Attention lawyers, dentists, Realtors and other businesses: Google may force you to “E.E.A.T.” your words if you’re using ChatGPT

 

I recently ran into a former client and discussed how his business was recovering from the pandemic.

“I was doing great,” he said, “until about two weeks ago.”

If you’re a lawyer, Realtor, dentist or any other type of small to mid-size business and recently started using ChatGPT for your website, you better pay attention to his story.

Turns out this former client just saw his website ranking take a nosedive, and all of his blog posts written since February have been de-listed.

The culprit? ChatGPT.

Or, more appropriately, the “misuse” of ChatGPT.

Here’s what he did …

'I thought it was OK …'

This attorney was a client of mine for about four or five months back in 2017. A former English major, he dabbled in SEO, paid a pretty penny to have someone design his website, then contracted out my bespoke blogging agency to handle his content. We wrote eight blog posts every month for him.

But he was also a self-described “cheapskate,” so we eventually parted ways when he decided to return to handling the content himself.

Of course, he wasn’t as consistent as we were, as he cranked out about two to four posts per month, but they were lightly optimized (mostly with short-tail, hard-to-rank-for keywords), and he kept at it for years. Sure enough, he eventually saw his agency rank on the first page of search results.

Then ChatGPT was released to the public near the end of 2022, and all hell broke loose for writers and clients alike. Suddenly, clients decided to take a “do-it-yourself” approach to their marketing efforts, whether it was social media, blog posts, email marketing or even monthly newsletters.

And the attorney was no different, telling me he “… was probably one of the first to convert all content to ChatGPT full-time.”

He knew the content wasn’t perfect – “It was pretty close, though,” he said, “or at least I thought it was OK” – and he knew he had to check everything and look for any incorrect facts, stats, etc. After all, he is a lawyer, and there could be legal implications if he inadvertently publishes misinformation. So he typically spent “like, a minute or two, max” cleaning up the content and ensuring there were no legal issues before publishing his posts.

The problem is that he wasn’t doing nearly enough to satisfy Google.

E.E.A.T. your words!

He noticed the problem a few weeks back when going through his analytics, a rarity for him. He was checking on a particular post that had received decent traffic, but what he saw instead made his heart drop: The view count went from steady to a steep decline to a 0.

But that wasn’t the only one.

“It was one of those afternoons when I needed a stiff drink,” he said, “because every post I had written for, like, the past four months either saw a severe drop in view counts or was showing a ‘0.’”

Of course, it didn’t take much detective work to realize what had happened.

“It’s that dang ChatGPT,” he said. “This can wind up costing me clients.”

All of this could have been avoided.

About two weeks after ChatGPT was made publicly available, Google came out with an update to its E.A.T. guidelines. Now, it’s “double-E-A-T,” or E.E.A.T., which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

To be clear, E.E.A.T. isn’t directly part of Google’s algorithms; however, it’s a vitally important ranking factor that significantly influences a website’s visibility and credibility. This holds true for various industries, including but not limited to lawyers.

Of course, I explained to my former client, all industries should prioritize adhering to these guidelines. Still, it’s particularly true for the legal, medical and healthcare professions, financial institutions, news outlets, and any business providing information or services that fall under the category of Y.M.Y.L. (Your Money Your Life).

The reason is simple: That type of content can directly impact someone’s well-being.

Given the potential consequences of inaccurate or misleading content in these areas, businesses and professionals in these industries must establish high levels of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness in their online presence. By aligning with E.E.A.T. and Y.M.Y.L. practices, these businesses can improve their search engine rankings, build trust with their target audience, and ensure that their information is reliable and beneficial.

Unfortunately, I told the attorney, it’s next to impossible to meet all those guidelines using ChatGPT, no matter how amazingly effective your prompts are.

So, what now?

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for DIYers still recovering from the pandemic.

You can still get away with utilizing ChatGPT to help you write while following all of Google’s guidelines. And if you buy JakeGPT’s “The Rigdon 2.0” prompt, then the output (the copy ChatGPT produces) will be as close to human as you’ll find, meaning less time cleaning it up before publishing it.

Either way, you should treat all AI-produced content as a first draft that will likely go through several layers of copy editing before publication.

Then you need to review the post and see how to adhere to the E.E.A.T. guidelines. Chances are, it’ll only take you a few minutes to add those elements to your blog post.

In fact, that’s all my client needed to do; his ChatGPT-assisted content from the past four months wasn’t terrible, but most of his blog posts didn’t provide the user with enough value because they lacked those crucial E.E.A.T. components.

I later showed my former client what a blog post created with A.I. and other digital marketing tools should look like. Our content goes through several layers of (human) editing and revisions and includes all those crucial elements that Google and other search engines seek.

But the best part? The same tool costing so many writers their freelance jobs can be used to “fully” optimize their blog posts. That includes the actual research that went into the keywords, the headline and SEO grades for the post, and all those easily forgotten foundational SEO elements, such as your meta description, your Alt tags and even a suggested new link for the content that’s optimized. That’s because it’s much easier, faster and more efficient to provide clients with that information now, thanks to all the new tech.

However, some businesses are now taking the opposite approach; instead of scaling back their content or trying to handle all the writing themselves, about 40 percent of our current clients have said they want the expanded SEO package, which includes all those elements mentioned above, along with AI-generated art and the blog posts’ accompanying social media posts.

You see, the blog posts my former client published didn’t have any of those elements; hence, the zero ranking for almost everything he’s written the past four months.

In fact, these days, he’s no longer a “former” client.

“I learned my lesson,” he said. “I won’t be handling my content on my own again any time soon.”

#ai #chatbot #GPT4 #promptengineer #promptengineering #aiprompts #generativeai #llm #blogging #blogger #contentmarketing

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JakeGPT is the owner and operator of JakeGPT1973.com, an AI-powered digital marketing company based in Carrollton, Texas. Email him at jakegpt@jakegpt1973.com. Click here if you’d like to learn more about JakeGPT’s DIY SEO services or its newly expanded optimized blogging services.