You’ve probably noticed. The world is in the midst of an Artificial Intelligence boom, with no signs of it slowing down.
Access to the likes of ChatGPT has accelerated the rise, paving the way for anyone and everyone to churn out content at an alarming rate, seemingly without the need for copywriters and marketing experts who’ve spent years honing their craft.
But is all as it seems?
Our experts are here to give you the rundown on the benefits of using AI as part of your SEO content strategy, and the pitfalls you need to avoid to retain brand credibility … and those all-important search engine rankings.
The advantages of using AI for content
If used in moderation and in the right places, AI can positively impact your SEO content strategy. Here are just a few of the advantages of using AI for content generation:
Boost productivity
AI can be used to produce content at a scale and speed that would be impossible for a human team to match.
Even using AI for idea generation, content briefs, proofing and topic inspiration can save time and resources to speed up the actual creative writing process.
Create a consistent tone of voice
While AI content typically lacks creativity, individuality and insight, it can be very useful for creating a consistent tone of voice to ensure a uniform tone and style across content. Likewise, using AI to proof content for typos, grammatical errors and as a synonym finder to improve on content can be beneficial for drafting emails, service pages and more.
SEO optimisation
There are lots of tips and tricks for using AI to boost your efficiency when it comes to optimising your content for SEO.
It can be used for ideas on where to incorporate relevant keywords, provide inspiration for optimising meta descriptions and giving you tips on how to structure your content for SEO best practices. If you’re writing on a topic with many different components, it can break these down for you and find sub-topics related to your main topic to help you organise large amounts of research.
The disadvantages of using AI for content
If you’re using AI as a complete replacement for authentic content without due diligence, it can be detrimental to both your SEO rankings and your brand, with the potential to negatively impact your previous SEO efforts, break consumer trust and really devalue your products or services.
Lack of depth and insight
Useful content will engage your reader and typically includes insight and originality.
A quick way to spot AI content is to look for the opposite; lack of depth, insight and context are a huge giveaway that content was written with AI.
Poor-quality content is less likely to engage the reader, and as a result lead to higher bounce rates, which Google uses as a ranking factor.
Undermine consumer trust
If your content reads like ChatGPT and doesn’t add value or lacks relevance, users are less likely to trust you, and your content.
Google’s E-E-A-T principle is a set of guidelines used to evaluate content based on its experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness. AI content needs to be carefully fact-checked and crafted alongside thorough research to inspire trust in its readers, and search engines.
Risk of duplicate content
Valuable and original content offers new ideas or research. However AI models learn from and produce content from existing material. This means that using content created from generic prompts not only risks a lack of originality, but opens your site up to potential plagiarism and duplicate content. If the content closely resembles content already on-site, Google is likely to penalise it and lower rankings as a result.
Our top tips for using AI in your content strategy
AI isn’t going anywhere, so it’s important that SEO pros like us keep up with the latest updates, test ideas and determine how to incorporate AI into their strategies.
Using the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini, Google’s latest AI offering, has the potential to boost productivity, save valuable time and provide inspiration on top-level topics and themes.
Here are out top factors to consider if you’re integrating AI into your content strategy:
Hone your prompts
The better your prompt, the better quality content AI will produce. Taking the time to create prompts that give clear instructions on what to include (and what to omit) regarding tone of voice, style, syntax and content topics will help to give your content purpose and a consistent tone that suits who you are writing for. It takes a good writer to use AI effectively and turn it into something of value.
Once you’ve determined the search intent of the query and have a clear idea of your audience and what they’re looking for, you can begin to craft content with intention and create a prompt that reduces the generic content production that basic prompts tend to produce.
Use this opportunity to ask AI to remove some of the common giveaways of AI generated content, such as overly-enthusiastic language and repetitive syntax.
Creating a good prompt can take time, and is often a case of trial and error, especially as AI continues to develop, with many platforms still in their testing stage.
Even with a quality prompt, nothing will replace human editing to ensure clarity and relevance and reduce repetitive outputs.
Focus on value
Good-quality content answers searcher’s queries. As AI content tends to give a superficial overview of a topic, it’s unlikely that the content generated can give the expertise and insight required for many searches.
When generating large amounts of content, it is easy to lose its purpose, relevance and clarity; focus on each sentence and subtopic to determine whether it really adds value to your searchers.
While editing your AI content, always ensure that the content aligns with your brand voice to engage your audience, and that it is peer-reviewed by industry experts if you’re creating content with a specific niche.
Take inspiration
While businesses and marketers alike should embrace the benefits of AI to stay abreast of industry trends and latest technology, AI should be used to enhance content strategies, not replace human writers.
AI is great for tasks such as idea generation, outlining, drafting, and finding patterns and topics in large amounts of information.
But any content produced by AI always requires manual proofing and editing to engage readers and remain relevant to the businesses goals.
How does Google plan to tackle low-quality AI content?
Google wants to ensure that the search results it delivers are relevant and high quality, and answer search queries quickly and accurately.
The Google algorithm already has hundreds (if not thousands) of measures in place to detect low-quality content and penalise any website that doesn’t meet its quality standards.
In a bid to fight poor-quality and duplicate AI content from saturating search results, it is continuously updating its algorithm.
In 2022 Google rolled out its Helpful Content Update to score content on its originality, and recently emphasised the importance of quality content by ingraining the Helpful Content System deeper into its March core update in 2024 to reward people-first content.
Google’s search update blog stated: ‘you’ll now see 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results versus the 40% improvement we expected across this work.’
Google takes a clear stance that content that is engaging, well-written and helpful will be rewarded in ranking results.
So, will using AI content kill your search engine positions?
Whether you write from scratch, use AI for inspiration or carefully curate a prompt to generate your content, the principles of quality content that ranks high remain the same.
While AI comes with a host of benefits for content writers, boosting productivity and scaling your content efforts, there is currently no replacement for human editing, creativity and insight.
AI can be a powerful aid in content creation when used with care, but it is essential that content remains engaging and relevant to retain the authenticity that forges a connection between users and brands.
Google’s fight against generic, low-quality content comes as a clear reminder that it has, and will continue to penalise content that does not serve the user.
Need a hand with your SEO strategy? Our experts would love to hear from you.