Developing a killer SEO content strategy? Don’t forget the humans in the wake of AI

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has unearthed opportunities for content to be created at a scale and pace beyond human ability. By the end of 2024, it has been predicted that data creation will reach 147 ZB (zettabytes), versus 64.2 ZB in 2020 and that 30% of content from large organisations will be synthetically generated.

Amid the explosion of AI-generated content, the debate rages on about the human role in content creation. I’d argue that not only is human intelligence (HI) equally as important as AI, it’s integral to the success of impactful and effective SEO content strategies.

50% of consumers can spot AI-generated content and, as a result, 52% become less engaged. Given the aim of content marketing is to capture the attention of, inform, answer questions and engage with a brand or organisations target audience, this is not a good start.

Google is fine-tuned to detect and remove low-quality, automated content. This tells us something significant: if content is being created, real people must be prioritised.

The starting point is defining who the content is being created for.

It’s not, and should never be, search engines. Understanding your audience and their search behaviour is fundamental to SEO. Google is looking more to human signals and helpful content to demonstrate trust and authority. Those brands that do this have a greater chance of winning in search engines.

Using both first and third party data, combined with search and social data, enables a brand to get a rounded view of who their target audience is. This creates informed content strategies that attract, inspire, educate and move people to purchase.

Added to this is having insights into how the target audience searches for content i.e., What sorts of questions are they asking when searching around brands, products or topics? And how do they physically search, type or talk? Aligning your content with user intent increases visibility and qualified traffic

And then where do they search? Older audiences use Google, younger audiences prefer social platforms like Instagram or TikTok. SEO keeps a brand’s attention pinned to Google, but it’s important to expand the remit and ensure we take insights from these social platforms to inform the content strategies holistically.

Forget search engines, think human first – successful content is aligned with the audience’s needs and search intent.

Google’s ranking system rewards original, high-quality content that demonstrates EEAT: expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness – so this focus is giving value to people.

This is why AI-generated content on its own could undermine SEO. Human writers draw on personal experiences and creativity to craft engaging and unique content. AI lacks these subtleties, producing content that feels inauthentic. This drives down its value and its ranking.

AI can still be used to generate ideas or improve the speed of your content delivery. But this should be balanced with human intervention in order to uphold content quality and ensure it’s delivering unique value to audiences.

AI-generation must be tempered with human oversight

In a digital world, seeing a piece of content authored by a real person carries weight. Yet something that’s seldom mentioned in SEO talks is the people writing the content.

Why are authors important? Because Google’s quality ranking formula (EEAT) looks for signals around the levels of experience and trust in your content – but it doesn’t like pages created purely for SEO. Highlighting that you use knowledgeable, trustworthy authors is therefore a great way for brands to show Google they are delivering EEAT content.

Authors should be clearly spotlighted to demonstrate EEAT

When it comes to authors, it’s time to swap your SEO hat for a PR one. What’s their digital footprint? Does Google know they exist? Whether a brand has high-profile experts or not, it needs to make them famous in the eyes of Google.

This can be achieved in a number of simple ways. For example, giving them a dedicated bio page that details their experience. Including links to internal and external content that they’ve authored. Clearly stating their names on content bylines, author sections and any relevant pages. And Implementing person schema on article and author pages. This helps web crawlers understand the page’s author and how trustworthy they are.

Signposting to the content authors gives a brand’s SEO strategy a higher chance of winning because Google rewards the human aspect. If a brand doesn’t have the right authors on board, tools like Muckrack and Ahrefs can be used to find authors who can be brought in under licence.

It’s clear that content creation demands a more human-centric approach than ever before. It’s not the AI that’s important – it’s the HI signals that consumers crave and Google rewards. That’s the key to delivering value and ranking well on search engines. And that’s what makes a killer (impactful and effective) SEO content strategy and programme.

The simple fact is that humans give content authority, making it relatable and trustworthy. Using AI to produce content improves scale and pace, not quality. In the wake of the AI revolution, a killer content strategy must put humans first.

Article originally published in Prolific North.