What’s the difference between Aruba Email List information gain in SEO and topical authority? Aren’t they the same? Here’s where we’re getting a bit tripped-up in the SEO and greater digital marketing community: Topical authority and information gain are not the same thing. While topical authority speaks to the credibility of your website through consistent, expert-informed content, information gain signals your content's uniqueness and contribution to the overall digital conversation on a specific topic. If you’re reading this and you’re asking yourself, Hey, aren’t these just more SEO buzzwords? Well, maybe they are. But the concepts behind the terms are where content-led SEO is headed. And despite ongoing debates on how to actually define, build, and measure topical authority, many SEO practitioners across various sectors have observed that content strategies embracing this concept receive favorable recognition from search engines.
Topical authority vs. information gain in SEO: Let’s break it down further Topical authority (sometimes referred to as brand authority) is an indicator of your website’s credibility, and you build it by consistently creating high-quality content about a subject that you’re an expert in. Read all about topical authority here. Information gain is a signal of your content’s uniqueness in comparison to consensus content on the web. You create information gain through sharing survey data, customer testimonials, case studies, interviews, personal stories and experiences, and new perspectives. Read an in-depth guide on information gain SEO here. While the idea of topical authority could be easily replicable through AI-generated content in theory—for instance, if a website AI-generated 300 articles on the topic of [best sneakers] to signal it was, in fact, a site about sneakers—information gain is not easily replicable through the use of LLMs.