If you’ve been following our recent series that discusses AI in digital marketing, you’ll know that we’ve talked about content a lot. We’ve covered it in the context of AI in SEO and AI in digital PR, so we’re back for one last entry that puts AI in content front and centre.
In a sense, you could say that we’ve saved the best until last. After all, everyone knows the famous quote (attributed to Bill Gates) that says “content is king”, and it’s over a year ago that we said that we still agreed with that statement.
But what about now?
With so much AI content flooding the web, can we seriously still say that content is king?
Just like last time, we’re here to tell you that, yes, we think it is! And although we’ve already said a lot on the subject of AI in content, we’ve still got some more tips and advice to give you, so make sure you don’t go anywhere…
TL;DR: Using AI to create large amounts of content that’s of a demonstrably lower quality than your writers would create is highly inadvisable, and is liable to damage your brand and result in you taking repeated hits from Google’s algorithm updates. Instead, you should leverage AI to help you to research content ideas, or review and repurpose content that you’ve already written. AI usage should allow you to create even more valuable content than you already do; it shouldn’t write your content for you!
Is AI-Written Content Bad?
First up, let’s get the obvious question out of the way:
Is AI content a bad thing?
We’ve answered this question before in our previous articles, but to recap we’d like to say once again that, no, it’s not innately bad.
AI content can provide plenty of value in terms of containing useful information, and Google certainly doesn’t say that content should never be written by AI. In fact, AI content snippets are appearing a lot more on search engines, so it would make no sense for Google to devalue its own features!
However, Google does urge that AI authorship should be transparently declared where possible, and it also says that AI content needs to carry value.
Therein lies the key.
Making use of AI content to offer your users more value will not hurt you. Overusing AI to pump out AI content that delivers a sub-par user experience almost certainly will.
If you’ve been reading our other blogs, you’ll know that this is something that we’ve said for a long time, and we’re sticking to it, because the evidence of Google’s March Core Update says the same thing. Google’s updates are concerned with upholding quality and reducing spam. They’re not designed to completely devalue all AI content, and we’ve no reason to believe that future updates will do that either. Google simply wants to protect the integrity of valuable content, because – like everyone has been saying for years – content is king.
How We’re Using AI in Content
So, you want us to put our cards on the table, and tell you how we’re using AI in content?!
We’ll tell you straight up what we haven’t ever done; we’ve never published a purely AI-written piece of content, and nor should you!
The human element is essential within your content. It’s what adds authenticity to your brand and allows you to talk to your customer base as one person to another. But that said, AI still has a vital role to play in efficient content marketing, so here are a couple of our favourite ways to use it.
AI for Content Creation
The article that you’re reading now contains no AI content at all (no, there isn’t a sniff of it, no matter what the various AI checkers out there might say if you run our text through them!). We maintain that full human-written content is a fantastic approach to digital marketing, and we feel that this approach has been thoroughly validated by Google’s March 2024 Core Update. One of our major partners has recently sailed through this huge update with record levels of traffic (over a 72% increase year on year, beating our target by more than 150,000 sessions!), and their growth strategy has been built on meticulously-researched human-written content.
However, you’ll know by now that we’re not going to say that AI has no value at all to bring to content writing. To say that would be narrow winded and just plain wrong. We certainly do sometimes leverage AI to help with the research stages of content, giving us a starting point to work from. It’s a great time saver! For example, to date, we’ve used AI:
- To suggest keywords. Asking generative AI for suitable keywords to target with an upcoming piece of content is a useful additional wrench in your toolbox. Create your prompt, plug the resulting keywords into your favourite keyword research tool to validate them for search volume, and then away you go with your usual process. We were already using multiple tools and approaches for our keyword research, so an AI inclusion simply adds an extra layer of thoroughness that also saves thinking time.
- To help with direction. Sometimes, you have a great idea for an article but don’t quite know how to get started. We’ve all been there, sitting at a keyboard waiting for the words to flow, right?! A few AI prompts can give you a rudimentary skeleton for your content. Of course, you’ll want to rewrite the text completely and fact check any claims that it makes, but it’s a handy tool to battle writer’s block. Because you can feed generative AI with details about the tone you want to take, the people you’re trying to reach, and the purpose you’re trying to serve, you can also get some new ideas on those fronts that can kickstart your creative juices and result in a better article.
Once you’ve actually got some content in front of you, AI can also help with some common tasks that you might refer to as “admin”: essential, yes, but not above some streamlining!
- To help with repurposing. Repurposing content is a great way to get maximum use out of it. For instance, you might write a great article that could be cut down to a short landing page format, chopped into posts for social media, or even subtly reworked to speak in a different tone of voice to reach a different audience. All this can be done manually, but it can be done much quicker with a little AI help. After all, you’ll already have created the content “blueprint” yourself, so the AI merely helps with the admin.
- To help with optimisation. The idea of optimising content covers more than just classic on-page optimisation for keywords. When you’re dedicating yourself to writing an article, then optimisation often flows naturally; you know your focus keyword, so it’ll come up. However, what about when you’re weathering a real content onslaught, like you would be when you’re writing potentially hundreds of social media posts? Your character count to make an impact is so limited, yet making that impact is vital. An AI copilot can not only give your creative impulses some fuel to keep on firing, but also make sure that your specific goals for formatting and engagement are upheld without you needing to consciously think about them countless times in succession.
AI for Content Review
We’d also commend AI to you when it comes to reviewing content. After all, there’s always so much chatter about how well (or sometimes badly!) AI can string words together that it’s easy to overlook what it can do with words that have already been written.
Sometimes, we’ll just utilise AI as a proofreader, and it does that job fairly well. We can ask it to watch out for specific things like readability and structure, and then just let it do its thing. Proofreading takes a deceptive amount of time, so being able to cut that time down is an absolute godsend that ultimately allows our writers to spend even more time writing.
Other times, we’ll rely upon an SEO tool that actually has an in-built AI element, like the SEMRush Writing Assistant. Personally, we don’t go in for full-on AI content writing solutions, as we think that they bring the same problems as pure generative AI content, but we do like Writing Assistant as we can get it to review the content we’ve already written and use AI to:
- Rephrase certain parts that we can’t quite nail down.
- Answer questions that can then be worked into the wider text.
- Check for too many filler words or repeated text.
We think that the “supporting” role of this tool absolutely nails what makes AI great. We’ll still do all of the research concerning keywords and search volumes ourselves, validating them as we always do, and then we’ll write the content ourselves too. Writing Assistant is not doing the job for us! However, it can be tagged in to make a solid piece of content into something that’ll perform even better, and we think that sort of “teammate” is worth keeping around.
AI and Content: the Verdict
When it comes down to it, our advice is to utilise AI to empower you to create more and better content, not to rely on it to create more content for you.
Pure AI generated content is still all too prone to factual inaccuracies and tends to have a homogenous tone and a lack of uniqueness. There’s no personable human flourish. As we’ve seen, Google is also cracking down on spammy AI content, which clearly confirms that you should maintain a strong human element within your words. But as we’ve said before, AI certainly provides invaluable raw material that can be moulded by the creativity of our writers.
If you’re someone who has already been using AI in your content marketing, or has perhaps been using it to directly create your content, then we’d urge you to be cautious. There’s a lot of value to be gained, but also a lot to lose if you expect AI to flat-out do your job for you.
Complementary AI matches well with content, but it doesn’t replace writers.
Adopting a balanced approach is something that we can help you with. AI is simply one tool at our disposal; we have many others, not to mention a wealth of good old fashioned writing experience too. Give us a call if you want to level up your content writing campaigns, and we’ll be happy to help create a strategy that paves the way to your success.
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