Information gain: Here’s what this new SEO ‘buzzword’ really means

The new buzzword in SEO is information gain. And like all new buzzwords, SEOs are throwing it around like we’ve just discovered fire.

But there’s a massive problem.

Information gain means different things to different people.

In this article, you’ll learn about information gain and how to use it to your advantage.

The 3 schools of information gain: Humans, machines and search engines

Information gain can be used in three topics:

• Machine learning.
• Google Patent.
• Information foraging theory.

Information gain is used to train decision trees in machine learning. And unless you are a computer programmer, we can largely leave that can of worms unopened (for now).

When SEOs talk about information gain, they mainly refer to the Google patent.

Google was granted a patent in 2022 regarding an information gain score that applied to documents. 

This patent showed that Google had developed a way to measure the “sameness” of content and either promote or demote it accordingly.

This is a great way for Google to deal with content that is essentially unoriginal or simply copied from another source and reworded. 

But what about information gain in relation to the information foraging theory?

Information foraging theory was documented in the book of the same name, written by Peter Pirolli.

It applies the models of how animals search for food (optimal foraging theory) to how humans search for information (which we’ll talk about later).

As you can see, we have three different meanings for the same term. 

With regards to SEO, the Google patent is mainly easy to understand – just make your content unique.

However, information foraging is more complex, so we need to examine it more thoroughly.

Why information foraging matters for SEO

Recently, Google started discussing information foraging theory in their decoding decisions report (the messy middle).

Indeed, information foraging theory seems to be the direction Google is heading, and to quote their report directly:

“An explosion in product choice and information has made it harder to feel confident about making the right decision.”

Or, to put it another way, there’s just too much information out there.

If we have too much information, the time to make a purchase decision is increased, and this isn’t good for anyone.

You can see why Google SGE might help things if you think about this.

By providing a generative AI response to a search query, a search user immediately grasps the subject without needing to click a website.

This initial information should help a user to make their next search decision.

Take this result from a search in Perplexity.

Within seconds, my knowledge of the best gym shoes for bad knees has increased, and there are many links and suggestions.

My next click will be to look at the suggested shoes, not to read another five blog articles.

If SGE works similarly, you can see how it will radically change commerce.

We’re no longer optimizing for Google. We’re optimizing for AI.

Dig deeper: LLM optimization: Can you influence generative AI outputs?

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From SEO to information gain optimization 

Google has been involved in AI for a long time, and AI is part of many of its systems.

They used BERT to improve their understanding of language, and I’m sure many more systems are in use.

The point is that Google is trying to understand content to serve search engine users better. Therefore, Google itself is reading your content.

Sure, not like a human does, but they are reading it. 

So, it makes sense to apply a similar approach to increase Google’s information gain from content, just like humans.

In essence, we become information optimizers. 

Our job as SEOs is to continually increase the rate of information gain.

The rate of gain, explained

Information gain rate, when it comes to information foraging theory, is described as:

• Rate of gain = Information value / Cost associated with obtaining that information

You see, while search engines carry a cost for indexing and retrieving documents, so do humans.

When we use our brains, we consume calories, and the body is highly efficient at not wasting them.

We use heuristics (mental shortcuts) to filter the world and make decisions.

Information foraging theory suggests that we seek to do the same. We attempt to gain as much information as possible from a source in as little time as possible.

To do this, we go through a five-stage process.

Goal

• What information do we need?

Patch

• We decide on what source of information would best deliver our goal. This could mean that we go to Tripadvisor, TikTok, YouTube or any website/ search engine that comes to mind.

Forage

• Here, we search for the information we need on the platform of choice. For this example, we’ll stick with Google. You type into the search engine keywords to try and find the information you need.

Scent

• When we head to search engines, we’re looking for the scent of good information sources; signals such as reviews, higher rankings and page titles that encourage clicks.
• We click on sites, scan information and decide whether to invest time reading the resource.

Diet

• We consume information from multiple sources before making decisions. This is what Google refers to as the messy middle of search. 
• For brands/ sites, being part of your consumers’ information diet increases the propensity that they will come to depend on you for information and trust you.

As we know, that trust leads to purchases or increased clicks (which can lead to advertising/ affiliate revenue). So this means that SEO should include optimizing around information scent.

But if you’ve read the above, you can see that Google search works similarly, just a machine version.

Information optimization: The new science

If we’re going to optimize around information gain, we need to understand that it requires a greater understanding of two factors:

• Machine learning. 
• Human learning.

We already know that Google wants original, experience-based information from the best sources.

They also want to reduce the cost of extracting that information.

Yes, Google wants an easy life. So, how do we do this on a practical level?

Simply put, we make extracting information easier for both machines and humans (at the same time), and here’s how.

The optimal website maximizes the value gained per interaction 

Contrary to what many think, fast websites might matter, but if the information gain rate from a website is low or has a high perceived cost, then the person will leave.

Here’s an example.

I’ve asked ChatGPT for some information about a hotel in Paris. It gives me the information the best way it can.

It gives a lot of information I can easily extract at a low cognitive cost. But how should a website deal with this?

Tripadvisor has a whole page dedicated to the hotel. Look at how they’ve optimized one section for information gain rate.

The content – which uses symbols, scorecards and lists room types – is designed for humans (and machines) to gain the most information in the least time/cost.

And it’s this that we have to get our heads around to help search users.

But we need to destroy some myths around content.

Good content is context-based

I read a lot of good content, but most of it’s in my inbox in the form of blogs people have written that are not designed to gain traction from search.

Good content for SEO is wildly different.

When we search online, we have an emotional need state that requires solving.

Kantar and Google did some research a while ago.

In this study, the above need states were used by searchers, who came to search engines looking for them to be resolved.

Some words that stand out across from each need state are:

• Quick.
• Laser focused.
• Specific phrases.
• To the point.
• Simplicity.
• Uncomplicated.
• Trust.
• Ratings.
• Reviews.
• Competence.
• Location.

It’s these attributes in information that search users look for in content online.

Strikingly, we can see how Tripadvisor’s content displays these attributes, and we can also see how applying them to content would increase the information gain rate for humans and machines.

But how can we start to take the approach of information optimization to content?

Well, here’s a four-part process to get you started. 

Part 1: Content structure

Look at how your page should be structured for search to increase the information gain rate.

A good example is the Tui website:

They’ve used faceted search “buttons” to help users find what they are looking for.

Consider how best to design your page for humans and search engines to increase the information gain.

UX matters, as does the information on the page.

Part 2: Information architecture 

Consider how you want your information to be structured for maximum information gain.

You might consider giving information early and quickly, for example:

“When is the best time to travel to Jamaica?” 

“March is the best time to travel to Jamaica.”

Look at your content and aim to add some, if not all, of the following attributes.

• Quick adventure.
• Laser focused.
• Specific phrases.
• To the point.
• Simplicity.
• Uncomplicated.
• Trust.
• Ratings.
• Reviews.
• Competence.

Part 3: Content design

The last impact is the design of the content.

Consider how best to add value, such as using unique images to your posts to help explain information or data.

Backlinko uses images like the above to convey data in an interesting format.

This leads us to the final part.

Part 4: Content difference

If you do all of the above, you should have content that is very different from what already exists.

But if you don’t, ensure that you do.

There are 1,000 different ways to say the same thing, but it requires creativity and consideration about how best to display your unique angles and viewpoints around this.

But here’s a little challenge.

Head to a site like Backlinko or HubSpot and look at their content.

Find an article and apply the above four-part system, and think about how you would improve it based on your unique views or experience.

This could serve as a suitable workshop for agencies and in-house staff to consider the information gain and how best to apply it.

Because in the era of generative content, information gain is king.

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Google CEO on future of links, AI making Search quality worse

As Google Search continues to incorporate AI-generated answers into Search, links will live on, Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Bloomberg in a new interview. Here’s what you need to know from Pichai’s interview.

Future of links. Unlike in previous statements, where Pichai indicated that the Search experience would evolve substantively in the next 10 years, in the Bloomberg interview he seemed to indicate that links to websites will continue to be an important part of Google Search results:

• “I think part of what makes Google Search differentiator is while there are times we give answers, it’ll always link to a wide variety of sources. We’ve had answers in Search now for many, many years. We are just now using generative AI to do that.”
• “I think [links will] always be an important part of Search.”
• “There will be times when they want quick answers. My son is celiac, so we did a quick question to see whether something is gluten-free. We just want to know. But often it leads to more things, and then you want to explore more. I think understanding that, meeting all that needs, is part of what makes Search unique.”

Google Search getting worse. Pichai was also asked about search getting worse and “more SEO spam.” Pichai didn’t directly answer it (a typical Pichai non-answer answer), but my interpretation is Pichai acknowledged the issue without confirming it. Here’s what Pichai said, you can decide what it means:

• “Anytime there’s a transition, you get an explosion of new content, and AI is going to do that. So for us, we view this as the challenge, and I actually think there’ll be people who will struggle to do that, right? So doing that well is what will define a high-quality product, and I think it’s gonna be the heart of what makes Search successful.”

He was later asked how concerned he was about AI-generated content ruining Search. His response:

• “The challenge for everyone, and the opportunity, is how do you have a notion of what’s objective and real in a world where there’s gonna be a lot of synthetic content? I think it’s part of what will define Search in the next decade ahead, right?”
• “People often come to Google right away to see whether something they saw somewhere else actually happened. It’s a common pattern we see. We are making progress, but it’s gonna be an ongoing journey, right?”

Google’s business model. Google made more than $192 billion just from search ads in 2023. Pichai was also asked whether a chatbot giving AI-generated answers, rather than links, is “an assault on Google’s business model.”

• “So we’ve always found people want choices, including in commercial areas, and that’s a fundamental need. And I think we’ve always been able to balance it. As we are rolling out AI Overviews in Search, we’ve been experimenting with ads, and the data we see shows that those fundamental principles will hold true during this phase as well.”

Other quotes of note. Pichai was asked about the perception that Google is behind other companies (e.g., OpenAI, Microsoft) in AI, (even though Google became an AI-first company in 2016):

• “I take a long-term perspective and say, when the internet just first came about, Google didn’t even exist then, right? So we weren’t the first company to do search, we weren’t the first company to do email, we weren’t the first company to build a browser. So I view this AI as, you know, we are in the earliest possible stages.”

Meanwhile, in what I consider a fairly shocking moment, Pichai – the leader of a company that while not perfect is doing and has done many amazing things – couldn’t articulate a coherent reason when asked a simple question: why anyone we trust Google:

• “Well, I share the notion that no one, you shouldn’t blind lead, you know? That’s why it’s important to have systems in place. Regulation has a part to play, you know, test balance innovation. But as these AI systems get more capable, it shouldn’t just be based on a system of trust people or trust companies.”

What’s the biggest threat to Google’s future, according to Pichai:

• “…not executing well.”

Pichai was also asked whether we’ll look back on this “LLM era” and laugh because it will someday look basic and rudimentary:

• “I hope we do … my kids aren’t impressed by touchscreens or the fact that they have this extraordinary amount of computing in their hands. So similarly … there’s no reason we wouldn’t scale up our computing a hundred thousand times in a few years. … I hope some of this looks like a toy in the future. I hope it is that way, otherwise, we didn’t do our job well.”

Why we care. Just the other day, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said “Google is not about blue links. It’s about organizing the world’s information,” which seemed to echo Pichai’s recent statement about Google evolving toward Search Generative Experience, where links to websites will eventually become less central to Search. AI answers are the present and future of Search – they’re not going away, especially if ChatGPT delivers on its rumored search product.

The interview. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the Future of AI | The Circuit

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Optimization beyond data: Design thinking for SEO

One of the things I love about SEO is its inherent duality.

We get to leverage both sides of our brains:

• The right brain when it comes to on-page, content and even link building campaigns.
• The left brain when it comes to technical, data analysis, etc.

However, it’s easy to think of SEO as predominantly left-brained. SEO tactics tend to rely heavily on data and numerical figures. We lean into technical know-how and keyword optimization. Logically, we react to what the numbers are telling us and decide the next steps accordingly. It’s a proven approach.  

But what about the people driving that data? What about their intent? Can we use more creative thinking to pursue better optimization strategies? 

When it comes to SEO, our goal is not really to gain the coveted top blue link. It’s about reaching the right people and addressing their needs by giving what they want as quickly and as easily as possible.

So, how do we reach that goal?

Users are always looking to do something, whether it’s finding information, being entertained or purchasing a product. How do we tap into emotional and behavioral data to support them?

That’s where design thinking comes in. 

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is exactly what it sounds like: adopting a designer mindset. 

It’s a human-centered framework for problem-solving the way a designer would – by setting out to solve a problem using creativity rather than data alone.

The design thinking process is typically divided into five stages:

• Empathize
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test and evaluate

With design thinking, the emphasis is not only on the solution but also on the end user.

SEO specifically focuses on providing the best solution for a specific audience. It’s about understanding user intent and adding value. 

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A new optimization process 

1. Empathize: Get to know your audience

Empathizing in this context is centered around identifying and understanding your audience.

The best SEO strategy optimizes for consumer discovery by understanding the people who are searching. This ensures you’re adding value to users and ultimately growing your audience through increased organic visibility. 

Conduct thorough research to learn about your existing audience and gain insights into search behaviors, motivations and pain points. 

There are a number of tools available to help research your target audience. Using Google Analytics to understand who is coming to your site is a great place to start.

In GA4, you can view audience reports under User > User Attributes to identify location, gender, age, language and even interests when available. 

You can also leverage Google Trends, Facebook Audience Manager and persona mapping or survey tools to learn more about your potential audience.

Gathering this information helps tailor efforts from keyword selection to content creation and off-page efforts. When your SEO strategy is anchored in reaching an audience you fully understand, you can reach them more efficiently.

Dig deeper: An SEO guide to audience research and content analysis

2. Define: What problem are we trying to solve 

The next step involves analyzing your audience data to define the SEO challenges you aim to address. This is critical to ensure you address the real wants and needs of the audience through SEO efforts rather than working from assumptions like search volume or clicks. 

Based on the unique audiences you have identified, you can better determine the specific challenges you need to address and how to reach users. Consider:

• What messaging and terminology is most likely to resonate with your target audience?
• Are users struggling to find relevant information on your website? 
• Are there gaps in your content that need to be filled?
• Based on location, what search engines are audiences using beyond Google? Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo?
• Based on age and gender, what non-traditional search engines do you need to consider? TikTok, YouTube, Amazon, Pinterest? 

Clearly defining the problem allows you to focus your efforts on the areas that will impact your SEO performance most.

3. Ideate: How can we best solve that problem?

With a clear understanding of the SEO challenge, brainstorm as many potential solutions as possible. It’s easy to fall into the same pattern of optimizing your site based on analytics data and search trends, but with design thinking, we emphasize qualitative data over quantitative data.   

A few different brainstorming techniques to help transcend your left-brained thinking habits include:

• Brainwriting: Everyone in the group writes down three ideas related to the challenge. From there, everyone passes their ideas on to the person next to them to elaborate on the thought starters and add strategies or tactics. This process repeats until the ideas have been passed around the entire group. Ultimately, everyone has contributed to each idea.
• Starbursting: Given a specific idea or strategy, create a six-point star around the idea, posing the questions who, what, when, where, why and how. Focusing on these key elements for each idea encourages the team to think about value and execution.

Think outside the box and consider how to create value for your audience through content, website updates, or user experience. In this exercise, quantity is key – use cross-functional thinking to generate ample diverse ideas.

• Is content expansion something that could help address your challenge?
• Do you need additional content that addresses a pain point?
• Do you need to improve the ease with which users find existing content? 
• Should social media be considered to increase visibility and extend reach?
• Are there PR tactics that could help generate earned coverage (i.e., inbound links and brand mentions)?
• Would other media, such as video, webinars or podcasts, potentially help address the need? 

Maybe traditional SEO tactics will help solve your particular challenge. But oftentimes, by integrating cross-channel tactics, you can better tackle SEO challenges and add value for users.

Dig deeper: SEO planning: Your one-page SEO plan

4. Prototype: Build the thing 

Before implementing any SEO strategy or tactics at scale, create “prototypes” to visualize and test your ideas.

Visualization is crucial in understanding how a strategy may address the problem or challenge. However, your prototype does not have to be a high-fidelity visual asset.

This could involve:

• Updating keyword maps and topic clusters.
• Drafting sample content pieces.
• Creating mock-ups of new features.
• Developing wireframes for website updates. 

In many cases, fancy tools and a team of engineers aren’t necessary. You can use lo-fi tools like Figma or Google Sheets to build basic prototypes that clearly convey the solution.

Whatever shape a prototype takes, keeping the unique problem or challenge in mind and relating it back to the audience is essential.

When considering the effectiveness of your prototype, use role-playing to put yourself in the shoes of the target audience. 

Dig deeper: Conveying keyword insights to non-SEOs: A visual approach

5. Test and evaluate: Does this solution work?

Design thinking makes so much sense for SEO because, much like SEO, it is an iterative process. 

The final step is to gather feedback on “prototypes” and/or tactics to refine solutions and strategies.

Intentionally test your tactics and continuously monitor performance. Leverage a modern framework for running SEO tests. Embrace a culture of experimentation to evolve your approach and better understand pain points. 

• A/B test everything from metadata to messaging to content structure.
• Leverage heat mapping to better understand how the target audience is using your website.
• Test keywords and messaging using Google Ads.
• Consider usability testing through a tool such as Hotjar or UserTesting. 
• Actively seek feedback on your site’s design, layout and functionality via surveys.

Changes in user behavior are more directly and immediately measurable than traditional SEO KPIs.

By testing with real users, you can gather feedback early in the process and make necessary adjustments along the way.

Creative problem-solving for SEO

Remember, it all starts with redefining the problems we are trying to solve.

Reframing SEO challenges around the target audiences’ needs and challenges allows us to better give people what they want.

When your SEO efforts are focused on the right audience, it’s easier to reach them. Traffic increases, which leads to more conversions.

Use design thinking to balance the analytical and creative sides of SEO. It can help you better understand when to use data, ignore trends and take risks, ultimately letting you create more user-centric and impactful SEO campaigns. 

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Online reputation management: Top 10 hurdles and how to overcome them

Your online reputation is what users can learn about your brand within a few seconds.

But today, it’s not only about what users might think. We also need to care about AI.

In this article, you will learn:

• How to properly monitor what is said about your brand online across different platforms.
• Why not all Amazon mentions might lead to the ecommerce giant (and what it means for AI).
• How the right strategy and different processes can defend your brand from potential threats.

1. Who will give the answers? Generative AI might

Generative AI has become a significant topic for brands worldwide.

The growing number of users researching AI-powered platforms gives us an idea about just how big the issue may become.

Even non-marketers use chatbots linked to platforms such as OpenAI to ask everyday questions. This is made much easier by chatbot platforms like Botpress or Messagebird.

The search landscape is changing heavily. As a result, online reputation management (ORM) will never be the same.

In the past months, numerous tests showed critical shortcomings, such as: 

• Major brands not making it into the top lists. 
• Generative AI completely making up testimonials and information. 
• Using ex-employees’ feedback on job sites to provide feedback about a company and many others.

A sustainable strategy to protect your brand from generative AI issues is to control the input. Language models are very likely to use various sources on the web to feed their algorithms to get text samples and understand the facts.

A brand (business or personal) that triggers a knowledge panel on Google is very likely to be in a good place when it comes to the semantic part of ORM. 

Generative AI will use more of its internal knowledge management systems to produce more accurate answers, considering real and understood facts.

To proactively control the narrative, it’s critical to work on connecting your brand to appropriate semantic fields to make it easier for language models to comprehend:

• What you do.
• Who you do it for.
• What products or services you offer to fulfill your promise.

In practical terms, this might mean tying the brand’s context to descriptive terminology around the skill level, price point or specific targeting:

• Online courses could talk more about the applications of their courses and different levels of experience (e.g., beginner Spanish courses).
• Ecommerce sites might want to specify their target audience (e.g., woodworking surfing supplies for experienced surfers).
• Car repair shops might indicate their focus on luxury cars (e.g., car repair shop for luxury vehicles).

As so often, input = output. The more you control the narrative on your website and other sites about your brand, the higher the chances that language models pick up the right information and reproduce it in the right contexts in generative answers.

2. Ambiguous semantics

Semantics aren’t always clear: It often takes multiple semantic entities to be presented in the right context to allow NLP engines to actually comprehend what the text is about.

The free Kalicube Copywriting Analyzer Tool allows everybody to ask Google’s NLP engine through their API about its understanding of a sample text.

Look at these examples and Google’s understanding in parentheses:

• “I just love the Amazon in Brazil.” (Amazon = “Other”)
• “I just love Amazon in Brazil.” (Amazon = Organization)
• “I love taking pictures of the Amazon River.” (Amazon = Organization?)
• “I love taking pictures of the Amazon River.” (Amazon River = Location)

These examples illustrate how hard it can be for neurolinguistic processing engines to grasp what a text is about.

Context is king when it comes to getting an NLP engine to comprehend what your page is about. Make sure your content is tied to enough context to be unambiguous while paying attention to different spellings, synonyms, uppercase and lowercase versions, etc.

Just because there is text on a page that a human can fully understand doesn’t mean a machine can take away the same information.

3. User-generated content and Reddit

Online reputation management needs to focus on what gets the attention online. Very often, user-generated content (UGC) accounts for a major share of that. Users generate content in different formats, such as YouTube videos, podcasts, images and posts.

Given Google’s partnership with Reddit, the widespread community network has become a critical priority for ORM.

Many branded and product-related searches will trigger one or more Reddit threads. In addition, Google’s Gemini could leverage Reddit’s content as training data for its language models.

Actively monitor Reddit and maintain a few official users representing your brand. Look into creating new threads and start participating in existing discussions around your brand and contextually related topics.

To control the narrative (and the training data for a potential SGE roll-out), maintain a positive and helpful attitude and try to lead users with negative experiences off Reddit and into your email support desk where you provide real help, compensation or other benefits to minimize the damage.

Dig deeper: How to repair your Google search results and reclaim your online reputation

4. Lack of proper monitoring

The more popular brand, the more mentions there are on the web.

Tools like Google Alerts can enable an easy and free entry point for monitoring mentions of a brand (add different spellings) and its products or services. 

However, Google Alerts is limited to indexed pages only. It will alert you by email about what is coming up in Google Search, while leaving you in the dark about most social media posts, threads and comments sections.

Effective brand mentions monitoring requires using (usually paid) third-party tools that search through a variety of platforms and consolidate all mentions in a user-friendly report, ideally with an indication of the sentiment of the different mentions. 

But here is why monitoring mentions is even more complex than that:

How should a brand possibly know what kind of information is being presented through generative AI on Google and all the other major platforms out there?

Brands can hope Google might provide some kind of tracking through Google Search Console, but at the moment, it only seems that Google SGE heavily impacts many brand and product searches.

If a brand wants to know how it is being portrayed across the different platforms, the simplest way is to query them manually (or set up an integration using third-party tools or Google Sheets plugins, etc.) to help with that. It’s not perfect, but it might give you hints on what to do next.

There is no excuse for not configuring a series of the most important Google Alerts to monitor your brand name, your main products’ names and their most essential spelling variations.

If your brand is frequently mentioned on social media platforms, you should sign up for a paid tool to cover content that Google might not index.

Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to assign a team member to frequently query the most important AI tools with defined transactional queries about your brand and products to understand the topics and applications associated with the brand. Then, react accordingly to their output by finding the likely source of unwanted information and aim to balance it out.

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5. Google reviews

One of the most common requests an ORM agency gets is to remove a negative Google review. Negative reviews directly impact the experience of search users as they see the review stars on Google Business Profiles.

Google and other engines might also use review data to train their language models, so dealing with positive and negative reviews is crucial.

Happy customers don’t leave reviews until someone asks for them. Make sure you have a process in place to proactively build up positive and context-rich Google reviews from real, happy customers. 

Somebody from your brand should respond to every review. Ideally, you can provide even more contextual information to enrich the review semantics and balance negative sentiments.

Dealing with negative reviews promptly and constructively and offering assistance via email could prevent an unhappy customer from venting their frustration on other platforms like Reddit.

6. Competitors and affiliates

Imagine a potential customer searches for your brand name, flagship product or founder’s name. At the top of the SERPs, they will likely find the brand website, about page or product page.

However, when you don’t pay attention to your online reputation, potential clients will often see competing domains and affiliate sites near the top of the SERPs.

Imagine spending thousands of dollars on ads to raise brand awareness. But instead, you might be driving clients directly to their competitors.

While your brand’s ad spend will go through the roof, the competitor’s SEO consultant might get a bigger retainer for their strategic thinking.

You can achieve the most effortless conversion through branded searches. Somebody already searching for Nike shoes is very likely to buy them. 

Affiliates have been leveraging this for years by first trying to rank for the brand or product they are running affiliate marketing for.

Your brand must dominate the top of the SERPs for your brand name. This includes brand websites, product websites and social media networks. 

7. Competing ads showing for your brand name

Another sneaky way for competitors to get a brand’s attention is through running ads on a brand’s name. 

Amazon has been doing this for years. For example, searches for “Adidas shoes” will likely trigger Amazon ads. This even happens at a smaller scale, where regional or national classified car portals might try to run ads on local car dealerships’ names.

Tests show that an important percentage of users searching for a brand will not click through to the brand’s website but elsewhere on page 1. If a competitor has a compelling ad on top, a significant portion of the clicks might go there.

Running ads for your brand name, product names and founders’ names should be the best practice in every firm, especially in industries where competitors are likely to run ads using a brand name.

This allows you to also appear there as the official site behind the brand and, based on the usually higher quality score, get a larger portion of the clicks for lower costs.

8. Abandoned social media platforms

Potential customers will likely search for a brand name before buying. They might often find and visit a social media profile to gather more information and what they find there might be critical to the purchase decision.

More and more brands show up with almost abandoned social media profiles, focusing efforts on the platforms that seem to be trendy but forgetting that the others are still around and need to be maintained by:

• Answering comments
• Updating header images
• Publishing frequently
• Triggering engagement

Although you might get more engagement on Instagram or TikTok, it doesn’t mean the old Facebook profile or LinkedIn page still ranking wouldn’t be seen and considered before a purchase decision.

What does it say about a brand if one of the main social media platforms isn’t constantly updated?

To properly defend your brand’s reputation, creating and maintaining profiles across the leading platforms is critical.

Not every platform requires the same dedication and resources. However, visiting a platform should not lead users to think negatively about the brand’s image, its dedication to customer service or the product quality.

9. Balance pages’ sentiment

Unhappy users, clients and employees are likely to vent on sites like TrustPilot, Glassdoor or Google Reviews. 

AI platforms might consider these and similar resources when training their language models and analyzing their content, specifically their sentiment.

A reviews page with three negative reviews is very different from one with three negative, two positive and one neutral review.

It is similar to talking to three unhappy clients vs. talking to three people, only one of whom was unhappy and the other two giving neutral or positive feedback.

Regularly monitor your websites and social networks for brand and product mentions. Establish processes to balance out negative impressions and highlight positive ones.

10. Responsibility and the lack of defined processes

In online reputation management, a lot goes back to putting in place the right processes to prevent issues in the first place and manage reputational issues or a reputation crisis appropriately.

Hand in hand with the processes goes the question of responsibility. Who is responsible for monitoring mentions and reacting to them?

To establish a process, answering the following questions can be helpful:

• Who is responsible for monitoring and reporting on brand mentions?
• What’s the protocol for reacting to positive mentions?
• How should the brand respond to negative comments and reviews?
• How does content creation support connecting the brand’s main entities semantically to the right related entities?
• Who monitors AI tools?
• How are positive reviews stimulated?
• How can the sales department plant the seeds for future positive reviews?
• Is there a process to track customer happiness and does a happy client get asked for a review?
• What will happen in case of a data breach?

Online reputation management today requires an overall strategic approach. 

Assigning clear roles, tailoring processes for different platforms and using generative AI to handle present and future threats can protect your brand and simplify defending against potential problems.

Dig deeper: A quick guide to managing your online reputation

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ChatGPT search feature rumors heating up

All signs point to ChatGPT launching a search feature soon. When? That remains the big question.

Rumor has it. OpenAI is developing a ChatGPT feature that searches the web and cites sources in its results, Bloomberg reported (subscription required):

• “The feature would allow users to ask ChatGPT a question and receive answers that use details from the web with citations to sources such as Wikipedia entries and blog posts … One version of the product also uses images alongside written responses to questions, when they’re relevant. If a user asked ChatGPT how to change a doorknob, for instance, the results might include a diagram to illustrate the task…”

And. “OpenAI has been aggressively trying to poach Google employees for a team that is working hard to ship the product soon,” according to the Verge.

Why we care. Search has quickly evolving in a new direction since the emergence of generative AI – with OpenAI seemingly perceived to be ahead of Google in many ways (not yet including Search), even though ChatGPT’s user base is still much smaller than Google. However, there is clearly growing frustration with all aspects of Google – from the quality of Search results to its abundance of advertising. Not to mention Google’s alleged monopolistic practices that have hurt advertisers, users and competitors.

X things we know about ChatGPT search. ChatGPT doesn’t want to copy Google’s model or layout (he hates ads). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said as much earlier this year:

• “I don’t think the world needs another copy of Google,” Altman said.

ChatGPT’s version of Search wouldn’t be traditional, or classic, general web search. Altman’s vision is integrating ChatGPT with Search:

• “…We are interested in how to do that well. That would be an example of a cool thing. I don’t think anyone has cracked the code on yet. I would love to go do that. I think that would be cool,” Altman said.

Dig deeper. Is ChatGPT the Google Search killer we’ve been expecting?

Other ChatGPT search developments. We first heard rumors about OpenAI’s search product in February. Other stories Search Engine Land has covered:

• ChatGPT recently made links more prominent for ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
• OpenAI launched its web crawler, GPTBot, in August.

More evidence. search.chatgpt.com appeared in the log files for some servers, as reported In Report: OpenAI To Launch Search Engine on Search Engine Roundtable by Barry Schwartz. There were rumors that ChatGPT’s search product would launch as early as tomorrow (May 9), but that seems unlikely at this point.

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Surviving and thriving in the new Google by Edna Chavira

March 2024 disrupted the SEO industry. Websites were deindexed, and manual penalties were delivered—all to produce more helpful, more trustworthy search results. How did your website fare?

Join us for an insightful webinar as we delve into the seismic shifts brought about by Google’s March 2024 updates and explore strategies to not just survive but thrive in this dynamic digital landscape. In this session, we’ll dissect the implications of the latest algorithm changes on content creation, link building, and SEO practices.

Register now for Surviving and Thriving in the New Google: Navigating March 2024 Updates for Content Creation, Link Building, and SEO Success to secure your spot and unlock the secrets to thriving in the new Google era.

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PPC landing pages: How to craft a winning post-click experience

Ads get you traffic. Landing pages get you customers.

The post-click experience remains underrated in the grand scheme of PPC marketing.

Many advertisers focus so extensively on ad campaigns that they neglect the experience on their website or landing page – which is where a sale is made or a lead generated – and all the other touchpoints that follow.

To win new business and retain that hard-earned revenue, you must expand your scope to include what happens after ad clicks.

In this article, I’ll walk you through:

• My own tried-and-tested landing page philosophy.
• How to improve the lead-gen post-conversion experience.
• How to improve the ecommerce post-conversion experience.
• Why you should take the post-click experience seriously.

Best practices to build and optimize landing pages

Most advertisers and agencies typically specialize in either ecommerce or lead-gen campaigns, but there’s a generous amount of knowledge crossover between the two.

At my agency, we were doing landing pages for ecommerce clients long before they became commonplace, as they are today. Because of my experience with lead-gen campaigns and seeing how impactful landers could be, we were able to learn from one discipline and apply it to the other.

That mentality is critical in today’s paid media landscape.

Here’s what I’ve learned about landing pages for both ecommerce and lead gen.

Keep designs responsive across devices

Smartphones accounted for 78% of B2C ecommerce traffic and 66% of orders as of Q4 2023. So before you do anything else with your landing pages, make sure they’re responsive across devices, with particular emphasis on mobile.

• Page elements should load quickly and be in the space you’ve assigned them. The longer a visitor has to wait, the more likely they are to leave.
• Copy, visuals, forms and other elements should render and work as intended. Buttons should be easy to press and spaced enough so that visitors don’t accidentally tap another element.
• Design and layout should look and feel natural to the smartphone form factor. Present all the key and primary information above the fold, including your call to action.
• Keep your navigation simple. A logo going to your website is fine, but no other links. The goal is to reduce clutter. Ask yourself if each element is truly needed.

Some landing page inspiration for your Monday:

– No navigation elements
– All necessary info above the fold
– CLEAR CTAs
– Small timer for urgency

Smooth, simple, and crushing for us

Test this structure with your next LP – there will be a clear winner. pic.twitter.com/KrGW4IHVAR

— Ash (@ashvinmelwani) March 4, 2024

Test and iterate your most impactful elements

There are a handful of elements I like to focus on when building, testing or optimizing our landing pages:

• Headline and copy: Pick clear over clever every day of the week. State in very plain language what you do and for whom and match both your ad and keyword intent.
• Social proof: Display credibility above the fold. Customer reviews, links to review sites and media or industry accreditations build trust with visitors.
• Offer, form and call to action: Make forms prominent, easy to fill and only as many fields as needed. For call conversions, a clear CTA is a must with tracking.

You can (and should) include content below the fold so that as people scroll, they can learn more about the business, what it does, the solution and its benefits. Intersperse that with CTAs between sections.

While you might see incremental gains by testing those elements lower in the page, if your budget is limited or you have other constraints, you might probably achieve more by:

• Highlighting new pain points with your messaging.
• Testing different styles of images or visuals.
• Using clear social proof that calls out value immediately.
• Trying a new offer or positioning the same offer differently.
• Writing calls to action that make readers feel confident.

Nailing your landing page's first fold will make you money at will.

But many haven’t realized its full potential.

Standing out is easy if you understand:

• Visual Narrative
• You-Driven writing
• Cognitive conversion triggers

If I were Coursera, this is how I’d do… pic.twitter.com/PQPpJKZVrp

— Elias Mas | Web Design & CRO (@eliasmas_tw) September 27, 2023

Approach copy and design with the right mindset

When the text and visual elements of your landing page work together harmoniously, this typically reflects in campaign performance.

Clicking on an ad that interests you, being met with a visually exciting page, discovering that the product is what you wanted, reading through an offer that makes you feel understood as a customer – it’s tough to walk away from that if you have a genuine need for what’s being sold.

But if your team has to prioritize one skill over the other, pick copywriting.

Landing pages succeed all the time with simple yet functional design and outstanding messaging, but they rarely perform to satisfaction when they look stunning without much substance in the offer and message.

Just don’t neglect design, especially mobile responsiveness.

Deliver what the ad promised

“What you see is what you get.” This should be your mantra when it comes to landing pages so that what people see in the ad is what they see on the landing page.

If you advertise for pest control but your landing page talks about repairing foundational damage from termites, it won’t convert well. Even though pest control is technically part of your offer, it doesn’t match the reason someone would click on the ad.

This is amplified in paid search, where your ad is shown mostly to people who are actively searching for what you’re selling or for related terms.

And as a customer, few things are as frustrating as clicking on an enticing ad, only to find out that what they wanted:

• Is out of stock.
• Costs more than advertised.
• Isn’t authentic or real.
• Will take too long for fulfillment.
• Doesn’t match what your page is selling.

Bonus Point: Your Landing Page

Did you turn off pop-ups? Does the landing page copy match your ads? What about your emails? Having a consistent tone gets lost by some brands.

This is the beggining, not the end. Let your brand's personality shine.

Don't use FB Lead Gen Ads

— Duane Brown 4x Vax'ed! (@duanebrown) January 14, 2021

Use the first post-conversion moment to set expectations

Once a click moves from your ad to your landing page, the last thing you want is to bombard them with popups and offers that interfere with their experience. It might be a paid funnel, but it should still feel organic.

What happens immediately after your visitor converts – either through a purchase or exchange of information – sets the tone for how they perceive your business. In many cases, it can have a strong correlation with lifetime value.

Many businesses opt for a simple confirmation message or neglect it outright. This is where you can stand out and create a positive experience.

Compare a simple experience:

• Purchase completed.
• Simple popup shows confirming order.
• SMS update when order is shipped.

With something richer and more crafted:

• Purchase completed.
• Redirected to a new page about the brand’s values (e.g., committed to sustainability).
• Email with confirmation, order details and thank you message.
• SMS updates as the order is dispatched, shipped, out for delivery, etc.

This is the best feature of mainstream news sites.

Whenever I'm about to waste my time on some clickbait article, this Jenga stack of pop-ups shows up, and I go away. pic.twitter.com/gJ3giSiVRF

— Daniel Vassallo (@dvassallo) May 1, 2024

Building a better post-conversion experience for lead gen

Lead gen advertisers get the short end of the stick when it comes to paid media because a “conversion” in the ad account still needs to be nurtured and converted by a sales or growth team.

However, this also means more touchpoints and more time to earn their trust and confidence. Here’s my advice for a smooth lead-gen funnel to follow an online conversion.

Make sure sales and marketing are aligned

The handshake between marketing and sales determines how well your prospects feel taken care of and considerably impacts conversion rates. No one wants to have the same conversation with a business repeatedly, even if they speak to several teams or reps.

Some signs that your go-to-market strategy might be fragmented include:

• Marketing using the same messaging with all leads from all campaigns.
• Sales taking days or weeks to follow up with new leads.
• Lack of agreement on how to define marketing-qualified or sales-qualified leads.

I’ve spoken to many business owners whose marketers and sales reps invest large budgets in paid media, call their leads once, don’t get through to anybody and then move on. You’ve got to try harder than that to succeed.

I’m always surprised that they’re happy to pay $150 to get the phone number of someone who wants what they’re offering, but they stop at the first hurdle.

SaaS companies tend to be a bit more savvy about revenue alignment, but the bulk of lead gen advertisers on Google and Meta are service businesses that focus almost exclusively on their area of expertise.

As an agency, it’s a wonderful opportunity to influence that post-conversion process and position yourself as a true growth partner.

B2B marketers must prioritize sales and marketing alignment for successful demand generation in 2023. xiQ's platform can help run demand gen campaigns, nurture leads, and deliver leads to sales.

Book a Demo: https://t.co/AYzfkEnuiK pic.twitter.com/4fyAU6RLIZ

— xiQ Inc. (@xiqinc) May 1, 2023

Address your customers’ objections proactively

Half the battle in lead-gen is knowing what your leads will have a problem with and equipping your sales team to proactively break down those objections. This might look like:

• Landscaping services → effect of chemicals on lawn and soil.
• Enterprise software → data security or onboarding.
• Electricians → availability and experience level.

Advertising can help speed up this process. Overcoming objections is a critical function of any good landing page. It also benefits marketing and sales teams.

By generating a higher proportion of qualified leads who are already aware that you can address their needs and concerns, their work is cut out for them, and they can focus on attaining a higher close rate.

Use marketing automation to improve lead quality

Marketing automation and CRM tools can be game-changers when it comes to lead qualification and engagement.

For many of our clients, we set up the free version of HubSpot so that they can get more value out of the leads we help generate:

• Understand which leads are qualified buyers vs. still exploring.
• Set up automated email sequences to nurture or re-engage leads.
• Send lead value by pipeline stage back to Google Ads to improve quality of future leads.

Up to the point where we start collaborating with them, these businesses source their leads whenever they happen to land in their inbox or their phone rings.

Many of them don’t know that there are levels to the quality of their leads or that they can actively influence that and I believe it’s part of the agency’s role to educate them how.

3⃣ Set up CRM integration

Whatever your conversion type, you want Google to know which leads turn out to be valuable and which don’t. If you do that, it can identify certain audience signals with each category and drive better leads. pic.twitter.com/4LTQKZgbfi

— Menachem Ani (@MenachemAni) February 14, 2023

Respect the sales cycle

Let’s say I decided to buy some audio equipment, but I’m not an expert on this subject.

I click on an exciting ad about custom home theaters and download their guide on how to build my own setup, giving them my name, number and email during the process.

One of three things will typically happen:

• I never hear from that business again.
• I hear from them once, but it’s an aggressive sales push that makes me second-guess my decision.
• I receive a series of thoughtful emails explaining the difference between 5.1 and 7.1 setups, which rig is right for which settings, how to evaluate manufacturers, etc. Each email contains a link to book time with an expert whenever I’m ready. When I speak to the rep, they first ask me where and how I plan to use the setup, not whether I’m ready to place an order.

The first business never had a chance, and the second one made me feel pressured to buy before I was ready, but the third one won my confidence over the course of a few weeks – and eventually, my order.

That’s because lead-gen micro-conversions (like form submissions) are generally equivalent to people asking for help and not always reflect immediate or urgent purchase intent.

If you provide that help and support, people feel reassured and when they’re ready to buy, you’re at the top of their consideration set. And it’s generally when the buyer is ready that a sale happens.

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Building better post-click and post-conversion experiences for ecommerce

The ultimate priorities for ecommerce brands are generating net new revenue and expanding to new audiences and ads are far from the only asset that can influence those figures.

When it comes to post-click experiences for ecommerce, companies like Fermat are at the forefront of what it means to think about the customer’s entire journey.

What happens after they click through, after they make a purchase, how you get them to increase their order size or become repeat customers – it all contributes to the growth and profit of the brand as a whole.

Gamify the shopping experience

Adding a layer of gamification to your ads and landing pages makes the process feel less like a sales pitch (which it always is to some degree) and more like a fun activity. This might manifest in formats such as:

• Create your own box/bundle.
• Interactive engagement drivers.
• Polls, quizzes and games.

Psychologically, the personalization and the time invested in engaging with these types of ads and landing pages can positively impact conversion rates.

If I feel like a product or offer has been custom-made for me, there’s a higher chance I’ll buy it than a more generic offer.

Ok DTC marketers, let's play a game….

Let's see if you can match the spend level to the gamified iteration.

A – $77,859
B – $4,917
C – $960

1. Word jumble
2. Word search
3. Eye spy

So your answer might be "A1 B3 C2", or something like that.

Right answers will win some… pic.twitter.com/tXDIJ9vMDL

— Jess @ FireTeam An agency on fire… (@HireFireTeam) April 22, 2024

Be proactive with no-stock situations

Sometimes, you send a click to a page for a product that’s out of stock – it happens. But it shouldn’t be the norm and it shouldn’t be the end of the story.

Depending on the product’s popularity, the success of the ad creative and the speed with which you expect to restock, you may decide not to pause or otherwise mess with a working setup.

In that scenario, a temporary banner explaining when the product will be back in stock is a proactive measure that makes customers feel like they haven’t been misled.

You can also collect emails or phone numbers to notify them when the product is available again and optionally direct them to explore products other customers also tend to be interested in.

You should consider pausing ads for non-bestseller products or items where you don’t know when you’ll be back in stock.

Use the first order to get feedback

Once the customer receives their first order, it is a great time to get honest feedback (if you want it). NPS and multiple-choice surveys can uncover important information, such as whether:

• Your product lived up to the hype
• Your shipping partner is holding up their end of the deal
• Your packaging needs improvement

By following up and asking for their input to improve your products or experience, you don’t come across as pushing for more of their money before they’ve had a chance to make up their mind.

Throw in a free gift to cement that extra bit of goodwill!

We use QR code stickers on first purchase to offer a free gift and ask them to fill out a short post-purchase survey to claim the gift. We might mix up with box inserts as well since handle most our own fulfillment. Then we segment post purchase communication not only for the…

— Huy Nguyen (We Win) (@nguyeningonline) April 24, 2024

Use email to cement lifetime value

DTC ecommerce loves its email marketing – and with good reason.

The nature of selling physical products with profit margins means that you don’t always recover acquisition costs with the first order. Subsequent sales – often for larger volumes or more expensive products – are where brands generate profit:

• Subscriptions.
• Bundles and packages.
• Gifting and seasonal hampers.

Email is a great way to deliver follow-up offers tailored to an individual’s preferences and buying habits. You can reach dozens, hundreds and even thousands of similar customers while making each feel like the offer was built just for them.

And the more successful those emails are, the more data you accumulate, so the next round of emails can be even more customized.

Get the timing of your offers right

One of the quickest ways ecommerce brands tank lifetime value is by getting greedy.

Offering a discount coupon right after someone places their first order is a classic example of how not to roll out your offers.

Your customers haven’t had a chance to decide whether they’re happy with the first thing they bought from you, so it comes off as presumptive.

Psychologically, it has the added effect of making a customer feel like you held out on them and, therefore, less likely to do business with you again.

Stop sending coupons right after purchase…

Too often I see brands pushing for the 2nd sale before the customer has received their first order.

Just because their first order has shipped, does not mean your customer is ready to buy again…

Even if you send a 10% off discount…

— Jimmy Kim (@yojimmykim) February 24, 2023

The value of investing in the post-click experience

Ad platform automation isn’t going anywhere. Fortunately for advertisers, it’s getting better too.

That also means that every single one of your competitors has access to the same tech stack and strategies as you do when it comes to what happens in the ad account.

So, where do you create differentiation? Outside the account: your landing pages and everything that comes after it. It’s here that you need to invest time, technology and effort so that you can reap benefits such as:

• Improving conversion rate.
• Maximizing customer lifetime value.
• Inspiring confidence in your brand or business among buyers.
• Earning the right to upsell after a positive first experience.

Avoiding this process because it will take an additional budget (or divert it from the ads) ignores the long-term consequences of stagnating.

On the other hand, if simply having a post-click experience can be a differentiator, imagine how strong of a moat an excellent one would be.

Dig deeper: 5 tips for creating a high-converting PPC landing page

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