5 ways Chat GPT Elevates your SEO Strategy

Since OpenAI launched its AI chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022, tech experts, journalists and businesses have rushed to test the limits of the technology and theorise on how ChatGPT’s AI might be used to make tasks faster, more efficient and more effortless. 

So far, we know that the program has both incredible capabilities and serious limitations. For businesses, it definitely offers opportunities to fine-tune their SEO strategy — assisting with content optimisation, keyword planning, topic research and more. But it’s important to know where the technology ChatGPT offers will help and where it can be a liability that may harm a site’s search rankings. 

In this article, we’ll break down the five ways ChatGPT can help you out, as well as the risks to be aware of when using this technology. 

What is behind ChatGPT’s AI technology? 

First, it’s important to note that while models like ChatGPT are often described as AI, they are not true artificial intelligence. OpenAI developed ChatGPT as a large language model, or LLM, and the program uses numerous data sources to generate text and chat dialogue designed to sound human because it was trained on written sources made by humans. 

The program is excellent for writing text in a particular style, turning inputs you give it into fully fleshed-out text and following instructions. It’s not good at checking its own work, doing factual analysis or spotting its own mistakes. The good news is machine learning like ChatGPT is trainable, and you can help it refine the results it gives you for some seriously helpful content optimisation.  

The Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4, often known as GPT-4, is a product that utilises OpenAI’s LLM, much as Chat GPT3 and ChatGPT3.5. Launched to a small audience, GPT 4 is the new modified version of ChatGPT that has a better-responding interface and increased capacity to handle ‘more nuanced instructions’, according to OpenAI. ChatGPT 4’s connection with CRMs is also advantageous for organisations because it is more user- and customer-friendly. 

What can ChatGPT do for your marketing strategy?

If you’re trying to put together high-quality content for a blog, website or social media platform, ChatGPT can help. With the right input, it can generate articles, social media posts and captions, product descriptions and more. If you’re developing a marketing campaign targeting a specific demographic, ChatGPT can help you hone in on the right segment and message.  

Here are the top 5 ways ChatGPT can elevate marketing and SEO strategy:

1. Boost your keyword research

Keyword planning is one of the more dry and technical jobs crucial for content optimisation and search rankings. ChatGPT is great at identifying the right keywords based on your prompts. 

You can start with a seed keyword and find related terms, or use long tail keywords and ask ChatGPT to pick up on trends, keyword difficulty and more. The chatbot also identifies what content is already popular for your relevant keywords.  

2. Conduct competitor analysis

If you’re unsure where your actual competition lies, ChatGPT will quickly find which sites and pages are the ones to beat for your topic area. By simply asking a prompt like ‘What are the top performing pages about X?’, you’ll quickly be given a list by the chatbot highlighting top performers. Then, you can continue to ask ChatGPT to drill down into the highlights of each page and pull out structures, commonly discussed points and other details. 

If you have your sights on a competitor and want to understand where they’re the most successful, try a prompt like ‘What are my competitor’s top performing pages?’ or ‘What keywords is X competitor ranking for?’ Once you’ve identified where your main competition is winning the day in search rankings, ChatGPT can conduct an analysis of particular articles to give you more insight.  

3. Content planning and generation

Diving into topic research can often be time-consuming in developing new content. With ChatGPT, you can pick a specific keyword or area of topic research and generate the beginnings of a fully fleshed-out blog post, social media caption or product description. 

Try inputting the prompt ‘I want to write a blog about X. Please write 600 words of content about that’, for example. Once you have this first draft, you can ask ChatGPT to refine its offering — giving it subtopics to include or exclude, asking it to adapt the writing style to suit your tone of voice, suggesting an overall structure with subheadings or even asking for emphasis on a particular nuance of the topic. 

If you already have long-form content you want to transfer to other digital marketing campaigns, for example, you can ask ChatGPT to read the content and formulate a shorter summary, meta description or preview that can run on another platform.  

4. Generate meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are one of the most complex pieces of copy to write because they are so short but need to contain certain words and information from a technical aspect. Not only can ChatGPT generate a meta description with certain parameters based on existing content or a live page, but it can also analyse your existing meta tags and descriptions and suggest optimised alternatives. 

Inputting your current keywords into ChatGPT is an excellent way to gain insights about their performance and what changes may be necessary to improve your SEO strategy. Try asking a prompt like ‘Generate a meta description and title for SEO on X keyword…’ and go from there.  

5. Create New FAQs

Trying to anticipate the question customers will ask about a new product or service may not be easy, especially when you’re inside the business and understand all the details and processes without thinking about it. This is where ChatGPT can shed some light on possible answers you’ll want to provide.

If you’re starting out creating a new FAQs section or page, try inputting the topic to ChatGPT and asking it to generate a specific number of FAQs on the subject. Once you’ve got the first draft of relevant questions generated by ChatGPT, you can review the content to make sure it’s factual, accurate and tailored to your target audience.   

The risks and limitations of using  ChatGPT for SEO strategy

AI SEO optimisation is great in theory, but before you start delegating all of your SEO strategies to a large language model, it’s essential to understand the drawbacks and limitations of this technology. 

As we’ve mentioned, ChatGPT does a great job of mimicry, adapting a writing style, sounding like an expert on a subject and persuading the reader of an adopted point of view. While ChatGPT may sound like it knows what it’s talking about, it really doesn’t. This isn’t true AI — it’s a chatbot with no awareness, and whether it’s just generated perfectly accurate descriptions of a scientific process or a completely made-up one that defies the laws of gravity, it can’t tell. 

Microsoft’s AI threat to Google – Bard

An unreliable narrator  

This lack of accuracy and contextualisation holds ChatGPT back from being able to create accurate, high-quality content optimisation and SEO strategies on its own. Nothing it generates should be published without close review for factual inaccuracies or downright fabrications — it’s known to make things up, a process known as ‘hallucinations’. For this reason, it’s better to think of ChatGPT as a writing prompt for a real person, providing a suggested overall structure rather than a polished final draft. 

Out-of-date data

The other issue with using ChatGPT for keyword research on content planning is that it’s only as good as the data it’s fed. That is to say, ChatGPT can often be using out of date information sources to formulate its answers. The latest GPT-3 training set isn’t available to the public yet, and some platforms (a recent example is Twitter) can also choose to pause or block the chatbot’s access to their data entirely, removing it as a source.  

Using up-to-date information is essential when crafting a competitive SEO strategy, so using ChatGPT when it may be months or even years behind in data inputs is disastrous for crafting keyword research and competitor analysis, which can help you get ahead.  

Algorithms and AI 

The final issue for overreliance on ChatGPT is that publishing AI-written content is seen as a black hat SEO strategy. Google is now rolling out updates that identify and penalise this kind of content. The search engine giant has their own LLM called Bard, so they’re certainly aware of how to identify texts copied straight from AI sources. As low-quality content is pumped out from ChatGPT and used by some sites, it will become increasingly important to use ChatGPT as a framework rather than an author. 

The benefits of using an agency for SEO

Still feel overwhelmed by the task of prompting and reviewing ChatGPT outputs for your own SEO strategy? We’re not surprised. The fact is, mastering content optimisation and beating out competitors in search rankings takes years of industry expertise and updated knowledge of the latest tools, techniques and approaches to ensure your business grows its online presence safely and with better efficiency. 

When you want to work with a trusted agency that’s transparent about how they operate and get real results, look no further than Online Marketing Gurus. We make it our business to stay on top of trends and use the latest tech developments and years of experience to drive more traffic to your site and boost your bottom line. If you’re ready to save time and money while transforming your SEO strategy, reach out to us today.