As AI Content gains popularity within the digital marketing space, SMBs are more and more likely to use AI tools in their operations. When used strategically, AI can supercharge the efficiency of your day-to-day tasks, tackling everything from optimizing a to-do list, composing emails, or writing website content.
Whether you’re skeptical about AI’s ability to meet your SEO goals or unsure how it fits into your broader strategy, this guide will address some misconceptions about Google’s position on AI-generated content, and provide some insight on how to best use this powerful tool for your business.
Q: Doesn’t Google penalize all AI-generated content in search rankings?
A: No. This is a very common misconception, even among the SEO community. Google prioritizes the best, most relevant content for a given search term, regardless of how it was written.
From the Google Search Central article Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content:
As explained, however content is produced, those seeking success in Google Search should be looking to produce original, high-quality, people-first content demonstrating qualities E-E-A-T. […]
Evaluating your content in this way, whether you’re using AI-generated content or not, will help you stay on course with what our systems seek to reward.
Q: How Does OneLocal Ensure “Appropriate Use of AI”
A: At OneLocal, we continually refine our AI instruction set and we use real humans to teach our models how to behave by providing feedback. By doing this, we can pass the required quality threshold and produce content that is highly relevant and unique while still being engaging for real users to read.
Q: Can AI-generated content rank as well as content written by humans?
A: Yes. AI can be used to do many on-page SEO tasks like conducting detailed keyword research, analyzing search intent, and even comparing competitor websites, integrating its findings into the content it creates. This all-in-one approach allows us to iterate on content with ease and optimize your keyword strategy on an ongoing basis.
Q: Will using AI content hurt my brand’s credibility with customers?
A: AI is prominent in today’s digital marketing space, and AI tools do a very good job of replicating the tone and personality of a human writer when given the right instructions. The key here is reviewing and refining AI output for accuracy and authenticity.
As part of our onboarding process, OneLocal’s content experts review each piece of content, and during UAT each site is reviewed by our CS team and by each merchant before publishing the site.
Q: Is AI-generated content capable of being optimized for specific keywords?
A: Absolutely. AI can sometimes do a better job than a human would when it comes to integrating specific requirements naturally. Just as you would provide keywords to a human, the same can be done for AI.
Q: Does Google prioritize human-written content over AI-generated content?
A: No. Google prioritizes high-quality, helpful, and relevant content regardless of whether it is AI- or human-written. Content quality is the deciding factor.
Q: Can AI content align with my brand’s unique voice and tone?
A: AI is very good at taking instructions. When given guidelines around the types of words to use, the tone of voice you typically write in, or even a sample piece of content, it can do a very good job of replicating your writing style and patterns. As part of our content generation process, our systems take into account all of the business details we gathered during onboarding.
Q: If AI tools are widely used, won’t my content look identical to others?
A: Not if you customize the AI-generated content to reflect your unique brand, target audience, and expertise. Human oversight is the key to ensuring uniqueness. At OneLocal, we have designed our own proprietary content prompting system and use those in combination with our in-house content experts to ensure your site is unique.
Q: How can AI help streamline other marketing channels beyond my website?
A: AI can generate personalized email content, schedule posts, analyze performance data, and even create engaging social media captions.
Q: What other aspects of my business, like operations or customer service, can AI improve?
A: AI can enhance operations by automating scheduling, inventory management, and reporting, while AI-powered chatbots help to improve customer service by providing instant, 24/7 responses.
Conclusion
AI is a valuable tool for SMBs. The benefits of AI content are undeniable:
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Efficiency: AI tools can create large volumes of high-quality content in a fraction of the time it takes a human writer.
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Cost-Effectiveness: AI reduces the time spent on administrative tasks, and can bring down the cost of production for your marketing assets overall.
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Consistency: AI can maintain a uniform tone and style across content for your website, social media, blogs, and customer service communications.
Now imagine using AI-generated content combined with SEO efforts from our LocalSEO features. You’ll be relentless in Google searches!
