7 Ways to Stay Safe in the AI Content Storm

AI content writing tools are taking over the content production and publication space by storm.

Without a doubt, using an AI writing tool such as Jarvis and Frase makes it easy for publishers to write and publish long form content quickly.

But it is important you must realize that this isn’t an exclusive advantage. AI writing tools have lowered the barrier to scaling up content production.

In the years to come AI written content will flood the digital space. This makes separating your site – your content – from the clutter increasingly difficult.

So, what’s the solution?

In this article, I’m going to share 7 ways in which you can not only stay relevant but also stay ahead of the brewing AI written content storm.

Let’s get started.

Use Custom Images

The first thing you can do to stay ahead of AI written content is to use custom images.

AI content publishers either ignore images all together or use stock images.

Search engines don’t assign much significance to stock images because it doesn’t help the algorithm establish how distinct the information on the page is.

However, custom images complementing the information on the site help your content stand out from the rest. As a result, search engines attribute more value to your page than to a page that uses stock images or no images at all.

In addition to helping your content stand out from AI written content, custom images also provides protection against copycats.

How Custom Images Protect You Against Plagiarism

To protect your content from plagiarists, watermark your custom images.

I’m not talking about using a tiny watermark on the corner. You must have a watermark over your entire image.

Plus, you must include frequent references to your images within the article. To do this, use phrases such as “Like you see in the image below” or “As you can see in the next image”.

By referencing the images within the article, copying just the text would not make sense.

An if anyone is stupid enough to copy your watermarked image, then you can easily take them down with a DMCA claim.

The most difficult part of the DMCA claim is to establish that publishers copied the content from your site. But if you have screenshots where publishers have used images with your watermark on it, you can easily prove your ownership.

Include Videos in Your Content Production Cycle

Here’s something interesting: while researching SERPs for various SEO projects, I have seen ‘how to’ pages ranking for ‘can you’ queries.

Let me ellaborate.

If the answer to a ‘can you’ type query is ‘yes’, then ‘how to’ is the next search the user would perform. Therefore, Google directly serves the ‘how to’ article in response to a ‘can you’ query.

Here’s what’s more interesting:

Videos seem to be Google’s favorite way of answering these ‘how to’ queries.

Therefore, if you find a ‘how-to’ query that doesn’t have a video or has a generic how to video, then you have the opportunity to capture the top spot on the SERP.

Here’s what you can do:

1. For any ‘how-to’ query in your niche that is underserved, create a video on YouTube.
2. Optimize the title and description of the video to match the query you’re targeting.
3. Create timestamps for each step in your video. For each timestamp, write a 3-4 words naming the step. Once you do this, YouTube will automatically create chapters corresponding to those timestamps.
4. Provide a link to the page on your website in the description of the YouTube video. This will establish the connection between the video and the page.
5. Embed the video on the page on your website for that query. Doing this will establish a link between the page and the video. Note: when you embed the video on your page, make sure it doesn’t affect the loading time.

By following these steps, your page has a great chance of beating AI generated pages that aren’t using videos.

Using Videos in Non-How-To Contexts

You can also use videos for articles that aren’t how-to articles. Here are a few examples:

1. List Posts: In this case, instead of creating chapters for each step, you can create chapters for each element in the list.
2. Question-Answer Posts: For such posts, you can create chapters for each question related to the topic you’re covering.
3. Product Review Posts: Videos with chapters covering each aspect of the product you’re reviewing can help your product review page stand out.
4. Product Comparison Posts: A video with chapters for each product as well as the over all comparison ties in well with product comparison pages.
5. Buyer’s Guide: For such posts, you can make video covering each aspect of the product the buyer must consider.

Quality Advantage

At this point, the quality of the video isn’t an important factor for ranking on Google.

Even low-quality but highly informative videos rank on Google – but there’s no guarantee it will do well on YouTube.

So, if video isn’t a part of your content strategy, I suggest you get started.

Build Databases and Fact Sheets

Let’s get this straight – at its core, Google and all other search engines scrape information from your site, process the information, and then serve that information in response to search queries.

While we may think that scraping information is the most critical and resource intensive part of the process, it is not.

Making sense of all that scraped information is the most challenging part.

Once the algorithm can make sense of the information, it can compare the information to all existing sources around the information and assign a ranking to the page.

Thereafter, serving the information in response to a search query is relatively easy to do.

Why Search Engines Find Databases and Fact Sheets are Finger-Licking-Good

Natural Language Processing is a body of knowledge and practices that help machines make sense of language.

Although Google’s capability to process natural language is growing at a mindboggling pace, the algorithm isn’t good at comprehending language the way we do.

But, do you know what the algorithm’s are extremely good at?

Interpreting structured data. Structured data is data presented in a pre-defined method that search engines can recognize and process.

Presenting information in a form that machines can easily understand lowers the processing load on the search engine. This reduction in load directly translates to saving money.

Therefore, by using structured data, you can save Google money. And in return, the search engine rewards your page with high value.

Using tables is one of the easiest ways to use structured data. So, if you have the opportunity to present any information on your topic in the form of a table, use it.

Building a database or creating a fact sheet is a quick, clean, and practical method to leveraging structured data to curry the search engine’s favor.

And guess what: AI writing tools cannot create databases or fact sheets!

What is a Database?

A database is a table with a header row. The header row labels an attribute. Each row under the header row contains the value of the attribute for each labeled column.

A table containing the name, email address, and phone number is an example of a database.

What is a Fact Sheet?

A fact sheet is a a table that has a header row and a header column. A product specification is a good example of a fact sheet.

For example, if you look at the specifications for a laptop, you’ll find a table containing information such as processing speed, RAM, and storage capacity. The row header describes the information and the column header describes the attribute.

Are there other forms of Structured Data?

Yes, you can check various schemas available on schema.org for more information about other types of structured data you can use you your pages.

Added Benefits of Using Databases and Factsheets

Databases and fact sheets become a ready reference for content publishers in your niche. Therefore, such pages become a backlink magnet.

Creating data-rich pages can help you generate a ton of organic backlinks.

Use FAQs – Factually Answered Queries

I typically use AI writing tools to help me get over my writer’s block. Once the tool gets me started, I take over and use my own experience and expertise to write the rest of the article.

A major gripe I have with AI writing tools is that they are extremely poor at generating factually accurate answers.

I was writing an article on scoring 700+ on a standardized test. But the information the AI writing tool generated catered to general advice on preparing for that test. As a result, I had to reject that information and write the article based on facts and personal experience.

So, if you want to gain an edge over publishers who use AI writing tools, target factually answered queries.

A factually answered query is any query that requires a high degree of specificity.

Let me elaborate.

While cookie-cutter responses can satisfy some search queries, a generic response may mislead or in some cases harm the searcher.

(Note to Tabitha: I could use an example from your experience to highlight this fact.)

Yes, I admit it takes the search engine algorithm a lot of time to identify and remove factually incorrect information, Google will eventually get good at it to protect its commercial interests.

(On a side note, there’s been some speculation that Google is paying Apple to not develop its own search engine. Nothing has been proven yet. But, I believe market forces will force Google to adapt and prioritize accuracy of the information it provides.)

Therefore, writing responses to factually answered queries can help your page gain more value in the eyes of the search engine.

Using Factually Answered Queries (FAQs)

You can either have an entire page dedicated to answering factually answered queries or you can have a section on a page devoted to this purpose.

While creating the section or the page, you can use the FAQ schema to present the answers in the form of structured data Google can understand.

We’ve already spoken about the importance of structured data in the previous point. So, I highly recommend learning and implementing the FAQ schema.

Leverage Site Architecture

I’m a big fan of MasterChef series. But what’s a cooking competition got to do with SEO?

Well, if you look at the way things are organized in the MasterChef kitchen, you’ll see that everything is easy to find.

In every setting, the contestants are under a lot of time-pressure. Fortunately, the kitchen organizes everything so that contestants don’t spend time hunting around for the right equipment, utensil, or ingredient.

In the same way, search engine crawlers are under tremendous time pressure. Here’s what I mean:

Estimates reveal around 1 billion gigabytes of information is added to the internet everyday. And the search engines have to keep track of all these changes.

So, like the MasterChef contestants, the search engine crawlers don’t have a lot of time to go around.

But, does your site architecture make it easy for the crawlers to access and process the information on your site?

Let me share an easy way to check this.

One of the core principles of organization is keep similar things together.

In SEO-speak, this translates to keeping information that goes together… well, together.

You might have heard of this concept as content siloing.

Advantage of Content Siloing Over AI Written Content

AI written content works at the level of an individual page. And even in that regard, it has several limitations. And as explained in the points above, I’ve taken advantage of those limitations to outclass AI generated content.

However, the biggest limitation is that AI writing tools keep you limited to what you can do on the page itself.

So, if you think beyond an individual page, you’ll see ways to outrank AI generated content.

Using content silos is one such method.

While hundreds of publishers may compete with your content at the level of the page, almost none would have thought about what to do a the next level – site architecture.

I’ve seen sites with thousands of pages. But there’s no internal linking, sitemap, navigation, or any other semblance of good site architecture. These sites are easy to beat on the long run.

What’s a Good Site Architecture?

Here’s the simplest way to implement good site architecture:

1. Create a primary page.
2. Build 3-4 secondary pages to prop up the primary page.
3. If required, build 2-3 supporting pages for each secondary page.

After building the pages, use links to connect the pages. There are three types of linking strategy you need to use:

1. Parent to Child Links: These are links going from the parent to the child. For example, these are links going from a primary article to a secondary article; or these are links going from a secondary article to its supporting article.
2. Child to Parent Links: These are links going from the child to the parent. For example, these are links going from the support article to it secondary article; or these are links going from a secondary article to a primary article.
3. Navigational Sibling Links: These are links going from one secondary page to other secondary pages; or these are links going from one supporting page to other supporting pages under its secondary article.

I’m writing an article and a video explaining the how-to of placing these links within an article. I’ll link it here once it is ready.

Start Clustering Queries Around Topics

Clustering queries around a topic goes hand in hand with building good site architecture.

The primary goal of clustering queries is to identify which queries belong together in a silo and then identifying the relationship between the queries.

I’ve seen three ways in which people cluster queries. These are

1. Keyword Approach: In this method, you select a core keyword and identify every query containing that core keyword. Typically, you would identify the queries by looking at the people also ask section and the related searches section of the SERP.
2. Experience: In this approach, you rely on your experience and your knowledge about the target audience to intuitively list and arrange the queries.
3. Reverse Engineering: In this approach, you can use the SERP to identify queries and then check whether they are related or not. This is a more refined approach than the keyword approach is.

I use reverse engineering to collect, cluster, and organize queries. Let me explain how:

First I compile a list of queries related to a core keyword as discussed in the keyword approach.

Next, I compare each query in the list to every other query in the list to see how similar the SERPs are.

For instance, if I see that two queries have 80% of the articles on the first page in common, then I know that the two queries belong in the same article. I’ve explained in detail how to build a content silo using clusters in another article. You can read it for more information.

Here’s an example of what an organized cluster looks like:

how much do lilac merle french bulldogs cost [0]
├── how much are lilac merle french bulldogs [10.0]
│   ├── how much does a lilac merle french bulldog cost [9.0]
│   └── how much is a lilac merle french bulldog [9.0]
├── how much are merle french bulldogs worth [7.0]
│   └── how much is a merle french bulldog worth [9.0]
│       ├── how much does a tri merle french bulldog cost [8.0]
│       ├── how much is a merle french bulldog [8.0]
│       └── how much does a blue merle french bulldog cost [8.0]
└── how much is a rare french bulldog [5.0]
    ├── are blue brindle french bulldogs expensive [8.0]
    │   ├── why are grey french bulldogs so expensive [5.0]
    │   ├── what french bulldogs cost the most [8.0]
    │   └── what is the most expensive kind of french bulldog [8.0]
    ├── what is the most expensive type of french bulldog [7.0]
    │   └── what color french bulldog is most expensive [10.0]
    │       ├── how much are rare blue french bulldogs [7.0]
    │       ├── are merle french bulldogs more expensive [7.0]
    │       ├── what is the most expensive color of french bulldog [10.0]
    │       ├── what color is more expensive in french bulldogs [10.0]
    │       ├── what color french bulldog is the most expensive [10.0]
    │       ├── how much is an isabella fluffy french bulldog [4.0]
    │       ├── what color of french bulldog is the most expensive [10.0]
    │       ├── which french bulldogs are the most expensive [8.0]
    │       ├── what is the least expensive color of french bulldog [8.0]
    │       └── what are the most expensive french bulldogs [9.0]
    │           └── what kind of french bulldog is the most expensive [9.0]

Note: I’ve generated this list programmatically. Doing this manually is nearly impossible.

Advantage of Query Clustering

In addition to propelling you above publishers who use AI writing tools, query clustering requires advanced data and analytics – and specialized knowledge.

This means that not many publishers would be able to replicate this strategy. Thus, you’d be miles ahead of people who are not even thinking about site architecture and query clustering.

Pro Tip: Using Heading Vectors

One of the major challenges I’ve seen my clients facing is – how should I write my heading tags.

While the query clustering and siloing obviously helps, heading vectors are an important concept that I see almost no one talk about.

So, what are heading vectors and why are they important?

What I remember about vectors from my engineering classes is that it has something to do with directions. The good things is – that’s all I need to know.

The heading’s vector is the direction the heading is pointing to. If you have a heading called “What to Feed Hamsters”, that heading is pointing in the direction of hamsters.

Now, for search engines to recognize the content on your page, you must have all your heading vectors pointing in the same direction.

So, “How Often Do Hamsters Need Feeding”, is another heading pointing in the same direction.

And if you have another heading called “What to Do in Case of Emergency”, the heading does not signal a clear vector. Therefore, you must re-word the heading.

Audit On-Page SEO, E-A-T, and Vitals

These are general housekeeping measures. But they are pretty important. Many mass-production content factories don’t run a tight ship. So, I suggest you look at all these aspects on your site as a way to distinguish your site from the rest.

On-Page SEO

A lot of people have been talking about on page SEO and this topic has been beaten to death.

But despite a lot of people knowing what on page SEO is, I don’t see many people implementing this properly.

They might use a tool like Yoast to tick some boxes and think that the page is optimized.

But they don’t get the whole philosophy of on-page SEO.

The philosophy of on-page SEO is to place tell-tale information at places where the algorithm is looking for it.

What do I mean by tell-tale information?

Tell-tale information is information that can help the algorithm identify what the site is about. And the algorithm looks for this information at certain places:

• H1 and title tags
• H2 tags
• Opening paragraph under each heading tag
• Opening paragraph before a list or a table
• Meta information such as title, description, alt text, caption, and filename for images
• Anchor texts for links pointing to the page
• First 100 words

So, the goal of on-page SEO is to have your primary query present at all these places so that Google can recognize what the page is about.

Now, you may be thinking – isn’t this what Yoast does? Well, Yoast does do some of it. But the takeaway here is that you don’t need Yoast to tell you this.

Once you know the philosophy, you can put yourself in the algorithm’s shoes and easily audit whether you’re sending the consistent signals to the algorithm.

I’m working on a comprehensive and advanced tutorial on doing on-page SEO the right way. I’ll link it here once it is ready.

E-A-T

Oh, boy! There’s been a lot of talk about E-A-T. But I take the information directly form the source: Google.

If you read Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, you will find information about E-A-T on page 19 and 20.

But to save you some time, I’ve read the entire guide and here are a few actionable steps you can take with regard to E-A-T:

1. Create an About Page: Before you say, “No S*it Sherlock!,” let me explain what you need to include on the about page:
   1. Purpose of the Site: This is the reason why your site exists.
   2. Person Responsible for the Site: Who is responsible for the information published on the site.
   3. Owner’s Background: If the site is related to a profession that requires a formal degree to practice, does the owner have the necessary credentials and experience to provide reliable advice on the topics related to the profession. If the site is not related to something that doesn’t require a formal degree, does the owner have the necessary everyday expertise build through life experience.
   4. Owner’s Contact Information: You must provide a clear method of reaching out to you. This can be through e-mail, phone, or contact form.
   5. Author Information: If you are the owner but aren’t publishing the articles under your name, then you must provide the information covered in point 2 and 3 for the author. This information must be made available as an author bio under each article.
2. Join a Professional Body: Each industry has organizations where you can enroll and have your name featured as a member of that organization.
3. Collaborate with Experts in Your Niche: Find meaningful ways to collaborate with people in your industry to help establish connections.
4. Compete for Awards and Prizes: Some competition are open for people to participate in. Winning prizes can help you establish your credentials.
5. Submit White Papers: You can publish white papers and give it away to people in your industry so that they can share the information on their web pages.
6. Contribute Guest Posts: Write for other prominent players in your industry.
7. HARO: Provide information to reporters writing article related to your expertise.
8. Get Certified: Getting a certification is much easier that getting a degree. But make sure the certification is recognized by the industry and that the certifying body maintains an accessible database of people with the certification.
9. Build Presence on A Social Media Platform: Create an audience on the social media of your choice.

By taking these extra steps to establish your E-A-T, you can insulate your site from publishers churning out AI written content.

Vitals

Make sure that all the sections of the core-web vitals section on your Google Search console are free of errors.

The main things to consider are page loading speed and mobile friendliness. In addition to this check whether all your pages are accessible to crawlers.

Also, make sure you’re site doesn’t have backlinks from spam sites.

Conclusion

At the end of writing this article, I felt a strange sensation – what if I do all the things above AND use AI writing tools!

That would be an awesome sight… or should I say – site.