How to Use AI for Content Creation

ChatGPT and other AI-driven tools are taking the digital marketing world by storm.

But do we know how to use them correctly?

Here are a few ideas on how AI-powered tools can help your content creation efforts, but first, a word of caution:

AI-Generated Content and Google

AI-generated content can solve some of the biggest SEO problems, i.e. scaling content creation but how safe is it to use it at scale?

Google doesn’t offer an official statement as to what their guidelines are when it comes to using ChatGPT (or similar tools) for content creation but Google is known to wait for quite some time until a practice becomes too popular and penalize it retrospectively.

Keeping that in mind, we need to rely on their existing documentation.

ChatGPT can create solid content and things are changing quickly. So far, this is where we stand:

• Most content that is created by ChatGPT can be detected as not human (and Google is confirmed to be using algorithms for that). It is quite likely though, that if ChatGPT continues to develop at this rate, its generated content will become undetectable.
• If prompted well, ChatGPT is able to generate content that is better quality than average web content. For example, it is able to produce better content than college students. Why would Google be against high-quality content if it improves the overall quality of the web copy?
• Essentially, Google states to focus on content quality disregarding how you create it.

And yet, using AI to create content from scratch may not be a good idea, here’s why:

Don’t Use AI to Write a Creative Copy (Articles)

While Google isn’t releasing a straightforward answer, they do have some solid documentation allowing us to understand what they are looking for in content. For instance, their product review recommendations explain that Google seeks to reward content that is based on the actual experience and/or expertise.

Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines (PDF) go into these standards even further by introducing the E-A-T acronym which stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It is now referred to as E-E-A-T to add “experience” to the concept.

Going back to ChatGPT, yes, it can write a great copy (and is likely to be able to produce an even better quality with each update) but it is still relying on other people’s knowledge (thousands of web documents it was using to get better). 

In other words, ChatGPT repurposes what other people wrote. It doesn’t contribute new ideas, insights or findings. What it misses (and will miss in the future):

• Personal experience
• Personal research
• Personal expertise (how you personally do things)

Focusing on these aspects when writing articles is what Google is looking for. It is how you achieve higher rankings whether you compete with other writers or ChatGPT or both.

Use ChatGPT for Generic Content

Generic content doesn’t have to be experienced- or expertise-driven. As long as it helps people by giving them additional information about a site, a page, a product, or a multi-media file, it should be fine to get AI help in creating it.

Here are types of generic content that can be generated with ChatGPT:

• Summaries, conclusions and takeaways
• Introduction to human-written content
• Video descriptions (or Youtube video summaries to use on your site for accessibility)
• Product descriptions using specs
• FAQ pages or wikis based on human-written content and research
• Promotional copy (for PPC ads or landing pages)
• Press releases

AI-powered tools like Text Optimizer can help you create semantically-optimized content that would work for any of the above purposes. Simply, submit your keyword or question, and it will use AI to generate your copy. What makes this tool special is that your copy will also automatically include semantic concepts making it more relevant to your query:

Where possible, make sure there’s a human review to verify AI-generated content is correct.

AI for Social Media Content

Social media marketing requires a lot of content created, including updates, captions and even long-form articles.

AI can make your digital marketing team’s life much easier by taking over much of their content creation workload. Use ChatGPT or similar tools to:

• Create tweets and Facebook updates based on your article (URL)
• Write Instagram captions
• Syndicate your content to long-form platforms, like Medium and Linkedin
• Compose replies to brand mentions and reviews.

Let me briefly elaborate on the final point. When it comes to positive mentions, a human being can come up with a limited number of ways to say “Thank you” but you don’t want to be repetitive. And yet, replying to those is very important to increase the number of touchpoints with your customers (as it is known, you need at least 5 of those for them to recognize your brand).

This dilemma is easily solved with AI tools that can come up with almost an unlimited amount of original phrases and sentences to thank your customers. This free Google Chrome extension helps you easily compose replies to social media messages. Simply install it and you will find its icon on top of any message that can be replied to. 

When you click it and select “AI comment”, the extension will automatically detect a message it needs to reply to. Select your tone (or type your own), and it will connect to ChatGPT to generate your response. You can copy it, paste it into the reply box, edit and/or personalize and reply. Very easy! 

This is just one example of AI tools that can be helpful for social media content. For CRM content, there are even more opportunities. For example, AI can converse with your customers in real time and then direct them to a customer support rep that better fits their questions. Both chatbot and IVR technologies are often powered by AI.

A word of caution: For negative mentions and replies, you may still want to use humans to write replies, as those need to be handled with much more caution.

AI for Content: Takeaways

There are ways to utilize ChatGPT for all kinds of content. You just need to experiment with the tool to identify those that work for you or your company. Here are a few examples:

Don’t use AI to write listicles

Lists of quotes, statistics, tools, etc. – all of these types of articles don’t always require expertise or experience to create. And yet, using ChatGPT for that will only produce yet another listicle that is no better than any existing one. 

Instead of prompting ChatGPT to write a listicle, copy-paste your list and prompt it to suggest what is missing. Do use ChatGPT to determine blind spots and find less-known items to add to your list.

Don’t use ChatGPT to create expertise-driven content

AI can only repurpose someone else’s expertise. It doesn’t have bias (which is often good for expert-driven content that offers its author’s unique perspective.)

Do use ChatGPT for:

• Writing content outlines
• Creating podcast or video scripts
• Finding more ideas to include into your existing articles
• Identifying missing steps or angles in your content
• Finding more sources to cite as further reading, etc.

ChatGPT can greatly improve your content and help productivity. It doesn’t have your experience or expertise though. Make sure you verify everything it writes for you too. Don’t forget that its knowledge base may be outdated. Plus, its content relies on what you ask it to do. 

Conclusion

AI is quickly becoming an integral part of digital marketing. Your competitors may be using it. Other writers may start using it. 

It may not be a question of choice: It is very likely that your business will have to start using ChatGPT to remain competitive.