Honestly, is content even a thing anymore?

Back when search engine optimization (SEO) and content creation were novel concepts, Bill Gates (yup, him) declared: Content is king.

His rationale was that search engines would drive more traffic to sites that delivered the best information. (Many others had come to the same conclusion, but Bill got the credit.) This spurred demand for fast, efficient, and accurate writers who understood the financial space. Not an easy ask.

However, that scenario didn’t last long, as many financial firms cheated by tricking search engine algorithms with keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing was an easy and cheap SEO tactic for creating content that worked for many smaller asset and wealth managers. Except it worked until it all went horribly wrong.

As with all things that seem too good to be true, Google and, more importantly, its users eventually flagged this junk content (for instance, finance, financial plan, financial planning, financial planner, financial planning results, certified financial planner, all used in a single short paragraph). Financial service businesses had to quickly replace it and recover from the Google penalties they received.

The skilled writers who had been kicked to the curb were welcomed back as heroes to fix the damage and craft valuable, useful, and authoritative material that investors and financial professionals actually wanted to read. Content was king again.

I share this tale because it could foreshadow the denouement of today’s battle between the content kings and emperors of artificial intelligence.

Is AI-Generated Writing Today’s Keyword Stuffing?

Copy generated by artificial-intelligence-powered tools is much, much better than the nonsensical junk that dominated the internet during the era of keyword stuffing. It is often generic, robotic, watered down, and flat-out wrong (a big concern in the financial realm, where people’s livelihoods and dreams are at risk). However, with the intervention of human writers, it’s a tool that can help smaller financial brands produce more content to be found online.

As more and more wealth and asset managers turn to AI copywriting, here are some questions to consider to avoid becoming the victim of the next keyword stuffing debacle.

Is Content Still King if Everyone can Create It? 

Think of it this way: Are diamonds still incredibly precious and valuable when machines can churn them out? Of course not. Prices have tumbled.

With the advent of ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools, brokers, advisors, and other financial professionals with limited writing experience can instantly fill a page (or more) with words because AI can scrape human and AI-created content and spit something out in seconds in a reasonably readable format.

It’s not just financial firms doing this. Every day, investors and financial professionals have become their own content creators. They pose finance and investment questions to their AI tool of choice and generate their own answers, articles, guides, and more. There is no go-between required.

If all financial firms were to turn to AI-generated content alone, as many seem to be doing with few checks and balances, content would no longer be king. It would eventually fall to the level of court jester, as it did in the keyword-stuffing days.

How can Wealth and Asset Managers Ensure Content Remains King?

Many financial service firms celebrate that they can quickly create countless pages of content, with negligible budgets and little time. Most only do cursory accuracy and compliance checks.

What they may be forgetting is that every other financial firm can do the exact same thing. In the end, what will set their content and brands apart?

The bottom line: How will a firm spending mere minutes creating its content fare against a competitor that’s producing original insights or, at the very least, ensuring its content is accurate, on-brand, and delivers value? The keyword-stuffing crisis could point to the future.

Will AI launch a vicious cycle of recycled, watered-down financial non-insights?

Currently, AI tools are doing a decent job churning out reasonably acceptable material. That’s because they typically scrape fresh, unique, human-generated content as a primary source of material to feed the beast.

But what happens when AI-generated content dominates the internet and original human insights fade? AI will be forced to source its own content, creating an endless cycle of uninspiring mediocrity.

Of course, many financial brands will still create unique material. However, at the pace things are evolving, they may soon be in the minority.

Will Internet Content History Repeat Itself?

Will a flood of mediocre AI-generated material trigger a return us to the consequences and ramifications of the bad old days of keyword stuffing? Will the race to the bottom eventually make fresh, unique content king again?

If history repeats itself, financial firms that go all-in for AI could be in for an expensive content overhaul in the near future, along with an extended stay in the Google penalty box.

AI-Generated Content Done Right

Here are four ways asset managers and wealth managers can do AI content correctly.

1. Use experienced editors, subject-matter experts, and compliance professionals to review materials. No matter how good your prompts are, AI content comes with issues. However, human intervention can transform AI writing into engaging, factual, credible, and brand-appropriate material.
2. Reserve AI for simpler content needs. AI is good at handling things like product and service pages, footer content, FAQs, headlines, basic emails, and social posts. Still, financial firms should have these things thoroughly reviewed by humans.
3. Focus on thought leadership. When AI handles content basics, companies can invest more resources in human-written material based on original financial, investment, market, and economic perspectives. Nothing — including AI — will ever replace the unique insights that genuine human knowledge and experience can come up with. Original, authoritative content sets financial brands above competitors that don’t have it.
4. Don’t be fooled by good rankings for AI content. There are many examples of poor AI content ranking well in Google. However, the sugar high doesn’t last long. Brands with high domain authority and solid backlinks typically rank high for anything they publish, even if it is mediocre. The issue: visitors will quickly abandon when they experience poor quality AI material, hurting rankings and brand credibility in the long term. In other words, keyword stuffing 2.0.

Is Content Still King? The Final Answer

While AI-generated content seems to be ruling the roost right now, financial firms that depend exclusively on it without significant human intervention put themselves, their reputations, and their search rankings in jeopardy.

What’s smarter is to leverage AI for simpler content needs while having it closely reviewed by humans. Then use the resources you save by doing this to create more authoritative original thought leadership content that will earn your firm respect, both from humans and the search engines that monitor their behavior.

Please schedule a complimentary conversation with Dan Sondhelm and the team to discuss your content marketing, SEO, and other needs.