Proprietary data keeps content ahead in SEO

Like many organizations, there’s a good chance that proprietary data doesn’t feature in their marketing strategy very highly, due to the expense and the lack of speed in getting data driven content on the web. With the advent of Chat-GPT and other LLM (large language model) AI technologies automating content production, the web has just become even noisier.

A noisier web is both a threat and an opportunity. In terms of the threat, the quality standards of the content for the web as a whole have just decreased as companies look to AI to lower the costs of creating and publishing content. 

The deluge of lower quality content will undoubtedly present challenges to searches like Google on how they must dedicate more resources to processing the added reams of content before finding useful content that will satisfy the most demanding audiences.

Navigating Google’s crackdown on AI content

Google made significant strides to update its ranking systems in 2022, introducing algorithms such as the Broad Core Update, with the goal of reducing unoriginal and unhelpful content on Search and keeping those levels low. Earlier this year, Google announced that it would apply the valuable insights it gained from that process to the March 2024 core update. 

This will see the core ranking systems refined to identify web pages that were created for search engines instead of people, offer poor user experience, or are generally unhelpful. Google expects to see unhelpful, low-quality content in Search reduced by as much as 40%, meaning less spam, scaled content created to manipulate search rankings, site reputation abuse, and expired domain abuse in results.

An example was made of Causal.app which used AI to scale 1,800 articles from a competitor’s sitemap to reach traffic heights of 490K visitors per month in 7 months before Google penalized them in January 2024.

AI is accelerating best practice SEO towards data-driven content

For businesses to stay ahead, their website would do well to make use of proprietary data to make their content stand out from the cornucopia of noisy content on the web. 

As more semi to fully automated gets published on the web, which is mainly an amplified version of the copy-paste practices that went on before, the merits of such data will be much more obvious because it’s to the conversation in a value adding way by being original. 

Of course the use of proprietary data for writing content is nothing new. For decades, marketing teams working in brands and PR agencies have commissioned surveys with sample sizes of a few thousand, for gravitas and to generate proprietary data so that the brands would receive editorial coverage. AI is merely increasing the importance of data driven content.

Enter Polly to thrive in the GenAI era of search

The beauty of AI is that it also brings opportunities. While it has scaled the problem of copy paste content blogs, new technologies have emerged to make the web better. For example, Advanced Symbolics Inc. (ASI) created askpolly, an AI platform which has taken survey data to new stratospheric heights.

Unlike conventional approaches which are relatively incredibly expensive to gain a sample size of 2,000 for survey data, askpolly will deliver answers to surveys with sample sizes numbering in the millions, in any country and globally, quite inexpensively such is the power of their AI. 

askpolly is using AI to synthesize the opinions of people across the web giving it extensive reach and representation. Who wouldn’t want to know what people are really thinking? How valuable would your content be as a result?

This use of AI is most welcome, because it means brands have the means to stand out from the competition on the web in a much more powerful way and be rewarded for it by the search engines via SEO.

You may consider the time to embrace this form of AI is now, as proprietary data will help your company’s SEO stay ahead of the competition. 

About Andreas

Andreas Voniatis is an SEO expert, published author of Data Driven SEO, and founder of Artios. For over a decade, he has specialized in data science and AI for online marketing. His expertise in SEO, data science, and cloud engineering has helped some of the world’s biggest brands, including Amazon, Trivago, Lyst, and ON24, get ahead in search. He continues to look for new ways to leverage data-driven SEO to maximize ROI.