Chris Young
Since ChatGPT came around at the end of 2022, the marketing world has been abuzz with speculations of how, if, and when AI will eventually put writers and content writing services out of a job.
One might begin considering different philosophical arguments about why AI will never eliminate the need for bona fide writers. However, within an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) capacity, there are real uses for different artificial intelligence platforms to aid in the process of content creation. Simply put, AI has not done away with content, nor with writers. It has, however, changed the task of the content writer to a certain degree, and raised the bar for those of us who continue to pursue gainful employment with attention-grabbing wordsmithy and grammar.
The first question that any good marketer asked when he or she first used ChatGPT was, “How can I use this?” And what an excellent question it was. If it used to take 8 hours to write a 1500 word article, and I can now produce the same number of words in 90 minutes, why not save the extra 6.5 hours? The main reason this isn’t feasible, at least for excellent content, is the quality that ChatGPT and other AI programs produce.
As the author of this article (an actual human, not AI), the task of wading through ChatGPT’s sundry hyperboles, run-on sentences, exhausting metaphors, and bad information takes longer than just writing an article. As a result, the reason that AI cannot be relied on for the highest quality articles is the standard of quality expected. If the goal is to just get something out there to target a keyword, ChatGPT and other AI programs can get a good SEO about 80% of the way there. However, there’s still a bit of a pareto distribution–that last 20% will take comparatively longer than the 80% that GPT did.
For SEO services, AI can still be used for lower-quality “mass-produced” content in a way that is effective for driving a limited amount of organic traffic. However, once the traffic gets to the website, there must be something of higher quality to keep them there. AI content might be compared to the ámuse bouche; it tastes good and it’s “on the house,” but there better be an entrée in the near future.
To answer the question that is burning in many minds today; no, search engines are not castigating or de-ranking AI-written SEO pieces simply because they’re written by AI. There are some reasons why AI content might not rank as well as human written content, but these are the same reasons that good human written content ranks better than mediocre content. All things being equal, the higher quality the content, the better it will rank. It just so happens that the AI content bell-curve tends towards the mediocre side of the spectrum.
So how does an SEO content writing service fix this? What Google has established in their guidelines are “EEAT” standards–experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness. It’s important to note that for companies who touch YMYL (your money, your life) topics, EEAT becomes even more important. As a result, the likelihood of credentialed human expertise increases dramatically. Many SEO content writing services will find that it is possible to edit an AI-written article for EEAT with the correct knowledge and experience. Adding experience into an AI article may look like including personal anecdotes or a case study that highlights a specific point. Expertise, authority, and trustworthiness rely on a combination of the publishing website’s credentials, the author’s credentials, the amount of 1st and 3rd party data cited in an article, and backlinks. Adding in relevant data will almost necessarily have to be done by a human given AI’s penchant for promoting untrue and outdated information.
Beyond EEAT, AI tends to be hyperbolic and uses language that feels somewhere between wooden and disingenuous. Good writers write the way that they talk, and nobody talks the way that ChatGPT does; not even butlers in 1950’s TV shows. Getting that human “x-factor” into your content is crucial if one of your goals is to produce sharable thought leadership content. This can lie outside of the scope of many SEO articles, but if you’re going to write the article anyway, you may as well make the quality high enough for it to be shareable.
One of the areas where AI absolutely shines for SEO content writing services is in the creation of low-hanging fruit content.
How to get a wine stain out of my shirt
How to grow an avocado tree from a seed
How to house train a dog
Articles like these could very easily be written by an artificial intelligence in a way that wouldn’t feel artificial. However, if you want to write an article about mitigating counterparty financial risk from your local credit union with a high exposure to delinquent commercial real estate loans, you probably want a human CPA or economist writing that. In fact, you may want a few different economists writing that.
That being said, there is a real place for so-called low hanging fruit content within an SEO strategy. It should not be the entirety of the strategy but, for keyword density and keyword presence, these articles can be very useful. However, we still recommend that EEAT edits have a seat at the table so that the article performs as well as possible with the algorithm.
AI makes the marginal cost of an additional article relatively low, especially when those articles are more generic. As a result, people with limited resources can now produce dozens of articles within a short time frame and compete on the same level with companies who had dedicated content marketing teams. This lowering of the barrier to entry is inversely related to the need for real thought leadership articles–the lower the bar gets for AI content, the higher the demand for actual thought leadership. Paradoxically, AI almost has a purifying effect in that it drives out mediocre SEO content writers and actually grows the market for those with a real writing talent. SEO content writing services should therefore focus on emphasizing quality rather than quantity.
One of the areas where AI punches above its weight class is the elimination of writer’s block. Any writer old enough to remember the days of yore before ChatGPT is familiar with the desk dance–hitting the writing-wall, then walking into a different room for a break, and walking back to the computer to stare at the screen. Wash, rinse, and repeat a half dozen times and that’s writer’s block. With AI, when a writer hits a wall, it’s possible to simply copy and paste the current paragraph into ChatGPT and prompt it with, “think of five different ideas for the next sentence or next group of ideas.” And there you have it, no more writers block! There are a number of different prompts that could be used to achieve this; one of the biggest limiting factors is the imagination.
Content briefs used to take anywhere from 45 minutes to 1.5 hours (or more) to create. However, with the use of ChatGPT, comprehensive content briefs can now be created in a matter of 10 - 15 minutes with the right prompts. These content briefs are incredibly high quality and do an excellent job of adding in the different talking points that will result in a good article. The thing to remember here is that keyword research as well as competitor research is still a key part of writing these articles and this cannot be outsourced to ChatGP. These parts still require human attention (Human analysis of SEMrush) in order to create the right SEO orientation.
Finally, when it comes to creating SEO content, AI does create a shortcut for topical research. It’s possible to ask ChatGPT to summarize a competitor’s article. It’s also possible to ask ChatGPT to identify the headers of a given article, key arguments, and identify keyword density. This shortcut for research, especially in summarizing a competitor article or an article that can provide helpful information, can significantly reduce the research phase of content creation.
While AI does have several legitimate use cases, there are a number of shortcomings that prevent it from being the fast-food version of content creation.
One thing that all content writers must be attentive to are the falsities that AI will assert as if it were gospel truth. This shortcoming is primarily due to the AI's reliance on pre-existing data sources, which may contain errors, biases, or outdated information. Where a human might have the ability to be skeptical, AI lacks the ability to understand context or nuances in complex subjects, leading to potential misunderstandings or misinterpretations of facts. Detecting and correcting these errors requires human intervention. This is not complicated and frequently where AI fails, a quick Google search can be sufficient to ascertain what is true, and what is the result of an AI fantasy.
Once you’ve sussed out the inaccuracies that AI produces, the next hurdle is that of the boring and hyperbolic tones that often accompany the bad information. The “spice” that many human authors can add to content–irony, sarcasm, insight, humor, and more–are often entirely absent from AI generated content. While AI can generate content efficiently, it often “tastes” more like a boiled chicken breast rather than, for example, cordon bleu. This deficit stems from AI's inherent limitations in understanding human emotions, cultural nuances, and the subtleties of creative expression. To address this shortcoming, human intervention is necessary to infuse personality, emotion, and creativity into the content. Writers, editors, and creative professionals can enhance AI-generated drafts by adding compelling narratives, emotional depth, and creative flair that resonates with the audience.
This point emerges from the last two points; the amount of time required to parse all of the information and determine whether or not it’s true and then add in sugar, spice, and everything nice is considerable. In fact, depending on how niche the topic and how deficient the original AI generated content is, this could take nearly as much time as it would have to write the article. At this point, the question becomes one of doing a full content “renovation” or just building back from the ground up. When the content is “low-hanging fruit” rather than thought leadership or pillar content, this question becomes less important. There is, however, a direct relationship between the amount of time and quality invested into an article and how well it performs on the SERP.
For SEO Content Writing services, AI falls somewhere between luxury and necessity. The technology itself is insufficient for running a full-bore SEO partnership. However, it can certainly help with lower-quality content and it can save large amounts of time when used correctly for higher quality content as well. One thing that can be said is that every newer generation of ChatGPT seems to be substantially better than the last. There may indeed come a time where SEO content writing services change to reflect different skill sets such as editing and prompt writing rather than article writing. However, for the time being, the human touch still reigns supreme when creating high-quality thought leadership content.
Be More Digital has been on the forefront of marketing advancements and natural language processing AI (like ChatGPT) and can help you understand how to use it to accomplish your marketing goals. Additionally, in a world where generic content is exploding, real content with an engaging voice will become crucial to attracting visitors. Be More Digital can help maximize engaging content and out-compete your competitors by creating SEO-optimized human-written content. For more information, contact us or visit our website for a full list of service offerings.
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