Photo: Canva

Today, AI is a fundamental element in business operations, influencing numerous areas, including customer engagement and predictive analytics. Among the advancements in this field, OpenAI’s breakthrough in November 2022 definitely stands out. The introduction of ChatGPT has changed the face of content and SEO, injecting itself as a helpful tool when shaping winning digital marketing approaches.

Nevertheless, it is important to discuss the potential adverse effects of these technologies and their questionable influence on digital marketing decision-making processes. As businesses eagerly adopt AI for efficient content production, they also need to consider the challenges it might pose to their SEO efforts, which are key to their online presence and business growth.

Redefining Content Creation: AI’s Role in Modern Content Marketing

Businesses are seeing a revolutionary change in content generation processes driven by AI advancements. This shift alters how many companies approach their content creation initiatives for online platforms, websites, and social media.

Traditionally a task for human writers, whether in-house or freelance, the adoption rate of AI technology has introduced a new marketing dimension. Modern AI tools now have the capability to create content that closely resembles human quality, adding new opportunities for the content marketing process.

Better Speed and Efficiency

AI has revolutionized content generation, primarily by significantly improving speed and efficiency. AI-powered content creation tools can handle various content types, including articles, white papers, website content, and social media posts, at a pace far beyond human capabilities.

This technology allows businesses to generate and disseminate more content in a shorter time compared to traditional human writing processes. AI systems aren’t hindered by typical human constraints like limited working hours or creative blocks, allowing for a seamless and uninterrupted content production workflow.

More Cost-Effective

For numerous businesses, particularly smaller ones operating on tight budgets, the expense of employing a team of professional content writers can be burdensome. The emergence of AI-generated content presents a practical and more economical alternative. It significantly reduces the costs linked to conventional methods of content creation.

The quality of generated content has also gotten better with the progressive development of AI technology, providing companies with a more affordable solution to creative work without straining their budgets.

Multilingual Capabilities

When it comes to international market expansion, content generation helps with incorporating certain language nuances and cultural sensitivities. AI-powered content generators can help in this area, offering more efficient translation capabilities. This enables businesses to easily broaden their audience across diverse linguistic groups, eliminating the reliance on human translators.

A major advantage of using AI for multilingual content is the substantial time and effort saved. Traditional translation methods are often lengthy and require significant manpower, with multiple translators needed to maintain accuracy. AI significantly simplifies this process and eliminates the chances of human error.

Photo: Canva | Multilingual Capabilities

Where Does AI-Generated Content Fall Short?

While AI-generated content has its advantages, it does come with a number of limitations that businesses should be aware of before fully adopting this technology for their content creation efforts.

Falls Short When Recognizing Human Emotion

One significant limitation of AI-generated content is its challenge in capturing authentic human emotions and connections. Even though the AI tools are capable of mimicking human voice to some extent, they fail miserably with regard to conveying emotions by humans. This limitation may result in content made up of impersonal, detached, or shallow content that doesn’t mean much to the readers.

Lacks Nuance and Context

AI content creation tools, despite relying on algorithms and extensive data sets, may encounter challenges in comprehending the nuances and context of specific subjects. Consequently, there may be instances where the content generated by AI appears to deviate from the topic, lack accuracy, or fail to adequately address intricate or less familiar themes.

Overly Reliant on Unproven Data

The success of AI in generating quality content is heavily reliant on the data used in its training. Poor-quality or biased data can lead to inferior, misleading, or even offensive content. Also, if the training data lacks sufficient representation of certain topics, AI models may struggle to produce accurate or relevant outputs.

Has Negative Impacts on SEO

AI-generated content often presents challenges when helping with successful SEO practices. Quality content that is relevant and engaging is favored by search engines. Even though AI sometimes creates content that passes these criteria, it may also have negative impacts on your SEO.

Overly Optimizes Keyword Placements

One frequent issue with AI-generated content is the tendency to overuse keywords. This can lead to problems like keyword stuffing, which can harm a website’s SEO performance.

Over-optimization can be viewed by search engines as manipulative, diminishing the content’s authenticity. It’s essential to ensure that content remains natural and genuine, which is much more doable when human writers are involved.

Photo: Canva | Negative Impacts

Unable to Meet Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) Standards

Google’s latest addition of “Experience” in its existing E-A-T framework has proven the need for content that is written by experienced individuals. Because AI-created content often doesn’t satisfy all of these requirements, it can compromise search visibility and your rankings.

Potential Copyright Infringements

There is also a possibility of copyright breaches with content created by AI. Since most AI systems are based on the aggregate of data collated from a range of sources, they may inadvertently lead to copying content directly and using it in their generated results.

This presents a major problem to different companies that use ai-generated content exclusively without checking their sources.

The Relevance of Link Building in the Age of AI

In digital marketing, link building has always been a key strategy. Despite evolving search engine algorithms, its relevancy has stayed the same, primarily because it’s a reliable method for websites to prove their credibility with search engines.

Why Link Building is Still Important

The primary goal of link building is to gain attribute hyperlinks from external websites that point to your own site. These links serve various functions:

• Improving Search Engine Rankings: Search engines like Google view backlinks as indicators of a website’s credibility and reliability. By acquiring high-quality backlinks, a website can significantly improve its position in search engine results. This improvement in ranking often leads to an increase in organic traffic.
• Generating Referral Traffic: When visitors access your website through links from other websites, this is referred to as referral traffic. This traffic can also help in enhancing visibility and is likely to help generate an increase in sales or conversions.
• Elevating Brand Presence: Obtaining backlinks from high-quality websites not only increases your brand’s visibility online but also adds to its credibility. This is a larger opportunity for capturing new customers and could generate new business partnerships.

How Does AI Fit Into the Equation?

AI can be an integral part of the link-building process that can simplify different elements. However, it’s important to look at this technology as an aid for human effort rather than something that entirely replaces it. Here’s how AI can effectively improve your link-building strategy while preserving the essential human element:

Branding Outreach

AI possesses the ability to identify potential link-building prospects and even craft personalized outreach messages. However, it’s important for human team members to engage in authentic interactions with website owners and build relationships. The personal connection established through human contact plays an important role when acquiring valuable backlinks.

Streamlining Content Research and Development

AI has the capability to analyze search patterns, user behavior, and competitor content to suggest appropriate topics and keywords for creating link-worthy content. However, the human touch remains crucial in crafting engaging, shareable, and well-written content that is much more likely to attract valuable backlinks.

Helps with Quality Assurance

Although AI tools can quickly identify reputable websites and potential opportunities for link building, it is important for human team members to carefully evaluate these recommendations to ensure they align with the brand’s values and objectives.

Conducting a manual review of the relevance and quality of these websites and links is essential to maintaining a high standard in your backlink portfolio.

Formulating Marketing Strategies and Identifying Opportunities

AI can offer valuable data and insights to shape your link-building strategies. However, human expertise is crucial for interpreting this data and making informed strategic decisions.

Marketers should treat AI-generated data as a directional guide, leveraging their knowledge and intuition to modify and enhance their link building tactics.

Ensuring the Effectiveness of Your SEO Strategies

AI can be a valuable ally to link building and other digital marketing tactics, but the blend of AI with human insight is vital. The data and insights generated by AI can help in crafting your strategies and pinpointing link building opportunities. This combination helps maintain higher standards in backlink quality and contributes significantly to improving your search engine rankings.

Author Bio:

Jason Khoo started freelancing in SEO back in college, sold his first agency, and now is founder of Zupo, which is an Orange County based SEO consulting agency helping construct powerful long term SEO strategies for our clients. Jason also enjoys multiple cups of tea a day, hiding away on weekends, catching up on reading, and rewatching The Simpsons for the 20th time.