AI and the Google Update: How Using Generated Content Affects Your Ranking

Google has recently updated their algorithms to improve search results by weeding out black hat SEO tactics. The core updates throughout the year in 2022 and the “helpful content update” in August of 2022, have targeted websites using content generated by artificial intelligence.

According to the new updates, websites that feature a great deal of artificial intelligence-generated content may be heavily penalized due to the often low quality of the content that AI tends to produce.

It may seem like a cheaper and quicker way to get content for your website, but the type of artificial intelligence that it’s easy to gain access to isn’t quite at the level where it’s churning out quality content. Thus, you may end up spending more money having to fix it in the end.

What New Google Updates Mean for Your Website’s SEO

The main purpose of Google (as well as every other search engine) is to provide the best search results to the user. The helpful content update of August 2022 asks marketers and web content creators to focus on people-first content. The best way to make sure you are doing this is to create content for people, not for the search engines.

You can ensure you are doing this by asking yourself the following questions:

• Would your intended audience find the content useful?
• Does your site have a main focus or primary purpose?
• Does the content clearly and concisely demonstrate a depth of knowledge and first-hand experience?
• Will someone leave your website feeling they have learned enough to achieve their goal?
• Will someone who is reading your content leave your website feeling they have had a satisfactory experience?

These are all excellent questions to ask yourself to make sure you have created people-first content. Just because content that is purely generated from AI is not generally high quality, that doesn’t mean it can’t be a valuable tool for your business.

Artificial Intelligence: An Effective Tool for Marketers?

Content creation is not the only reason businesses are using artificial intelligence. AI is helpful when it comes to collecting and processing large amounts of data as machines are capable of calculations with much more accuracy and speed than humans. There are many other artificial intelligence examples for a modern world to be aware of.

Pros and Cons of Using AI-Generated Content

As we have already discussed, it is clear what the cons are with using AI-generated content:

• Quality concerns — It’s virtually impossible for machines to understand tone as well as how to bring in effective resources and influences.
• Search engines devaluing content — As noted above, in Google’s helpful content update, they prefer content that takes a people-first approach.

While we have discussed the disadvantages, there are some advantages of using content that has been created by artificial intelligence. These include:

• Writing speed and scalability —- These tools can create content much faster than human writers. So between researching and writing, an article that’s two pages may take a human thirty minutes to write whereas it will take artificial intelligence just a few minutes.
• Cost — The cost when compared to human writers is significantly cheaper.

Of course, there are other helpful ways to use artificial intelligence to help your business. For example, you may want to look into artificial graphic design, artificial web developers, automated customer communications, and other artificial intelligence tools for your small business.

Another approach is to optimize content so that you are using artificial intelligence as a tool to optimize content for a human-first approach. This is more of a collaborative approach. You take the content generated by the artificial intelligence and you have a human edit it. This tends to take less time and effort than writing something from scratch.

Improving Your Rankings and SEO: The Bottom Line

As you have evaluated your website and the content that you have created for it, it’s also a good idea to evaluate your SEO in general. It’s not enough to just measure your rankings. There are many other metrics you should be keeping track of like keyword rankings, organic search traffic, and backlinks.

You also want to make sure that the content on your website is performing well and giving you good website engagement metrics. If no one is engaging with your content, something isn’t working about your messaging. Engagement metrics will give you a way to measure how users are interacting and enjoying the content on your website and how well it is optimized for search.

You want to make sure you are taking the time to take a look at your website to see what’s working and what isn’t. Take a moment to review these helpful steps to effectively evaluate the SEO value of the content on your website.