Differentiating informational articles for improved rankings

BakerStreet

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On this SEJ article https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-explains-how-it-processes-queries-ranks-content/513441/ Roger says "unique" content is not content that doesn't repeat the same 3 words, aka how copy scape works. He's talking about differentiated content from competitors. I thought about it a bit and I think he's on to something. In the age of LLMs, "the right answer" meaning 1 answer that's quite good for the query, can easily be found. However, to compete against LLMs, Google is trying to show UGC and "other answers." Therefore if you just write "the right answer" your content won't do well, since that answer can be generated by LLMs.

One way of giving "other answers" is UGC. Another is expert quotes. Here, I'll list ideas to differentiate informational articles so that it'll stand out against the competition and, hopefully, rank well in the age of LLMs.

  1. expert quotes - I think I'm just gonna go through google news and see what people who are quoted in news articles about my topic say, and try to copy the quotes into my articles. I never interviewed the guy but I have an expert's quote in my article now. I think it'll work as a quote and I hope it works as expertise!
  2. news updates - for my niche, there's an article about it in the news every day. I'm thinking about having a section about the news in my articles too, to keep my readers informed. Not sure how relevant it would be for the searcher, but it'll help make my articles stand out. I'll make an example at end of post.
  3. Do social justice shit - add a blurb about social justice that affects my industry there just to stand out.
Anyone have any other ideas on how to differentiate informational content? I'm gonna test this now with my already ranking article and articles on page two to see if it helps. Will report back.

Also, since I'm here, it'll be one hell of an operation to differentiate articles in a business targeting long tail keywords! Holy shit! Thank god we have LLMs now! Hopefully this can be condensed to a few extra step for CB makers and a few extra prompts for writers.

==example news update in informational article==
title: "How to get a fishing license"
  • intro
  • steps to get fishing license
  • how to make an appointment
  • 2024 Fishing Act
  • Proposed ban on catching carp
  • Information for Fishing for people with disabilities
  • conclusion

Edit: Safety - safety information would be helpful.
 
BakerStreet said:
Anyone have any other ideas on how to differentiate informational content?
Click to expand...

Lie.
  1. Expert Quotes - According to numerous TikTok videos, an unnamed whistleblower from the NOAA has claimed that climate change activists in Congress are trying to pass a federal ban on fishing with plastic line, citing "disproportionate damage to minority turtles."
  2. News Updates - Lawmakers are furious that requests for fishing licenses haven't gone down quicker. They don't want you to be able to feed yourself in the case of an "emergency event" so that you have to rely on the government for everything, as usual.
  3. Social Justice - As reported on Instagram by an anonymous source, Congressional staffers have leaked memos concerning a plan to institute race- and gender-based quotas for fishing licenses to help achieve the NOAA's DEI goals by 2030.
 
  1. Tables with data.
  2. Small illustrations and infographics.
  3. Unique images.
  4. Quizzes and surveys
  5. Good and relevant internal and external linking
 
Jesse said:
Lie.
  1. Expert Quotes - According to numerous TikTok videos, an unnamed whistleblower from the NOAA has claimed that climate change activists in Congress are trying to pass a federal ban on fishing with plastic line, citing "disproportionate damage to minority turtles."
  2. News Updates - Lawmakers are furious that requests for fishing licenses haven't gone down quicker. They don't want you to be able to feed yourself in the case of an "emergency event" so that you have to rely on the government for everything, as usual.
  3. Social Justice - As reported on Instagram by an anonymous source, Congressional staffers have leaked memos concerning a plan to institute race- and gender-based quotas for fishing licenses to help achieve the NOAA's DEI goals by 2030.
Click to expand...
I thought you said "lie"?

@BakerStreet how is your site currently performing/competing against AI-generated content? Is AI your main source of competition?
 
Smith said:
I thought you said "lie"?

@BakerStreet how is your site currently performing/competing against AI-generated content? Is AI your main source of competition?
Click to expand...
We had 50% drop in traffic in March code update. Our main competitors are one platform that used ai in its product lead SEO and gov sites. The new Google also really ranks gov sites that don’t even mention the keyword! It’s crazy! We’re being outranked by gov sites that don’t have the keyword in it. Tell me that five years ago and I’d think my SEO is just really bad and that the keyword is low competition. Now I think Google is interpreting the query as a navigational query to the gov site.

Hopefully this differentiation would allow us to stand out in the results page and rank. Craziest thing is that competitor using LLMs only has like 400 words on page.

I hope differentiation would allow us to stand out against other companies doing content marketing too not just gov sites or this one competitor.
 
BakerStreet said:
We had 50% drop in traffic in March code update. Our main competitors are one platform that used ai in its product lead SEO and gov sites. The new Google also really ranks gov sites that don’t even mention the keyword! It’s crazy! We’re being outranked by gov sites that don’t have the keyword in it. Tell me that five years ago and I’d think my SEO is just really bad and that the keyword is low competition. Now I think Google is interpreting the query as a navigational query to the gov site.

Hopefully this differentiation would allow us to stand out in the results page and rank. Craziest thing is that competitor using LLMs only has like 400 words on page.

I hope differentiation would allow us to stand out against other companies doing content marketing too not just gov sites or this one competitor.
Click to expand...
I've been following your posts and I'm pretty sure I know the niche you're operating in (or at least very similar). It's a competitive space. And like you said the gov pages are probably going to dominate because, ultimately, they are the ones that set the rules related to the product/service you sell. So, when people are looking for information about that product/service, Google thinks the gov is the best-suited entity to answer whatever questions searchers have, which is usually wrong but c'est la vie.

You've been talking about a few other channels (e.g. social and PPC) are you still pursuing those or are you mainly focused on improving content like you're talking about here through differentiation?
 
Smith said:
I've been following your posts and I'm pretty sure I know the niche you're operating in (or at least very similar). It's a competitive space. And like you said the gov pages are probably going to dominate because, ultimately, they are the ones that set the rules related to the product/service you sell. So, when people are looking for information about that product/service, Google thinks the gov is the best-suited entity to answer whatever questions searchers have, which is usually wrong but c'est la vie.

You've been talking about a few other channels (e.g. social and PPC) are you still pursuing those or are you mainly focused on improving content like you're talking about here through differentiation?
Click to expand...
We applied to be authorized by the gov in our niche a few weeks ago. I'm still corresponding with the gov worker on the authorization. I started running PPC for one product line and am still n00b in PPC. Still learning on how to organize ad groups and make ads and so forth. No PPC sale yet. Once we get authorization, we can run PPC for all product lines and even other product lines that we haven't touched yet.
 

Sundar Pichai confirms my hypothesis. I'm right! If the query is answerable, Google has been using featured snippets to answer the query. In the future, that answerable query will be answered by an LLM.

In addition to that, since Google is used globally by many different groups, Google wants to surface a rich, diverse set of answers in the organic results.

So, yes, going for "the right answer" is heading for failure and being redundant by LLMs. You need to make your content differentiated for a certain group. I think what Pichai is saying is that, if there's a group devoted to that answer, it'll rank due to user metrics, backlinks, etc. My original idea doesn't go far enough, as I was only talking about diversifying my content. Pichai wants different voices to appear for different camps.

So, to learn with an example, if the query is "who will win the presidency?" the LLM answer would be "either the democratic or republican candidate for the US presidency." and the organic should include results from the democratic part, republican party, Green Party, libertarian party, and IDK what other parties exist.

... now... how do I get my answer to be from a group?! Ideas:
* build my brand more
* add a forum
* ????

Also, FYI, I did execute the first draft of the content update. We just ended up google newsing the topic. Then we added news about the topic in the article. Too early for changes and only 1 sample is not enough but the content is different than other content. I'm going to go and create new "BS" that is on-brand for my content too.

So, if it was BuSo and the article was "how to speed up Wordpress" I'd go and add a "features from the forums" heading with quotes from other people and stuff like that. This is my USP for the content.
 
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200349181A1/en

There's a fucking Google patent for this!

Contextual estimation of link information gain​

Abstract​

Techniques are described herein for determining an information gain score for one or more documents of interest to the user and present information from the documents based on the information gain score. An information gain score for a given document is indicative of additional information that is included in the document beyond information contained in documents that were previously viewed by the user. In some implementations, the information gain score may be determined for one or more documents by applying data from the documents across a machine learning model to generate an information gain score. Based on the information gain scores of a set of documents, the documents can be provided to the user in a manner that reflects the likely information gain that can be attained by the user if the user were to view the documents"
Click to expand...

My hunch so far is that you need to figure out how to differentiate your content from what's published already on the web. If there's a consensus to what the answer is, featured snippets will answer it and all other pages will have the same answer. To counter that, Google is showing "information gains" which is stuff you wouldn't learn about if you were to read the "correct answer."

I'm going with adding social justice shit to my articles, since there's always new stuff there and "the right answer" never has that. I don't have any positive impact to report yet but the fact that this patent exists shows me that I'm on the right path.
 
Are guys aware of SEO by the Sea? The guy goes through and explains, or attempts to, Google's different patents. It might be worth looking at for you conspiracy guys... :smile:
 
BakerStreet said:
My hunch so far is that you need to figure out how to differentiate your content from what's published already on the web. If there's a consensus to what the answer is, featured snippets will answer it and all other pages will have the same answer. To counter that, Google is showing "information gains" which is stuff you wouldn't learn about if you were to read the "correct answer."
Click to expand...

I've been thinking this too, although born more out of my experience with title tag differentiation and corresponding increased CTRs. Applied the same approach to a test site I spun up a little less than a year ago. I reviewed all the top rankers, made sure I was in-line with the "facts" presented, and then doused the page in uniqueness. I made jokes. I made dope infographics. Took all my own photos and watermarked them. Didn't templatize. Added fun polls. Embedded related video and audio. Shared it all via social, getting legit interactions and referral traffic.

Site was on the up and up until April wherein it was promptly destroyed. I'm seeing some keywords trickle back up because my CTRs are just fucking nuts but still no obvious widespread sustained recovery.

I'm going to keep plowing away, because this is some of the best content I've ever published and I still believe in it. I don't think Google can survive in the long-term if it simply serves up the same result just plastered on 6 different news domains. Users want humanity in their content. People miss old school long-form passion blogging.

The winds are blowing in the right direction, now if only the nerds on the Search team at Google can figure out how to hoist their sails properly without tying themselves in knots..
 
BakerStreet said:
My hunch so far is that you need to figure out how to differentiate your content from what's published already on the web. If there's a consensus to what the answer is, featured snippets will answer it and all other pages will have the same answer. To counter that, Google is showing "information gains" which is stuff you wouldn't learn about if you were to read the "correct answer."
Click to expand...
I wonder if personal opinions and commentary would be one way to differentiate content. Could help explain the preference towards UGC as of late.
 
chubes said:
I wonder if personal opinions and commentary would be one way to differentiate content. Could help explain the preference towards UGC as of late.
Click to expand...
I think so, if the personal opinion or commentary is actually new information. From looking at the patent, it checks for the topic that the user searches for and what pages they've visited already. Then it finds new pages about that topic, that has additional information that the previous pages did not have. It seems like the requirements is that the page is about the topic, and it has something new to share. You can call it "value added" and it wouldn't be wrong. Google just doesn't want to suggest the same info over and over again. This would explain EEAT too: If the personal opinion happens to be a doctor, for example, for a medical query, his commentary might not always be 100% matching with "the correct answer" but it will be different and on topic.

Another way I'm approaching this problem is this: For this topic, what have people say about it? Is there anything else I can add to the conversation that would carry the conversation further? This would be my value added and also how I differentiate my content from others and, hopefully, how I get SE traffic. This is also basic sophmore level writing in university.

Now, the challenge would be how to add to the discussion for a long tail query such as "Denmark wedding planner" in a way that allows for it to be an SOP for my team. Hmmm...
 
This is critically important, but adding SJW nonsense to your articles isn't likely to satisfy what Google is looking for with "Information Gain" (which you should search for on BuSo because we've had some decent conversation on it over the years. It's in the On-Page day of the Crash Course, too.)

It's not just any word-vomit nonsense added to the page. It needs to be packed full of entities that are otherwise not commonly associated with the results that surface for that query. The easiest explanation is if the top 20 results of a "top 10" style search query all have the same 10 people or locations in their list, having 8 of those 10 be different, and then having "runners up" and then "bonus #11 and #12" and crap like that will help you rank very fast for keywords you otherwise wouldn't qualify for. Made some good money doing this a while back. It's hard and expensive to do at scale, since you're not having some content mill rewrite articles.
 
My own experience with information gain was that it worked great to begin with, but with time, it would lose it freshness boost and eventually the same old high DR sites would overtake it, particularly after they began copying my findings.

One exception to this was when that unique content managed to attract strong editorially given links (which can include outreach). That combination of fresh content and strong links seemed to really create lasting value that persisted as much as 5 years.
 
Agreed. Once you take the #1 spot with new info, it gets copied and loses its power. So you start chasing your tail trying to keep up with it. Just another reason content-at-scale is becoming troublesome.
 
bernard said:
  1. Tables with data.
  2. Small illustrations and infographics.
  3. Unique images.
  4. Quizzes and surveys
  5. Good and relevant internal and external linking
Click to expand...
I was leaning towards the #1 point myself. Articles having more datasets and analysis will provide more value than run-of-the-mill articles.
 
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