Substance and Style

A few weeks ago, I used this post to explore whether having AI write your content is a good business decision. Assuming you’ve decided to stick with creating your own content, you might be wondering how to remain high on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) on an internet flooded with AI-generated content. As a human, you won’t be able to compete with the volume of work an AI can produce. You will have to rely on quality to set you apart. You are (for the time being, at least) superior to AI in a lot of ways. Here are some ways you can stand out:

1. Promote your humanity. A decade ago, I never would have thought being a person could be a Unique Selling Point, but here we are. If your customers care about getting their content from people, announce that your content that it’s created by humans. Prioritize making a human connection with your audience. Be the you that can’t be replicated by a machine.
   
2. Look at your content the way real people do. So far, AI cannot see through your audience’s eyes. Your ability to do so helps you create content google loves. The main goal of search engines is to provide what people want to see (so people continue to use them). AI does’t really “understand” what people want and need, at least not yet. So if you want people to find your content, lean into the fact that you do. AI is playing a numbers game. Essentially, it has read the internet and is regurgitating the facts, answers, and content that it thinks will have the broadest appeal. There is no regard for specificity or nuance. Humans will have an edge here unless and until AI figures out how to appeal to specific audiences and make meaningful connections. You know your target market. If you continue to provide what they need, you will be well positioned to continue to rank high.
   
3. Be knowledgeable and truthful. Just as AI doesn’t care about a specific audience’s needs, it also doesn’t care if it’s right or accurate or basing its content on the biases of human writers and artists. Search engines do, though. While anyone can publish anything online and it always has the chance to show up on page one or two of results, as a general rule, search engines try to return useful results. Truthfulness, expertise, and authority are important to search engines. Score high in these areas by posting your credentials and publishing useful content, and you’ll likely beat out AIs that aren’t worried about credibility.
   
4. Make more video content. Video has been growing in importance for years because it outperforms other content most of the time. In the age of AI, it will become an even more valuable tool for human marketers. For the time being, AI can’t compete with people in video production with live footage or with animation and motion design.
   
5. Don’t be spammy. The main benefit of AI is its ability to be far more prolific than people. The people using it will still have to decide how prolific they want it to be. If people post everything an AI produces day after day, they will most certainly come to be viewed as spammers by search engines.
   
6. Design your website with SEO in mind. Even if your content is competing with AI content, you can still publish it in a way that makes you rank higher. I have yet to see an AI design a website that is fully optimized. Some of the most basic but important things you can do (having a hierarchy and structure that make sense, providing good site navigation, using relevant tags and descriptions, making sure your content is related to your titles and headings, etc.) are things a person is still going to have to do for a while yet. Writing headings and subheadings that are easily understood by search engines doesn’t come naturally to AI. At present, you can teach it to do this, but you have to teach it for every new piece of content. Providing structured data is another way that humans can beat the bots for now. It can show the search engines what content is important (a featured product or video, etc.), which the search engine then serves up to the right audience. So far, it takes a human running a website to teach search engines which parts they should highlight.
   
7. Repurpose. You have the ability to repurpose content. AI doesn’t know what part of a blog post can be pulled out, turned into an infographic, and posted on instagram. It has no sense of what content to pull together to put into a newsletter. It doesn’t understand the purpose of the content, so it has no chance to figure out how to repurpose it. 

While it can be discouraging to feel you’re in competition with machines, keep in mind that quality matters over quantity both in what you produce and what audience is brought in. It’s more beneficial to reach five people who convert than 5 million who don’t. Though panic and excitement around AI abound in pretty much equal measures, we really have no way of knowing exactly how all of this will pan out. There are very real concerns about copyright infringement, the production of propaganda, and other issues that tug at the edges of reality itself. As far as SEO goes, though, it’s not time to despair yet. AI is almost certainly here to stay and it will only get better with time. For people, it’s best to focus on what we’re better at, meet the needs of our audiences, and protect Sarah Connor just to be on the safe side.