Leveraging ChatGPT or other AI-Generated Website Content for SEO
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have rapidly emerged as valuable resources in the digital marketing toolbox. At Invite Them Home, many clients come to us with AI-generated articles, beaming with pride at their accomplishments, like a kindergartener bringing home prised artwork. While we appreciate the effort, the vast majority of the time, these articles will need work to make them a valuable asset for a website or social media post.
While using AI to write content may initially appear tempting, it is essential to remember that AI is not here to replace but rather to augment your current content creation SEO strategy. In this post, we discuss some major issues with using ChatGPT or other AI products to generate articles and blog posts and give some advice on using them responsibly.
Table of Contents
The AI SEO Conundrum
Google’s Reaction to AI: An Overview
In the quest for higher visibility on Google Search, businesses and content creators may wonder how Google perceives AI-generated content. However, Google’s policy on this is quite clear: it doesn’t oppose AI content but opposes spammy, manipulative uses. This article aims to shed light on this policy, its implications for search engine optimization (SEO), and how to harness AI responsibly for content creation.
Is Google Flagging AI Content?
Google’s ranking systems prioritize original, high-quality content, demonstrating what they call E-E-A-T: expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and experience. Emphasizing quality over the mode of production has been a guiding principle for Google and is now applicable to AI-produced content.
Historically, using automation, including AI, to generate content primarily for manipulating search rankings violates Google’s policies. However, Google’s policies also acknowledge that not all automation or AI generation practices produce poor-quality content. Automation has long been used to generate helpful content like sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts. AI can also power new levels of creativity, serving as a crucial tool for creating quality web content.
What sets spam apart from quality content is the purpose behind its creation. If the essence of AI or automation use is manipulative, aiming primarily to influence search rankings, it goes against Google’s guidelines.
The Impact of AI Content on SEO Ranking
Recent studies suggest that Google’s algorithms favor human-generated content. There is even evidence to suggest that these algorithms can detect AI-generated content produced by large language models (LLMs) like GhatGPT. Instances of mass deindexation of websites using low-quality AI content have been reported following spam updates.
However, despite these cautious measures, Google does not ban AI content altogether. Companies and creators using AI as an essential tool to produce helpful, original, high-quality content can still succeed in Google Search.
Keeping It Real: When AI Content Misses the Mark
Lack of Originality:
Thankfully, we haven’t yet reached the scary point in the future where artificial intelligence can generate novel ideas. AI tools use existing data for content, which means they cannot generate fresh thoughts and insight. Relying on AI content will make it difficult for you to create new content covering the latest trending ideas and topics and remain competitive in your market.
A case in point is some content we evaluated for one of our agency clients. I took a quick peek at the content, which had all the earmarks of pure ChatGPT content. Within a couple of minutes, we could guess the query that generated the document, which produced an almost identical version of the submitted content. If we could do this, their competitors and others would do the same. The lack of originality and authenticity means that, in effect, this content would have been competing against itself on other platforms, which is not a key to SEO success!
Inferior Expertise:
Good news: you’re still the go-to expert about your business and its products and services. While the internet is a bottomless pit of information, when it comes to knowing your organization, you will always reign supreme. AI uses a lot of words to say very little. It speaks in generalities and lacks the specific solutions and problem-solving your products or services offer. ChatGPT will also never be able to include case studies and testimonials from your satisfied customers. Personal reviews make a huge difference for potential clients, so without these, your website will suffer.
Even more dangerous is the potential for AI content to include inaccurate or false information. Thus, relying solely on AI content increases the risk of disinformation, possibly leading to significant consequences, including legal trouble.
Quality concerns and possible plagiarism
Speaking of legal trouble, AI content risks encroaching into plagiarism territory. The ethics surrounding AI content and plagiarism are a contentious issue – is it ethical to present AI-generated concepts or text as one’s own?
It’s important to remember that AI relies on existing web and other published content to generate new content, potentially leading to duplicate or unoriginal content. Unoriginal content could hamper your brand’s unique voice and potentially lead to SEO issues. Your content may get flagged if it is similar to articles that came from the same sources. If this content isn’t reworded properly, it will go against Google’s “stitching and combining content” guidelines.
Firstly, let’s go over what exactly plagiarism is. Plagiarism involves replicating another person’s ideas, words, or work and falsely claiming them as your own. Though an AI software isn’t technically “another person”, utilizing its content and presenting it as your own closely mirrors the actions of plagiarism.
If the AI content is marked clearly and the audience is informed of its origin, ethical boundaries are respected. But, using an AI writing tool and passing it off as your own creation is deemed unethical by most. Labeling it as AI content can help avoid this manipulation. Thus, appropriate citation is paramount when using articles, whether citing or paraphrasing, to avoid plagiarized content.
Besides plagiarism, AI content comes with its own set of ethical issues. AI tools rely on large datasets for information, and these datasets can be biased, leading to skewed content. Additionally, AI content can falsely frame news stories based on selected data to support specific arguments, creating misleading narratives.
Algorithms Devalue content
Google released its helpful content update in August 2022, and continues to focus on this goal, highlighting “helpful content written by people, for people.” The goal of the updates are to look for content as part of an extensive effort to guarantee that the search results people see are brimming with original, accurate, high-quality content.
The primary objective of the helpful content update is to reward content that provides visitors with a satisfying experience. Conversely, content that fails to meet a visitor’s expectations is predicted to not fare as well following this update.
So, how does one create content that will continue to thrive under this new update? Google advises that you should follow their established guidelines to create content for people, not for search engines. They call this a people-first approach.
Google provides questions for content creators to consider as a checkpoint to ensure they adopt this approach. These questions range from whether their content is useful for their audience to whether their site has a primary purpose or focus.
Google highlights the importance of avoiding a search engine-first approach. While SEO best practices still have a role to play, creating content principally for search engine traffic risks producing content that searchers find unsatisfying. Google’s system will automatically identify and devalue content that has little value or is otherwise not very helpful to users. If a site removes unhelpful content, its other content could see improved rankings.
Google will also continue refining the process of detecting unhelpful content and launching further initiatives to better reward people-first content. The update punishes content created to rank higher in search engine results.
Lack of creativity and personalization
Creative content makes articles more engaging. People share articles more often if they make an emotional connection to them, but AI does not have the emotional intelligence to create this type of connection. Its focus is generally directed toward adding facts to an outline. Unlike humans, AI struggles to incorporate emotion or creative nuances into content. This lack of human touch can lead to less engaging content and reduced dwell times on your website.
In addition, AI relies on existing web content and data to develop wording. AI does not understand user intent for queries and still lacks the common sense of human behavior. Artificial intelligence will never understand your customer’s pain points the way you do, and your audience will gravitate towards content that “gets them” rather than offering straight data.
AI Needs Human Supervision
While it’s tempting to copy and paste AI content into your blog post and call it a day, you’d be shocked at how many subtle but significant errors you’ll find if you take the time to read it over. AI tools combine information from several websites into one piece. This means there might be some mix-ups to fix, such as product descriptions with textures and colors. This is generally because AI tools do not understand the deeper context and culture.
The primary goal of any of your web content, whether AI-generated or human-written, should be to serve your audience’s needs and not just manipulate search rankings. Regardless of the source of your content, Google and other search engines will easily recognize if your content is written solely for the purpose of SEO (take a look at the famous “Thai Food Near Me” example). AI SEO tools will primarily aim to optimize content, so you might end up with some comically nonsensical content if you leave AI to its own devices.
Choose The Right AI SEO Software:
Chat GPT
Pioneering the list is ChatGPT, a free or low-cost AI tool, depending on your subscription, known for its exceptional ability to generate readable, in-depth, and informative content quickly and at a lower cost than manual efforts. With Chat-GPT, businesses can maintain their competitive edge by producing high-quality content with consistent turnaround times. However, its performance can be amplified when provided with precise editorial guidelines and examples, helping the tool better understand what the content needs to achieve.
At Invite Them Home, we pay for ChatGPT Plus, which is an incredibly improved counterpart to the free version of ChatGPT. This version does a much better job sounding natural and authentic as well as minimizing biases and factual errors. That being said, we would never post the content directly to your website or social media accounts. While ChatGPT can help you get started, and overcome writers block, it should be used as a tool to get your content started, and then edit it for accuracy, clarity, and focus.
Surfer SEO
For those focusing on generating fully optimized articles quickly, we highly recommend Surfer SEO. Ideal for the bottom 80% of content, such as basic informative articles, Surfer SEO capitalizes on the power of AI to generate content that aligns with SEO best practices but doesn’t require an extensive human touch.
Semrush
Semrush, a leading SEO platform, is also noteworthy, specifically for its powerful AI tools designed for content creation. One such tool is ContentShake. As an AI-powered writing assistant, ContentShake streamlines the process of content creation, making it easier for businesses to consistently churn out SEO-friendly content.
However, this like other generative AI writers does not add anything new to the online data pool. Its suggestions and illustrations will be very general in nature. They will not be focused on your organizations strengths or the needs of your clients and prospects. Again, if you choose to use this tool vs ChatGPT, you will be faced with the same issues. You will need to extensively edit the content for it to be of genuine value to you and your target audience.
Frase
Frase is another AI content writing tool worthy of mention. Known for its efficiency, Frase helps create high-quality content that resonates with their target audience while aligning with SEO best practices. But, its key to helping you create high-quality content is not in its AI writing tool. As in the examples above, you will get very generic content. One reviewer we saw here gives an example of its output and it is not good. Frase is good however at helping you make sure content you write answers the questions, and discusses the points needed for your content to rank well in search results. With search engines becoming “Answer Engines” this is quite helpful.
Jasper AI
Lastly, Jasper AI makes a name for itself by generating original, high-quality content tailored to a brand’s voice and talking points. Offering valuable features like writing with a brand’s voice, creating effective product descriptions, and generating various marketing copy, Jasper AI is a versatile tool for personalized and consistent branding.
It is great at tasks like writing listicles, summarizing content, etc. It has an extensive suite of helpful tools that can save time and make your content pop a bit more. Its best use is again, helping you improve text you have written, or perhaps polishing AI written articles.
