Keep a human eye on your AI-generated content

Adelina says: “Keep a human eye on AI-generated content.

Google has accepted AI as a content generator, but AI can make really big mistakes and it can rephrase the same things over and over again. Sometimes, it will just make things up.

You want to have people proofreading everything and making sure that the content is accurate, it’s good for your users, and it suits your product.”

Can you get AI to produce the content initially?

“Absolutely. I used to think that Google was not going to accept AI-generated content. Now, though, they are saying, ‘it’s important to recognise that not all use of automation, including AI generation, is spam. Automation has long been used to generate helpful content, such as sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts.’

That’s from Google’s guidelines, and it applies to more content as well.”

Will Google soon get to the point where they’re not able to tell whether the content is AI-generated?

“Google has many clues they can use to detect AI-generated content, so I don’t know if it won’t be able to recognise it anytime soon. I know that AI repeats the same things over and over again, and it says the same phrase using different words. That’s not great because it is basically repetition.

For me, I’m using artificial intelligence for my project and it’s working very well. However, you have to be very careful with the prompt you give to your AI tool – whether that’s Jasper, OpenAI, or whatever. You have to make sure that it’s not repeating the same things. I am creating descriptions in different formats for my project and the AI would just say the same things. It wouldn’t take into consideration that it’s a different format.

You need to be very careful and give that AI tool the right prompt if you want to get good content in exchange. Using the right prompt will improve the quality of the final piece of content.”

How do you improve your prompts and what do you need to incorporate into them?

“There are some tricks that work a lot of the time. Sometimes, though – even if you give the right prompt and you’ve checked it down to the smallest detail – it won’t work. In those cases, you can go heading by heading, asking the AI for something very specific. It’s like asking for that same content from a person, but much faster.

There are three main things that you can include within your prompts to ensure the quality is as good as possible. First, you have to give the AI a specific role. It will work much better if you ask it to act like a marketing professional or a professional copywriter. Then, you want to set a tone. You can tell it that you want an informal blog post, for example, or an informal article.

Then, you can give it the structure that you want the AI to follow. That’s something that you should investigate prior to giving that prompt. Create a final structure and give that to the AI tool. Then, you can work on the final draft that it gives back to you. The role, the tone, and the structure are the three main things that you should give to an AI tool.

If you asked for a blog post and the AI is not quite giving you what you want, you can tell it to correct that issue or keep something particular in mind that it has done incorrectly. For example, you can tell it that the title it has used doesn’t work for local SEO, and explain how you want it to be done differently.

To make sure that the content is accurate and correct, you need to ensure that the AI has a professional proofreader, or a person who does whatever you are writing about – or at least has specific information on the topic.”

How do you ensure that the AI is structuring the content properly?

“You can give the AI a specific title, heading 2, heading 3, heading 4, etc., on that particular topic. That way, if the first draft doesn’t convince you, you can tell it to change the content under specific headings or include different information in specific places within the article. Then you can go over it again.

You’re probably going to be targeting a keyword phrase with your content, so you want to ensure that the content is relevant, it’s targeting the right audience, and it’s using the right phraseology. If you’ve researched the questions and keyword phrases that you want to target, you can give those to the AI. Instead of just giving it one topic and asking it to produce the whole article, break it down into subheadings and have more control over what it includes.

I still like to manually add the keywords to the article myself. I’ve tried telling the AI to add them in a natural way, but it’s not natural at all. I do that myself and I work on the links, the anchor text, and all the rest. AI is a very powerful tool, though, because it allows you to create that content in 10% of the time that it would have taken before.”

When you’re editing, do you ask AI to make those changes, or do you take the nearly finished article from AI and finish it off yourself?

“I take the nearly finished piece and then add extra keywords, the anchor text that I want to use for the links, and everything else.

I don’t give it back to the AI again because it usually does the job worse than I would do it myself.”

How do you incorporate EEAT into AI-assisted content?

“There are different ways of doing it. Firstly, the author should always be someone who is actually a professional on that topic. For example, I am an SEO professional and I’m the copywriter for my articles, so it’s 100% real.

As the author of that article, I’m going to incorporate the basic EEAT elements into that. I’m going to link everything on my profile that reveals to Google that I’m a professional who is dedicated to SEO. I’m going to keep providing my experience – because AI only gave me a draft. I’m then going to be finishing that and giving my personal experience and knowledge.

That should happen with every article that you write. Have a specific author for each topic. That will show Google that you are using AI, but you have real people behind every piece that you create, taking care of that content.

No matter what type of business you are in, you should be able to do this yourself. You will usually have people who are specialised in a specific topic as authors. If you are a coffee shop, you can have a barista as the writer of your articles. They are a professional with knowledge and expertise. Equally, you can be an SEO professional or an IT technician and have an online profile.

As long as Google can find out that you are a real person and that you have experience and authority, then you are going to lend credibility to that content.”

What’s the best way of demonstrating that you are a real person with authority?

“As part of your author bio, you want to link to an author page on your own website – and have social profiles that are linked to that as well. It’s social signals, website signals, the author description, and any mentions on the internet about you as a professional in that sector. All of that works.

Ideally, if you want to be seen as a professional in your niche, you want to get out there and appear in other places beyond your own website. You can include those mentions on your own website, of course, but your website should also have different mentions on other blogs, and on other social media. Social media is a very powerful signal for SEO.

There are people who are already very public about their profession and what they do, and they have more authority. However, it doesn’t mean that you – as a person who is starting a career in a certain environment – can’t do that as well. Google actually understands that smaller profiles are worthy as well. Your LinkedIn profile, for example, is a very powerful tool for Google.”

Can you format the About section in your LinkedIn profile to increase the likelihood that Google will incorporate it into the knowledge panel? Does writing in the third person help?

“That’s something that I’ve never really thought about. My About section is written in the first person because, for me, LinkedIn is also a tool for finding jobs as a freelancer. I would rather the person gets to me on that platform rather than through Google, in this case.

I think it depends. What I do know is that Google is not taking my description, so it may have something to do with writing in the third person. I do have an introductory paragraph about me as a professional on another website, and that’s written in the third person, but that’s not appearing either. I think I’m just not famous enough to have a description on Google yet.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Keep that human eye on the AI – and don’t stop doing that because we don’t know what is going to happen with AI in the end. Right now, Google is happy with it – or at least tolerates it and is trying to make it part of one of its own products.

However, you should keep your content as original as possible. AI is helping us make things faster, but keep that human eye and don’t leave it to run by itself.”

Adelina Bordea is SEO Team Leader at FreePik Company, and you can find her over on LinkedIn.