I'm taking on a challenge to see if I can get to the top of Google's search results with AI-created content in just one hour.
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Additional SEO Resources
I Tried to Rank #1 on Google in 24 Hours to Prove a Point ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlNIHl92b3k
These ChatGPT Hacks Make Digital Marketing WAY Faster ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ7LEJQzfNM
Will AI Tools Kill SEO? ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zojOvpZ83gE
SEOs: Do this to make Google's algorithm love you ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngekIXiFN3s
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There's a lot of talk about whether Google likes AI content or not, especially because of their rules on spam. So, we're diving into an experiment where we'll use ChatGPT to try and rank #1 on Google in less than an hour.
We’ll share the whole process, from picking the right keywords to tweaking our content for that top spot on Google. It's all about finding out if small changes can really lead to big wins.
Watch the video to see if AI-generated content can really win the top spot on Google's SERP.
#rankingoogle #rankingoogleinanhour #chatgpt
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You might think that Google hates AI content
because they have an entire section on it in their spam policies. But the keyword here that often
gets missed is "spammy". In fact, I think they love AI content
when it's used in a very specific way. I'm going to prove it by ranking #1 in
Google, surpassing some of the biggest sites in the world using just AI content. In fact, I'm going to do it in less
than an hour starting... now. Alright, so the way we're going to rank #1 is to go
after a keyword w
here there's a Featured Snippet. And the only real thing you need to qualify for
a snippet is to rank in the top 10 for that keyword. So let's go and find those keywords. I logged into my free Ahrefs' Webmaster Tools
account, went to the Organic Keywords Report and set a couple filters to find
featured snippet opportunities. And after a minute of work, I had over
7,000 keywords to choose from. Okay, so my game plan is to Google some of
these keywords and choose one where I think the current sni
ppet can be improved. And I was going to make some minor edits to
our post using content generated by ChatGPT. And so, I'm thinking like 15 minutes
of work – max. And then from there it's just a waiting game to see
if Google thinks that our page deserves to rank #1. My hopes were high and spirits were even higher. But it was then that I remembered
what happened the last time I tried this… There's a hole in my plan. The last time I tried to make small edits
and shortcut my way to #1, it didn't wo
rk. And basically, I had to rewrite an entire
article in order to win that snippet, which by the way Google referred to as "epic tips". Anyway, I obviously don't have enough time to do
a full rewrite nor do I trust ChatGPT to do a full rewrite. And more than anything else, I just really
don't want to make the same mistake again. My stress levels were on the rise. And with time ticking away and no hope in
sight, it felt like I was on the express train to Fail town. But after a moment of success,
two questions
popped to mind that would set me on the right track. Ok… so what if last time actually wasn't a failure? But rather, I didn't give Google enough time
to give credit to those small changes I made? And what if… what if rather than optimizing
for one keyword, I did it for a whole bunch until my time ran out? I've gotta try. So back I went to the organic keywords
report to choose my keywords. And because there were 7,000 to choose
from, I made a few rules for myself. Rule #1. Our blog
post needs to be
a good match for the query. For example, this page ranking for "create an affiliate
program" is a perfect match for the keyword. Our "Affiliate marketing for beginners" guide isn't. So, disqualified. Rule #2. The page that owns the snippet
has to have a similar or, ideally, higher level of authority than our website. And that's because people love
to comment with things like: "This is never going to work for 99% of websites. Ahrefs has one of the highest domain authorities". "It
's worth mentioning that Ahrefs
has high domain authority." Yeah, we do… but so do all of our competitors,
including Wikipedia that has a DR 96! And yeah… I'm definitely going after Wikipedia. We have a DR 91 in case you're wondering. And Rule #3. Our pages can't have ranked recently in
the featured snippet for an extended period of time. So again for Pagerank, the last time we had
and held the snippet was like 7 months ago. This way, I'll know that a sudden #1 ranking
for a sustained period of
time would have been because of my work, and not luck. So after 15 minutes, I'd chosen
10 keywords to go after. It was time to call in my team of writers. And by writers… I'm talking about ChatGPT. Alright, so the first keyword
I have is "marketing funnel". And it looks like HotJar owns the snippet here
and it's clearly a definition or paragraph snippet. So I'm actually going to copy this definition
and go to ChatGPT and I'm going to say: "I want to win the featured snippet
for the query "market
ing funnel." HotJar currently owns it with this definition." And Paste. "This is the definition from our page." And I'll copy and paste that into our chat. "Now make ours better." And I couldn't believe the definition it gave me... The definition is like a full blog post. No one wants to know this. This is terrible. I thought this would be a homerun win. I was even planning to scale this to the
7,000 plus eligible keywords on our blog! We'd get a vertical spike in traffic, I'd share it
on our Yo
uTube channel, and everyone would subscribe because they'd know that this
is the place to learn digital marketing. But all my dreams shattered – from a single prompt… And a single prompt is the very
reason why this didn't work. Okay, so I remember reading in OpenAI's
API documentation about system roles… and I can't find the exact snippet,
but just look at their code samples. They all define a system role like, you are a helpful
assistant, a personal math tutor, or an HR bot, and you have access
to files to answer
employee questions about company policies. Now, I'm not an AI expert or an engineer,
but what I think a "system role" does is it adds context and expectations to the conversation. Like what makes a featured snippet "good"? ChatGPT and I gotta align ourselves here
so we're playing from the same playbook. And once we're on the same page, it's only
then that I can ask for a snippet optimization and expect something, maybe, decent. So in an attempt to set context and expectations
,
I asked ChatGPT to tell me the different types of Google featured snippet?" And the first two types were exactly
what I wanted to optimize for. I decided to start with definition
snippets, so I asked it: "What makes one definition snippet
better than the other?" And ChatGPT outlined a checklist of criteria. Now, because I agreed with most things said,
I didn't ask for modifications or provide any further suggestions. I needed to start editing these posts
because I was racing against time. So I
gave it my first target keyword, the content
from the snippet, and their entire page's content for additional context. I also told it my goals, gave it our full content,
and asked why HotJars is better than ours based on the criteria we established before. And the justification was decent. Now it was the moment of truth. "ChatGPT, Can you rewrite my
definition to be better than hotjar's? Explain why it's better using
our 7 point criteria as support." And with only 35 minutes remaining
I saw so
mething unfamiliar… hope. Alright, so this still isn't perfect, but it's way
better than what we had before and it's actually working off a framework which I can
reuse for all of the other keywords that I chose. So I'm going to finetune this definition with
ChatGPT and then we're going to try and blitz through the rest of our keywords. We were off to the races. I told ChatGPT to shorten our definition. I gave it some complimentary images that
would be used in our post, and I asked it to use simp
ler language. And while it would have been way faster
to just manually edit the definition myself, I was on a mission to prove that Google actually
loves AI content when it's used to improve clarity and user experience. Alright, so I've done the first featured snippet
and I feel like there's some chemistry now, and so, I'm going to go and try and finish
off the rest of the 9 snippet optimizations. ChatGPT and I optimized snippets for the query
"PageRank," "SEO tips," "SEO vs. SEM," and more. We
were like two peas in a pod. And with less than three minutes
remaining, it was time to call it. Okay, so I did 9 out of 10 snippet optimizations
with AI that I'm pretty happy with so all we can do now is wait. And we didn't have to wait long. With just one day passing by it happened again… Yesss!! I got my first snippet for "SEO vs SEM"!!! I was on an SEO high and there was
nothing that could bring me down. I went to bed thinking of what
might happen over the weekend. Will Google add me to thei
r
SEO starter guide page? Will they issue me a trillion dollars in stock? All I knew is that whatever was coming
my way would be well deserved. And before I knew it, it was Monday December 11th. I logged into my Ahrefs account, went to
my Rank Tracker Project, and it was gone… I lost the snippet. And the whole point of this wasn't to just win
it, but it was to win and hold it for a sustained period of time. So, we are back at square one with
less than three minutes of our time. I need a break….
The next day came… then the next…
and the next… but nothing. I knew something was missing, but I
couldn't quite put my finger on what. So as a final attempt, I went back to Google
and searched for "seo vs sem" to see what could be missing.. Okay, so this is going to sound like a completely
"conspiracy SEO"-type theory, but just stay with me here. So, I noticed that the SERP is still showing the old date. And that's because I didn't change the updated date
in the post considering it was a super-m
inor edit. So, I think I have like three minutes left from
my original hour, so I'm going to just change the updated dates to the time
the posts were changed. No bumping to the top of
the blog or anything like that. Literally, just going to change the dates. So I did that with the 9 posts that I'd updated
and submitted most of them to Google search console for indexing. My timebank had officially hit zero.. And two days later, I'd learn that my conspiracy
SEO theory may not have been as crazy as
I had originally thought. Okay, so, it's December 15th and
I think something's happening. So, our share of voice had a noticeable bump
for our featured snippet keywords – the most notable movement being for the keyword "pagerank." And yeah, it's not a number one ranking
but I feel like something's brewing here. And as crazy as it might sound, I think it
has to do with changing this tiny little part, which by the way, has nothing to
do with the quality of the changes. Was I going crazy? It sure
felt that way. So I had to get to the bottom of this. And I knew just the person to call to find
out if I was crazy or if there was something happening under the surface. Okay, so, when I changed the definition for
the PageRank article and Google recrawled the page, nothing really happened
in terms of, like, a boost in rankings. But when I changed the last updated date
and nothing else, we jumped, like, 3 positions. So, do you think that the date change
had anything to do with this boost? Maybe
. There's a lot of SEOs that believe if
you update the date - it's going to help. I think you probably triggered another system,
maybe the Featured snippet system, you got a better answer and it's trying to rank you higher. Some of those processes are delayed a little
bit, so I think that's a little more likely. So you're saying there's still
hope to win the snippet? There's always hope. The fire inside of me was reignited. And I knew it was just a matter
of time before we'd see success. But wit
h the holidays just around the corner,
I decided to take some much needed time off. I sang carols with the family, exchanged gifts,
and rang in the New Year with a delicious burrito. And before I knew it, I was back in the office
on January 3rd, checking our rankings… I did it!!!! I can't believe I did it! Alright, so, I got the snippet for "seo vs. sem" and
I got the snippet for "keyword cannibalization"! Also, we went off from position 6 to
position 3 for the keyword "pagerank." So, we're hold
ing it and we're really not
that far off from overtaking Wikipedia. But I quickly realized that the battle wasn't
won because at least one of our keywords needed to hold the #1 ranking position
for an extended period of time. Days went by and we lost the featured
snippet for "keyword cannibalization." But we were still going strong holding
the snippet for "seo vs. sem." And more importantly, our total share
of voice was at a sustained new level. Something was happening. Then on January 9th, the
unthinkable happened. Yooo, I just outranked Wikipedia! And by the end of the month, I hit peak
adrenaline, winning 3 out of 9 featured snippets using just AI content. Now, as for the keyword "seo vs sem", we held
a #1 position for well over a month and the last time this happened was nearly a year ago. And the same happened for "pagerank"
with a tiny bit more volatility. By the time we were halfway through February,
we were holding the snippet for 3 keywords: "marketing funnel," "seo vs sem," a
nd "pagerank." Okay, so we are at the end February and
it's safe to say that this is a win, but I want to show you something even crazier
than ranking #1 for a few keywords. So, I was tracking the 9 URLs I was working
on in an Ahrefs, and just look at the massive total traffic boost! Even with just these tiny optimizations we've got an
estimated over 10,000 more monthly visits from search. This is amazing!!! But then I realized that maybe
I hadn't proven anything. I mean - did the ranking increa
se
come from changing the dates? Did we just luck out from some algorithm update? I knew that the only way to prove that Google
loves AI content was to switch it back to the original human-written content. So I went to archive.org, pasted in one of
our URLs, but they didn't have a snapshot of our page when I made the changes. So I checked in Ahrefs Page Inspect... Oh my goodness, there's so
many dates to choose from. I chose the date right before I
made the changes to this page. I scrolled down
and immediately
saw the original version there. So all I had to do was copy and paste this
into WordPress and hit the Update button. Then I submitted it to Google search console. Rinse and repeat for the other pages
and we're back to the waiting game. But I didn't have to wait long… Alright, so it's only been like three hours since
I submitted for indexing in GSC and we already lost the snippet for "seo vs. sem." And let me remind you - we held that
snippet for, like, two months straight… And a
few hours later, we'd lost the snippet
for "marketing funnels" and "pagerank." Now, while I may have proven that the AI content
snippets beat our human written snippets, it doesn't exactly mean that Google loves
all content created by AI tools, clearly. Google loves what the user loves, and when
a user searches for informational content, they want simple, clear, and concise information,
which AI just so happens to be good at creating – probably better than humans. So, rather than creating spammy
AI content,
risking getting deindexed and losing a large portion of your business in the name of scale… Focus on clarity and AI may just
be a good assistant for that. If you want to see how to do that, go and watch
our video where I ranked #1 for a super competitive query in under 24 hours.
Comments
very misleading and clickbaity. First off, you are publishing content on a very high authority site. so ranking is almost guaranteed. Try this experiment with a run of the mill blog , not ahrefs, and see how it goes.
@sam It's not an AI content that you showed us. It's your provided information, your data and ChatGPT just rewrite it in more simpler way. By the way thanks for such a nice tips.
Sam, this was great. I love the theatrics. As someone who does a lot of testing with date time stamps, I'd suggest using some controls to isolate some of those variables. Just changing the date has an impact but it's your competitors that rank you not Google, so date becomes more essential in queries where dates are important. Single controlled variable testing with dates in non date important queries, we find it less important until you hit a threshold. Date can quantify help accuracy of information and definitely improves CTR. Not sure who your guest was but I also agree with him that the passage ranking system might need more help getting processed. I love the reinforcement that AI doesn't kill websites humans do :)
Good god. What a masterclass of, - SEO - GPT - Video storytelling. - Product placement. Hats off.
Thank you for posting this! It shows just how much detail needs to go into the prompt, and that AI can work, but on the proviso that it's lined up with what the user needs :)
im not seo expert, but using your domain to publish any content will definitely almost work! and this video just give people the impression that good content ( seo optimised or not) is so "easy" with just a few promots, copy paste from chatgpt etc. yeah....im gping to say its misleading!
Clear and understandable, I wish there was more information like this.
I love these case studies where you have to wait a period of time to get the results. Try to partly rewrite a lower ranking article with chatgpt and try to rank it higher that way.
Absolutely loved it! @Sam, you always teach genuine, valuable, and most importantly, Google-friendly techniques. I have followed your techniques for the last few months and have seen great results. I would say that the date thing definitely has something to do with Algo. I have experienced the same with a few of my posts.
when it comes to the updated date - are they reading the date right off the page, or is it pulled from the wordpress publication date. Something is strange here - surely they can compare page versions to see if there have been changes... and if they are reading it off the page, anyone could spoof that without actually editing the content.
Excellent tip – much appreciated for sharing. I've been a follower for over two years, consistently deriving high-quality insights from your content. Amidst the challenging landscape of Google updates, where many have seen their rankings fluctuate, my websites have maintained a strong presence at the top of Google's search results. A heartfelt thank you to the team and a special shoutout to @Sam for the invaluable guidance.
I enjoy a lot these kind of videos from you ! The only problem is that they are making me a content consumer rather then a content creater😂, which is the reason I was searching them in the first place
Hey, I’m just getting into SEO and have found your videos so informative. I just wanted to say thank you and I also had a question. Does changing the meta data or keywords in the html of the website improve search optimization? I’ve heard a few people say this but can’t confirm.
This video is really cool - and in my personal opnion you did a great job keeping me interested in such a boring subject for me (again, my personal opinion) - actually im really enjoying your content recently, since i had to start researching about SEO - and this one in particular is so Funny - thank you and wish you the best
Excellent video Sam! Super engaging and packed full of helpful information. Very nice!
Aherf hase high domain authority, this Is why your ai experiment ranks on google
Now, SEO's say- dont build niche sites, build brand. Can you make seperate video on - How to make a blog/ website a Brand?
Try to make an example using new website, let me see if this really works.
Your video is not as usual tutorial. Your video is a complete SEO thrilling movie. Joss!
Impressive! Your video gives the feeling of a thriller movie :)