How I Use AI To Elevate Content
Have you noticed how ChatGPT and its Generative AI siblings and children will change your life? For good or for bad.
This David Rosam on Digital Marketing is about how I use Generative AI to help with long-form content—the material that’s such a challenge to produce and get right but still gives you the best opportunity to rank on the search engines.
But, before I tell you more…
Have you seen this rubbish?
I tested the output for a proposed blog post for my site using a paid-for AI tool:
Shall we start with the repetitive structures?’ X, also known as Y’ at the start of each section. And there’s the clumsy keyword stuffing—how often do we have ‘on-page SEO’ in one short paragraph? Then there’s the boring, plodding style that doesn’t engage with the reader. And this is from a tool that pitches itself for writing optimised copy!
That kind of output is not going anywhere near my site or my clients’. The time required to edit and rewrite into something competitive will be comparable to writing it from scratch.
So why not write it from scratch? In full-fat, creative human. Your unique perspective and creativity are invaluable in the content creation process.
The Organic SEO Environment in 2024
Succeeding at Organic SEO can be very tough—unless you’re lucky enough to be in a low-competition niche (I’ve researched two of them recently, so they still exist). And Organic SEO is getting more challenging as Google’s demands for quality content get more stringent and its tools to understand it get more advanced.
At the same time, website owners are using AI to generate millions of pages of regurgitated content. Google must analyse those millions upon millions of pages of middling copy while missing the good stuff amongst the noise. I believe Google will need to triage content (maybe it already is) as it spiders the web, effectively ignoring pages, sections or even sites that it thinks are not adding anything original to the web’s knowledge.
If I’m right, you must make your content appear unequivocally human-written so that Google ingests it correctly; if it doesn’t, you may be saying goodbye to your ranking ambitions. You still need to ensure it’s better quality than the competing content, of course, as Google applies a battery of quality tests to your content.
Make the changes, and don’t be mistaken for software
I’ve added an extra step to my content-writing workflow—checking if what I’ve written could be misunderstood as AI-generated. Why should I do that if I’ve written all of the content? I don’t fully trust AI content detection tools to classify my content as human-written, so I try using at least three such tools to test each piece I’m involved in. So far, only two pieces have needed a little tweaking.
Why AI is broken for SEO content
With all the data that Generative AI companies have hoovered up into their systems, AI applications regurgitate it on demand. And, you know how much utter rubbish is on the internet… I know I’m being over-simplistic, but it illustrates my point. The output is garbage because the input is garbage—as old-style computer scientists would rightly have it: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
And, with more and more AI content for AI to feed off of, some argue that internet content quality is in a death spiral. If they’re right, it sounds like an opportunity to me!
Moreover, AI is happy to chat and answer straightforward questions—eg, when did Queen Elizabeth II die?—but if you’re expecting helpful nuance and analysis, you will be out of luck, no matter how much effort you put into your AI prompting expertise.
As we all know, AI gets things wrong, so you have to check all its ‘facts’. It doesn’t know how to fact-check or even feel something’s amiss. It’s all just data. Moreover, it can’t conduct research, understand the words it’s spewing out so quickly, or offer an opinion.
How AI Fails Your Organisation
The biggest killer is that the information you want to publish resides inside your organisation. Even if you run AI locally (‘at the edge’ as some term it) and it happily smushes together all your confidential information, it still won’t understand your business, products, or customers.
I’m not saying Generative AI will never be much use, as some commentators have. Ultimately, I haven’t dived into its theory deeply enough to make such a conclusion. However, I believe that for AI to be truly beneficial to us as communicators and marketers, it will have to evolve. It will need to be a lot less Artificial and a lot more Intelligent, capable of understanding context, generating original insights, and believably adapting to different writing styles.
After that detailed preamble, it’s now simple to understand how and why I use AI to elevate content.
How to use AI to write great SEO content
I use ChatGPT and other AI tools to help me in the early stages of writing content or a brief. It’s where its strengths lie, and where it will not harm the quality of the finished product.
I use an AI to run off two or three outlines (more if the outlines are very different) quickly
I then edit the AI output into a single outline, adding any missing elements. There’s always something missing!
I look at the proposed structure. A human will better understand if the structure is telling the story well. I always end up editing the structure when evolving it into a formal Copy Plan or part of a brief for a writer
Finally, when writing, we all suffer writer’s block from time to time. That’s when a piece of AI-generated content may be able to unblock you. Even a bit of rubbish copy can give you the spark you need.
In short, use AI at the start of your content creation process and gradually dial it out as you develop the copy. By the time you have started your first draft, you should not be using AI, so that you will be producing 100% human-written content with all its benefits and peculiarities.
I'm always on the lookout for new AI tools to enhance my content creation process. You may have come across a tool that writes decent content. I’d be really interested to hear about it and your experiences with it.
Please let me know at david@davidrosam.com if you need help harnessing AI for your content creation. I can also write full-fat human content or make your AI content human.
Get in touch, and let’s talk about your content challenges.
Until next time, from my 100% human-written newsletter, thanks for reading.
Best
David