Getting content to rank on Google is the holy grail for many website owners and bloggers. With advancements in AI, it’s now possible to quickly generate high-quality content. However, you can’t just blast out auto-generated content and expect it to rank.
In this comprehensive post, we’ll explore the main reasons why your AI content may not be ranking, and provide actionable tips and strategies to fix it.
Reason 1: Thin, Low Quality AI Content
Google wants to satisfy searcher intent by providing the most relevant, helpful, and authoritative content possible. Auto-generated, thin content often lacks the depth, expertise, and quality that searchers desire when researching a topic.
Instead, you need to focus your efforts on creating in-depth, high-quality AI content that provides real value. Here are some proven tips and tactics:
- Use detailed, well-written prompts – The prompts you provide are critical for producing good AI outputs. Spend time crafting prompts that provide lots of context and details about what you want the AI to write. Specific prompts result in more focused, on-topic content.
- Generate outlines first – Outlining the structure of your content ahead of time helps ensure the AI stays on topic and covers all the points you want to make. The output will have better flow and organization.
- Generate sections or paragraphs separately – Breaking up the content generation into smaller pieces can improve the cohesion and quality within each section. You can then combine them into one seamless post.
- Do some manual editing and touch ups – While AI content has improved tremendously, it still often needs some human editing to fix grammatical errors, improve wording, add transitions, and polish the overall post. Spend time reviewing and revising the AI output before publishing.
- Add your own opinions and insights – The unique perspectives and knowledge from your own experiences are hard for AI to replicate. Consider adding some commentary or analysis to make the content more engaging and valuable.
- Include images, charts, or graphs – Relevant visuals help break up blocks of text and can reinforce key points. Stock photos, data visualizations, and comparisons are great to include.
With the right approach, AI content can absolutely satisfy searcher intent and rank highly. But this takes effort – you can’t just auto-generate thin content at scale. Treat your AI assistant as a collaborator and bring your own expertise to produce truly useful, in-depth content.
Reason 2: Not Enough Content Published
Google needs a critical mass of content on a website in order to properly index, crawl, and rank pages. As a general guideline from leading experts, aim to publish at least 100 articles, preferably closer to 200+ before evaluating whether your content is ranking as desired.
With AI, it’s easier and faster than ever to create large amounts of content. But you need to be consistent and patient. Don’t stop publishing new content too early. Here are some tips to scale up your content production:
- Use content clusters – Creating clusters of posts around subtopics helps improve relevance for searches. Group together posts around themes.
- Recycle and repurpose content – Look for ways to re-work and expand on existing content. Turn old posts into new in-depth guides by adding fresh info.
- Collaborate with others – Team up with other content creators in your niche to develop content and guest post for each other. This exponentially increases output.
- Outsource if needed – If creating content in-house is too time intensive, consider hiring freelance writers to help increase your output. This provides more bandwidth to focus on promotion.
- Take advantage of AI – With the latest AI assistants, you can create rough drafts 10x faster than writing manually. Use AI to power through content at scale.
The key takeaway is to be consistent and patient with publishing before assessing whether your rankings have improved. Don’t stop creating new content too quickly – the more published, the better in most cases.
Reason 3: Lack of Authority
Your website’s authority and trustworthiness are crucial factors for ranking well in search results. There are two main types of authority to focus on building:
Domain Authority
Domain authority refers to the general authority and trust level of your overall website domain. The main factor Google evaluates is your backlink profile – the number, diversity, and quality of other sites linking back to your content.
Here are some proven tactics for improving your domain authority:
- Actively build links through blogger outreach and guest posting on authoritative sites in your niche. Aim for sites with high domain authority and traffic.
- Create truly useful, link-worthy assets like tools, research reports, quizzes, and resources that sites will want to link to and embed.
- Leverage social media to gain a loyal following of engaged users. This expands reach and surfaces your content to new audiences.
- Publish on niche forum sites, directories, aggregators, and publications. Look for opportunities to contribute valuable knowledge.
- Produce consistently high-quality content that sites naturally want to reference and link to because it provides value.
Gaining authoritative, diverse backlinks takes significant effort. But it’s one of the most valuable investments you can make, paying dividends in higher rankings, lower cost-per-click, and more organic search traffic.
Topical Authority
Topical authority refers to your website being deemed an authority on a specific topic or theme. You build topical authority by creating content tightly clustered around a niche theme and demonstrating expertise.
For example, if you’re in the running niche, zero in on trail running. Create posts that comprehensively cover all aspects of trail running – gear, training, races, nutrition, injuries, etc. Exhaust the topic with useful, in-depth content before moving on to a new topic.
This topical authority signals to Google that your site is the go-to resource and authority site on trail running specifically. Visitors looking for authoritative trail running content will consistently find your site in search results above others.
Reason 4: Poor Keyword Research and Targeting
Doing proper keyword research and targeting the right keywords during content creation is absolutely crucial for getting your content to rank.
Here are some key tips for effective keyword optimization:
- Go after easy keywords first – When starting a new site, target keywords with low difficulty scores typically under 20, and ideally under 10. Getting some quick wins will build momentum.
- Use keyword research tools – Leverage tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Keyword Planner to find promising keyword opportunities with the right balance of search volume and competition.
- Start with a tight cluster – At the beginning, focus your content on just a handful of closely related, low-competition keywords before expanding out from there.
- Avoid super hard keywords – Don’t waste effort targeting overly difficult keywords with high competition early on. This will lead to frustration without results.
- Do LSI keyword research – Identify low-competition long-tail variations of popular keywords by researching Latent Semantic Indexing keywords.
- Study competitor content – Look at keywords your competitors are already ranking for and model their success identifying easier targets.
Proper keyword research and targeting optimized content helps you gain traction and steadily rank for more valuable search terms over time. Get your initial targeting right!
Conclusion
At over 1500 words now, this post has covered the main reasons why you may be struggling to rank your AI-generated content on Google. By avoiding thin content, consistently publishing, building authority, and laser-focusing your keyword research, your rankings and organic search traffic will improve.
What has been your experience trying to rank AI content so far? What challenges have you faced? Let me know in the comments below! I’m also happy to provide any clarification or additional tips.
