6 Ways SEO Pros Are Using ChatGPT Right Now

Careful, Google. There is a new player on the search engine scene.

Surely you’ve heard this before, but this time it’s serious.

ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a large language learning model.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) and massive amounts of data, it can interact with users in conversation, answer follow-up questions, admit mistakes, reject inappropriate requests, and even challenge false premises.

Although not a direct competitor to Google per se, this OpenAI-developed chatbot is changing the way searches are conducted. And this will dramatically change the shape of search engine optimization.

In this article, we’ll take a look at this technology and discuss innovative ways that forward-thinking search engine optimizers are already using it to do their jobs.

What can you do with ChatGPT?

We’re just beginning to explore the potential for using machine learning and artificial intelligence in SEO and marketing.

ChatGPT is able to participate in discussions and answer questions in a way that is very close to a human.

It can write essays, fictional stories, poetry, and even copywriting—which worries professional writers like me a bit.

It allows content to be created with such precision that the New York Department of Education has banned its use for fear of fraud.

But ChatGPT is more than just content: it’s smart enough to be used for writing meta descriptions or debugging code. Currently, using it to code is a lengthy technical process, but expect it to become much easier as the learning model grows in size.

It can also be used as a search assistant, providing answers to queries in clear and concise formats, so users don’t have to search through multiple web pages to find answers to their questions.

For example, if you’re looking for a recipe for Beef Wellington, rather than trawling through a dozen blog sites and scrolling through a lengthy story about how the blogger’s grandmother once made this dish for Winston Churchill, ChatGPT provides you with a list of ingredients and preparation steps .

As an SEO professional, this might sound a little scary.

But taking advantage of AI technology rather than worrying about it might be a good move.

There are many ways you can use it to streamline your work and make redundant or repetitive tasks more efficient.

Let’s see how cutting-edge SEO pros are already using ChatGPT.

How SEO pros are already using ChatGPT

1. Create content

Creating content can be tedious, especially when you don’t have an experienced (and humble) writer like me on the team.

Can ChatGPT do this for you? Well it maybut you probably should Avoid using it to write websites and blog posts.

In 2022, Google search proponent John Mueller made it clear that the search engine considers content created using artificial intelligence to be spam, which is a violation of the company’s policies.

Currently, Google algorithms can identify and penalize AI-generated content, even those using anti-detection algorithms.

When working with AI, you should always use human oversight.

However, anyone can safely use ChatGPT to create content for social media posts, email pitches, landing page text for PPC, or even ad copy. It can also be a great brainstorming tool.

I asked ChatGPT, “What is SEO?”

In response, I received three well-written paragraphs with an overview of search engine optimization.

As long as you’re careful, ChatGPT could help streamline a lot of redundant content tasks like ad variations, but you have to do it always Check all generated content carefully. as it may contain inaccuracies.

2. Keyword research and analysis

Okay, so you’re not willing to risk the penalties if you get caught using ChatGPT to create content. That doesn’t mean you can’t leverage its power as part of your content strategy.

ChatGPT makes keyword research virtually effortless.

All you have to do is open the chatbot, type in some of your target keywords and ask for related keywords. ChatGPT creates a list of related keywords based on its understanding of the search results.

To try out this functionality, I searched a list of keywords relevant to a banking software vendor.

A short time later, the chatbot presented me with a list of keywords and phrases that might have taken me much longer to create using traditional keyword research.

You can also use it to determine the competition for different keywords.

For a general example, I asked it to determine whether “basketball” or “twine net” would be easier to rank. We already know the answer, but it was nice to see the chatbot confirm it.

3. Development of a content strategy

Okay, I admit this blew my mind. I wouldn’t have even thought of it if I hadn’t seen this tweet from Joe Speiser:

6/ Outline your content marketing strategy

As an an example,

I asked chatbot about an AI SaaS content strategy.

It’s pretty easy
However, you can ask Chat to extrapolate each point until you have a detailed roadmap. pic.twitter.com/QxcvKNHJNK

— Joe Speiser ⚡️ (@jspeier) January 2, 2023

That’s right. You can ask ChatGPT to design a content marketing strategy for you.

While it doesn’t return detailed plans (although you could probably ask for one), it does offer a set of general tactics for content related to a specific field.

One caveat that comes to mind when deploying a chatbot-created content strategy is the concern that your closest competitors might be doing the same. As a result, they all create near-identical blog posts about “the benefits of AI,” “how AI SaaS can improve efficiency,” etc.

4. Better understanding of search intent

To me, this is the most interesting SEO potential that ChatGPT offers – its ability to dig deeper into the search query and look beyond the words to the intent of the search.

Yes, Google is trying to do this, and yes, it has improved dramatically over the lifespan of the search engine — but to quote a tweet from Keiran Flanagan, “Google takes your request and tries to answer it.” ChatGPT takes your request and will often improve it.”

4/ Added value:

In a number of examples, ChatGPT offers additional tips that the searcher had not considered

Google takes your request and tries to answer it

ChatGPT takes your request and will often improve it

Great example from a great study we did @HelloSurgeAI pic.twitter.com/ZeDJGWP2VR

— Kieran Flanagan 🤘 (@searchbrat) January 3, 2023

Although the beta version of this chatbot is not yet connected to the internet, it appears that ChatGPT’s learning ability will allow it to develop an exponentially better understanding of what each search is looking for, and sometimes even provide information that the searcher did not know they looked for.

As an SEO professional, you don’t need to be told that if you craft your content to better answer a question, you’ll skyrocket in the rankings. ChatGPT can help you with that.

5. Generate good SEO titles

Ask any writer and they will tell you that titles are one of the hardest things about writing, especially for SEO purposes. All too often they end up with dry things like “how do I build backlinks” or some boring equivalent.

To make things even more exciting, I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of titles for a backlinking site, and they responded with ten options, all of which were more interesting than my “how to” line.

6. Creation and management of analysis reports

For many marketers, reports and spreadsheets are the bane of their professional existence. But companies want data that proves their efforts are making a difference. This is where ChatGPT can be a real game changer.

Additionally, this feature can help you spot new ranking opportunities that you might otherwise have missed.

Suppose you want to create regular expressions for analysis reports, but you don’t have in-depth programming knowledge. For example, you might want to filter a report for certain words to identify opportunities to expand your FAQs or how-to guides.

With ChatGPT, anyone with a basic knowledge of how these phrases work can use the chatbot to automatically build a list.

If you regularly struggle with Excel or Google Sheets (and who doesn’t?), ChatGPT can save you much of the headache of writing formulas and analyzing data.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of how AI can help you with these processes, but if you want more information, Search Engine Journal’s IT guru Vahan Petrosyan has an excellent article that covers these topics in more detail.

AI presents a brave new world for SEO

ChatGPT is an extremely impressive tool. And it’s easy to get carried away with the excitement of what it offers and what it could do in the future, especially in the SEO space.

Just the small sampling of the features discussed above could potentially save you hundreds of hours every year.

However, it’s not without its downsides. On the one hand, in its current form it uses data up to 2021 at the latest and can therefore not provide any information on current events.

It’s probably safe to assume that a later version of the chatbot will fix this issue, but we still don’t know how long it will take for the AI ​​to learn about new events and relate them to other topics.

In addition, it is not 100% accurate and unbiased. Depending on its inputs, it may receive incorrect information and thus repeat itself, while the original dataset it was trained on may not be free of dataset bias.

Finally, as a kid growing up watching the Terminator movies, there is always a concern for me that ChatGPT will become self-aware and enslave humanity. To be on the safe side, I dealt with it directly.

It “thinked” for a suspiciously long time before returning this unconvincing answer:

The Final Verdict

ChatGPT is cool and all indications are that it’s only going to get better.

It shows the potential to make search engine optimization significantly faster and more efficient.

We must make every effort to ensure that it is not linked to the nuclear arsenal.

Just kidding… sort of.

More resources:

---

Featured image: CHUAN CHUAN/Shutterstock