Time to read: 5 minutes
AI is being used more than ever.
And while it may be tempting to go full throttle into using it to reduce the time you spend on the content for your website, paid campaigns, social media profiles, and email marketing efforts, it’s still important to have some limits in place.
Key Things to Know
- Use AI to support, not replace – AI is great for helping you curate outlines and ideas, but it shouldn’t be used to mass-produce entire website content.
- Edit and fact-check wisely – Publishing unedited AI content can lead to errors, misinformation, and potentially even penalties from Google.
- Always keep it real – Do not fake human experiences like testimonials, reviews, and personal case studies to stay aligned with Google’s guidelines.
- Leverage free AI tools – Use tools like Perplexity and Claude to better understand your audience, maintain brand voice, enhance page design, and more. With that said, here are the dos and don’ts when it comes to using AI for your content.
AI Content Dos
We know that saving time and becoming more efficient is crucial to success. Here are some of the ways you should be using AI for your content to give yourself a boost.
Do Develop, Brainstorm, and Research
AI tools can be super helpful when it comes to creating the framework for a piece of new content, aiding in topic ideation, discovering current search trends, and gaining insights into possible keywords.
Do Proofread Your Copy
Before AI, the majority of writers depended on the spellcheck feature in Microsoft Word for simple edits. But thanks to AI, and automated tools like Grammarly, most platforms can proofread content up to 3,000 words, and all you need to do is give it a specific prompt to correct tone, check for spelling mistakes, and much more.
Do Refresh Existing Work
If you already have human-written content on your site that just needs some small tweaks here and there, AI can definitely be of help. This can involve reworking sections based on user intent, updating titles, creating meta descriptions, or inserting relevant keywords within the copy.
AI Content Don’ts
While there are many ways AI can help, it’s important to recognize that it’s far from perfect, and overuse can hinder your website’s rankings. Here are some of the main things we recommend avoiding.
Don’t Generate Content at Scale
One of the top things you shouldn’t do with AI is to use it to write the content on your website. Not only can AI be full of hallucinations and other errors, but if search engines catch on that your entire website was written by AI, they may categorize it as spammy.
Not to mention, Google recently announced that its quality rater team, which is tasked with keeping search results up to the search engine’s standards, is now assessing whether a website’s content is AI-generated. This means that now more than ever having content crafted completely by AI can lead to site penalties that may see you removed from SERPs (search engine result pages).
(Photo example of spam penalty in Google Search Console)
Don’t Publish Without Editing
While we encourage you to have AI help you with content off of your website, such as in PPC ads, social media posts, and email newsletters, it’s important to still make sure the content is reviewed by a professional first, especially when it comes to fact-checking statistics and making sure included links work.
Don’t Create Fake Experiences
While it may be tempting to use AI to write testimonials, reviews, and other content related to personal experiences, you need to keep case studies and other personal anecdotes written by humans since the E-E-A-T approach (experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) is still king.
Top Tips for Using Our Favorite AI Tools
Here are some tips and pieces of advice from our team for using Perplexity and Claude to diversify what you may already be doing with tools like ChatGPT.
Perplexity
- Use Perplexity and prompt with “Tell me about the [niche] industry, its audience (potential customers), and their drivers.” This will give you some great information that you can use to create content, whether in blog posts or social media posts, that does a better job at driving business. Be sure to turn the social forum option to “on.”
- Additionally, business owners and marketers can use Perplexity’s social forum search option to understand exactly how people in online spaces talk about their offerings.
- Take this information into Claude, linked below, along with your copy, and ask for recommendations that more directly reflect user language, especially regarding pain points and objections!
Claude
- Feed relevant brand emails, notes, written content, and call transcripts directly into Claude so you can create a “language model” you can cross-reference against internal copywriting to ensure it’s written in the right voice for your audience. Otter AI is a great tool for capturing internal dialogue for you to use for this method.
- Claude is also a phenomenal design partner. Feed screenshots of your different page templates into the tool and ask for ideas on how to improve above-the-fold content or lower sections on the page as you state your goals (ex: build trust, increase conversions, have users click on internal links, etc.).
- Not to mention, certain marketing materials, such as video content, take a lot of time and resources from your team. That’s why repurposing is so important. Feed a video transcript into Claude and ask for a blog post and 10 social media posts.
