With the rapid rise of AI-driven content in the past few years, the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT seems to be the final nail in the coffin for Google to finally address the elephant in the room, what’s their take on AI?

In a recent blog post, the company discussed the implications of AI while also announcing their own AI, Apprentice Bard, to try and take back the market share that ChatGPT is eating up. 

Understanding Google’s Content Analysis

Contrary to popular belief, Google doesn’t outright ban AI-generated content. Instead, it focuses on eliminating poor-quality content from its systems and hinders it from ranking. Generally speaking, AI content on its own doesn’t provide a lot of useful information compared to an actual human writer.

Because of this, you won’t see AI content ranking over actual high-quality human posts. But this begs the question, how do search engines like Google look at quality in the first place? There are always obvious SEO ranking factors, such as having an engaging meta description, great titles, inserting images, etc. 

However, if you think about it, inserting a few images or changing your meta description doesn’t lead to your content ranking immediately. Instead, it's a culmination of a few key factors that can truly take your content to the next level.

In Google’s case, this is classified as E-E-A-T, and this is expanded to:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

So, if you want your content to rank, you’ll have to focus on E-E-A-T, which the search engine has just recently updated as well.

Focusing on E-E-A-T: The Key to Ranking

Now that we’ve established that E-E-A-T plays a primary role in the likelihood of your content ranking, how does one go about improving it? Here are a few key factors that you must integrate into your site, your content calendar, and your SEO process.

Create an Authoritative Profile

We’ve often seen websites that publish great content but have no indication as to who wrote them. While this may seem like an innocent flaw, Google appreciates content that shows strict ownership by a certain individual or entity.

More evidently, that particular owner or entity should have some affiliation or reason to post that content in the first place. For example, an author with a filled-out bio, profile picture, links to social media websites, and clear indications of expert knowledge about the subject matter is expected to produce higher-ranking content.

Therefore, do not add all your articles under the same author, provide credit where it is due, and don’t create umbrella accounts such as Editorial Team, which seem to be all-encompassing. 

Here’s the Aloha Digital way of setting up profiles on a blogging site with multiple writers:

• Each writer on the blog should have their own profile
• Each profile should include a profile picture and links to active social media accounts
• Social media accounts should post information related to the content the writer talks about once in a while
• A writer should write content about a certain domain/niche, they shouldn’t cover everything
• Writers should portray their expertise in their bio and have a certain sense of attachment to the niche in question

While this can be quite a pain to set up initially, it pays off in the long run. In fact, setting up author profiles and adding relevant profiles if you haven’t done so already is a sure-shot way of increasing your overall impressions and clicks.

Focus on People-First Content

The primary purpose for you to create content should be to add value for your readers, not to manipulate search engine ranks. This means that practices such as keyword stuffing, inorganic backlinks, falsified information, and unclear answers can lead to your site actively losing rankings.

So, when you take a look at your content and your site in general, here are a few questions that you should ask yourself:

• Does my content create value for a reader?
• If someone reads my content, do they learn something at the end of the day?
• Is my content easy to read, and does it flow naturally?
• Is my content free from any stylistic errors or spelling mistakes?
• Is the content present on my website factually accurate? Or does it contain information that may not necessarily be true?

If the answer to all of these questions is yes, congratulations, you have a website that’s producing engaging, user-first content. If not, you’ll have to sit back at the drawing board and think of a better content strategy.

To help ease your woes, here’s the Aloha way of writing a piece of content from start to finish:

1. Find a piece of content that an author is genuinely interested in and has expert knowledge about
2. Analyze the competitors, find out what information they have and what their gaps are
3. Conduct your own primary research utilizing personal expertise as an asset
4. Draft up an outline that contains the headings and particular keywords that make sense for that particular search intent
5. Create the initial article, add images, headings, and relevant external and internal links that provide value to the user
6. Perform a grammar, punctuation, and style check alongside ensuring that paragraphing is done accurately such that the content is easy-to-read
7. Publish the piece and wait for it to top-rank on Google!

Stay Away From Obsessive Automation

According to Google, there’s a thin line between actually useful content created through automation and one that the company considers spam. Since there’s no real way to assess what kind of content you’d be producing, we recommend staying away from automation. 

Instead, focus on the key factors we’ve mentioned above and try to create content that’s meant for people above all else. While search engine manipulation may seem to work in the short term, you’ll end up losing all your hard work once you are flagged as violating Google’s policies.

Final Thoughts

Google’s definitely cleared the air when it comes to content and its recent debacle with AI. While there are no outright bans, it is clear that human-made content that focuses on author expertise is favored. Therefore, make sure that your content provides value to the reader, isn’t overtly stuffy, and tries to answer search intent in the best way possible.