I love AI. I know there has been much skeptical (and fear-mongering) information about it. Many people are fearful that AI content could make their content writing jobs redundant or threaten the future of their marketing careers. There are many jobs that AI could threaten (I spoke to a concerned stockbroker this week), but B2B and DTC marketing aren’t on the chopping block for the foreseeable future.
As a nerd and technophile, I played with open-source AI software for years before its “explosion” into mainstream business apps. I am an early adopter and am excited about how artificial intelligence optimizes marketing ops and improves results.
How To Stay Ahead Of The Curve With AI Marketing Software
If you work in digital marketing or are a business owner actively involved in growth marketing, I highly recommend using AppSumo. As a full-stack digital marketing professional since 2009, I know how important it is to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to new martech software solutions.
Every month, I get notifications from AppSumo regarding new marketing software for all business functions, including email marketing, UX/UI journey mapping, content marketing tools, SEO, competitive research (I love those insights!), and more.
Test Driving Emerging AI Tools Affordably
AppSumo regularly offers special promotions, during which you can try out the software for a week (sometimes up to a month) for free or a small fee. Is it worth $5 to get behind the wheel of emerging AI software that can give you a competitive edge? You bet! I highly recommend the method for digital marketers to leverage AppSumo for lifetime membership licenses. It is much more cost-effective.
Perhaps because I have been test-driving martech AI for years, I am not intimidated by it but eagerly embrace it. Artificial intelligence and marketing are successful long-term partnerships that improve results and efficiency.
I’m getting recertified in Google Ads and madly in love with the new AI optimization software my favorite search engine has launched.
Pro-Tip: Use software like Similar Web to gain insights into your competitor’s ad strategies (and targeted search terms). If you outsource your Google Ads to an agency, it can be a helpful quality assurance check. It has built-in alerts that let you know when your paid search terms are being bid on (targeted) by your top competitors. That beats scratching your head, wondering why your CPC is outrageous and your ads are not performing.
Human Writing Versus AI Content: Can You Spot The Difference?
I have been working with a healthcare company this week, and we briefly discussed artificial intelligence and content writing. Their SEO provider had told them that a content writer was no longer necessary; artificial intelligence could do it faster and better. Naturally, the SEO agency could now handle that workflow for them.
Anything to inflate a service invoice. The bad agencies do that constantly—caveat emptor. When choosing a new SEO provider, I suggest working on a monthly retainer. As my new client expressed frustration, annual retainers guarantee inconsistent focus, attention, and results.
Some of my biggest clients have been global SEO companies—the outstanding ones that walk the talk and get results for businesses. I frequently refer new and past clients to trusted providers—agencies I respect and have personally worked with. I care about and enjoy helping companies to spot shoddy service providers to avoid problems.
Detecting Low-Quality AI Content
This morning, I read some content that, if I am being honest, screamed AI + no human copywriting. It was short (which is fine) but full of fluff, which provided no value or insights. It was words for the sake of adding words to a blog, but topics and information that had no relevance or utility to the target audience.
So much for E-E-A-T… I’m sure the piece will be a giant traffic magnet clicked on when shared via email or social media. [Blank Stare] This happens when people with no skill at content marketing produce content.
My head hurt after I read it because it was poorly crafted, AI-generated garbage. Out of curiosity, I ran it through a scanner to determine how much of the copy AI had created and how much had been written by a human being.
The AI content score was 58%. Yikes.
It took me three minutes to assess. Google and other search engines take far less time to determine that. However, many business owners question whether AI-generated content is equal to human-written content in terms of SEO. So, let’s talk about that.
Marketing and AI Merge For Better Efficiency and Results (But There Are Still Quality Issues and Technical Limitations)
As marketing adopts AI, you hear plenty of messages about artificial intelligence copywriting skills. While I am between full-time corporate opportunities, two companies have approached me to work on AI content modeling. I had to learn more!
I attended one information session/interview with the prospective client. They are working on humanizing AI content writing. Some in-depth conversations with them expanded my understanding of the finite differences and problematic limitations between human-written and AI-produced content.
The two companies combined are hiring over twenty content experts to teach AI how to write in a more “human” way for the next year. That is a big investment from an AI SAS provider, right?
Would they do that if AI copywriting was good enough to get favorable SEO results?
Nope.
Are those “humanizing content” tools provided in the most popular AI copywriting solutions working? I’ve tried a few of them, tested the results, and was not shocked to learn they still did not perform to the quality level of human writers.
A 58% AI-written score for a content piece was a problem. But that doesn’t mean that some SEO agencies will not pass it off as acceptable to companies who trust them and do not know better. It’s shady, but it happens all the time. I learned about the recommended maximum percentage (even though it is hotly debated) that will guide the content my team produces for our clients.
No NLQs and NLP? Search Engines Can Tell The Difference
Let’s say you decide that your content team is expendable or that you can reduce your marketing administrative costs by outsourcing your content writing. You can have software like ChatGPT 4.0, Jasper, or HubSpot with the proper prompts. Many other types of software assist with generating copywriting.
But it is not fully optimized content. It does not sound or read like human writing, which may not be a huge problem (yet) in terms of SEO, but many marketers expect a core update that will change that shortly. Then, all that exclusively AI-written content will become a liability instead of an asset.
Then there are tools like SURFER SEO (something valuable I was introduced to in 2022), which provide a content quality scoring system. These software tools scan the web for the top-performing (traffic-magnet) articles in your subject matter and provide a list of keywords you can integrate into the copy. The keywords are semantically related to topic clusters: search engine rocket fuel.
Natural Language Queries and Human Search Optimization
One important thing that basic content optimization does not provide is Natural Language Queries (NLQs). Suppose you have an agency-level software subscription ($$$). In that case, SURFER SEO offers NLP (natural language processing) that transforms statements, questions, and keywords into snippets that reflect user intent and natural language patterns.
This is particularly important for optimizing landing page content on a website or funnel for voice search. You can leverage AI more heavily for other types of content, such as email marketing, social media posts, or downloadable collateral, such as ebooks.
SURFER SEO and similar software is a game-changer compared to free human copy with no SEO assistance. But if the bulk of that content is still written in AI, that is problematic. Opinions vary about what quantity of content (% AI written) is passable to get good indexing and ranking results. One standard metric suggested by many experts is that the article must be less than 20% AI to be effective.
How Can You Effectively Use AI To Generate Valuable Content?
Artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools optimize production time. They can help by providing research; however, a content writer must still fact-check information provided by AI. The ChatGPT disclaimer states that AI cannot be 100% trusted on statistics, facts, or details. I often catch inaccurate responses and information. Remember, AI is NOT infallible.
With solid queries, AI can help expedite content production by:
- Assisting with heading (H2/H3) research ideas.
- Providing links to similar competitive articles that reduces investigation time. Some AI tools also offer a content score for the top-ranking articles, which gives you a competitive target to meet or exceed in your content.
- Identify missing key topics in the content you have written. Are you covering all the same information points as the highest-ranked competitive articles? There is a prompt (or two) for that.
- Writing summary paragraph content that a content professional can rewrite. Artificial intelligence provides a good starting point and ideas that the writer can expand on in their own words.
- Rewrite existing content in other languages. However, my tests suggest you should still have translated content reviewed by a native-language writer.
- AI can help improve the scalability of content production; with AI tools, producing quality content now takes less time, which allows teams to increase the volume of content created and published. That also gives you more time to devote to creative strategy, target audience segmentation, etc.
- Checking for plagiarism. Yes, AI copies text (and that’s a problem).
- Content length metrics so you exceed the appropriate length of top-performing competitive articles.
Your SEO team member or friendly agency provider should work cooperatively with your in-house content team. Publishing words for the sake of adding content to a website was okay from 2009 – 2011. Today, Google and other major search engines do detect (and penalize) poor-quality content.
How To Use AI Copywriting The Right Way
You may not get a site penalty (unless you publish plagiarized content) for heavily utilizing AI content. However, when that core update, which will prioritize low-ratio (%) AI content, arrives, you can expect to experience a significant hit to your SEO. The clean-up will require an overhaul of a large portion of your content, costing your business time and money.
Always check your AI copywriting ratios. With an experienced content marketing provider, aim to keep your AI-generated score below 20%. Always remember to write high-quality content that is useful (not only for your SEO but also for your customers) in a relatable, authentic human voice and tone.
This article was written entirely without AI assistance. Can you tell?
