Creating great, insightful content is already a difficult task for marketers. The challenge of ensuring your article sits high in the rankings is a challenge – and even more so if you have a new business or it lacks authority in the SERPs.
In the next year, many businesses are looking towards tools to help increase their content output and improve their SEO, and AI-generated content is the current popular solution.
But AI-generated content comes with its pros and cons. Today I’ll be looking at these in more detail but first, let me share a little about what it actually is.
What is AI-generated content?
AI-generated content is tech-powered content – including blogs, website articles, product descriptions and other marketing materials – based on search queries led by humans.
AI (also known as artificial intelligence) software can pull information from search engines to create content based on specific search queries on topics, keywords or phrases. Let’s begin with how this could positively impact you.
The Pros of AI-Generated Content
Quick Creation Turnaround
AI Software provides almost immediate deliverables for content writers, no matter how simple or complicated the subject may be.
Even the most productive human writers know it can take hours to produce top-quality blog posts and marketing assets. On the other hand, the average AI tool will produce this in under a minute.
A key takeaway: Depending on the AI software you choose or pay for, the amount of content you request each day is uncapped. This can help you produce a backlog of content to fill your content marketing or social media calendar.
It’s Cost Effective
AI comes at a fraction of the cost of paying a full-time writer or freelancer. Most writers are paid hundreds when expert articles are needed, or thousands of pounds in salary. Alternativity, an annual AI subscription is usually just under £100.
Sometimes, work done by a person is well worth the investment for those seeking well-research, high-quality content – but for SMEs and startups, AI-generated content is a good place to start in return for a small fee.
Stronger SEO
The SEO-related capabilities of AI-generated content are a key part of what makes it attractive to businesses.
The software works to pull popular and SEO-optimised content to suit your desired topic. This adds great value to your marketing, especially if you don’t know how to structure SEO content or write about specific keywords suited to your offering.
By utilising this, you can view examples of optimised keyword clusters and format the content guaranteed to grant you visibility.
Avoiding Writers Block
Developing new ideas for content can come with unwanted pressure, and it can be even more daunting when a deadline is in place.
You don’t worry about writer’s block or generating multiple ideas when using AI-generated content.
You can even just use AI to produce the beginning of your piece (often the most difficult part) or to mock up a layout, and you can let your own creativity manage the rest.
Sound good so far? Now let’s take a look at the concerns related to AI-generated content.
The Cons of AI-Generated Content
Concerns with Plagiarism
AI gathers its information from multiple sources to produce the content users search for, but you’d never know that because it never discloses citations.
This puts you at legal risk of being sued by the original creator for plagiarism of their work if the content you put out there is too similar.
Using AI Content could decrease your Google ranking
Google helpful content strives to “help people see more original, helpful content, written by people, for people, in search results”
Therefore, search engines can pick up on AI content as it usually lacks trust, expertise and authority. It’s important you keep this in mind when producing content for web pages or external articles.
On the other hand, you could utilise AI to help encourage your creativity – using it for content ideation, or for short-form content like customer responses, as part of your shopping experience or social media captions.
Inconsistent Content Quality
When using AI-generated content the quality is not guaranteed every time. This is due to the amount of information available varying on the relevant subject of the piece.
Therefore, your output of informative content could become inconsistent and have a negative effect on how your brand is perceived by your audience.
Your content will require human proofing
It’s in your best interest to proofread or edit AI-generated content before you publish it. Readers will be able to identify inaccurate, or offensive content that AI wouldn’t detect due to its lack of knowledge.
Alternatively, you can use the AI content as a base and adapt it yourself to produce the finished product. This will give a human feel to the content, making it more likely to rank in searches.
Overall
From the above, it’s clear that AI-generated content isn’t the perfect solution we all expect it to be.
It’s great for lending content writers a helping hand and filling in the gaps where needed but it does have its cons. Therefore, you shouldn’t rely on AI entirely but rather use it as a starting point and allow your creativity to flow around it.
Thanks for reading,
Myk Baxter, eCommerce Consultant
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