6 ways SEO Specialists are now using ChatGPT

January 13, 2023
Posted by: Shalini W
Category: Search Engine Optimization

Machine learning and AI have a lot of potential for SEO and marketing, but we’ve only just started to use them. ChatGPT can take part in conversations and answer questions in a way that is very close to how a person would. It can write essays, short stories, poems, and even ads, which makes professional writers like me a little nervous. It can be used to make content so well that the New York City Department of Education has already banned its use because they think it could be used to cheat.

But ChatGPT is smart enough to be used for more than just writing content. It can be used to write meta descriptions or debug code. Right now, using it to code is a technical process that takes a long time, but it seems safe to assume that it will get much easier as the learning model grows.

It can also be used as a search assistant, giving clear and concise answers to questions so that users don’t have to look through multiple web pages to find the answers they need.

For example, if you want a recipe for beef wellington, you don’t have to look through a dozen blog pages and scroll past a long story about how the blogger’s grandmother once made this dish for Winston Churchill. Instead, ChatGPT gives you a list of ingredients and steps for making the dish.

How SEO professionals are already using ChatGPT

1) Making Content

Making content can be a pain, especially if you don’t have a skilled and humble writer on staff like me.

Can ChatGPT help you with this? Well, it can, but you probably shouldn’t use it to write blog posts and web pages.

John Mueller, a Google spokesperson for search, made it clear in 2022 that the search engine considers content made by AI to be spam and a violation of the company’s rules.

At the moment, Google’s algorithms can find and punish AI-generated content, even if it uses other algorithms to avoid being found.

When working with AI, you should always have a human watch over it.

But anyone can use ChatGPT safely to make content for social media posts, email pitches, landing page copy for pay-per-click ads, or even ad copy. In response, I got three well-written paragraphs that explained what search engine optimization is and how it works.

As long as you’re careful, ChatGPT could help you streamline many content tasks that you do over and over again, like making different versions of ads. However, you should always carefully check any generated content because it may be wrong.

2) Research on and analysis of keywords

Okay, so you don’t want to take the chance of getting caught using ChatGPT to make content and getting in trouble for it. That doesn’t mean you can’t use its power as part of your content strategy.

ChatGPT makes researching keywords almost too easy.

All you have to do is open the chatbot, type a few of your target keywords into it, and ask for others that are similar. ChatGPT will make a list of keywords that are related based on what it knows about search results.

I searched a list of keywords related to a banking software provider to try out this feature.

After a short time, the chatbot gave me a list of keywords and phrases that would have taken me much longer to come up with using traditional keyword research.

I gave it the task of deciding whether “basketball” or “twine net” would be easier to rank as a high-level example. Even though we already knew the answer, it was nice that the chatbot said it again.

3) Creating a content strategy

Okay, I’ll admit that this one surprised me. If I hadn’t seen this tweet from Joe Speiser, I wouldn’t have even thought of it:

You’re right. You can ask ChatGPT to help you come up with a plan for marketing your content.

Even though it doesn’t give you detailed plans (though you could probably ask for them), it does give you a high-level set of tactics for content in a certain field.

One thing to keep in mind if you want to use chatbots to create content is that your closest competitors might do the same thing. So, you all write almost identical blog posts about “the benefits of AI,” “how AI SaaS can improve efficiency,” etc.

4) Better Understanding Of Search Intent

I think this is the most interesting thing that ChatGPT can do for SEO: it can drill down into the search query and look beyond the words to see what the search is really about.

Google does try to do this, and it has gotten much better at it over the years. But, as Keiran Flanagan said in a tweet, “Google takes your query and tries to answer it. ChatGPT will take your question and often make it better.

Even though the beta version of this chatbot isn’t connected to the internet yet, it seems that ChatGPT’s ability to learn will help it understand what each search is looking for, sometimes giving the searcher information they didn’t even know they wanted.

As an SEO pro, you don’t need to be told that your rankings will go through the roof if you change your content to better answer a question. You can do that with help from ChatGPT.

5) Making SEO-friendly titles

If you ask any writer, they’ll tell you that titles are one of the hardest things to write, especially for SEO. Too often, they end up being dry topics like “How to Build Backlinks” or something else equally boring.

I asked ChatGPT for a list of titles for a page about backlinking to spice things up. It gave me ten options, all of which were more interesting than my “how to” line.

6) Composing And Managing Analytics Reports

Reports and spreadsheets are the worst parts of their jobs for many marketers. But companies want data to show that your efforts are helping. This is where ChatGPT can change the game.

More than that, this feature can help you find new ways to rank that you might have missed otherwise.

Let’s say you don’t know much about programming but want to write regular expressions for analytics reporting. For example, you might want to filter a report by certain words to find places where you can add more information to your FAQs or how-tos.

With ChatGPT, anyone who knows the basics of how these expressions work can use the chatbot to automatically make a list.

Also, if you often have trouble with Excel or Google Sheets (and who doesn’t? ), ChatGPT can help you write formulas and sort data with less trouble.

I’ve barely touched on how AI can help you with these tasks, but if you want to learn more, Search Engine Journal’s resident IT guru Vahan Petrosyan has a great that goes into more detail.

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