Why AI-Generated Content Doesn’t Guarantee Organic Performance
The Importance of Website Content Written by a Human
Artificial intelligence has been the most popular and hot-button topic to start the year. On the surface level, it’s a perfect system to make life easier; instead of you having to do all the tough writing work, you just need to type in a prompt of what you want to be accomplished, and the program will spit out the written results you desire, informed from a mountainous amount of information gathered from across the internet.
Who needs humans to write content when an app will now do it in a fraction of the time? Just task your AI model of choice to write your landing pages and blog posts, throw them up on your website and wait for your site to improve its online performance and rank over your competition while hardly breaking a sweat. Right? Unfortunately, it’s not that easy, and the content provided from an AI model, while a fine starting point, is nowhere near the quality that Google demands it to be for long-term success. Read on as we outline why human guidance, writing and curation is still needed for your website and its content to succeed, even with the help of AI.
Your Website Craves to E-E-A-T
A couple of letters are of exceptional importance for Google: E-E-A-T. These letters stand for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. This is how Google aims to rank a site, and a higher presence in these tenets means a higher ranking in the valued Google SERPS (search engine results pages). In layman’s terms, Google needs to be able to trust that the content you produce/populate on your website is first-hand knowledge, is written by an expert source, can be trusted to be accurate and that the source has accepted authority. Your content strategy for your website needs to be focused on these four core pillars.
It should stand to reason then that the principles of E-E-A-T are something that an AI program can’t accurately represent, as they promote the opposite of what artificial intelligence does. AI can’t outline its experience on a topic, only make guesses as to how a human would experience it. As well, true expertise can only be presented by a person, and an expert article is for sure more valuable and to be trusted by someone who has actual first-hand experience with the topic at hand. AI content may seem like it gets the job done on the base level, but it’s lacking the fundamental authorship that can only be gained by a human writer and their expertise, which eventually contributes to the website’s E-E-A-T as a whole. When Google tells us something about how they rank content, we must listen. When it comes to search engine ranking, AI content is missing multiple vital pieces.
Generated Content ≠ SEO-Optimized Content
Piggybacking off of the last point, AI content gives you an excellent collection of words and sentences that seem to answer your query, but that’s only part of the battle when it comes to writing for users on the web, and with so much competition out there. The content you receive back from an AI model may seem like it’s ready to be plugged into your website, but it’s most likely missing several SEO elements that are obvious to seasoned strategists, but which AI has no clue to include or prioritize. You can’t just throw up a collection of text on your website and expect it to rank, it needs to be SEO-optimized to make it easier for search engines to crawl and engage with, as well as being more helpful for users. Some basic elements that need to be looked after include:
- Proper length and enticing title tag
- A meta description that provides supportive information
- A concise and informative URL
- Correctly written and coded headers
- Keyword usage and placement
- Internal linking
- Alt text for images
These are all things, individually, that AI may be able to help you write/produce, but won’t necessarily know how to write to accomplish every need for a fully SEO-optimized page. This is all to double-down that just because AI spits out some paragraphs of text doesn’t mean it’s ready to compete in search, and may just get buried under far more optimized and quality content that it can’t stand up to.
You Need to Promote Your Unique Voice & Brand
As smart as these modern AI systems are, they still can’t quite accurately write and represent as a human would. AI content leans more toward the content of yesteryear of just content for content’s sake, thrown up on a website but with no real care, point of view or “voice” behind it. Google has always valued content aimed at humans and not just written/created to rank, but in the wake of their Helpful Content Update from August 2022, this is even more of a focal point in today’s age: content made for people, and not to deceive search engines.
There are thousands of dealerships out there with the same vehicles, same service jobs, same parts, same accessories, and all at the end of the day representing the same thing within these offerings. A Ford F-150 is still the same Ford F-150 no matter which dealership is selling it. Each dealership is different, though, with a unique brand, history, ties to the community, staff, operating vision and more. This is the funnel in which your content should be written, a voice that represents the brand of your dealership, one that can only be accurately presented by you. AI can’t write in this voice, and, which, ultimately Google values ahead of search engine-first content. Think of your customer base, the values of your dealership and write your content as the true voice of your business, not just something that could be copied and pasted on any other dealership and it would still make sense. Only you know your dealership, not an AI program, so ensure your content is represented as such for ultimate success.
AI Lacks Accuracy & Current Information
There are so many minute details that come with the products and services offered by a car dealership. Take a vehicle for example: each year it upgrades to its new model year, which may include a host of changes from additional features to features lost, to a new trim lineup to an entirely redesigned body with new size dimensions. We as human writers and researchers can accurately represent any new and changed information as it stands at this moment, but current AI is kneecapped by only often only having a general view of a topic, and often with information that is outdated and not represented to this current moment in time.
Thus, you can’t fully trust that your AI piece of content is accurate down to every detail. It may have all of the large overarching information down, but some of the fine-detail info needs to be properly double-checked and sourced so that you can feel confident that this piece of content is actually up-to-date for customers and that they are reading something they can trust. You do not want incorrect model information that may be outdated on your website, all because you assumed the AI program knows all.
Trust in EDealer for Curated Landing Pages & Blogs
If you want landing pages and blog posts written, produced and added to your website that you can fully trust: do so by trusting in our SEO & content team here at EDealer. Our SEO strategists work in concert with your dealership to not only create the quality, SEO-optimized content that you desire but also to ensure that it’s representative of your dealership’s unique brand voice. We have content marketing packages for both new vehicle models and fixed operations (service, parts, financing, etc.) that will be expertly curated and executed by an expert SEO human touch. Contact us to learn more about these services, and to see how your organic performance can benefit from a human-led content marketing strategy designed to satisfy what Google wants.
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