With AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard sweeping the globe, business owners are considering their options for writing more efficient content. Of course, it makes sense. Copywriting is hard work. It takes investment and creative energy, and planning content on a regular basis is time-consuming and costly.
That’s also fueling the frenzy around AI writing.
Everyone wants more for less. But does that mean you should cut corners?
Definitely not.
Shortcutting the process won’t achieve high-quality work.
If you want content that connects and converts, you need the appropriate drivers behind it: human emotion, creativity and strategic thinking.
The technology of AI is spectacular and intelligent, but as with any digital tool, there are limitations. AI-generated content cannot replace SEO copy and the creative content it generates remains superficial and soulless. What’s more, AI tools cannot replace authentic human emotion (yet).
Before we dive deeper, let’s consider the Three Laws of Robotics.
These rules were developed in 1942 by sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov to protect humans from androids by restricting robot behaviour and keeping AI ethical.
Asimov envisioned the problem we face today, as sci-fi often does, and created a principle for safe, compliant and robust robots.
More than 80 years later, the fundamentals have not changed, just evolved. Here’s how to stop bots from harming you or your business when considering AI tools.
Key Points:
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You don’t need me to tell you that human emotions and connections are integral to content marketing. I know I bang on about the importance of creating connections, but you need them if you want your content to perform.
So if you’re not getting the results you want from your web copy (or copywriter), you’ll look for alternatives. Cue robots and AI for business.
Great SEO copy performs and actively engages an audience. It provides value and creates an emotional connection, one that’s often built through the power of stories.
While AI is a smart tool to aid the process, no matter how good it is at churning out copy, those words aren’t the best words for your audience.
Why?
Users demand audience-specific content tailored to their needs, wants and search intent —content that’s written by humans, for humans.
The best website copy is not superficial. You don’t simply choose keyphrases and write optimised copy around them either. Good SEO copywriting, like any form of marketing, sprouts from strategic thinking, originality and the ability to creatively connect dots in ways we haven’t seen from AI tools like ChatGPT.
That doesn’t mean AI shouldn’t be a valuable part of your toolkit though. There are benefits, especially if you want to maximise productivity and streamline repetitive and mundane tasks.
When used logically, AI tools can help create better content. But they should be used as an assistant, not an outsourcing solution.
ChatGPT opposes everything Google asks for in user-friendly content; web copy that demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. Without meeting these signals, you leave your audience unsatisfied and run the risk of Google devaluing your content.
Since AI-written copy lacks E-E-A-T credentials, quality raters (and users) will struggle to trust content that doesn’t showcase the expertise of the writer and their years of experience.
Imagine what that lack of trust and credibility could do to your brand.
Google’s Helpful Content algorithm is also something to factor in, which rewards content that gives readers a satisfying experience. The most recent update highlights that content must be written by people, for people to be deemed helpful. After all, it’s content from humans that provides a more cohesive and satisfying approach to creative copywriting and SEO.
Without the experience or interpersonal understanding of your business, how can AI articulate why customers should choose you, or most importantly, why they should trust your brand? You need more than just a bot to handle your strategy.
Copywriters and business owners cannot rely solely on AI tools for web copy, doing so is irresponsible and detrimental to your brand.
If you want to spice up your content and make your readers and Google hungry for more, focus on creating authentic human experiences.
For websites, this demands three essentials.
Bots like ChatGPT can be incredibly useful for marketing materials such as emails, sales letters, social media and speeches. But 100% AI-written content is ‘rubbish’ for SEO. Your web copy might be new, but it won’t be original or have that competitive edge. Quality content with backlinks is what ranks.
The SEO value of content depends on how informative, useful, credible and engaging it is. High-performing copy must also be optimised for your target keyphrases.
AI tools can find and categorise keyword opportunities and generate content that ranks – much quicker than any SEO specialist or copywriter could. But using AI to automate the process puts your content and SEO strategy at risk.
Because anything less than reliable damages your brand and hurts your online presence.
We’re almost living in The Jetsons era. But instead of flying cars, we’re seeing robots make mind-blowing breakthroughs in medicine, healthcare and agriculture.
The online world is no different, and there’s no denying web search is changing.
Just recently, Microsoft and Google have jumped on board with AI-assisted search similar to the conversational bot ChatGPT. But Google is no stranger to AI search technology. Its machine-powered algorithms have been helping to process search results for years, for example, RankBrain and BERT among others.
These algorithms use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to scrape answers from websites, process search queries and determine what results appear and how.
SEO still remains relevant, no matter how sophisticated AI gets. AI search simply creates new opportunities the same way Google’s Knowledge Graph, Alexa and Siri did when they first came out.
With AI, you have an indispensable tool for automating the time-consuming parts of copywriting like research, outline development and generating ideas.
But everyone who uses AI tools such as ChatGPT and Jasper is using the same language model. This can generate similar content for related topics and causes copy to be flagged if it’s too similar to published materials. The secret behind this is advanced pattern recognition.
When you use AI tools to generate content, it’s very similar to article spinner tools that shuffle words and use synonyms to spit out copy. This doesn’t provide value to your audience and steps wildly on plagiarism’s toes.
Google says AI falls under auto-generated content which is against guidelines and can lead to a manual penalty, harming your website and business. On the other hand, the company also has a policy of rewarding high-quality content and will continue to prioritise people-first copy, whether humans or machines produce it.
It would be unlikely for Google to completely ban the use of AI content anyway, when they use AI so heavily themselves.
Robots or not, there’s no way to beat search algorithms outside of creating reliable, human-first content. And Google is smart at detecting (and penalising) AI-generated words.
If you’re using 100% AI-generated copy for web pages, blog articles, product descriptions or any other form of digital content, it’ll be flagged as rubbish by Google. And your site will be dumped into the digital landfill – a place where profits crumble and customer engagement dissolves.
The best way to avoid compromising your SEO and hurting your brand is to use AI as a foundation – not the final (or only) solution.
There are three options to consider as a business owner who needs web copy:
I’ll let you in on a little secret.
Digital marketing isn’t all conscious planning and creative brilliance. There are many tedious tasks we can speed up, automate and improve with AI if it’s used ethically and responsibly. AI tools might not be able to replace the skills and real-world experience of copywriters, but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be used in digital marketing and the SEO industry.
Here are a few processes that can be streamlined with AI:
While creativity can’t be forced, AI tools can be useful for stimulating ideas. It’s still important to work with a copywriter who can flesh them out with human skill and find a unique angle to further research into, plan and write. And you should never publish topics or ideas as they come.
Extensive research is an enormous part of marketing, especially SEO and copywriting. AI chatbots can help simplify the process, summarise PDFs and create content outlines, providing a solid starting point to dive deeper into.
From an SEO perspective, most conventional keyword research tools already use an AI input, helping to crawl and analyse large amounts of data in far less time. But it’s the experience of an SEO copywriter that solidifies the right information into creative web copy that converts.
Every piece of content you publish must be grammatically checked. No one is perfect after all, and typos can fall through the cracks when double-checking information, even by the smartest of people.
Grammar-checking programs such as Hemingway Editor and Grammarly are powered by AI-enabled algorithms. I’ve been using both to tweak and polish my copy for years. In this case, it could make sense to test an AI tool for streamlining the editing process. A skilled human proofreader will have to refine the final output.
Not all use of automation and AI-generated content is spam. There are types of helpful content, such as transcripts and weather forecasts that many publishers automate with AI to save time. AI tools can also be useful for Google Ads and social media captions. Human editing and fact-checking are still required.
With or without AI, you should never publish any content without asking yourself is it helpful or spam? Was it written with purpose or does it add to the noise?
More importantly, does it offer a solution to your audience’s problems?
There is a lot of concern surrounding AI technology stealing jobs. In many industries it already has, so it’s normal to have some anxieties around it. But I don’t believe robots for writing or online search is something to be anxious about.
AI isn’t here to take over, it’s designed to help. And believing robots might replace copywriters is like thinking computers will replace writers. Can a tool replace the person who uses it? Maybe for menial tasks. But writing content that creates connections is far from menial.
As predicted, AI has evolved into imaginative and highly-intelligent machines. But that emotional human component is still integral for content marketing and those important parts of people’s searching and buying journeys only a human can relate to.
While AI-generated content may seem efficient and affordable, it lacks these key drivers of creative thinking and personal perspective that are needed for creating content that converts.
AI technology is always learning and will only get more sophisticated. Instead of trying to beat it, why not find ways to ethically embrace it?
As an SEO copywriter, it’s my job to provide value through helpful content that creates connections. I’ve been doing that for many happy businesses for more than 10 years – and I’ll always strive to give more value than a bot can.
Robots may not be able to harm you (yet), but don’t let them harm your words, your website or your brand either.
Disclaimer:
There are elements of AI I use in my work regularly:
