Put the human and the author first to differentiate your content

Lidia says: “Embrace and accept that AI has changed the economics of content. Being able to create loads of content that meets user intent and responds to high-search-volume queries is no longer a competitive advantage.

Differentiation is key. You either have to provide the best possible content and understand your audience the best, or have an extremely recognisable brand. Creating content is just table stakes now. Anybody can go and ask ChatGPT to write content for them.

This is not necessarily a negative for good SEOs. If your whole strategy has revolved around copying whatever the top 10 ranking people are doing and regurgitating it into a blog post of your own, then you are in trouble. However, if you’re creating strategies that put the user first, then you can really benefit from the flood of bad content we are about to see on the web and differentiate yourself by making truly audience-led content.”

How do you put the user first when you're creating your content?

“It's not just the user, it's also the author. Imagine the massive sludge of AI-generated words.

Recently, I was part of the Blue Array Academy Summer of SEO giveaway, where a lot of people applied to get a scholarship for a Blue Array course through me. I decided that I wanted to read all of the applications and go through them.

So many of them were written through ChatGPT and they didn't let the human shine. I read those applications about ‘how passionately they feel about their training’, and it was very obvious that there was no human behind it. The applications that actually touched me and ended up successfully receiving the scholarship were the ones that told me a story about them – with a genuine, unique differentiation of the human that was talking to me.

You can use AI for content repurposing, editorial tasks, improving readability, and even creating the content in some cases – if you're doing very good user research, to begin with. However, you need to be speaking from a human to a human. Try to bring out the particular opinion and specific anecdotes and examples that your subject matter experts have. Make that shine through in the content. You need to strike a delicate balance between brand voice guidelines and the tone of voice that these people have. Make your authors shine.”

Can you prompt an AI to create more human content, and incorporate things like anecdotes within the text?

“You can, if you give it those anecdotes. If you don't, it’s going to be using the same ones that everyone else is getting. This is more evident when you're working at scale.

When I was reading all of those applications, when I read the first one that was created by AI, I thought that person had put a lot of work into it. Then I read the next one, and it was the same, and the next one was the same as well. They had the same structure and the same tone. They had literally just copy-pasted the list of questions from the application into ChatGPT and it had regurgitated those same standard answers.

I create some of my social media content through ChatGPT because it helps me scale my own content repurposing and content distribution. What I do, however, is prompt it very clearly and use examples of my tone of voice and previous content to say what I want to say. I give it instructions like, ‘Be friendly, be approachable, be warm, be helpful.’, which are all part of my unique tone of voice.

Everybody has their own tone of voice and their own inflexions when they speak. Personally, I get very excited, I make a lot of faces, my voice goes up and down, and I convey a lot of emotion when I speak. A generic, unprompted, plain AI is going to be outputting boring sludge. However, an AI that's been prompted to be funny in the way that I'm funny, or that's been shown my humanly written content before, can output something that replicates my tone of voice. You can create good content through prompting an AI, and you can even create content that channels the human.”

Do you need to be thorough and not rely on the AI to create content without input?

“It’s not just about being thorough. Anybody can prompt it thoroughly and offer it a very extensive, detailed list of facts that they want to incorporate. You want to brief it to speak like you and have a voice. Brief it to replicate the things that make your voice unique, and brief it to let your human experiences shine.

I work with a ghostwriter who interviews some of my subject matter experts so that we can accelerate the amount of content by subject matter experts we're creating. Instead of dedicating two weeks to writing something that they're not good at writing and don't want to write, they dedicate one hour to get interviewed by my ghostwriter, and 20 minutes to review the content. I had to brief my ghostwriter to speak in the first person, as if they were the author, and to not remove their anecdotes and specific examples from their extensive working experience.

You don't just want to describe the type of content they’re working on or their theory on multi-site CMSs. If you have an expert who's had one mishap they'd like to talk about, don't remove it just because it's not on the brief. It's adding colour. Include that human element in your content strategy, whether you're creating it with AI or with something else. Bring the human author into it.

In a year's time, I might be using an interviewer or a reporter who asks the questions, and then a transcript AI that identifies key phrases and structure and transforms it into an article. That's going to take a lot of prompting, a lot of prompt engineering, and a lot of work. Maybe I'll still be using a ghostwriter in a year but I don't think I will in 3-5 years.”

What is the role of schema now?

“I use schema markup in combination with AI, and that's really fun. To put the human at the centre, for the sake of both the author and the reader, I like to highlight my author's expertise. In order for their expertise and their author bio to be as EEAT-friendly as possible, I give them a template, they fill out some questions, and I build out a very EEAT-friendly bio.

I have a GPT-driven engine read those bios and output knowsAbout schema and detailed person schema that includes their qualification and their job role. If I just published that, it wouldn’t do great. It does not pass validation standards at all. It needs an extra layer, so I go on to schema.org validation and I tweak the JSON because it's making that up, for the most part. I tweak the JSON and feedback the warnings and errors from the schema validator into the AI until the schema is perfect.

This is my very first iteration. When I manage to do it at scale, it’s going to be huge – and you can do this for authors. You want to nest that author's schema into the article so that search engines don't have to jump to the author's URL to explicitly learn what they know about and their EEAT. Nest it into the article and be as explicit as possible with your schema.

Then, in the article, you can also combine different tools and different uses of AI to output what this article is about using schema. That combination of AI, the expertise of the author, and schema markup is going to really win for you in 2024.”

Are you using ChatGPT natively for this or is it in combination with other software?

“You can use the ChatGPT API within a piece of software that you write yourself. You can connect the API to systems that you're making for yourself, which is what I'm doing. If you want to do it at scale, then that’s what you should do. There is some third-party software that can approximate this, but I'm not currently using it at the moment.

You can also ask for help. I married a developer, so I will bring him over and ask him to install Node.js for me or how to get my Python going. With a little bit of curiosity, perseverance, and some assistance (especially free assistance), you can get those apps running.

Something that people don't understand is prompting over prompts. When I was developing tone-of-voice guidelines for my personal brand (for me, as a human), I fed it a bunch of articles as examples. However, if I were to re-feed all of those articles to the engine every time, I would run out of tokens or it would become too costly to run the API. You can tackle this in many different ways but there are two that I prefer.

First, give it your content and ask it to create a prompt for itself that would make it speak using your tone of voice guidelines, then it does, and you can just copy-paste that prompt rather than inputting those articles each time. Once it's outputted the prompt, you can also ask it, ‘What fragments of the text did you use that were most relevant for creating these prompts?’ Then, you take those fragments and you now have two layers: the prompt and the fragments. With both, you can ask ChatGPT to integrate them together so that it provides its own examples of your tone of voice.”

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

“Stop writing content for the sake of writing content. Search volumes are a guideline but a lot of the searches that happen every day are completely new. You need to understand your audience and what they need – and talk to them. You can even use AI to interview them and extract key phrases from that conversation. Make the content that they say they need, not just the content that has volume.

Don't sacrifice quality and helpfulness for quantity. Maybe reduce the number of blog posts that you think you're going to write from 10 to 5 – and make those 5 better researched.

If you have started in an organisation that already has thousands of articles that don’t really get much traffic, then evaluate why those articles aren’t driving profit. First, figure out why that content is not performing and classify it into groups based on the cause. Is it very outdated? Does it not matter anymore? Put that in a group. Is it not performing because it's not optimized? Put that in another group. Is it not performing because the search intent for the query has shifted, but it performed in the past? Also, what does ‘not performing’ mean? Is it not performing organically? Do people navigate to it from the site? Does it get any engagement? Does it get any links? You want to know all of these things.

Out of that information, you can make informed decisions on what to do for each group. If the search intent has shifted, you might be able to rebuild the content to fit the new search intent. If it's not optimized, you can try to optimize and evaluate it in three months' time. Take the right approach but understand why that content isn’t working first.

You might find that somebody has started writing nonsense content that's not related to the core concepts of the brand. They might just have created it because it had high volume. In that case, you want to map what the brand is about. What is the core product? What is the problem that the product solves? What is the audience that you are solving this problem for? What other problems does this audience have? That would become your content universe. Anything that doesn't fit that content universe needs to go.”

Lidia Infante is a Senior SEO Manager at Sanity, and you can find her over at Lidia-Infante.com and at sanity.io.