By SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), has been the centre of attention for bloggers, digital marketers, and almost every single business that operates on the internet, and for all the right reasons. With the right SEO techniques, businesses can boost their visibility and recognition towards the sky, and a bad use of it can bury a business into the ground, indefinitely.
Speaking about SEO, there’s been chaos among digital marketers on the internet ever since the advent of AI-generated content, and many are wondering whether using AI-generated content is good for SEO or not.
This guide aims to explain just that, and fill in the gaps between your understanding of SEO and AI, how the two are linked, and what Google says about all of this.
If you’re a digital marketing professional, make sure to read this article till the end, and get a boatload of SEO insights that will help you take your business to the next level!
AI-Generated Content – What Is It?
AI-generated content refers to pieces of writing, audio or video that were created by artificial intelligence. Essentially, it’s content that’s created without a human’s direct input. Using algorithms and machine learning, AI can analyse data and produce content that mimics human writing or speech.
AI and machine learning applications are currently dominating every single field out there, whether it’s generating spot-on content for your blog post, or generating a realistic voiceover that your audience won’t be able to differentiate from the real thing.
While there are some concerns about the implications of AI on the human workforce, it’s undeniable that AI technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated and prevalent in our daily lives, especially when it comes to its usage in Google ranking, and SEO as a whole.
What Does Google Have To Say About This?
Google’s opinion on AI-generated content has been ever-changing throughout the years, where they’ve terrified AI users at one point while giving them ease at one. However, the main gist of it is that as long as you’re keeping a check on the content yourself, and making sure it’s giving value to your audience and is made with the audience’s needs in mind, it’ll rank.
Let us break that down for you.
Back in 2022, when ChatGPT users were going ham with AI-generated content in an attempt to rank better on Google, John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate, threw them all into a pit of chaos, letting them know that all AI-generated content was considered spam by Google, with the websites being at risk of being deindexed.
While this was a terrifying experience for the AI warriors out there, Google revisited its stance on AI-generated content in 2023.
Experts at Google explained that only the websites that were solely relying on AI-generated content for ranking purposes were at the risk of being thrown out, and people who were just leveraging AI to boost their workflow, but still using people’s first approach didn’t need to worry about using AI-generated content.
This means that you can use AI-generated content to help you create helpful, good content on the internet, and Google won’t have any issues with you, and you’ll still be able to rank your content on search engines.
The Do’s and Don’ts Of AI Generated Content
Now that we’ve explained what AI-generated content is, and what Google’s opinion and stance on this whole thing is, it’s time to explain what works for you, in your journey to rank better on Google, when it comes to using AI-generated content.
Do’s
What we recommend when using AI-generated content is to not completely rely on it to create your content, but use it to get the menial tasks out of the way. For example, AI content generators, for which ChatGPT is the biggest example, are great at fishing out relevant keywords and making content guidelines according to them.
If you’re a business owner or the handler of operations at a business that focuses on written content, you can use AI platforms like Jasper or ChatGPT to create helpful and meaningful outlines for your content and hand them over to your writers.
Google rewards websites that are consistent with their content, and with AI, you can boost your content production and increase your visibility, as long as you’re not substituting quality for speed, and aiming to create helpful, people-first content.
Don’ts
Not focusing on the quality of your content will have you getting de-ranked on search engines, and eventually losing your optimised position on engines like Google.
This is because AI platforms and artificial intelligence, in general, are still in their infancy, and can occasionally generate nonfactual content, or funny-sounding content, and if Google catches on to these mistakes a little too often, you’ll find yourself in a puddle, unsure of what to do next.
Essential Guidelines for Using AI-Generated Content
Whether you’re opting to use AI-generated content is your own choice, and it’s entirely up to you how you want to use it.
However, to give you an overview of the best practices, consider the following recommendations:
- Use AI to create content, but don’t completely rely on it. Instead, use it to fish out important keywords in your industry, and create content that revolves around these keywords.
- Instead of creating top-to-bottom content with AI, use it to create compelling outlines. After that, create a strategy for content that fits into these outlines, and use a people-first approach to get ranked better.
- Editing and proofreading are very important and are often overlooked. This is especially true in terms of AI-generated content, as it can often spew out content that is nonfactual and non-sensical.
Summarising It All
The race to page 1 is filled with participants that will use any tactics necessary to get to the finish line, but we recommend that you be careful, and ensure the quality of your content if you’re using AI-generated content to speed up your ranking process.
Remember, AI content or not, Google will always reward content that genuinely helps the audience, so make sure you’re always catering to the needs of your readers and buyers when you’re writing content!
