AI Content For Your Dental Website?
Here’s why it’s lazy and a bad idea….
Along with most of us, you’ve probably marveled at the capability of AI and how it can effortlessly generate text, images and even video from just a few simple commands. Extremely useful right? Well no doubt AI has some very handy applications and is great for making some routine tasks very simple, but there are other areas where its use can be unexpectedly problematic – one of these is generating content for a dental website or blog. So why is this? Let’s jump in and take a closer look.
Why is AI content bad for your website or dental blog?
On the face of it, using the wonders of AI to generate lots of content for your website certainly sounds compelling and a great idea. After all, search engine optimisers often tell us how great content can bring lots of website visits and help to propel us up the Google rankings – so easy peasy then? Well, unfortunately not and the main reason why it’s not, is down to Google.
Google’s main aim is to return the best answers for questions that users ask when using their search engine and they do this by surfacing web content which achieves that in search results. For example, the dental websites which they consider to be the most useful and authoritative are typically promoted to the top of the ranking results and hence get lots of traffic for their owners.
In an effort to differentiate good websites from poorer ones, Google has developed and finely tuned algorithms to index and “understand” website content so that it can be best matched to user’s search queries. As part of this incremental algorithm development over the years, Google has become extremely adept at recognising unique, compelling content and promoting it, while at the same time relegating poorer content.
You can probably see the issue here? If everyone is using AI to generate content and then publishing it on their websites, how is Google ever going to determine which of it is actually worthy of being top of the web rankings – it’s not even unique in the truest sense of the word. So we can see why they are skeptical about AI content and taking a stand to relegate it where it’s found.
A new challenge for SEO
When AI first appeared lots of SEO practitioners saw it as the Holy Grail for creating content and boosting web rankings for the client’s websites. In fact, before Google started to get hold of it, they certainly had some success. There are even tools which have been developed and which are still on sale today, specifically designed to generate ‘SEO content’, for example to create lots of similar local web pages designed to rank for slightly different keywords. While this might sound very clever and worth a shot, it definitely isn’t, so please don’t do it! Also make sure your SEO team isn’t doing it either. We’ve seen it increasing in the dental website community over the last six months or so and it’s bad news; so don’t get caught out.
Google is cracking down on AI SEO content – do it properly
Bottom line here is that Google doesn’t like AI content used for SEO purposes and it’s relatively easy to see why. Don’t be tempted to try the AI approach as Google is already getting very good at spotting it and the results of a website demotion are pretty hard to claw back. There is no doubt that great content that is unique and compelling for users is very useful for SEO, but please generate it properly i.e. write it yourself or have a bona fide content writer do it for you. Simply put, don’t fill your website with content which Google effectively now sees as spam. You’ll definitely regret it when Google catches up with you and demotes your website, often irretrievably, in the search rankings.
If you’d like to know more about SEO or perhaps you’ve been at the wrong end of “dodgy” SEO done by another dental marketing agency, please get in touch with the Dental Media team for a no-obligation discussion and fact-find on 01332 672548.