Can AI deliver content marketing that ranks on Google? My 100-day challenge

One of the biggest personal surprises of 2021 was discovering a new suite of marketing tools that use artificial intelligence to generate content.

AI has come a long way in recent years and I’ve been amazed at the quality of the content I’ve been able to generate for my clients and my own projects using AI.

Last year I started a small-scale experiment to see if I could create a travel blog that was written almost entirely by AI and have that page rank on Google.

I was going this mostly out of curiosity and it wasn’t something that I took too seriously.

This was an opportunity for me to learn Search Engine Optimization and play with some new content generation tools.

SEO is something I’ve never really needed to worry about with my clients. They typically get more traffic than they need.

But last year I decided it was time to look into SEO and broaden my horizons.

So I started my little travel blog and to my amazement, with very little effort from me, my AI-written blog posts (about places I have never visited) were slowly starting to rank in search results.

When COVID lockdowns hit in the middle of the year, I put the project on the back burner thinking there wasn’t much point working on a travel blog if no one could travel.

But a week ago I checked in on my Search Console results and was surprised to see that since restrictions have started to lift, the impressions and rankings were all starting to lift again.

If only I’d keep at the blog during the lockdown, the site might actually be starting to achieve something worthwhile.

Another project that I’d neglected in 2021 was my own personal website. It simply hadn’t been a priority for me. I had enough work, enough clients so this website sat dormant for the better part of the year.

Can Robots Build A Website That Ranks in 100 Days?

Well, today’s the first day of a new year and I’ve decided to see if I can take what I learned from the travel blog experience and use AI to deliver 100 days of content for this site.

I’ll talk more about my process and the tools I’m using throughout the 100 days but the two main tools I’ll be using are SurferSEO and Jarvis.ai.

SurferSEO will be used for SEO strategy, content planning and keyword research, and then Jarvis.ai will do most of the blog writing.

Given most of my marketing experience is in the nonprofit sector, I’ve had Surfer put together a content marketing plan that’s designed to help get content ranking for the keyword “online fundraising”.

My goal is to post a new blog, every day for 100 days and let the AI dictate both the content strategy as well as write the content.

Already I can see there are some blog posts that Surfer has suggested that might be a bit of a stretch, but as much as possible, I’m going to let the robots do most of the thinking and most of the work and see how this goes.

Throughout the 100 days, I’ll also post some updates on things I’ve learned along the way. And in a little while, I’ll share some screenshots from Google Search Console so you can see how these two apps have gone.