Dominate Content Marketing in the Age of ChatGPT
It’s no secret that AI chatbots like ChatGPT have almost immediately brought major changes to the digital marketing space. Marketing agencies and the businesses they serve now have the ability to generate near-flawless copy for websites, ads, emails, blogs, scripts for podcasts and videos, social media posts, and plenty more. And the quality of the output is astounding—when it comes to following instructions and producing relatively error-free content that reads well, ChatGPT blows the doors off WriteSonic, Jasper, and other clunky AI writers we’ve been fumbling around with for a couple years now.
The sudden ability to instantly produce great quality content is going to be a boon for digital marketing, especially for bread-and-butter services like SEO and PPC, which rely on quality content for efficacy. Marketers can now, for example, build out small websites in a flash to immediately compete for better organic search rankings; businesses can now mass-produce e-commerce product descriptions and have the chatbot assist in creating quality PPC landing page content. Companies can break into new markets more quickly by building dozens of landing pages in a fraction of the time.
This all comes with the caveat that AI-generated content is not perfect, and relying on it too heavily could backfire if you don’t have expert quality control in place. Despite its impressive qualities, content from chatbots can still include mis- or disinformation and strange phrasing, or unintentionally duplicate existing content on the web. Raw AI output is almost never ready to publish. This makes editing and the application of marketing best practices and strategy even more crucial in this new age.
ChatGPT = More You Vs. Me
A looming glut of chatbot-produced content means that the cutthroat world of digital marketing is about to get even more throat-cuttier. Even if you have a strong writing team, as millions of pages of high-quality AI content start hitting the web, your expert human-authored content is going to face stiffer competition. To compete and find success in the age of ChatGPT, marketing agencies and businesses are going to need to shift their content development process to focus more on strategy, chatbot manipulation and direction, and high-value content instead of just well-written content.
Based on our knowledge of search engines, SEO, and our own experience with AI technology, SharpNet’s content department has outlined a road map for content marketing success in this new, even more competitive age of digital marketing.
1. Don’t abandon original writing.
“Garbage in, garbage out,” absolutely applies to today’s word-slinging chatbots, astounding as they are. If you have brilliant writers, they are absolutely still an asset. If you can start your AI content project with human-authored writing that is creative, has flair and carries an engaging tone, your AI content is going to be similar.
Google likes to reward content that is fresh and offers something unique and valuable to its user base. This was always true but became more of an emphasis after the search engine’s 2022 Helpful Content Update. What’s more, its crawl bots are getting better and better at identifying this type of content, so it’s not likely to be lost in a sea of well-written but generic AI pages.
To give your site and your clients the best chance of showing up on the search results, use ChatGPT and other AI tools to leverage and amplify—but not replace—brilliant original content from humans. It gives you an advantage over businesses that are just going to crank out generic AI pages. This especially applies to blogs, pages about niche services, and even product descriptions.
2. Prioritize SEO fundamentals like keyword research and seamless on-page optimization.
A page of high-quality AI content isn’t guaranteed to rank for any keyword on its own, much less the specific sets of keywords your business or client needs in order to compete online. Great AI content still needs to reflect and incorporate SEO best practices, such as keyword research that reflects both relevancy and user intent, keyword density, location references, and seamless on-page optimization. By “seamless,” we mean incorporating keywords into on-page content as naturally as possible: ex. “Our window installation service in Wichita can lower your energy bills and increase the value of your home.”
Seamless integration is more crucial than ever, as Helpful Content and previous updates have helped Google get better at identifying pages specifically built to game its algorithm. The growing sophistication and wariness of Google’s crawl bots means that awkwardly cramming exact-match phrases like “window installation Wichita KS” into every H1 and throughout the body is going to have far less payoff than it used to.
By combining the quality and rapid turnaround of AI chatbots with SEO best practices, you’ll create naturally flowing, search-engineered content that offers a distinct advantage over the more generic, churn-and-burn AI output of others.
3. Find or train SEO-minded content editors.
As you may have guessed by the first two items, the key to remaining competitive in the ChatGPT-led world is finding the right fusion of SEO and content expertise to guide your content creation. This requires an understanding of how search engines interact with site content, and how to manipulate that interaction using SEO strategies.
Editors have always been important, of course, but with quality set to be less of a differentiator in the content space, editorial oversight now plays a more outsized role in the success of any content marketing campaign. From developing and optimizing business-specific writing prompts to vetting AI output and making sure the output avoids duplication/plagiarism and bad information, the content editor assumes a wide variety of crucial tasks in an AI-driven marketing world.
The shift in editorial focus from editing and managing human writers to managing AI output also means your content team needs to be well-versed in more marketing-centric skills. You now need people who can edit and audit AI content not just for accuracy and tone, but also for readability (this could be through the addition or creation of scannable chunks like bullet lists, listicles, or FAQs), proper page structure and layout, effective use of headings, and optimal keyword density. Moreover, having a person well-versed in SEO strategy oversee your content development will result in a more intentional and effective marketing campaign for your business or clients.
Want to learn more about the promises and pitfalls of AI content marketing in the age of chatbots? SharpNet Solutions’ team of digital marketing specialists stands on the cutting edge of the industry and can discuss how great content can benefit your business or agency. Contact us today for more information.
MAKING SACRIFICES
We only have 750 characters to make this happen. This means there isn’t a lot of room for fluff. Things that may seem important to the business owner, like “family owned and operated” or details on how the business was started, aren’t valuable search terms. That type of info doesn’t serve the Google algo and doesn’t inform the customer about the variety of services or products they offer. It may have to be sacrificed to more relevant search terms and locations.