SEO is quite important for traffic to your website. But did you know that using AI-generated content could actually hurt your SEO? Here’s why you should avoid relying on AI tools content generators if you want to rank well in search engines.
SEO Success Requires Expert Human Writers, Not Just AI
As a website owner, you want your pages to appear as high as possible in search results. This brings more eyeballs and potential customers to your site.
SEO Services helps make that happen through tactics like keyword research, metadata optimization, link building, and quality content creation.
The better your content, the more signals search engines have that your site offers value to users.
If you publish low-quality, AI-generated content, it gives the opposite signal – and may even get your site penalized.
Don’t Just Take My Word for It
“But how bad can it really be?” you ask.
Last year, I worked with a client who insisted on using AI tools to generate most of their blog content.
At first, I tried to advise against it. But they were determined to take the “easy” route. Their site had been around for a few years already and was ranking decently with older, human-written articles.
But within 3 months of switching to AI content, their traffic dropped by over 60%! Their keyword rankings tanked across the board.
When I did an SEO audit for them, all of their content scored poorly on metrics like readability, engagement, and authority. Their pages had also been hit by multiple duplicate content penalties from Google.
Turns out, the AI just wasn’t capable of crafting truly unique, high-value content. And Google’s algorithms punished the site for its low-quality, “keyword-stuffed” pages.
Luckily, after I showed them these troubling results, the client agreed to start investing in expert freelance writers again.
By removing the AI content and reverting to human-written articles, their rankings and traffic began to recover over the following months.
The Lessons You Should Learn
I share this cautionary tale so you don’t make the same mistake. While AI tools have their uses, relying on them for main website content is playing with fire. Don’t just take my word for it – here’s what the experts say:
According to Moz CEO Sarah Bird, “Google is pretty good at detecting machine-generated content at this point and knows it lacks the uniqueness, creativity, and freshness of stuff actually written by humans with knowledge on a topic.”
Plus, Google explicitly warns against automatically generated content in its Webmaster Guidelines. It states this content offers little value to users and risks getting hit by a penalty.
The reasons why artificially generated content fails from an SEO standpoint boil down to 3 key deficiencies:
- Lacks Expertise and Accuracy
AI tools can spin up articles about any topic, but they lack true subject matter expertise. As a result, the content often contains inaccuracies, shallow analysis, and flawed assumptions.
Using them to write about complex, nuanced topics like healthcare, law, engineering, etc. is especially problematic.
- Sounds Unnatural and Robotic
The writing style of AI content generators still isn’t sophisticated enough to pass as a human quality. A human reader can usually tell it was machine-written after reading just a few sentences.
The tone sounds robotic, and the passages lack logical flow. This signals search engines that the page lacks merit.
- Not Original Enough To Rank
AI applications rely on analyzing and repurposing existing content. As a result, they often end up copying or too closely paraphrasing source material.
The articles come across as derivative, not unique takes on a subject. Search engines will slap duplicate content penalties on these pages.
Read More- Rank Higher Locally in 2024: The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Local SEO
