Be human in order to sell to humans

Jess says: “Be human, which is just two words, but it’s also a lot more. It sounds simple, but it’s not.

When I talk about being human, I’m talking about the fact that we’re still selling and marketing to humans on the internet. All of our optimizations and all of our SEO efforts are aimed at a human.

The middle point is Google, and that’s a robot, but the person that’s going to end up converting, buying, or doing whatever you’re trying to get them to do to make those numbers go up and to the right, is still human.

We should be trying to be as human as possible. If that includes leveraging a little bit of AI, then I’m a big fan of doing that. However, there should be editorial processes included in that because it’s not yet where it should be for a human audience. Until we’re selling to Googlebot or Bender from Futurama, then we still need to be human.”

Why and how does being human give you the edge?

“Firstly, for all those lovely Quality Rater Guidelines: the EEAT of Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust. They’re not directly in the algorithms, but they are the leading indicators, which is a big thing that SEOs and all our marketers are always touting. They are leading indicators of growth, conversion, and whatever you want people to do.

Including those and surfacing them as much as possible are human traits. You’re surfacing the fact that you’re working with a PhD, or that you are a PhD, or that you’re a forager with 15 years of experience knowing which plants won’t kill you if you eat them. That’s important and it’s human. We’re not yet at the point where you can trust an AI or a robot to decide whether or not something is poisonous.”

Does being human take more time?

“It can do. I’ve started to roll out some AI drafts of content with a few clients, to speed up that process, because writer’s block is a legitimate thing that every writer struggles with.

I like using a service called Lex. When you get a little bit of writer’s block, all you have to do is type ‘+++’ and it will help fill in some of the content. Then, you can go through and self-edit to make sure that it’s in your voice and using your tone, and it’s not saying anything incorrect – like telling you to eat poisonous mushrooms.

It helps to speed some things up, especially with content like marketing landing pages. It’s really helpful to get a first draft out there. Then, you need to make sure that your internal stakeholders are reviewing everything to ensure that it is up to snuff.”

If you’re outsourcing content production, can you check whether it has been edited adequately or not?

“It’s easier today but it is going to get more difficult as the AIs get better, faster, stronger and learn more.

Today, there are a whole bunch of services that you can use to double-check things. ChatGPT uses pretty standard before and after phraseology so, if they haven’t edited it, you’ll be able to tell. It’s less obvious when someone spends hours writing drafts and then feeds ChatGPT with so much information that it takes an hour to kick back some sort of content. That’s feeding the dragon in a more comprehensive way to get exactly what you want out of it, but most of us aren’t using it to that expert level.

At the moment, it is going to be obvious when content is written with AI because it’s pretty elementary compared to something that was written by an expert.

As SEOs, we need to make sure we define what we want out of the AIs as well. We need to know our target audience. We’re working closely with the stakeholders so we should know what stage of the funnel we’re trying to target and what kind of expertise the reader is likely to have. If you’re reaching a CEO as opposed to a tech support person, then you will use different terminology.”

Are humans satisfied with reading content that they know has been created by AI or do they want their content to be created by humans?

“Ideally the latter but, in the world we’re living in, this technology isn’t going away. As marketers, we would be remiss if we were not leveraging it to some degree. Being human, we’re also fallible. We’re stretched by time, and we’re always asked to do more and more and more. Using a little bit of AI to help with that is good.

That’s also why there always needs to be an editorial process or somebody making sure that it reads like a human. At the end of the day, you’re still selling to a human. For example, adding in a ‘What Is…’ section is dependent on what you’re actually selling to somebody. That’s usually pretty amateur and answering those questions is not often going to help you convert in the end.”

Are there any specific elements in a text that tend to be created by humans?

“Definitely. Every industry has its own lingo going on, just like SEO. When I take on a new SEO client, I’m not going to bombard them with DA PA, SERP, and all the other words that come as second nature to us.

However, the person you’re writing content for wants to see that kind of lingo in there. They understand it and it’s their language. Ensuring that kind of language is in there helps it to read properly. If you’re reading an SEO article and it doesn’t include the things that you’re expecting, you begin to suss out whether or not this person’s legitimate by the way that they write.

The first step is ensuring that you’re using the right terminology within that industry, which is where those experts come from. I’m not an expert. I say that out of the gate with all of my clients. I’m learning about their industry as much as any new person. I come in with a fresh perspective, which is cool, but I need them to make sure that whatever we’re writing comes from their perspective, with their knowledge and expertise.”

Is it important for every brand to have a set of brand guidelines, to ensure that the tone is consistent across any content that is produced by humans or AI?

“Definitely. This all leads back to traditional marketing. Every brand should have brand guidelines, writing guidelines, or tone documents. When you’re a writer, these things are a gift, and you’re able to write within these structures. Then, you can layer in SEO structures on top of that, such as ensuring that you have a TL;DR paragraph at the start to satisfy the featured snippet.

That’s another thing that we have to teach clients about. Most people don’t know what a featured snippet is. That’s our language, not theirs. It’s our job to help them layer out the content so that it feeds search engines but it also satisfies humans.

In the Semantic Web and the knowledge graph internet that we’re all moving towards, especially with SGE, that kind of knowledge is going to be more and more important. Schema, knowledge graphs, and all these things are extremely important to get that prime real estate at the top.”

Do you think that schema has peaked, and Google is increasingly comfortable understanding what’s on the page without it?

“That idea balances out the automation part of it because schema isn’t human. You’re marking things up to automate and scale that out into a programmatic SEO approach.

However, schema is still incredibly important because it’s the introduction to the knowledge graph. That’s the human part of it: building your knowledge graph and building that up for clients as well. You are making sure that you have all those checks and balances throughout the web. Some of them are really boring but that’s what we do.

Whether or not we still use the attributes and markup of schema is to be determined in the future, but the act of doing that for the humans searching the web is still going to be important.”

What elements of SEO don’t require the human touch anymore?

“Internal linking is something that I like to use tools for, and I have a couple of subscriptions. Ahrefs has a lovely tool that is getting better at internal linking, and they have a great tool for meta descriptions as well. They ran a study which showed that Google changes the meta description 60-70% of the time, and it’s dependent on the search query.

Excluding meta descriptions completely is not the way to go but automating them to see how they perform out of the gate is really helpful. Then you can start measuring the click-through rate for humans instead of robots.”

If you’ve designed the first couple of lines of text on a page for a featured snippet, could that also be used for the meta description automatically?

“You can use the same text for both, as long as they’re both satisfying the search intent for both the page and the keyword that you’re targeting. Odds are, Google’s going to change it if the user searches for something that’s also on the page but isn’t part of the meta description. They’ll try to pull in that text and make people click on it regardless. We can only control so much, as humans, but we can try to satisfy that as much as possible.”

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?

“The speed of your site is the most difficult thing to get buy-in on, it’s a long play, and Google’s changing those Core Web Vitals metrics as well.

If you have time to put in a dev ticket that can sit in the backlog for them to get to at some point (as long as you’re not in an extremely competitive market where you need every last inch of room), your site’s loading speed can wait for the time being, because there are a lot of other things that you can focus on.”

Jess Joyce is an SEO Consultant, and you can find her over at JessJoyce.com.