Use a human touch to gain real credibility

Desmond says: “Don’t forget the human touch, and the importance of real credibility online.”

How do you know when to use the human touch and when to rely on AI and automation?

“A lot of content online is based on AI because you can easily put out a lot of content that way.

You should mostly use AI for ideation, in the pre-creation phase. Then, you want to use those human touches when you are creating the content, to really make it unique.”

Since AI bases its answers on content that already exists, how do you ensure that you are crafting something unique?

“When you start with ideation, you want to think about what has already been written. Then, based on what is already out there, you can have a conversation with your clients and try to get in contact with different target audiences to see what their needs are.

You can have those conversations in person, you can call them, you can send an email, and we have also been using a lot of forums lately. You could use something like Reddit to find information, for example, although it really depends on your target audience.

Your clients and your audience can help layer on top of the ideation that you are doing with AI, so that you can create something more unique.

If you say to a client that you want to be found for a specific topic, you can ask for their insights about it. You can get a lot of very good input, but you can also get input that’s less valuable because they know a lot about their product, but they don’t know where to start.

That’s where you can use AI to help steer them towards the right direction and then, based on that, you can add a client layer and a research layer, and the content will have more added value.”

Should you be meeting with your clients regularly to have these conversations?

“Yes. We sit down to have those conversations once a quarter, but it depends on the type of client. For some clients, like e-commerce where it is more fast-paced, we do it once a month.

In general, though, you can have that meeting once a quarter and look at the coming months. What are the topics that you’re going to write about? Also, for topics that you already have content about, are you seeing changes in the market that you could use to update your content?

For example, for a YMYL client that we have, we asked all of their internal medical specialists to use the questions that we shared with them when they were having consultations with their clients. We asked them to write down what questions those clients had and the issues that they had, so we could use those in our content strategy.”

What’s your preferred AI tool to use for this research process and what kind of prompts do you use?

“My preferred AI tool is ChatGPT, but we also combine it with SurferSEO. A lot of SEO specialists use that, but more to see what type of content is already ranking well. We have created prompts to see, for Topic X, what the most trending questions are and, based on that, we get a specific output.

We have a few prompts that we use internally. It always starts with mapping out the target audience – the customer persona. We do that based on client input, and also our input, then we put it together. From our prompt, you want the AI to describe the type of content that will be relevant for your potential customers during their customer journey. But it’s also important to get in contact with current clients or ex-clients to try to confirm our AI-created output.

What you see is that a customer journey isn’t linear nowadays. We don’t just look into what content is relevant for organic, we also look into the content that will be relevant for advertising, TikTok, YouTube, and also from an official perspective. Then, you get a lot of output, and it’s up to us, as consultants, to decide what content we are going to use.

Our prompts are improving all the time but, for us, what’s most important for answering a user’s question is to get insight into what the customer journey looks like and what type of content is interesting to them. Then, matching that with actual first-party data.

First-party data is so important, especially nowadays, because you can prompt as much as you like but AI won’t give you anything new. We are in a market now where, if you want to be seen, you have to be unique.

You can be found with AI content – we have tested that – but you also have to look into it from a user engagement perspective. What is the user engagement on that content? If you compare AI content to content that has a human touch, the human touch content vastly outperforms the AI content, from a user engagement perspective, based on our own experience.”

When you ask AI for trending questions on a particular topic, where is it getting that information?

“That’s a very good question. To be honest, we don’t know. They have a lot of databases, but I hope that they’re also getting it from different forums and a combination of other sources from across the web.

What’s tricky is that it’s getting that information from existing content, because it can’t come up with new information in the way that we can, from a human perspective.”

Do you use AI in the actual creation of the content?

“We use it for the outlines, and mostly from an efficiency perspective.

There are different tools that you can use to create all of your SEO outlines, and it really helps with ideation, again. Then, based on that, you can use all of your input to sharpen those outlines.

Sometimes, you will send the outline to a client, and it will really follow the structure that they see when they’re having a conversation with their potential clients. However, in some cases, AI-created outlines without any input simply don’t make sense.”

Does incorporating the human touch make a positive difference for Google or is it tricky to measure?

“That’s something that I’m seeing a lot on LinkedIn. In the longer run, I believe it will have a more positive impact with that human touch, but I’m seeing a lot of AI-based content that’s doing well right now.

We don’t have the data for this, but I would say that it’s 50/50, if I have to follow my gut feeling.

It’s more about user experience and the user’s actions when they are on the page itself. You can incorporate some AI content in what you produce, as long as the experience that you deliver is the same or better than your competitors.

What works is when you can get people on your page, and you give them a great experience. AI content isn’t bad if you can prompt it well. As they say: garbage in, garbage out. I really believe in that. In some cases, if you’re very good with it, you can stand out with your content.

However, if you want to really stand out, then you should be using AI in combination with the human touch.”

Why are author pages important for adding that human touch?

“If you have a client in a YMYL business, and you’re writing content about specific medical or financial topics, it’s important to show your authority.

Anybody can buy backlinks, but if you’re writing an article and you’re referring to the writer -the author – you can provide excellent referential citations to something like a well-known magazine or platform within your niche. If that platform is saying, ‘Person X is the best in his niche. Check out his articles.’, that is very unique.

That can be really impactful, instead of only focusing on building authority through your own articles or category pages. It’s important to build credibility on author pages as well.”

How can updating content with author insights enhance the human element?

“That’s something that we’re working on a lot. If you are updating your content with author insights, it makes it more personal.

You can write ‘Desmond has 12 years of experience in SEO’ on an author page, and that’s fine. However, if you’re writing an article about technical SEO, and you include, ‘Desmond has done X, Y, and Z for clients A, B, and C in technical SEO’, then link to more information on a case studies page or an awards page, that’s very powerful.”

How do you showcase your expertise?

“From an author perspective, you can create an author page and showcase the articles that they have written. That’s one step in showing your expertise.

However, you can take that a step further. For me, as a sales specialist, if you go to my author page, you will see some of the case studies that I have worked on. There is a section that shows the articles I have written, but there is also a section that shows the results that I have achieved.

That adds a lot of value.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“When I started in SEO, I was mostly doing a lot of link building. Please stop buying low-quality links.

Low-quality links are the ones that you find on generic directories that don’t get many visitors, but also PBNs. You can tell that it’s a low-quality link when you go to the website and you can see that it’s been created solely for link building – like a blog network.

Also, if you’re buying a link from a website and you’re not getting any traffic, that says enough.”

Desmond Boateng is a founder at DGTLBase, and you can find him over at DGTLbase.com.