Strategies for content optimization in era of Gen AI.
3 min read
Generative AI based tools present two challenges to the content focused business. Firstly, why would people visit your website when they can ask Gen AI directly. Secondly, how can your produce high quality content that is vastly better than Gen AI generated content. In this article we will tell you how to achieve both.
SEO is an art of staying one step ahead of competition. If you have something no one else has, you will eventually come out ahead. Historically this meant following several SEO strategies that make you better than others. Such as proper headlines, well curated table of content, improved content organization and good rich original content.
Generative AI however has changed all this. Tools like Google Gemini or ChatGPT can go through entire internet for you and present you content that precisely gives you what you want. It can be very specific and delight the user. The content it produces eventually is based on multiple internet sources written by different people.
As a content expert you should aim for two things in this era.
The Gen AI tools pick up content from your webpage and not your competition.
Users would want to visit your page rather than just be happy with Gen AI provided answer.
How to make sure Gen AI tools rely on your pages ?
You need to remember that Gen AI tools ultimately rely heavily on text and text linkages. It is critical that you write your articles using standard grammatically correct English and relevant terms the user is likely to use in their prompt engineering.
Unlike purely user-focused text, you need to remember that models use your content as training data, and everything on that page eventually leads to some neural network parameters being changed. Hence, it is fine to provide details that a human reader might not be too interested in but a neural network might better understand.
Some tips:
Avoid using unusual and less used words.
Try to use common english words.
For technical terms use specific terms and also their variations.
Give extensive definitions of the terms on the same page even when you think it is obvious. You may do this as footnotes as well.
Do a spell and grammar check using Gen AI tools.
Use Images and Interactivity
One way you differentiate well from Gen AI generated content is interactivity. Gen AI is still few years away from building interactive webpages. Do not just rely on text anymore but provide detailed illustrations, animations and even interactive examples in your content. This makes it harder to generate content but the Gen AI can not beat you here.
Tools will figure out that your webpage has something useful that they can not summarize and often provide links to your webpages.
Interactivity and images means other people too will find more value on your website rather than just relying on chatbots.
When I was learning Javascript I often liked the sites that would provide a small embeddable sandbox in the webpages where I could run code directly. It makes learning more fun. - Ashley. (A student learning to code).
Content fuels generative AI.
Remember that however smart and intelligent tools like ChatGPT might seem to you, they are ultimately relying on content generated on webpages. We do not even know if these tools will ever be able to produce something distinctly original.
This means that need for content would always be there except that Gen AI would be a filter using which users might access the content you produce. Eventually, both the Gen AI companies and content companies will have to figure out a way to help content generators monetize their high quality content one way or another but until than what you need to do is to focus on producing high quality content that surfaces in SEO as well as Gen AI tools.