Hello, SearchGPT. Goodbye, Google? What This Means for Your SEO Strategy!
ChatGPT For SEO – In a major shift for the digital landscape, OpenAI has introduced a real-time web search feature in ChatGPT, directly challenging Google’s long-standing search model. The startup had unveiled SearchGPT, an artificial intelligence-powered engine, designed to deliver real-time updates on sports scores, breaking news, weather, and even stock quotes and more.
This latest development provides users with instant, conversational answers with live source attribution, allowing ChatGPT to tap into a growing demand for immediacy and relevance.
As Expert Jazmin Green, Head of Enterprise SEO at OMG notes: “This was a necessary development for ChatGPT, whose main challenge has been misinformation in its results.”
Expert Jazmin Green, Head of Enterprise SEO at OMG
Historically, ChatGPT’s data sources have included open forums like Reddit and Quora, which– while often valuable– tend to lean more toward opinions than facts.
“It’s similar to how we’ve been advised not to rely on Wikipedia, the open-edit nature of these platforms means content isn’t always factual.” Green adds.
This makes ChatGPT’s shift to a search model grounded in credible sources a vital step forward.
Adding to the complexity, ChatGPT’s search feature currently operates on Bing’s US-based data, regardless of where users are located. This means international users are seeing results from a mix of US-centric perspectives, an important consideration as the platform expands its reach globally. However, this advancement goes beyond simply reshaping user preferences; it’s prompting industry-wide innovation and redefining how we think about SEO.
What does this mean for SEO?
Despite ChatGPT’s impressive milestone of processing around 10 million queries daily, this still represents a small fraction of Google’s staggering 8.5 billion daily searches. However, with 20 million weekly active users worldwide, ChatGPT is steadily gaining traction and evolving into a go-to platform, and ultimately a competitive player in search. For SEO inhouse or outsourced professionals, ChatGPT’s growth doesn’t signify the end of SEO– rather, it highlights the role as more critical than ever.
As Green puts it: “ChatGPT’s rise doesn’t mean the end of SEO—it means our jobs just got even more interesting. As ChatGPT evolves, our strategies at OMG must evolve with it, ensuring our clients stay ahead.”
The competition brought about by the changes in the search landscape prompts a shift in the SEO industry towards a deeper emphasis on user engagement and authenticity. OpenAI’s approach has accelerated a new era in SEO where relevance, authority, and a highly engaging user experience are more crucial than ever.
We can expect Google to adapt, most likely evolving its tools to maintain its leadership status and helping creators align with these new demands.
As Jim Limberis, OMG’s Head of SEO, sees it: “Competition with AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT compels us all to innovate, ensuring search delivers true value and efficiency for users. Google will rise to the challenge, leading an era where content must meet relevance, authority, depth, and insightfulness.”
ChatGPT’s real-time search model sets a new industry standard, one that promises to enhance the user experience, inspire continuous improvement, and drive the industry forward.
At Online Marketing Gurus, we’re excited to see this competition unfold and remain committed to harnessing these advancements to ensure our clients thrive at every stage of their digital marketing journey. We’ll be keeping a close eye on how ChatGPT and other AI-driven platforms continue to evolve, adapting our strategies to ensure we and our clients stay ahead of the ever-changing digital landscape.
You may also want to read: Don’t Get Left Behind: How to Future-Proof Your Content Against AI | What is Gemini? A Guide To Google’s Newest AI | What Is Google BARD? A Guide To Googles New AI
How To Use ChatGPT for SEO Strategies
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 Search Engine Optimisation 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.
The Impact Of Using ChatGPT For SEO
From podcasts to online forums and catching up with colleagues, just about everyone is talking about the phenomenon that is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an advanced language model developed by OpenAI capable of generating high-quality text across various styles and topics. But how does this AI work, and will it be a turning point for content optimization and search rankings? Read on to find out everything about using ChatGPT for SEO.
For Starters – What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. It was developed by the American artificial intelligence research laboratory called OpenAI in November 2022. ChatGPT AI uses a generative language model that can be used for applications like language translation and its most popular use — content creation. Because of its impressive content generation capabilities, ChatGPT has been picked up by several industries to streamline workflow. In particular, it has quickly become an indispensable assistant for digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) agency specialists regarding content optimization.
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT draws its writing technology from large data sets to create text that resembles human writing with a natural flow, proper language, grammar, and sentence structure. To receive a generated response, a user must ask ChatGPT a question like you would an online chatbot. For example, ‘what are the benefits of using a conveyancer to sell my home?’ Since its launch, creators have used ChatGPT to replace the time and effort typically needed for mundane writing tasks, including translation, summarising information, and research.
How is ChatGPT different from other AI text generators?
ChatGPT can generate high-quality texts that closely resemble human language as a language model. However, some key differences make OpenAI one of a kind, such as:
- Astounding training data— ChatGPT has been trained using a massive amount of text data, including books, articles, and other documents from a diverse range of sources.
- Interactive — ChatGPT can interact with users in real time, responding to queries and providing information on various topics. This makes it a useful tool for multiple industries and needs, from customer service to educational tools.
- Contextual awareness — ChatGPT is designed to understand the context of a conversation or text, which helps it generate more relevant and coherent responses.
- Fine-tuning capabilities — ChatGPT can be fine-tuned on specific tasks or fields, which helps it generate more targeted and relevant text. For example, it can be fine-tuned on medical text to generate more accurate descriptions of medical conditions.
AI SEO optimization — is ChatGPT the future for SEO?
Given its abilities and worldwide uptake by creators, many digital marketers have begun asking where OpenAI stands regarding content optimization and search rankings. While ChatGPT can generate high-quality texts that can be turned into useful and unique content, AI is best used for content research and should not be relied upon as an SEO strategy. SEO requires a specific set of techniques and strategies to improve the ranking of a website or page in search engine results pages (SERPs).
The limitations of ChatGPT
Though there are many perks to this new text-generation AI, the platform has not shied away from its limitations.
Bias
Since a user can ask the AI for specific information, the machine can also be told to avoid certain aspects of a topic or be driven in a desired direction. Language models like ChatGPT are trained with large datasets of text, which can sometimes include biases or stereotypes in the data.
Requires highly detailed instructions
ChatGPT requires detailed instructions to provide high-quality original content that takes a specific point of view. The more instructions the AI is given, the more sophisticated the answer will be. This is both a strength and a limitation of the technology.
Tendency to be repetitive
Because the AI requires detailed instructions, ChatGPT can sometimes produce repetitive or redundant responses, particularly if asked the same question multiple times or given limited context.
Programmed to avoid certain kinds of content
ChatGPT is programmed to detect and avoid generating text on the topics of graphic violence, explicit sex, and content that is harmful, such as instructions on how to build an explosive device. Will ChatGPT replace Google? It is unlikely that ChatGPT will completely replace Google, as the two technologies serve different purposes. Google is a search engine that uses complex algorithms to retrieve and rank information. On the other hand, ChatGPT is an AI text generator designed to produce responses to specific questions. While ChatGPT can provide information and respond to queries, it does not have the same scope of information or capabilities as Google.
Can ChatGPT content be identified?
At the time of writing, no system developed by Google can detect whether ChatGPT wrote a piece of content. However, that’s not to say that the search engine couldn’t identify AI-written text. One proposed way to identify AI-written text is invisible watermarking. According to experts, ChatGPT watermarking involves embedding a code into specific words or punctuation, as AI-generated words tend to follow a pattern. By embedding these codes, the text can be ‘watermarked’ and be picked up by search engines.
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.
Search GPT
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 a social media strategy, 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 online digital marketing and SEO strategy:
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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 research for 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.
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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 spying on your competitors SEO efforts 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.
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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 descriptions that sell. 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.
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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 SEO 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.
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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 AI
An unreliable narrator
This lack of accuracy and contextualisation holds ChatGPT back from being able to create accurate, high-quality content creation / 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 as opposed to ChatGPT for SEO
While it’s safe to say ChatGPT won’t be replacing SEO best practices anytime soon, businesses must still do their due diligence in implementing a killer SEO strategy. 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.
