“Can’t you just use AI to write a bunch of webpages and put the website up in a day?”
I heard that for the first time in 2023, at the West Coast Symposium, as a potential new client was bargaining with me in the hopes of getting a lower price. At the time, AI was relatively new and I didn’t have a great answer for why we wouldn’t do that. I just knew, deep down, that truly connecting with people in crisis takes the heart of a real human behind the keyboard.
We’ve come a long way since then, and I’m so glad to say that I was right. By all indications, human-centered and human-created content is winning when it comes to SEO — and it’s partly because so many people created so much AI garbage online.
SEO guru Neil Patel recently ran an experiment in which his team posted 744 articles across 68 websites—some written with AI, some by humans—and tracked the metrics over five months. The results were conclusive:
“Traffic for the AI-generated content fluctuated from month-to-month while the human content had steady increases over the 5-month period,” he explained. “In fact, by month 5, the human-generated content had 5.44X more traffic than the AI-generated content on a monthly basis.”
Of course, AI content takes much less time to create. With that in mind, is the ROI then better? Still, no.
Human-created content gives you more bang for your buck. The reason why, as we discussed in a prior week, is because the Google algorithm has become clogged with millions of pages of generic AI-generated content. In order to deliver useful results to searchers and maintain its edge over AI agents, Google is now prioritizing the Es: emotion, empathy, and experience.
We’ve seen this play out with our own clients, as those clients who’ve been with us for years are getting a big boost on old posts. Newer clients are getting a chance to switch things up just in time.
In short, I’ve never been more excited about what content marketing and SEO can deliver for clients than I am today. We’re all getting an edge in the rankings — and your potential clients are all the better for it.
AI is still incredibly useful for so many tasks. Out of everything it can do, it’s probably just the worst at writing (and, apparently, at drawing hands). If you haven’t played around with ChatGPT or another platform yet, here are some of our favorite uses:
Analyzing Data: We’ve been using AI to do the most sophisticated SEO analysis that we’ve ever done. In one recent project, we built a proprietary AI-powered algorithm that analyzed several hundred thousands cells of excel data to build a custom keyword priority list for a client—something that would be nearly impossible to do by hand. Upload your own Excel sheets to do advanced calculations and analysis.
Call Audits: Clients using call transcripts can use AI to “coach” admissions reps on some platforms. Ask your account manager for more information if you’re interested.
Meeting Transcripts: At BuzzFactory, we’re huge evangelists of Otter.ai. Not only does it capture an accurate transcript of our Google Meets; but also, its advanced AI search capabilities allow us to enter queries like, “Remind me what Ben said he wanted me to do before our next meeting,” or “What was the general tone of Melissa’s last client meeting? Were they happy with our services?”
Your account manager will continue to share AI tools with you as relevant. In short, AI is a great helper, but we’re still the ones in the driver’s seat—for now!