Don’t rely on Ai for SEO search traffic.
Last summer I set out to prove that I could write better ad headlines than Chat GPT. Remember that one?… It was me vs. Chat GPT in an epic headline smackdown.
I won hands down, but it was based on subjective criteria and it was a sample of one. Not exactly statistically convincing.
Now there’s some new data published by the marketing influencer Neil Patel that adds quantifiable data to my soapbox diatribe.
Patel’s SEO agency did a substantial, quantitative study with 68 different websites. His content team did 744 blog posts — half were written by Chat GPT and the other half were written by humans.
Then they tracked organic search traffic over the span of five months, and guess what…
Yep, the human element actually improves SEO rankings.
The “real” blog posts out ranked the Ai-generated blog posts 94.1 percent of the time. Google’s algorithm knows when you’re using Ai.
So if you think you’re improving your SEO rankings by increasing the volume of Ai-generated blog posts, think again.
More Ai posts doesn’t mean you’ll be found on Google. Higher volume does not spell higher rankings or more traffic. You have to balance quality and quantity.
And here’s something else that I should point out…
Patel reported that the average time spent producing a blog post is quite minimal.
Sure, Chat GPT is faster… Ai-generated content took an an average of 16 minutes in Patel’s test. Living, breathing writers spent an average of 69 minutes per blog post.
That’s not much time either way. Blogging, it seems, has turned into a race to the bottom in terms of quality.
In the endless quest to “always be posting” most companies are just spewing out more worthless nonsense that never gets read, much less reposted or recommended.
So if you want to differentiate your content from the competitor’s content — and your brand from all the other brands — it pays to devote some quality time to the task of writing.
The opportunity cost of taking the short cut.
So it appears that Ai-generated blog content produces lower volumes of traffic. Plus, there’s no style. No substance. No attitude. No voice worth listening to.
You get nothing that will distinguish your brand from all the rest. That element rests entirely in the hands of humans.
But there’s another bigger problem with letting Ai write all your stuff: You miss out on a lot of good ideas and big thinking.
The fact is, the process of writing generates an endless stream of ideas and inspiration. It forces you to clarify your strategy, your ideas and your message.
If you delegate that process to a machine you’ll just continue with your fuzzy thinking and your all-over-the place approach to marketing.
Ai can crank out volumes of information that already exists, but it cannot do the thinking for you.
You have to balance quality and quantity.
If you’d like to improve your content production without turning to Ai, contact me here.