Information Gain in SEO: What It Is & How to Improve It

SEO has become one of the strong digital marketing tactics used by businesses of any sector to levitate their online presence and revenue. There are many elements businesses should pay attention to, including the quality of content. Yet, recently, Google granted a new score: information gain in SEO.

Information gain score rates how unique and valuable the information on your website is. To learn more about information gained in SEO, read the explanation below!

What Is Information Gain in SEO?

Information gain is the score granted by Google in June 2022 to ensure valuable content in the search results. In this context, valuable content is people-first, original, unique, and high-quality one. 

Therefore, the information gain score will show how original your content is to others. According to the patent, the majority of the scenarios used to determine information gain scores are carried out following further searches, document views, and search result views. It is a learning procedure tailored to the learner and/or the subject matter they are researching.

Generally, information gain in SEO studies the content with new information about particular subjects and presenting consensus content with first-hand knowledge and unique, innovative viewpoints. 

This concept differentiates information gain from other traditional metrics, such as keywords and backlinks. With that, Google can provide top-notch content that satisfies user intent by giving fresh points of view that are hard to find on the internet.

How Can Information Gain in SEO Impact Search Rankings?

It can be said that Google has its own way of measuring how original content is and possesses a metric that allows it to actively promote or degrade material according to how different or similar it is. 

Then, what is the purpose of information gain? The information gain score points to a new algorithmic component that focuses on content farms and AI-generated content.

For this reason, less unique content will be degraded. So, in summary, this content scoring metric indirectly affects SEO since it encourages webmasters to produce original, rich, and valuable content (not only search engine friendly). Since the content is well-developed according to Google’s requirements, the rankings will potentially improved on search results. 

Information Gain in SEO and in Machine Learning, Are They the Same?

Both SEO and machine learning have “information gain” terms, but what is the difference between them? Actually, information gain in SEO and machine learning are completely distinct. 

Information gain in SEO is concerned with how valuable and novel the content is for readers in comparison to what is already on the web. It places a strong emphasis on producing content that provides fresh perspectives or information that is not commonly accessible, improving the quality and relevancy of content in search results.

On the other hand, information gain in machine learning, which is mainly employed in decision trees, is a statistical property that quantifies how well a feature divides a set of data into target groups. It aids in identifying the most informative characteristics for data splitting at every decision tree node, enhancing the model's classification procedure.

Then, why must SEO experts understand the difference? This is because information gain in SEO is crucial for optimizing content for human user engagement and information supplies. 

Information gain could transform conventional SEO tactics by pushing content producers and marketers to concentrate more on the quality and originality of their work than on search engine optimization.

How to Calculate Information Gain in SEO?

Web pages must be analyzed, both new and old, to determine information gain scores. First, you must collect data by extracting the content from pages. After that, you can input the data into a machine-learning model that evaluates the new pages' distinctiveness and importance by contrasting them with previously examined pages. 

Then, based on the amount of new and important information that the new pages are expected to give in comparison to the existing content, the model generates an information gain score for them.

Lastly, the most useful content is shown to users based on these scores to optimize the amount of new knowledge they learn.

How to Improve Information Gain in SEO Content?

The primary key to improving information gain is producing original and high-quality content. Yet, there are more strategies you should do to enhance the information gain, such as:

1. Incorporate Emotion into Your Content

When creating content, you should use emotion to connect and stay relevant to your audiences so that they can turn into paid customers. Using emotion in content also can humanize the content. 

By providing your audience with something to relate to and connect with, you will give your content an interesting spin.

2. Write First-Hand Experience

First-hand experience content is always unique and original since it gives personal events to the readers and this satisfies the search engine algorithm. In this case, you can write in first-person pronouns telling about a factual event.

3. Leverage Media to Your Content

Aside from writing, you can leverage media, such as infographics, videos, podcasts, and many more to deliver information to the audiences. This will make you stand out more and give it a different approach to sharing information. 

4. Put Fresh and Valuable Information

To enhance your content, you can add information from news sites, journals, statistics, and any other sources of recent data. You can also ask for input from experts in the industry to offer their special insights to give your article a new angle.

5. Create Customer-Focused Content

Rather than seeing what the search engine result pages provide, you can create content based on what your customers need. You may write content about the original information found in testimonials, case studies, and client feedback. 

Moreover, you can look for topics or issues that may come up frequently in your comments that you may write about.

Those are the ins and outs of information gain you can learn. To sum up, information gain is one of the criteria you can pay attention to when creating content. Therefore, you can provide valuable and original content to your targeted audiences. 

If you need a hand in producing top-notch content based on SEO best practices you can partner with SEO Writing Services by cmlabs. Not only writing SEO content, cmlabs can also help you realize the SEO strategies that improve your business site performance on SEO Services. Secure a meeting now and tell us your SEO needs for free!