Employ AI to improve your quality, not your quantity

Joseph says: “My number one SEO tip for 2024 is to focus on quality, not quantity, by using AI to harmonise user intent and coming from the perspective of the writer and creator of a web page.”

How do you focus on quality and avoid the temptation to produce a lot of quantity with AI?

“One thing that came out with the ChatGPT craze was everybody thinking it would replace writers, and people were scared of losing their jobs. They were focused on the old world of SEO, which was creating tons and tons of content. Most local SEO agencies that we work with are compensated based on quantity – on how many blog posts they make, etc. When ChatGPT and other AI tools came out, everybody rushed to produce more quantity for free.

Keep in mind that Google’s EEAT had already been changing the algorithm for well over a year. Google’s been moving away from a spammy, quantity-based algorithm and moving towards a focus on the user. Social media now shows everything from engagement to happiness signals. Reviews show up on Facebook, Google, and different platforms now. Google is looking for what’s going to make the user the happiest, so that’s what we are using AI for.

We’re the harmonising people. If you learn a little about me and HumJAM, we focus on harmonising things. With ChatGPT we know that Google doesn’t need more content. The other thing that people are scared of is that Google’s going to replace the need for SEO altogether. People will type in, ‘How is weather created?’ and Google will provide the answer with chat. It won’t be a webpage; it won’t be that kind of thing. But, guess what? Google doesn’t need you to mass-create more information because they already have it. Eventually, AI will take care of it.

What they need is information that’s going to engage the user or reader. You can take ChatGPT and say, ‘Rewrite this from the perspective of Bugs Bunny.’ If you’re a business, you can take a children’s storybook and say, ‘Write this from the perspective of Richard Branson.’ Nobody wants boring content anymore. We’re in the information space, we’re in the social media space, and people want to be ‘enter-trained’. They need to be entertained and trained at the same time.”

Does Google want to rank content that’s purely written by humans above AI-generated content?

“100%. To get around that, we use another tool called WordAi, which we’ve been using for a long time. It’s a great tool that will take any content that you’ve written with another AI tool, rewrite it, and remove the AI signals. Once WordAi is done with it, the content will present a 98% chance that it was written by a human.

There are watermarks that can be recognised in AI content. The LLM (which stands for large language model, such as ChatGPT) is choosing next-sentence phrasing when it’s writing, which follows a pattern that can be seen by Google or another tool. If there’s a repeating pattern, we might not see it, but Google or another tool can say that it’s probably AI because of the way the sentence structure was written.

WordAi will remove that repeating pattern, so it appears more natural. We’ve tested it out and it really does make a difference. With side-by-side testing, ‘WordAi’ and ‘human’ rank about the same but ChatGPT by itself doesn’t rank that well at all. If you’re using ChatGPT, even just to reword something, try to throw it in another tool. There are many out there.

We haven’t run into a limit for how much content WordAi will produce, and we will put complete 4,500-word articles through it. If we do any AI work at all, WordAi is the last filter we will put it through.”

Do you rewrite articles from another website or are you simply refreshing your own existing content?

“We’re always refreshing our own content, not somebody else’s. Neil Patel was recently in the news because he was showing how you can take something that’s already ranking, rewrite it using WordAi, and then use that on your own page.

Some people think that’s okay and, in my personal opinion, it can be – as long as you’re making it better. If you’re rewriting it, adding more graphs, adding facts, etc., you’re taking what someone else is doing and improving it. It’s no different than what Led Zeppelin, Jay-Z, or any musical artist might do. You’re just improving it. If Google rewards you for improving it, then the original person shouldn’t be upset because you simply did it better.

Is that okay, ethically? I’ll let the readers decide. I wouldn’t personally do it, but you can.”

With this content, are you creating a new URL on your website or are you refreshing an existing article on an existing URL?

“We’re mainly refreshing existing URLs because we’re very keyword-centric in our processes. We don’t do any SEO that’s not driven by keywords, which is driven by user intent, which is driven by a dollar or a goal that we’re trying to achieve. We’re not just ranking for vanity purposes.

My partner calls the keyword ‘the treasure map’. If we rank for these keywords, we’re going to make money or get leads or whatever you need. That keyword is going to tell us if we’re already ranking. Does our website already have content on that? If it doesn’t, then we’re obviously going to create new content to fill that gap.

If there is content already, we’re going to check and see where we’re already ranking for that keyword. If we’re within the top 10, I’m going to do very little editing or updating. I might take the first paragraph and rewrite it: add two more bullets, throw it in WordAi, double-check it, and then put it on the page. I might analyse the top 10 and then make sure that I’m at least matching what the competitors are producing, which is basically a refresh or revamp of existing content.

If you want to rank and you’re on page two or page three of the SERPs, then you should revamp or refresh. We use Surfer SEO to do that but there are a lot of tools out there. It will say, ‘Here’s all the keywords you’re missing. Here are the paragraphs you’re missing.’ Then we’ll edit or update it and republish.

We might change the title, but it depends on what we’re ranking for and what the competition is doing. The slug, however, will absolutely stay the same because we’re not changing the keyword.

When we revamp or refresh, ChatGPT can add flair; it can add a new perspective and harmonise with user intent. You can add creative things like local information. You can literally say, ‘What are the concerns that homeowners with families in the Norcross area have about service technicians in the air-conditioned industry?’. ChatGPT will give you all of those very specific concerns, which makes for great content on a refreshed page in that industry.

You can ask ChatGPT flair questions, and it will help you rewrite your content to match the user’s intent. You can tell it to rewrite your content from the perspective of a specific user to make them want to engage. It could be the perspective of a homeowner, an art collector, a cartoon enthusiast, or any client’s perspective. You can even instruct it to write ‘in a way that will make the user want to engage’. You can be very specific, and it will harmonise your content with that user intent.

When Google recrawls it, they won’t see it as information-based content. It will look like experience content, which is EEAT content. It’s about the user experience. Are you making the person who wants to buy from you have a good time? That’s what AI can help you with.

You can also add video, add an FAQ, add an index that you can click to get to sections, etc. There are lots of different things you can do, but you’re just refreshing it, making it better, and bumping it up – with the help of a tool.”

Are you seeing any trends in the elements that you should be including that Google wants to rank?

“The secret one that I’ve noticed is for triggering ‘near me’ searches (which is probably most relevant to local SEO in 2024), and that is FAQs. FAQs are great additions to most content. For a local service, the first question can be, ‘What is the best [fill-in-the-blank] near me?’ Some SEOs will be thinking they’ve been doing this for years but there is a secret here if you want to be in the ‘near me’ search and trigger that really easily.

You put your FAQ at the bottom of your service area pages, and the number one FAQ question is, ‘What is the best [plumber/carpenter/main keyword] near me?’ The answer is your company, but you point to a map pin. If you put that FAQ on a service area page, then that map pin is saying, ‘We’re the best company near you’. The ‘near you’ is then linked to that service area map pin, which will get you within the top three ‘near me’ searches in the Google search map.

That’s one little secret but, to go a step further, Google loves your frequently asked questions section. Go to AnswerThePublic or wherever you can find frequently asked questions for the keyword you’re targeting, and make sure to include and answer all of them in your content. That will go a long way. Even Surfer SEO will show you those questions in your briefing when you’re updating your content. Make sure you answer them, and an FAQ is an easy way to do that.”

Can you use AI to determine the questions you need to answer and generate content based on that or is there still a lot of human involvement?

“There doesn’t need to be a lot of human involvement. I can’t tell you how many FAQ items I have saved in my ChatGPT. There are lots of helpful tools you can use. You can find browser extensions that will read a webpage and consume it into the ChatGPT database. You can tell it to read a URL into ChatGPT and then ask it to create FAQs based on that page. It will basically give you the FAQs and you can then tell it to write a paragraph answering each one of those questions.

Alternatively, you can then take your keyword and throw it in a tool like Surfer SEO and it will tell you the frequently asked questions. Grab those, throw them into ChatGPT and say, ‘Answer these questions in a unique way that would appeal to the search engines.’ You can literally phrase it like that. You could also say, ‘Answer these questions from the perspective of the owner of a plumbing company.’, or ‘Answer these questions from the perspective of Bugs Bunny.’

Your FAQ can become something that people will be interested in and stay on. Engagement is another ranking factor that’s coming into play here. FAQs will keep the person on the page looking through those questions – so will an index, intriguing videos, and things like that. Anything that gets people to stick, stay, or share is key.”

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?

“Stop doing quantity. Stop working for the sake of working. Ask ChatGPT what you should be doing when it comes to a website, an issue, a challenge, or whatever you’re working on. Having mentors and other people in your life, or reading books, can also help with that but stop just creating content.

Also, stop getting Fiverr gigs. We saw someone doing citations for Fiverr gigs and it massively messed them up, because they went and created thousands of junky citations which were then really hard to get rid of. Stop the quantity game. Google is going to get rid of that game. They’ve already been deprecating and de-indexing a lot of stuff that’s poor quality.

Up your quality game. Use the AI to harmonise that quality and write from different perspectives. Write from the perspective of the owner, and use EEAT and these algorithms to create the content that Google is looking for right now. They’re not looking for knowledge-based information, they’re looking for user-based content that a user wants to read and consume. That’s what we’ve got to start modelling our content towards, and AI can help us do that.”

Joseph S. Kahn is President and Co-Founder of Hum JAM, and you can find him over at HumJAM.com.