AI Content Workflow

The most effective way of getting recommended in AI search is to optimize and create new content on your website. This makes up about 70% of the work we do at our agency, and I like to think we've gotten pretty good at it.

However, sometimes when I explain this to prospective clients, they have one of two responses. They'll either say, oh, AI could never write our content.

We need to write it ourselves. Or they'll say, oh, you're just having AI write the content, right?

We can do that with ChatGPT. I'd like to tell you what I tell them and then give you the exact process we use to create content in our agency.

We create content for some of the most complex industries, including immigration, attorneys, cyber security, finance, education. We'd yet to find an example where we couldn't get AI creating content that's of the same quality as they can create themselves.

But it's not easy. Take time.

And if you have ChatGPT just spin up a bunch of content for you, it's very unlikely to rank, and if you're doing it at scale, it could get you penalized...

plete understanding of your company, and it doesn't have that tacit knowledge you get from experience. And so, of course, you need to give that knowledge to the AI.

You need a knowledge base. This is the first thing we do for every client.

We call it their brand ambassador, and we create this for them. It's typically about a dozen markdown files, but it might also include Pdfs or spreadsheets.

You want to provide comprehensive information on your company, on each of your products and your services, your unique value proposition, your ideal customer profile. You want to understand every important page on your website and when to reference those page.

Share information on your brand, voice what to say, what not to say. As many examples as possible of things you've written.

The canonical version of any guides or processes you've detailed. If you're having it.

Create images for your content. You want guidance on how to create images in your brand style.

Don't worry about collecting this all at once...

f the puzzle. The other half, to get an AI to write high quality content for you, are the instructions.

And nowadays, those instructions take the form of Claude Skills. First skill we use generates an article brief.

For this, we give it the topic and any other information we have. So perhaps the client has given us some notes or a voice memo, or they've done a video on this topic, and we can use the transcript.

Other times, we just have the topic. Whatever we have, we dump it in there, we give it the skill, and we let Claude go.

Claude then searches in a search engine for the term we're trying to target. It starts doing some research.

It's trying to identify a few things. One, what's the intent behind this term?

And what type of information does the searcher expect to find? We want to make sure we're matching that intent.

Two, what information do we need to collect to make sure this article is robust. That will ultimately define the research we need to do.

And 3, what insights from the client need to be incorporated into the article...

Has access to that knowledge base. That knowledge base is also helping it match the tone of voice for this specific brand.

And then once that draft is complete, we're giving it to our first revision skill. First revision compares the article to all content guidelines we created for this brand.

And those guidelines come from all previous content we reviewed and provided feedback on. Anytime we or the client had feedback on an article, all of that is getting fed back into this document.

Part of their knowledge base. And this entire step is devoted to making sure any feedback that has been received in the past is applied to every article going forward.

Then the second revision skill is a fact checker. We make sure that every factual claim in the article is backed up by another source.

We make sure we're never linking to competitors, and we make sure that every link is working and actually backs up the fact it claims to. Finally, we have a steel that extracts descriptions for any infographics we might want to put throughout the article...

Google is now ignoring the vast majority of content online. Let's talk about why this is and how you can make sure your pages don't get ignored.

So it used to be that Google included the majority of content online in their index, meaning when you did a Google search, Google was looking through most of the pages on the internet. And that's because there was a manageable number of pages.

Eventually, that number became unmanageable. And with ChatGPT and other large language models creating content, it just doesn't make sense economically for Google to index every page on the internet.

And Google understands that most of these pages are saying the same thing as another page, and there's no real value in indexing the same information multiple times. This is commonly called commodity content.

It's not adding anything new, and Google doesn't want it bloat their index. So in that case, they attempt to identify the most authoritative source of that information and only index that one...

ides your content is commodity content without even looking at the content. If you go into Google Search Console and you look at your pages report, you might find some of your pages marked as discovered, not indexed.

These are pages that Google didn't even bother to look at. They just found the URL and decided now we don't want this in our index.

There's two main reasons this might happen. The first is that Google determines it's just not the type of page people would want to find in search.

Maybe this is outdated information, you have an old year on the title, or it's like your COVID policy. Or maybe it's like a thank you confirmation page or your privacy policy.

In that case there's really no issue. You're not trying to drive search traffic to those pages.

The other situation is that Google already has content on the topic implied by the URL, and it doesn't see your website as the cop authority on this topic. In that case you gotta honestly ask yourself, do you have the authority to speak on this topic?...