Write from real, authentic human experience

Greg says: “Don’t get distracted by all of the AI content on the web.

A lot of people are choosing to use AI to write all of their content, but AI is just predicting words based on the content that is already out there. As more of it floods the web, AI is training itself on AI. It's like copying the same VCR tape over and over again, and the quality continues to get worse.

The way that businesses and marketers need to combat that is with real, authentic human experience. AI systems and models cannot replicate that.

Write your content with humans. Skip the stupid informational stuff. Share authentic experiences and reasons why humans vibe with your company. That's how you're going to win in the future.”

Where does research come into it, before you create your content?

“A lot of people are saying that, with the rise of AI search models, you don't have to do keyword research anymore because every query is different, but people still think about concepts. So, you still have to do keyword research related to the concept to understand how your potential customers are thinking about the problems that they have. That's the key.

People tend to forget that, as marketers, we're here to help our clients, or our own company, solve the problems that customers have. A lot of people have lost track of that and are churning out content for the sake of content, and creating content just for Google or AI.

That's not what the content is for. The content is for the consumer. It's for a person who says, ‘I have this problem, I need a solution,’ and you're trying to let them know that you offer that solution.

You still have to do that keyword research. You have to figure out how people are thinking about their problems. Then you need to write that amazing, authentic content and make sure that your business is unforgettable.”

Will Google recognise original content, and will it predictably rank that over AI-generated content?

“Google's always been clever enough to understand what original content is.

The other day, I was reading about a company that had started churning out boatloads of AI-generated content, and they saw a lift. Then, a few months later, they tanked. They ended up worse than they were before they started churning out programmatic content at scale.

A lot of people out there think that more content means better. They think you’re going to get results faster, or you’re better than your competitors who aren't putting out as much content. However, if there's no strategy behind the content, what's the point? You could add five pages a day to your site. Why? Just because you want more?

Google's never cared about the number of pieces of content on your site; they have always cared about the quality of that content, and that's been true for years. Why would that change now?

People tend to really get distracted by the AI stuff. For some verticals, AI overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT search, and Perplexity will take away some of that search share, but in others, it's not affecting search that much. However, people are still jumping to do all of this content at scale because they think that they don’t have to pay for it, and they can get rid of their team of internal writers.

The problem is that content just doesn't perform as well – which has been proven time and time again. Does that mean that it's never going to get there? No. I'm sure the AI models will continue to get better and, at some point in the future, you'll be able to create content with AI that is just as good as content created by humans. However, it's not there yet.

Part of the problem is that the general public (and even a lot of marketers) think that AI is true artificial intelligence, but we only call it AI because it's easier to say than ‘LLM’. AI is not AI. None of it is intelligent or thinking. It's just word prediction.

When it gets smarter, I'm sure the content will be better. For now, though, it's just not there, and it's not going to help.”

What does the effective use of AI within a content strategy look like?

“A lot of people are using AI backwards, and they're starting out by using AI to write the content. You shouldn't have AI replace the things that you do. You should use it as a tool to make you more efficient at what you do.

That doesn't mean having it do it all for you. Maybe it creates an outline for you, and you pick and choose the bits that make sense and don't. You can use it to proofread and check facts. There's a lot of pattern identification stuff that it excels at. It's just not there for writing content.

If you do a Google search, there are tonnes of offerings for AI humanisation services out there, where they just basically go in and remove em dashes and phrases like ‘delve’ that humans don't really use, and then they call it a day, but the content wasn’t great in the first place.

I would caution everyone to back off a bit and really think about the end user and what we're doing for them with our content. That's the disconnect. A lot of marketers, especially business owners, have migrated their thought processes over the years. Before, it was, ‘What do we do to help our customers? What do we do to stand out for our customers?’ Then it became, ‘Let's do everything for Google. All that matters is Google. If we show up well in Google, our customers will naturally find us.’

The businesses that have excelled through the years are the ones that never forgot that we're not doing this for Google. We're doing this for our customers. That's what's really important.”

Considering the quantity of content online now, how do you position yourself as someone memorable and unforgettable, who’s doing things differently?

“It's about answering the questions that your customers are asking and creating content that offers a solution to the potential problem they might be having.

Something I learned from working with doctors and plastic surgeons is the idea that customers shop by symptom. A plastic surgeon will create content on his website and use medical terms all over the site.

For example, many people might know that a rhinoplasty is a nose job, but you might not know that a blepharoplasty is an eyelid lift. As you age, your eyelids start to droop, and people will tighten that area up with a procedure called a blepharoplasty.

Most plastic surgeons have the term ‘blepharoplasty’ all over the page, but they don't ever say ‘eyelid lift’ or ‘this is for droopy eyelids.’ You have to realise that the general public has no idea what a blepharoplasty is. They're looking for ‘My eyelids are drooping, what can I do?’ or ‘How do I fix my droopy eyelids?’ That should be the way that you're writing your content.

You should be answering those questions about problems that your potential customers or clients are asking, and then offer education, guide them down the path to purchase, and let them know, ‘Here's this problem, here's our solution, and here's why our solution is one that you should seriously consider.’

Then, offer those authentic human experiences. Talk about real-world solutions for real-world problems, and give testimonials from real-world customers, sharing real-world photos and not AI-generated crap.”

Is it better to be everywhere or focus on one or two platforms that are more likely to resonate with your target audience?

“I fall in the middle on that, actually. Instead of being everywhere, you should be where your customers are.

You see this ‘be everywhere’ movement, and that means you have to be on Reddit, LinkedIn, Substack, Discord, Quora, your own site, and social media. However, in your particular vertical, maybe your customers are only looking at Pinterest and Reddit, and that's it. Why would you waste time worrying about Substack, Discord, LinkedIn, and other places where your customers aren't actually looking for solutions?

Part of the research you need to do isn’t just around the concept or the topic, it's around where your customer base is looking for those solutions. Rand Fishkin was really smart in building SparkToro because it's a great tool that helps marketers discover where their audience and customers are.

A lot of people either assume that they only need to put content on their own website or that they need to push their content out everywhere it can possibly be, because the more places that it is, the better. Even if you're doing it with AI, you're still wasting effort when you could just put it in the three or four places where your customers are going to be looking.”

How do you make sure the content you produce is both appropriate for your brand and consistent across different platforms?

“The most important thing is to have some sort of brand guideline document that says, ‘This is what our brand's voice will be, everywhere: in social posts, in ads, in videos and podcasts, on your site, in your content, what is that brand voice? What is that brand personality?

Make sure you do a lot of research and nail down all the particulars. Then, make that document public so that everyone who is creating content can see it. Maybe even train your team on what that brand voice is, so that voice is consistent.

It doesn't have to be that everything is goofy and crazy, because that doesn't fit with some brands. An IT company is going to need something very specific that is different from the bar or restaurant up the street, which will have a much more playful brand.

I have a buddy who works with a company that does data annotation for AI systems. Basically, if you are doing AI, you need data annotation. If you're creating an AI system for a self-driving car, then the cameras will detect things, and those things need to be annotated in the system so that you can train the model correctly and make sure that it's detecting the right things.

This is a pretty common issue and need for AI companies, so their brand voice would need to be extremely technical and very specific about the needs of this really technical niche.

A restaurant, a bar, or a car dealership could be a lot more fun and playful in their brand voice than someone who needs to be very technical. That brand voice document is really going to help guide everyone and keep things consistent so that you don't have Jimmy on the social media team writing goofy posts that don't fit with the brand voice.”

Is there a number one content surfacing opportunity, or does it depend on the type of business you operate in and where your audience is?

“It depends. Everyone is starting to see some referral traffic from ChatGPT, which currently has more adoption than anyone else.

There's still a lot of research showing that, at most, it's 3-5% of the search volume that happens on Google. For years, we’ve said that everybody just pays attention to Google, but there is an audience over on Bing. So, if you're running paid ads, you should put a portion of your budget on Bing because there's less competition and your money goes further. The same is true with ChatGPT.

It's a small audience. It's growing, and it will continue to grow, but it's a small audience right now. You should worry about it. The problem is, nobody really knows how to get into ChatGPT. Sure, a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon and saying, ‘I've got it figured out. You do this, this, and this,’ but nobody really knows.

The models change constantly anyway, so something that works today isn’t guaranteed to work next week. I get really frustrated with all the people on LinkedIn saying, ‘We’ve cracked the code and we can get you into ChatGPT,’ because everyone searches differently. Every query is different. These are incredibly long tail queries.

Google has said for years that 20% of all the queries entered each day have never been entered before. That number has to be exponentially higher for ChatGPT and AI Mode questions, because they are long, very specific, and very detailed.

How are you going to do rank tracking to know that you're showing up in ChatGPT when you're only tracking one specific query? It just doesn't work that way. So, what can you do? Again, it's about creating awesome content: being visible, being unforgettable, and making sure that, if there's a lot of competition, everyone knows about your brand.

Make sure that everyone is talking about your brand. Now, those mentions on other websites are becoming more and more important because that's what the AI models are picking up on, more than just the content on your site and the links pointed to that content. Does that mean that the be-all end-all goal is just getting mentioned on other sites, and you're going to win? Obviously not. It's more complex than that. Right now, though, things are changing so quickly. Let's not put all our eggs in one basket.

There are so many companies making decisions to do things with AI when they don't really understand how AI works. It's not the right decision, and they're making bad decisions for the future. So many companies out there are going all in on AI. Look on LinkedIn. You will see all these SEOs, digital marketers, writers, and editors being laid off because people think they can do it all with ChatGPT. They can't.

Right now, the lion's share of what's coming to you is still coming from Google, especially now that it’s been proven that ChatGPT is looking at Google search results. Is AI important? Sure. Are we losing traffic to it? Sure. However, the number of people who are looking to buy your product or service has not changed. The only thing that's changed is the way that they're finding you.

We've all been trained to look at organic traffic and organic conversions as the top metrics for SEO success. That's no longer the case. We're going to have a lot of zero-click search. We're going to have a lot of people who just show up to buy, and never even saw your website directly, because it was surfaced in some AI interface, or they saw it on some other site and just decided to come buy from you.

That's okay. You're still going to make those sales. You're just not going to be able to track everything from soup to nuts in Google Analytics anymore.”

Greg, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Make sure that you are using human-written, authentic content.

For the foreseeable future, that’s how you're going to continue to win – both in organic search and in AI search.”

Greg Gifford is Chief Operating Officer at Search Lab Digital. Find out more over at SearchLabDigital.com.