Summarize with AI
by Cory Wasielczyk, Digital Media Strategist, Pink Dog Digital
With the rapid growth of AI tools in the last couple of years, it has never been easier for small businesses to generate content for their websites. And, in fact, that’s sort of what we’ve been seeing happen across a wide variety of industries. It seems that everyone, from multinational enterprises to publishing empires to the plumber down the road, has at least experimented with content generation through ChatGPT or Claude.
What’s The Best Way to Improve a Website’s Google Rankings?
For as long as I’ve been a part of this industry, the default answer I’d always given for how small businesses can improve their website performance metrics was: just get more content on your website. And before AI, I think there was some merit to that approach. But these days, with a torrent of content flooding the internet so quickly that we’ve repurposed a word to describe it, I’m not so sure that more content is always the right answer for small businesses.
Rather, I want to argue that, instead of shooting for content quantity, small businesses might be better served by focusing on content quality.
Caveat: this isn’t always the right move. For a brand-new business, or one that doesn’t have a solid SEO base already, new content additions should absolutely be front and center of the content strategy.
But for those that are established and that have a few years of blogs or articles in their archives, taking the time to focus on quality may have a larger impact on performance than simply publishing more and contributing to the slop machine that some argue the internet has become.
AI is The Great Equalizer (In a Bad Way)
Much has been made of AI’s ability to bring capabilities that used to require specialist skills to people that don’t have those skills. So, for example, you don’t need to learn the craft of writing to get ChatGPT to spit out a short story or a blog article. You don’t need to learn a coding language to get Claude Code to make you an application. Why go out and buy stock images from professional photographers when you could just prompt Midjourney or Nano Banana to make an image for you?
Here’s the problem with that approach that I don’t think many people realize. AI tools like ChatGPT are probabilistic, not deterministic, in how they operate. What I mean is that when you get an output from an AI, the AI models mathematically calculate the probability of various outcomes and selects the most likely one. It does this hundreds or thousands of times for each prompt based on the number of tokens it ends up outputting.
AI is essentially a massive predictive engine. And what ends up happening when you ask AI to produce a piece of content for you is that it ends up outputting vague and generic content. It is programmed to do so, by its very nature.
Take this thought experiment – think of a spectrum of what constitutes “good” writing vs “bad” writing… doesn’t really matter who or what you put in the “bad” extreme and the “good” extreme. AI writing would fall squarely in the middle of this spectrum. It is designed to output average content because of its probabilistic nature.
Do You Want Your Website to be Full of Average Content?
Now, average content, in a vacuum, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean, it’s certainly better than bad content, right? Maybe not as good as having good content, but average content is… well, average, yeah?
But then… what makes your content worth reading, or indexing on Google, over a competitor that also used ChatGPT to generate the average content on their website? Or over your other competitor who used Claude to generate the average content on their website? Or over anyone else that used any other AI tool to make the average content on their sites?
And the scary part – what makes your average content worth reading, or indexing on Google, above a competitor who didn’t use an AI tool, and thus has better content than yours?
Okay, But What Constitutes “Good Content?”
Glad you asked, hypothetical (or actual) small business owner!
We consider content to be “good” when it either solves a specific problem or it fulfills an intent for a clearly defined audience. So, if your service page fulfills the intent of the user to learn more about your services, then we consider that a piece of “good” content.
How do we make sure we produce “good” content that outperforms “average” and “bad” content? A few ways:
1) Relevance
The content needs to be relevant to your audience and their specific needs and interests. We live in a time when more and more companies are able to produce hyper-specific content that is tailored to the specific needs of the individual user – think those emails you get from a company like Amazon with items from your wish list, for example.
Small businesses typically don’t have the ability to do that at scale, but there are definitely ways to make sure you’re addressing the needs and interests of your target audience as a whole. And your content needs to do this in order to stand out.
2) Originality
Undoubtedly, there are going to be things in your industry that are common for every business in that industry. There are (probably) standard repair procedures for a leaky pipe in the plumbing world (correct me if I’m wrong, plumbers!). Every record store sells vinyl records.
Originality is where you take your unique perspective and apply it to your content, or you communicate your unique value proposition to your audience. If you’re a plumber who fixes leaky pipes, you probably have some unique insight as to why homes in your service area tend to get them frequently. If I owned a record store (fun fact: I did, once upon a time), I would want my website to tell people that I specialize in *insert obscure musical genre* records, or that I have an extensive jazz selection, or whatever.
The point is that you have to go beyond the surface-level information and actually give your prospective customer a reason to choose you over the competition.
3) Credibility
First-party data is huge for standing out. If your business has original research that it can use on its site, you should absolutely use it.
Other credibility markers include: BBB membership, Google Review testimonials, awards, industry memberships, etc.
Your Content Quality Plan
I would highly encourage you to take a look at your content database and audit it carefully. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer.
- Is your content fulfilling their specific needs and intent?
- Does it tell them effectively why they should choose your business over the competition?
- Have you utilized insights from your first-party data?
- Have you communicated your trust and credibility markers effectively?
Every piece of content on your website needs to serve a purpose. If it doesn’t have a purpose, it isn’t really doing anything for you but take up space; and that’s the best-case scenario.
A Short Case Study – When Quantity Doesn’t Work as Planned
I recently worked on a client’s website content where they had a bunch of location pages. Location pages are great for service area-oriented businesses as they do really well to capture location-based queries in Google. The problem, though, was that they had created sublocation pages as well.
So, for example, they had a page for, we’ll say, “Plumbing Services in Hanover, MD” – this was their main location page. Then they had 5-6 sublocation pages, each one focusing on specific services within the main page. So, “Plumbing Repair Services in Hanover, MD”, “Drain Cleaning Services in Hanover, MD”, “Toilet Plumbing Repair Services in Hanover, MD”… you get the picture.
While the idea behind this approach was understandable, it didn’t end up making any sense when you looked at the Google Search Console data. The data showed that all these sublocation pages were doing was making the domain appear for completely irrelevant searches.
And I don’t have anything to prove it as of yet, but I suspect that the sublocation pages may have also depressed the rankings of the main location pages too due to a phenomenon called keyword cannibalization. Simple explanation: it’s when you have two or more pages competing for the same keywords.
By focusing on the content quality, and not quantity, I reasoned that the client may be able to see better results for their location pages. I implemented fixes, consolidated the content from the sublocation pages into the main page, and set up redirects for the old subpages to go to the main one. I’m confident that this approach will lead to better outcomes for them.
Wrapping Up
Should your small business focus more on quality and less on quantity? It depends on where your website is at right now.
If you don’t have a good few years’ worth of articles up on the site, or you’re struggling to rank for long-tail keywords or high-intent keywords related to your industry, I think that creating more content would be a good strategy.
(In fact, I’ve actually taken this approach with another client. Their former marketing agency wrote new content for their website for years – but the problem was that they wrote content for a residential audience, whereas the client works more with commercial clients. In that instance, new content that’s more focused on their desired core audience made more sense than trying to rewrite 10+ years of residential content.)
But for those with a decent archive, more content might not be the right move. Instead, a content audit, refreshing old articles with new information, and rewriting underperforming content to make it better is more likely to make an impact.
As always, if you’d like me or one of our other content experts to take a look at your content and provide some recommendations, contact us to book a strategy call!
Make Your Content Work for Your Business with Help from the Experts at Pink Dog Digital
If you would rather not juggle audits, merges, rewrites, and link cleanup yourself, we here at Pink Dog Digital can take it off your plate. We’ll review your blog, choose the best refresh targets, update or consolidate posts, set the right redirects or canonicals, and rebuild internal links so everything stays organized.
We’ve helped hundreds of businesses through the Baltimore region grow their digital presence with our complete array of content writing and SEO services; now expanded to include optimizations for AI large language models like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode.
Call us at 410-696-3305, email [email protected], or contact us through our website to get started.
