SEO
3 Ways To Safely Embrace AI-Generated Content & Opportunities
This post was sponsored by SE Ranking. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Wondering how to best integrate AI into your marketing workflow?
Unsure which parts of your content creation strategy can be safely delegated to machine learning?
You’re not alone.
While 46% of business owners resort to AI to craft internal communications, 30% of them are concerned about misinformation AI can cause and 33% are worried that AI implementation could lead to a workforce reduction.
Still, the demand for high-quality content continues to grow, and at least 12% of businesses are turning to AI-powered tools to optimize their content writing process.
The SE Ranking team is no stranger to AI.
We’ve been actively integrating this AI-powered Content Marketing Tool into our team’s workflow to create compelling SEO copy that outperforms competitors in search engines.
Important note: we have no intention to replace our human writers with AI. Instead, we use AI for creating more content than we ever could without AI assistance. We hope to finally test all the ideas we had for a while but never had a chance to implement because of a lack of resources.
Let’s dive into how these AI tools have helped us every step of the way:
- AI Writer, which is based on GPT neural networks.
- Extensive content optimization capabilities.
But first, let’s share why 44% of businesses are using AI technologies now, and why 56% are not.
How Missing AI Opportunities Right Now Can Leave You Behind In The Near Future
The market for Generative AI is booming, with market size expected to reach $51.8 billion by 2028.
44% of respondents adopted AI content writing.
Myth
52% of experts believe that automation will displace people from their careers.
That fear is the main reason why people are refusing to try out new technologies.
Fact
AI writing offers numerous benefits to marketers, giving them access to high-quality content at scale and at low cost.
If you need to produce high volumes of content in a short amount of time, such as product description pages or blog posts, AI can help you get ahead without the need to raise capital.
The earlier you incorporate AI tools into your workflow, the faster you will gain a competitive advantage.
Now is the best time to learn how to capitalize on these tools, while everyone is learning at the same time.
The usage of content automation tools and AI is just a skill, not a replacement, and we will show you how to master it.
So, let’s see how automation with AI tools works during each step of the content writing process.
How To Automate Your Workflow With Content Writing Tools
The content creation process starts with topic research and then includes the following stages:
- Brief creation.
- Content writing.
- Content evaluation.
- Additional optimization.
Each of these steps is time-consuming and requires you to focus on different variables during the process.
Here’s how to automate your writing routine with the help of SE Ranking’s Content Marketing Tool.
1. Build Briefs Faster With An AI Tool
Estimated Time Savings: 20 minutes vs 2 hours
First things first, let’s talk about brief creation.
Step 1: Set Up Your Content Parameters
Start in the Content Editor.
Select your parameters, including your target keywords, which you can choose with the help of the Keyword Research Module.
Then, the software analyzes the top-ranked content on the selected topic.
Step 2: Select Your Relevant Competitors For Automatic Analysis
To help inform your smart brief, choose all relevant competitors from the list based on:
- Total traffic.
- Domain trust score.
- Page trust scores.
- Total number of referring domains.
- Word count.
- Website visibility.
Depending on the pages you chose, the tool recommends:
- Content length.
- The number of media elements to use.
- Terms to use (and their placement).
All of these recommendations play a crucial role in helping web pages rank higher.
Step 3: Select Your Must-Have Keywords
This AI offers you a list of natural language processing (NLP) terms. NLP algorithms will look for these terms in your content to prove their relevance.
SE Ranking prioritizes terms based on how top-ranking pages use them in their texts and how well these pages perform in the SERP.
You can also go through the list and hand-pick the terms that you feel are the most appropriate.
The next step is content structure.
Step 4: Confirm Content Outline Structure
SE Ranking’s Content Editor shows how competitors structure your texts.
While you can add your competitor’s H1-H6 headings to the SEO technical assignment, content writing best practices require you to use them as a reference to create your own structure from scratch.
With AI owning the creation of a smart, data-driven content writing brief, you can save valuable time, allowing you to focus on ensuring your content is as strong as possible.
2. Delegate Content Writing To AI
Estimated Time Savings: 1 hour vs 3 hours (or more if you had writer’s block)
When the brief is all set, you can choose to pass most of the writing routine to the GPT-powered AI Writer within the Content Editor, as we did here.
Step 1: Add Your Keywords From Your AI-Generated Content Brief
Once you transfer your terms from your brief, AI Writer will generate different types of content using your target keywords.
Step 2: Automatically Get A High-Engagement Headline & Rough Draft
Once you input your keywords and voice, you can use the writing assistant to generate:
- An intriguing headline.
- Text structure.
- A rough draft of your content piece.
Step 3: Quickly Edit A Near-Complete Rough Draft
In our example, we were surprised to find that we loved the first paragraph generated by the AI Writer.
However, we ultimately decided to put it in the Summary section, since what it wrote included the main things we wanted to emphasize in our text.
We also felt like changing one sentence in it.
To do this, you just need to select a piece of text and ask the AI writing software to rephrase it:
Step 4: Evaluate The Content
Now that our first draft is finally ready, it’s time to do some editing and polishing.
To make it easy, AI can help you:
- Evaluate its content score.
- Check the text for grammar.
- Uncover spelling errors.
- Determine uniqueness.
This is to ensure that the piece is of high quality and can win our competitors’ traffic.
In our example, here’s how we used the Content Marketing tool for this purpose.
AI Content Score
SE Ranking’s Content Score offers valuable insights into how your content stacks up against the competition in terms of quality and impact.
It also provides hints on which adjustments can help your copy perform better. The tool also scans texts for common grammar and spelling errors to ensure that the content is professional and error-free.
Here are the results we got:
AI Plagiarism Checker
Another useful tool is the plagiarism checker.
Plagiarism is a serious issue that can damage the reputation of any website if not handled properly.
But with the help of this tool, you can be sure that every piece of content you’ve created is completely unique and of the highest quality.
Thankfully, that’s our overall uniqueness score. 100%! What a relief!
Step 5: Don’t Worry About Job Replacement
As you can see, AI does not remove content creators from the responsibility of creating work.
Your business and teams are still in charge of all the produced pieces, including text quality, trustworthiness, data, advice, and so on.
Whenever you use an AI writer, it’s important to fact-check and verify any information that the system provides you with. AI cannot determine which information is true and can generate misleading and inaccurate content.
3. Optimize Content For Better Search Performance
Estimated Time Savings: 30 minutes vs never getting a click from Google
You might have noticed in the screenshot above that the first draft of this text received a Content Score of 51.
Naturally, the results should be better if we wanted our content piece to be visible in the highly competitive SERP environment.
Step 1: Follow The Automatically Generated Recommendations
Follow the tool’s recommendations to improve the score, which, in this case, includes:
- Increasing the word count.
- Adding some images.
- Integrating suggested terms into the copy.
As a result, we managed to increase this text’s Content Score to 66.
3 Benefits Of Using SE Ranking’s Content Marketing Tool
First and foremost, AI content tools save time.
By automating many of the tedious tasks involved in content creation, such as researching the topic and generating briefs, and crafting the copy, an AI writer frees up time for writers and content managers to focus on more high-level tasks.
With the help of the Content Marketing Tool, we crafted the copy four times faster and spent minutes instead of hours creating the brief.
AI Writers are an incredibly cost-effective alternative to hiring more content writers to manually create content. Automated content creation can help you fulfill your content needs and quickly generate high-quality results.
Improved quality: AI tools don’t just help you save time and money; they also help to produce copy that is more SEO-friendly. By understanding which keywords your audience is searching for, as well as the keywords that search engines expect to see in your text, you can make sure your content is being seen. AI writing tools also help you keep your content on topic and focused, ensuring that your content is concise and convincing.
Considering AI as your teammate and delegating some of your tasks to it will help you build new skills in using AI for your work and leverage the technology’s potential. If you’re looking to automate your content creation process, our Content Marketing Tool can be your go-to solution. The platform’s AI can also provide suggestions and feedback so that writers can refine their work and produce higher-quality content.
The fact of the matter is this: AI-powered content creation solutions are the future of content creation. As the market continues to grow, businesses that embrace AI tools will be better equipped to create high-quality content efficiently and effectively. At this point, not using AI solutions is like washing dishes by hand when there is a dishwasher. You can do it, but why bother?
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by SE Ranking. Used with permission.
SEO
How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO
Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.
If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.
However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.
Ways to Optimize Older Content
Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort.
Refresh Content
If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.
Rewrite Old Blog Posts
When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely.
This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.
Delete Old Blog Posts
You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it.
Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.
Promote Old Blog Posts
Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.
Which Blog Posts Should You Update?
Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit.
Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.
If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings.
Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic.
With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.
How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO
Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.
Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.
Conduct New Keyword Research
Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic.
Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too.
Look for New Ranking Opportunities
When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it.
Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags
If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags.
Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:
- Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
- Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
- Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made.
Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page.
Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags.
Replace Outdated Information and Statistics
Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.
Tighten or Expand Ideas
Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more.
Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:
- Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
- Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
- Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
- Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
- Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
- Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
- Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.
Improve Visuals and Other Media
No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality.
Update Internal and External Links
Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.
You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.
Optimize for Conversions
When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years.
So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.
Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post.
Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.
Key Takeaway
Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions.
By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero