Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last year or so, you’ve probably heard of ChatGPT.
It’s the latest technological breakthrough, an advanced AI language model that is capable of generating an answer to any kind of question you ask it.
But here’s the strategic twist: ChatGPT isn’t just a novelty. It can be a valuable asset in your SEO toolkit too.
Of course, new SEO AI tools are coming onto market every week, but we’ll stick with ChatGPT for this article, as it provides a good framework for incorporating AI tools into your SEO research and strategy.
So, if you’ve been scratching your head over how to improve your website’s visibility and rank high in search engines, we are here to tell you that it is possible to tap into ChatGPT’s capabilities to help you do just that!
Whether you’re a seasoned SEO pro or a newbie just starting out and wanting to increase your visibility, this blog is going to help you harness the power of ChatGPT for search engine optimization success!
1. Learning About SEO Best Practices
One of the coolest features of ChatGPT is that it has all of the knowledge of the internet (up to a point. More on that in a second) at its “fingertips.”
This makes it an excellent time-saving tool when it comes to Googling any SEO questions that you might have.
Surely, you know what we mean. We can’t be the only ones who have been so frustrated with our search results that we wanted to just shout our question in Google’s ear.
That’s a bit what it's like feeding your prompts to ChatGPT. What might take you thirty frustrating minutes of solid Googling to find out can take you just a few well-phrased questions using ChatGPT.
It is capable of giving you AI-generated content about guidelines on important factors in SEO ranking, such as how to best structure your website for optimized UX/UI, how to use internal linking, what to do for mobile optimization, and more.
If you’re ever not sure about any rules or what SEO best practice standards you should aim for, ChatGPT is more than willing to help.
The caveat to this, of course, is that ChatGPT does have its limitations. While it’s perfectly fine to give ChatGPT prompts about evergreen questions and answers about SEO, do keep in mind that its unlimited access to the internet is also its greatest weakness.
It is only programmed with information from 2021 and before, meaning the past year and a half, and all of the information it came with, does not yet exist in ChatGPT’s servers, so it will not be capable of researching anything that is trending currently.
Of course, it won’t tell you that. While ChatGPT will confidently answer any questions you have about current topics, just be warned that if those answers have to do with anything that happened after 2021, they are unlikely to be accurate.
2. Help with Keywords
ChatGPT can also help you generate a list of keyword ideas and identify relevant keywords to target in your content.
Again, be aware that the information it generates is, by definition, outdated. Avoid asking it for anything currently trending, because it has no access to that information (again, it will give you a great-sounding answer despite this, so don’t be fooled!).
Asking it about any evergreen or perennial information should be just fine though.
Mostly, ChatGpt is helpful with content optimization. Just provide it with your keywords and a section of a blog post or a meta description you want to punch up, and it is more than capable of rewriting paragraphs for you, suggesting optimal keyword placement, density, and variation for optimal SEO and ease of reading.
It can also offer you some long-tail keywords related to your keywords, which are a little more specific and easier to rank for.
Again, remember that ChatGPT has its limitations. Any long-tail keywords or variations it provides you with are best checked with an additional SEO tool (more on that too!) to verify their relevance and accuracy.
3. Webpage Optimization
In order to rank high on search engines, your entire website needs to be optimized for SEO, not just your blogs and product descriptions.
A neat trick to getting this done quickly and easily is to provide ChatGPT with your (already verified) keywords and then ask it for help improving meta tags, title tags, image alt tags, schema markups, and URL structures.
Just type in your prompt and ChatGPT will be totally capable of generating some optimized written material for you to punch up your SEO and help your website pop up more frequently in search engines.
However, at all times, be sure that you are keeping the user experience in mind when you make these changes. If you’re changing your headers and titles so much that it sounds like a robot wrote them, then you’re defeating the purpose here.
At the end of the day, you’re writing for humans, not for Google.
And keep in mind that Google is not a stagnant constant. It’s improving every day, constantly evolving its bots and indexing AI to think more like a human does.
Write for humans, trust us. The bots will catch up soon enough and it’ll pay off in the long run.
And if you’re not sure where the line is between natural and robot-like, it would be a good idea to run any AI-generated info by the copywriters on your team.
They’ll be able to look over the content to make sure headings, titles, and image descriptions align with your messaging and flow in the way that they need to flow.
4. Content Strategy
If you’ve got your sights set on optimizing the content of your website for SEO, it helps to have some ideas to get you started.
This is where AI SEO tools can really help you. It’s great for the ideation phase of any project you’re working on and can easily assist you with coming up with ideas for any strategies or content you might want to try out.
It can also help with things like audience research, such as search behavior and pain points, as well as ideas for promoting your content to that target audience. These types of asks are evergreen and won’t be affected much by ChatGPT’s lack of access to recent information.
Have ChatGPT generate some ideas to try and then hand them off to your creative team to bring them to life!
5. Technical SEO with AI
Technical SEO refers to the technical aspects of your website, such as crawlability, indexing, and search engine performance.
Before you get too excited, no, ChatGPT cannot actually make any changes to your website. It’s not that advanced (yet).
What it can do, however, is make suggestions that could improve the technical aspects of your website. This includes guidance on XML sitemaps, recommendations for configuring the robots.txt and .htaccess files to control search engine crawler’s access to your website, as well as tips on how you can improve your website’s speed and overall performance.
You can also copy-paste sections of your website, like blog excerpts or product descriptions into ChatGPT’s message prompt or even just describe the layout or navigation of your site and easily get its advice on how you can optimize for SEO.
But train ChatGPT before asking it to optimize your writing for you! Tell it that you want to describe your business and paste in information from your website.
Tell it that you’re going to ask it to answer the pain points of your target audience and then paste in information from your marketing personas or sales ICP.
That way it has the context that it needs to give you useful answers.
6: SEO Tools and Analytics
Again, ChatGPT cannot actually access your website to analyze your metrics, but it can provide you recommendations for popular tools and platforms that can help you get this done.
And if you already have access to these tools and don’t understand exactly what the reports are telling you, ChatGPT is useful for this too.
Copy-paste the written portions of your results into its message prompt and ChatGPT can help you interpret your data and make sense of the reports you have on website traffic, keyword rankings, click-through rates, bounce rates, and other important metrics.
Of course, what would be most effective is to have a human SEO expert explain your results to you or, at least, verify everything ChatGPT made of it.
But it’s a good enough start if you’re new to metrics and want to gain some initial insights into your website’s performance!
When Not to Use AI for SEO
AI is a great tool for helping you optimize your website for SEO, but it can’t do everything. Here are the areas where ChatGPT’s limitations are most evident and where you should look to other tools or people to help you get it done.
Writing Content
While ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for optimizing content, providing strategies, and generating outlines, you don’t want to rely on it to fully create content or write blogs or articles for you.
As “smart” as it is, ChatGPT is still an AI language model and may not give you completely accurate or reliable information. Remember, it only has information up to 2021. Any information after that, ChatGPT has no access to.
It also will give your writing an unoriginal, bland, and robot-like quality to it. It takes a human with creativity and knowledge of your target audience to make writing that is truly engaging and valuable to your readers.
ChatGPT works best as a tool for your copywriters, not a replacement.
Local SEO
Local SEO focuses on optimizing a website for local searches, something that ChatGPT does not have the ability to generate.
Understanding your competition is pretty crucial for local SEO and since ChatGPT doesn’t have any access to real-time data (or your competitor at all, if they popped up after 2021) or the ability to analyze who these competitors are, it won’t do you much good here.
You also need to really resonate with a local audience, using local language, terms, and knowledge that would be familiar to them to really be successful. Unfortunately, this is something that ChatGPT and other AI tools can’t do just yet.
Algorithm Updates
This is something that requires access to current data, insider knowledge, and the ability to interpret metrics.
While ChatGPT can give you general insights, its lack of information after 2021 makes it an ineffective tool for analyzing algorithm updates. As newer AI tools come to market, this could be fixed, but as of this writing, there isn’t a reliable solution for this.
Consult an SEO expert or use a dedicated SEO tool to help you with this instead.
Competitive Analysis
Another limitation brought on by its lack of information after 2021. In order to effectively analyze your competition, you need up-to-date information, which ChatGPT just can’t give you.
Instead, use an SEO tool, consult your website analytics, or visit your competitor’s websites to check out their content and their overall online presence. If you need to, consult an expert to help you interpret your data to keep up with your competition and figure out what your next step should be.
Keyword Research
ChatGPT can definitely help you with finding evergreen variations in keywords, but as its database of information only goes up to 2021, it cannot help you find keywords that are currently trending or tell you which keywords have a high search volume.
ChatGPT Tips for Better Answers
We find that ChatGPT is infinitely more useful when you know how and what to ask it. Here are some tips to help you save time and get useful answers to the questions that you ask.
- Ask Specific Questions: ChatGPT answers are only as good as the prompts that you feed it. Be specific and ask it for exactly what you’re looking for in order to get the best results.
- Keep it Simple: Asking for too many things in one prompt is an easy way to “confuse” ChatGPT and cause it to give you irrelevant answers. Focus on one thing at a time and ChatGTP is more effective.
- Make Clear Asks: As with all artificial intelligence platforms, ChatGPT doesn’t do very well with complex asks. Make sure any prompts you give it are clear and direct.
- Be Patient: ChatGPT won’t always get it right the first time. If you’re finding that the answers generated are missing the mark, then relax and be patient! Change up the way you’re phrasing your question, be clear and concise, and you’ll get the answers you need.
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Unleash the Power of AI
Harnessing the power of AI SEO can be the game-changer you’re looking for in increasing your web page’s visibility and improving your digital marketing strategies.
Now is the perfect time to dive in and harness the untapped potential of this powerful tool and others like it, while your competitors are still exploring its possibilities. Why not strike while the iron is hot and unlock those opportunities to stay ahead of that competition?
How do you optimize your content for SEO?
