How to Build a Vape Site in the Age of AI (And the Dangers of Doing It Wrong!)

by Sep 15, 2024Vape Shop Help

For better or worse, 2024 will definitely go down in history as the year in which AI – and generative AI in particular – hit critical mass. Easy AI-based text and image generation have shown up just about everywhere this year. AI functions have been added to things that you already use, with tools like Shopify and Microsoft Word adding buttons for instant AI-based content creation. There’s a good chance that you’ve played with ChatGPT at least once as well.

You’ve got a vape site to build. You need to do product descriptions, blog posts and more. AI-based content creation is available everywhere, and the tools are cheap or free. Would there be any harm in just having a computer generate all of that text for you?

As you’re about to learn, generative AI isn’t quite the panacea that it’s made out to be – and in the long run, leaning on AI as you build your vape site could end up doing more harm than good.

Human-made content brings sustainable results.

We have worked with the world’s leading vape brands since 2010, and we do not use AI in any part of our process. Get in touch now to discuss your needs.

What Is Generative AI Exactly?

Before we delve into the details, it might be helpful to present a brief introduction of what generative AI is in case you’re not much of a computer aficionado. Whether you’re using a tool like Microsoft Copilot or clicking the friendly “Generate With AI” button in Shopify, what’s happening in the background is essentially the same.

Generative AI works by scanning an enormous volume of human-created text or other material, converting the material to numbers and analyzing the relationships between those numbers. The relationships are stored as the AI’s training data.

You interface with generative AI by giving it a prompt like “Create an article that explains what hitting a blinker means.” The AI converts those words to numbers, references the numbers against what’s in its training data and produces the words that are most likely to follow the words you entered. The process is essentially the same regardless of which tool you’re using.

Generative AI certainly feels like magic when you use it for the first time. Mainly, though, it just comes down to the fact that today’s computing power makes it possible to process enormous volumes of data extremely quickly.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Using AI for a Vape Site?

Using AI to Build Vape Site Risks

Oh, look — I found the easy button!

The benefit of using AI for building a vape site or any other type of website is obvious: Generative AI can create enormous volumes of content with very little work on your part. The drawbacks, however, are significant.

  • AI isn’t an expert in vaping or any other topic. Essentially, it can only repeat what’s in its training data.
  • AI doesn’t actually understand the words it produces, and it doesn’t have the ability to confirm that what it’s saying is actually true. AI will frequently state a falsehood as a fact, a phenomenon that’s been nicknamed a “hallucination.”
  • AI can’t create anything truly new because the content is always essentially a remix of what’s in its training data.
  • AI won’t create content that you truly own. The content generally has no copyright protection. In the future, if someone else enters the same prompt that you entered, they’ll get virtually the same content.
  • AI enables the rapid spread of spam and misinformation.
  • People generally don’t enjoy reading AI-created content because it doesn’t provide a good experience compared to human-created content. I’ll discuss that at greater length shortly.

Is AI Content Good for SEO?

The main reason why you’re probably interested in using AI for your vape site’s content is because you’re hoping that it’ll be an easy way to generate traffic. If you use AI to create content for your vape site, one of two things will happen. You might generate some traffic in the short term – and if you do, the traffic will eventually tail off with no hope for recovery – or you might never generate any traffic at all. These are the traffic graphs for four vape sites that rely solely or mostly on AI-created content.

AI Vape Site 1

AI Vape Site 2

AI Vape Site 3

AI Vape Site 4

No matter what, AI-generated content isn’t going to help you build a sustainable brand. AI might help you build a website that rockets up the rankings quickly on Google because you can rapidly publish content addressing an enormous variety of targeted search terms, but the end result will always be the same – your traffic will drop as quickly because people won’t be happy with the experience. What does sustainable traffic look like? Just look at our Vape Case Studies page to see several examples.

How, exactly, can Google tell that people aren’t happy with a website? I’ll discuss that next.

How Does Google Know That People Don’t Like a Website?

Google Chrome is the world’s most popular web browser, and the main reason why it exists is because it is one of the most important tools in Google’s arsenal when it comes to determining how websites should be ranked. Google has always been able to tell when people visit a website and then immediately click “Back” to return to the search results. With Chrome, though, they can actually see what’s happening when people are browsing the web outside of Google’s properties.

Thanks to the clickstream data gathered by Chrome, Google can tell when a user views a website and then immediately browses somewhere else – even if the “somewhere else” isn’t back to the search results page. Google can also see what’s happening during site visits. Google’s ranking algorithm knows, for instance, if an e-commerce site never makes sales because of low-quality content.

So, with AI-created websites, the same pattern occurs over and over. The site publishes content that appears to satisfy search queries, so it begins to appear on results pages for those queries. The site’s traffic goes up. People show Google that they’re not happy with the experience they have on the site, though, and the traffic begins to drop.

Why Do Users Dislike AI-Generated Content?

Why do AI websites always follow this pattern? It’s because people don’t like AI-generated content, largely because of the reasons I described above. I’ll explain.

It’s Full of Fluff

Firstly, AI-created content tends to be vapid and rarely ever says anything of substance. If the content in question is a product review, for instance, you can tell that you’re not reading the experiences of an actual human user – it’s just a mountain of essentially meaningless text that doesn’t exist for any reason except to push a product.

It Isn’t Truly Unique or Original

AI-created text looks great on the surface. When you investigate further, though, you can see that it’s just reusing the same phrases over and over.

There’s also a lot of sameness in AI content. Tools like ChatGPT tend to use the same structures – and even many of the same phrases – over and over when generating text. Once you’ve seen a bit of AI-generated text yourself, I can guarantee that you’ll be able to identify it with near-perfect accuracy in the future just by glancing at it. For users, it’s the same story. People are inundated with valueless AI text every day, and they’re sick of it.

If you use AI to build your vape site, you’ll see what I’m talking about after you’ve created just a few product descriptions or blog posts. You’ll also begin to notice some of the phrases that generative AI tools use repeatedly. Here are just a few of my favorite examples. Virtually everything that you’ll see on these search results pages is created by AI.

These numbers give you an idea of the massive scale at which AI-created fluff has proliferated on the web.

Even phrases that are specifically tailored to vaping and seem like they might be original are being reused by AI text generation tools over and over. The phrase “elevate your vaping journey” — which appears on a whopping 216,000 pages — is a perfect example.

What do you suppose happens to content containing the same phrases that are already on hundreds – maybe even hundreds of thousands – of other pages that are already in Google’s index? You guessed it: Absolutely nothing. The content never shows up in Google’s search results at all.

It’s Often Unhelpful

As I mentioned above, one of the biggest problems with using AI to generate text is that the tool has no way of knowing whether the content it’s producing is actually accurate or helpful. An article about troubleshooting a Lost Mary vape that isn’t charging, for instance, might include instructions telling the reader to remove and reseat the battery. Hope you’re handy with a soldering iron! The web is full of this type of content right now, and it’ll show up on Google’s search results pages until people begin voting with their clicks. Then, it’ll fall away.

Google, however, is doing its best to remove the clicks from the equation by detecting AI spam before it even shows up in the search results.

Google Knows That Users Don’t Like AI Content

Vape Site AI Risks

Use it at your own risk.

In March 2024, Google implemented one of its biggest core updates ever – and the main purpose of the update was to reduce the volume of unhelpful AI content appearing on search results pages. Another update in August 2024 was designed to increase the prominence of helpful human-created content. These updates are only the beginning.

Spam has always been a cat-and-mouse game between spammers and search engines, and it always will be. People don’t want to read unhelpful AI content, though, and that’s the biggest thing in Google’s crosshairs right now. It’s becoming less and less likely at this point that a vape site dependent on AI will ever rank for anything. You saw an example of that in the graphs that I shared above.

How to Build a Vape Site That Gets Sustainable Traffic

We’ve been building great vape sites since 2010, and we know what it takes to create a site that gets sustainable traffic and can weather Google’s frequent algorithm updates without missing a beat. We’d love to help you do the same. If you want to build a vape site for the long term, here’s how to do it.

  • Focus on your customers. Create content for humans and not for Google. Focus on making sure that what you publish is actually helpful and informative.
  • Pay attention to your analytics to find out what your users are doing. If your website’s bounce rate is especially high – or your conversion rates are low – you should analyze your site to see what the problem is. Remember that users vote with their clicks, and a site that doesn’t provide a good experience will always have trouble earning high rankings on Google.
  • Minimize your use of AI as much as possible. Even if you only use it for brainstorming or outlining, you’re still going to get a result much the same as everything else that’s out there. If you want to show your expertise and build trust, you need to bring something new to the table.
  • Get people searching for your brand. A recognized brand name is one of the most powerful tools that your vape site can possibly have.

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About the Author: Jason Artman

Jason Artman founded eCig One after switching from smoking to vaping in 2010 and has been a professional writer and SEO consultant since 2007. His work has been featured on television and in leading publications, and it has been referenced in numerous peer-reviewed journals. Jason works with leading vape brands around the world to generate targeted web traffic and increase their revenue.