information gain
Google is aware that multiple documents about the same topic will likely contain a lot of the same content.
That’s where information gain can make one document stand out over others.
Here’s what Google’s patent has to say about it:
…when a set of documents is identified that share a topic, many of the documents may include similar information.
Information gain scores state how much more information one source may bring to a person who has seen other sources on the same topic. Pages with higher information gain scores may be ranked higher than pages with lower information gain scores.
Although not mentioned directly, you will find information gain references all over Google’s Helpful Content Guidelines.
This one is a little harder to implement and will often take some time to get right, but it is something I started doing a few years ago.
When you work in this field long enough you start to see patterns. One pattern I saw emerging was that much of the content being published was largely just a regurgitation of the content of the top ranking pages.
Of course, there is the old saying if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I didn’t like the idea of just publishing what everyone else was.
So I started to ask myself this simple question:
What can I provide that other content is not providing?
If you yourself are not an expert on the topic, this can be even more difficult to pull off, but there are some things you can do.
One of my favorite methods is to comb Reddit forums about the topic and look for questions people are raising that you are not seeing in the top 10 search results.
Another place to look is YouTube and Facebook groups. These will take longer to go through, but can be a great source of information.
Steve Toth had a great idea he shared a few months ago on SEO Notebook to use the search modifiers:
- filetype:pdf
- filetype:ppt
- filetype:doc
Combine these with your target keywords and you will often find a lot of good information that is not being written about by the articles you find at the top of the SERP.
Also, if you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for SEO Notebook while you are there.
