Written ByIn case you’ve been living under a rock, Open AI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. Safe to say, its release caused quite a stir amongst marketing professionals, especially those that provide SEO consultancy services.
In this article, we explore how ChatGPT SEO should (and shouldn’t) be used by marketing professionals for SEO purposes.
ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that facilitates users to simulate human-like conversations with an AI.
GPT stands for Generative-Pre-trainer Transformer and is the latest in a technology known as ‘large language model tools’ (language processing models that use deep learning to produce human-like responses).
This deep learning is powered by large amounts of data and computing techniques, to make predictions about stringing words together in a meaningful way.
So, they access a vast vocabulary and library of information, while also understanding words in context. They can even mimic speech patterns while sharing an encyclopaedic knowledge.
Put simply, the difference between ChatGPT and traditional chatbots is the size of the data set.
Chatbots are usually trained on a smaller dataset in a rule-based manner, answering specific questions and doing specific tasks.
ChatGPT is trained on a huge data set, and it can perform a range of tasks in different fields and industries.
To put it into context, the size of ChatGPT’s data set is equivalent to over 385 million pages on Microsoft Word!
Despite the hype (and fear of losing jobs to ChatGPT!), there are significant limitations of ChatGPT, especially when using it for marketing purposes.
ChatGPT doesn’t speak with feeling and emotion, and doesn’t think the way people do. So although marketers could use ChatGPT to enhance customer experience, without the involvement of humans to provide relevancy, character, experience and personal connection, this type of AI will still diminish meaningful customer connection instead of enhancing it.
ChatGPT is prone to outputting text that’s subjective, inaccurate, or nonsensical. So content generated by ChatGPT still needs to be reviewed and validated. Firstly to avoid possible errors and illogical answers, but also to ensure consistency with a brand’s message and image.
ChatGPT is not connected to the internet and has limited knowledge of events after 2021. Which makes it useless when it comes to innovation and current events. This blind spot forms a critical part of any SEO strategy we would recommend, so is a major drawback.
ChatGPT lacks the lived experience of individuals that allow them to bring humour and imagination to content, as well as strike the right branding tone to match the target audience. Over-relying on ChatGPT therefore limits the creative abilities that humans possess.
Using AI SEO tools like ChatGPT is likely to lead to duplicated content, which Google hates and penalises. Meaning, your content is unlikely to rank well in SERPs (search engine results pages).
Google is able to detect content that has been written by a human, and that which has been written by AI. Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller said:
“For us, [AI content] is still automatically generated content, and that means for us, it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.”
Google Panda first launched in February 2011 as part of Google’s quest to eliminate web spam and ‘content farms’. Many businesses at the time were churning out high volumes of low-quality content pages to attract search engine traffic.
Why? Because great content brings something new, unique and experience-driven to the table.
Sounds familiar, right? Which is why Google has already issued a code red internally about the rising surge of AI content. Meaning, we can expect Google to move fast to ensure that AI produced content doesn’t little the search results.
ChatGPT may seem like a tempting way to game the system and produce content at scale. But a good SEO agency/consultancy will tell you that it will do more harm than good. Marketeers should not be using ChatGPT to write content, it simply can’t write a good enough blog because it:
ChatGPT SEO can be of used in the following areas;
Use ChatGPT to generate research based keywords for your next articles. For example, asking the system to provide you with “keyword ideas about website design for restaurants” for your blog. In turn, this will generate a list of long tail keywords for you to develop articles around.
You can ask ChatGPT to generate semantic keywords for you – conceptually similar terms that provide more context for search engines. Content will then rank higher because algorithms recognise depth as a signal of trust and authority.
Ask ChatGPT to generate ideas for your articles. For example, “10 blog ideas for ecommerce digital agency”. Then keep refreshing the list until you get 10 ideas that will attract your target audience.
Once you’ve chosen your article titles, you could ask ChatGPT to put together a structure for the body copy. It will provide around five headers with bullet point prompts that will form a brief for your researchers and copywriters.
A well optimised page will include a good title that has target keywords, is compelling, and intriguing enough to encourage clicks and conversions. So you could ask ChatGPT to spruce up your title with one that has a specific tone, is optimised for search, and considers click-through-rate.
ChatGPT can generate SEO optimised page titles by training the model on a dataset of existing page titles and their corresponding search terms. ChatGPT will then generate new, similar page titles that include relevant keywords and phrases.
As with titles, you can also ask ChatGPT to generate compelling meta descriptions that are optimised for specific keywords.
As an integrated marketing agency, our position on ChatGPT SEO is this.
Blog content needs to be human-written, thought leadership content that distinguishes your brand, and ChatGPT is not there (yet!).
What it can be used for though is research, idea generation, and SEO assistance in generating keywords, titles, descriptions etc that will get your site ranking in organic search. We specialise in link building, local, technical and on and off-page SEO, content writing, user intent profiling, Shopify, Amazon and ecommerce SEO, and A/B testing.
If you want to know more about using ChatGPT in your digital marketing strategy, or want to talk to an SEO consultant about your strategy, get in touch.
We are a team of SEO specialists who build optimised and scalable SEO strategies driven by data and keywords that soars brands to the top of the search engine pages.
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