Take control over who can access your content

Emma says: “Control who has access to your content and, if you do want to give them access, make it personal and personalised.

I’m talking about search engines and AI. Obviously, getting your content in front of users is the main reason why you are creating content, and you want those users to be performing an action. Controlling how they access that content is one of the most important things that you can do.

If you are a news organisation or a journal that produces original research, for example, you now have a bit more control over which companies have access to your content – specifically, with the addition of the ability to block ChatGPT in your robots.txt file.

Back when news organisations first joined Google, were getting their news articles ranking, and had people discovering that content through Google and other search engines, they missed the opportunity to develop some kind of more formal relationship with those search engines. In return for access to that content, they could have had a monetary relationship.

There is a lot of complexity around the decision of whether you want to give access or not but, at this point, we are seeing another example of that decision absolutely needing to be made. AI companies are using that content to train their algorithms and then spit it out as ‘unique’, even though it's not necessarily unique and they are not necessarily crediting the organisation that created that content in the first place.

This decision is vital, and you need to make it now. This doesn't just impact news organisations either; every single business should be having this discussion. At a company level, and with SEOs who keep abreast of this topic, you need to decide whether you want to give access and help these AI companies train their algorithms to create this content.”

Are there any particular types of content that you should typically block ChatGPT from accessing?

“News is the most obvious one, or any kind of original research – something that might feature in an academic journal, for example. Also, event-based content. If you’re an aggregator of events in a specific niche, then it might be worth blocking ChatGPT. Of course, that is a decision that you would want to involve people other than SEOs in. Personally, I would lean towards blocking at that point.

There are also lots of different organisations that would want to take a moral stand on whether you want to give them access free of charge, or at all.”

Are there any downsides to blocking ChatGPT from accessing your content?

“Potentially, though it will depend on how ChatGPT and Google continue to grow and be used. If we start to see Google being used less, then you might want to see how something like ChatGPT or Bard develops because different companies are crediting sources in different ways.

Something like ChatGPT doesn't necessarily give credit. However, if a user asks questions like, ‘What is a good food to give my dog with a sensitive stomach?’, then you would definitely want to appear for that kind of query if that is what you provide. At a brand level, it is absolutely worth being known. Giving access, and nuanced access, to your content might be a good idea.

If you are an events company, you may not want ChatGPT to be accessing your activity listing pages. However, you might want to give it access to the marketing content on that site because you still want to appear in different kinds of searches. You probably want to be recommended in the ChatGPT results for ‘I want to run a 10k. How do I book this?’, if that’s something you want to rank for. On the other hand, if somebody wanted a list of all the 10Ks in their area, you wouldn't necessarily want ChatGPT to be able to give a good answer. You would want them to go to the site.

At the end of the day, you never really know how it's going to develop. ChatGPT might be moving in a slightly different direction and it might start citing things more. You might want to see how these tools develop and how the use of them changes.

Essentially, you want to retain your USP. You want to be able to provide people with the value your business offers. Information isn't necessarily what your business might be doing, but the service is. You want to protect and keep that, or at least be credited and cited for it.”

Why should you make your content personal and personalised, if you are giving access to it?

“With AI coming into searches a lot more, and the latest version of SGE, Google are supplementing that with a much more human feel over in the Perspectives tabs. They are also highlighting things like experience and a more personal element in the content they rank.

You've got two sides of the coin. On one side you have results that are purely informational, which can be provided by an AI tool. On the other side, the user may not trust that AI-generated information, so they want a human touch to it, so Google are building that in. We're seeing a lot of movement – from the core algorithm update that we just saw to the helpful content update that's happening now – toward making content more personal. If you want to create content and get it to rank, it's absolutely worth keeping this in mind and making your content slightly more personalised.

I don’t necessarily mean through personalisation on the site, with recommendations on where they go next, etc., but thinking about how individuals want to digest information. If you have video content and you want that page to rank, have a transcription for that content because not everybody likes video. If you have written content you might need to show images and have video to make sure that it is more personal and user-friendly for the audience that is coming to your site and digesting that information.”

Should you have some informative, factual content that’s designed to be accessed by AI, along with more personalised content elsewhere?

“Absolutely. If you have a website that targets small business owners to help them develop their business, you might have one hero piece of content that explains how to create a business plan for your startup. That business plan and that information aren't going to be useful for every type of business, so you might want to delve deeper. It’s your classic hub and spoke technique.

You might want to create content explaining how to make a business plan for creating a new product in the food industry. Then, you will provide some information from somebody who's done it before. They can offer specific recommendations or what not to do, based on their experience. That kind of information is not only going to be much more helpful to users who didn’t feel that they got what they needed from that first hero piece of content, but it's what Google are looking for now.

Google are making moves to try and be more helpful to users overall, and SEOs need to catch up. It's certainly been an endeavour over the past few years, where a lot of SEOs are saying that you shouldn’t write to try and game the algorithm. We're so past that now. We need to try to look further in the future of where this is going to go – and being as helpful as possible is absolutely it.”

Is there an ideal platform on which to publish more personal content?

“It depends on your business and your business goals. For my SEO agency, I probably wouldn't go on TikTok – although there are probably some people doing it really well. It's just not in our strategy. It doesn't make sense and I don't see my audience being there. Even though a video I upload to YouTube might do quite well, I wouldn't necessarily expect to see the same results on TikTok.

Each platform requires something that is personalised to the audience that uses that platform, and sometimes that will be the same. On LinkedIn and YouTube, people might want informational content about what an SEO agency does, or they might want to learn about SEO. Personally, however, if I go onto TikTok and see somebody telling me about SEO, I will skip it immediately.

You need data to inform you about where your audience is and what they want from each platform. On the flip side of that, if I saw an SEO comedian making jokes on TikTok, although it might be a little bit cringy, I probably wouldn’t immediately skip that.

People want different things from social media. Your video won't necessarily be applicable to each social media platform, and you need data to help you make decisions about where you should be using the content that you're creating. You don’t need to be publishing the same video on every possible platform because some people will hate you for it. That has a negative impact on your brand, so you're possibly having more of a negative impact by doing that.

However, having a YouTube video and embedding it on your page is still going to be useful (even if the data doesn't necessarily suggest that video is required) because some people might prefer to digest that through video. It won’t necessarily be the thing that gets you to rank, but giving the option to digest this information in different ways on the page is still quite useful.

Again, you need to look at your own data to see if people are actually pressing play or not, and whether that’s something you want to continue doing, but it helps you be a little bit more useful to your audience and their different needs/requirements.”

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?

“I went to a talk about link building at a conference recently. This talk would have been useful if it had been presented as the speaker having done everything that you shouldn't do, and then showing the results. Instead, they said that they wanted the business to thrive, and then they went through all of the link-building techniques you shouldn't do – from link farms to reciprocal linking to paying people. Then they showed their results from that as if that was the thing that you should be doing.

Go and read up on the modern literature and the Google Webmaster Guidelines around linking. Although the person who gave that talk did see some nice results, their results would have been a lot better if they had done things differently.

Stay up to date with the things that are happening in SEO. Every so often, you'll be surprised because Google will directly give a hint like your ability to change the robots.txt file or that some form of linking is probably not the best route to go down. Stay up to date.”

Emma Russell is Founder at Oxford Comma Digital, and you can find her over at Oxford-Comma.digital.