Using AI Writing for Content Marketing and Effective SEO

Are you using AI writing for content marketing? Since Google no longer penalizes AI content, why not? That door is open, and AI tools can help you create effective content that ranks well in search. The key is to use AI to enhance, not weaken, the uniquely human element in effective audience engagement. As others double down on average-quality content and spammy marketing approaches, the winning path is writing in your brand’s voice that connects with your customers to help them achieve their goals.

AI tools can help you do just that.

Let’s learn how.

Why Did Google Reverse Its Ban on AI Writing?

On February 8, 2023, Google Search issued new guidance about AI-generated content that boils down to this: there will be no penalties for web content written with AI tools — as long as it’s useful content. That is a big change for Google. Last April, their Senior Search Analyst and Search Relations team lead, John Mueller, described AI and any “automatically generated” text as “spam” that would be handled by Google’s Web Spam team.

What made Google completely reverse its position on AI content less than a year later? 

What made Google completely reverse its position on AI content? 

Until 2023, Google regarded AI writing as a type of spam based on “content scraping” and “article spinning.” Scraping means programmatically copying existing content from the web. Spinning processes the copied content with a program that generates a “new” version of the old material. Unsophisticated, old-fashioned content spinning might mix text from multiple sources and replace some words with synonyms. It’s a crude kind of plagiarism that reminds me of high school essays that got “recycled” in the days before the internet.

Obviously, spun content is very spammy when it’s pushed on people as something worthy of their attention. It’s really intended to “game” search engines by fooling their algorithms into thinking the spun content should be rewarded with a high search result placement. 

Today, the sophisticated content that a Large Language Model (LLM) can produce is also the outcome of scraping — but on a massive scale. OpenAI’s GPT model draws on many terabytes of information from the web before a certain point in time. When it’s powering a chatbot like ChatGPT, the “spinning” it does comes from its ability to predict or actually guess what letters and words should follow, one after another. This appears to give ChatGPT the ability to synthesize potentially adequate responses to questions and prompts, especially if a human fact-checks and proofreads them. 

AI Writing is as Good as Average Human Copywriting

Given the quality and popularity of predictive language models driving AI writing tools, Google’s Search team may have realized that trying to continue detecting and banning AI-generated web content would become a costly and likely unwinnable arms race. Plus, if the AI writing is good enough, it’s no longer necessary to ban it just because it’s AI-generated. It may even have reached the minimum standard of useful writing, especially if it’s corrected and improved by human editors and writers.

The question for you is whether you and your audience are satisfied with average marketing content.

Spam is never useful — at least not for the recipients. And spam is spam, whether it’s from humans, AI, or both. The same goes for passably adequate copywriting. It’s good enough to gain admission to the race but not good enough to win against the best human-authored writing. This is really a glass-half-empty and half-full situation: artificial intelligence has risen to the level of human mediocrity.

If you think about it, average human-written marketing content is generated from intelligent “scraping and spinning” too. If we read some articles on the web and then write something similar in our own words, is it spam? It may be unoriginal and mediocre copywriting. It might be a little spammy. But if it’s not overly focused on search engine optimization with lots of clunky keywords stuffed into it, it might be useful to someone.

Providing reasonably accurate answers to questions people are asking in their search queries is always useful. AI writing can do that now at a basic level, and at its best, it’s as good as or better than the enormous amount of average and sub-average human writing on the web. 

The question for you is whether you and your audience are satisfied with average marketing content.

Google Wants Helpful Writing By People, For People — More Than Ever!

There’s a lot more to quality web copy than its usefulness. Not all useful content is equal in Google’s eyes. Their August 2022 “Helpful Content Update” is worth reading in this light. It was intended “to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.” 

Note that “helpful” is very similar to “useful,” but there’s one big difference between these two words. “Helpful” carries a more personal sense of a relationship. “Useful” implies a more impersonal, merely functional transaction. “Using” people is usually a bad thing. We help people and use things — like tools. Tools are not people and we should not pretend they are. 

That’s how I read the intentions of Google’s Helpful Content Update, especially in the questions they suggest we use to evaluate whether our writing is “on the right track with a people-first approach.” Here’s their most important self-diagnostic question for copywriters and content marketing professionals:

Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?

Google Search Central, “What creators should know about Google’s August 2022 helpful content update“

In other words, if you were speaking in person directly with a member of your target audience, would you answer their questions by telling them the same things they can read on your website, in the writing you’ve aimed at them? Or have you written for search engines rather than your potential customers? 

Even in its changing perspective on AI content, Google is being consistent with what it has always said: marketing content and all other web content should be written for people — not search engines. AI is good enough to do that at a very basic level. It’s even better than a lot of spammy copywriters who don’t have a good grasp of the subjects they write about. 

Can AI Help Us Write Better Content for Humans?

AI tools can certainly help turn out good writing — with capable humans using it well. Unfortunately, a lot of people will use AI in lazy, short-sighted ways to flood the internet with quasi-spam and flat, SEO content just as they always have. There is a big upside to this, however. It will create an even bigger opportunity for exceptional writing that goes in the other direction. Exceptional writing may actually become a necessity for reaching and engaging your intended audiences. Merely average content may well drown in the flood of the following paradox.

When All Writing Is Good Enough, None of It Is

AI should help raise the bar on written content across the web in terms of grammatical correctness, translations available, and general readability. That’s truly a good thing, but it also creates a strange contradiction. If all we do with AI is raise the average and continue producing average content, the sheer volume of it will require search engines to treat “average” as the floor rather than a baseline. 

Google has added a second ‘E’ to its E-A-T mnemonic. Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are now joined by Experience. Human experience, that is. It’s exactly what AI does not, cannot, and never will have.

Also, if we don’t add new knowledge or original expression to the internet, no matter how useful and helpful it is, we won’t stand out and engage our audiences as well as we could if we put more of ourselves into it. We’ll be feeding AI language models with their own output, which is not a productive feedback loop. It will be a kind of accelerated content inbreeding. 

AI-driven search and recommendation engines need clear, accurate, and authoritative content that stands out because that’s what potential customers always need. That’s why I think and hope AI may prove useful as both an assistive tool and a motive for better work that’s more personalized, unique, and effective at connecting with people. 

Exceptional Writing Will E-E-A-T the Competition

In December 2022, Google updated its search quality rater guidelines by adding a second ‘E’ to its E-A-T mnemonic. Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are now joined by “Experience.” Human experience, that is. It’s exactly what AI does not, cannot, and never will have. Naturally, Google uses human search quality raters to rate web content for these very human attributes. So does that rule out using AI to help write winning content that ranks?

Not necessarily. 

The more creative and insightful you are with your AI tools, the better they will perform — just as with any tool. Capable human guidance and intervention with an AI writing tool make the difference between spammy results and helpful articles. 

We Don’t Need to Be Experts and Exceptional All the Time

While I’m hopeful and pretty confident standout writing will become increasingly valued as the web fills with spam and subpar AI content, it’s also true that a lot of good, basic, day-to-day work in content marketing doesn’t need to be exceptional E-E-A-T material. In fact, it shouldn’t. 

It may be humbling to admit, but often we don’t need to write much better than ChatGPT. And that’s usually fine too. Depth, personality, and expertise aren’t called for in a lot of content marketing. That’s why AI tools can be helpful for small tasks in our daily work. They can be helpful when we’re trying to be unique and stand out too, by helping us brainstorm topics.

When is AI-Assisted Writing Most Practical and Effective?

Writing can be transactional or relational. It can be merely useful, or it can be memorable and personally helpful. Like machines, copywriters, and marketing professionals are not going to be very original or personally invested in their everyday tasks, especially if we’re in a hurry. Outside of the more creative and specialist writing we may occasionally do, originality isn’t the main goal in a lot of marketing content. In those cases, assistive writing tools are helpful for suggesting topics and drafts for short content like CTAs and some social media messaging. 

In other cases that aim at Google’s E-E-A-T standard, it’s better to shift into a more personal, original, and creative frame of mind. You might bring in expert sources and customers for interviews and case studies when you don’t have firsthand knowledge of a subject. AI tools can be helpful for this work too if you habituate yourself to using them for the small but important tasks where they work best: suggestions for titles, topics, interview questions, summaries, and meta descriptions.

Humans have always been quite good at lazy and ignorant writing. We can’t honestly blame our tools for that. It’s how we use them. If you keep one eye open for what the AI is missing or getting wrong, you’ll use it well. AI tools can help us write as people for other people in small but practical ways. The key is to use tools to help humans — not help tools abuse humans! 

Write for people instead of treating them like machines or non-entities on the other side of a search algorithm we’re trying to please. Write as you want to be written to — that really is the Golden Rule of Google. If an AI helps you do that, you’re using it well.