If you’ve been on the internet or social media over the last couple of weeks, chances are you’ll have come across ChatGPT, a chatbot created by OpenAI.
Since its release in November 2022, it’s gone viral and according to some reports, had over 1 million people sign-up in the first 5 days since its release.
Users around the world have been testing its capabilities and getting some pretty impressive results. In fact, if you’ve been on Twitter over the last few weeks, it’s been trending a lot, and you’ve probably seen many examples of what users have been able to get it to do. In fact, we created an entire podcast episode interviewing ChatGPT and you can listen to that here.
It is quite simply mind-blowing.
For marketers, it presents huge opportunities and is undoubtedly going to influence marketing going into 2023 and beyond.
In fact, some people have been questioning if people will continue to rely on Google for answers, or if they’ll just jump straight into ChatGPT.
That got us thinking, would ChatGPT be able to help us when it came to SEO? Could it undertake some SEO tasks for us?
In this post, we’ll be exploring what ChatGPT is, what you can do with it and whether you could use it for SEO.
We’ll be looking at how ChatGPT can help with:
- Keyword Research & generating long-tail keyword suggestions
- Writing and suggesting Meta Descriptions & Titles
- Generating Heading suggestions for your pages/posts
- Writing compelling Ad Copy
So, what are we waiting for, let’s dig in…
So, What is ChatGPT?
First things first, what exactly is ChatGPT?
I saw on Twitter that ChatGPT was described as a Chatbot on steroids, and to me, that’s a pretty accurate statement!
It’s so much more than your usual chatbot and looking on the OpenAI site itself, their statement says that:
“We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response”
On Wikipedia it’s described as:
“a prototype artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI which specializes in dialogue. The chatbot is a large language model fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques”
But who better to ask than ChatGPT itself…We posed the question, and here was its answer:
“GPT, or Generative Pretrained Transformer, is a type of language model developed by OpenAI. It is a large, deep-learning based model that has been trained on a massive amount of data in order to generate human-like text. GPT is often used for natural language processing tasks, such as language translation, summarization, and text generation. It can be used in a chat context to generate responses to user input in a way that sounds natural and human-like.”
Based on other Chatbots, the main difference seems to be that it specialises in dialogue and is able to talk to you just like a human would do.
With other chatbots, it can become frustrating to use them quite quickly with the answer options limited.
With ChatGPT it’s more of a conversation and there are far more ways to use it, which begs the next question…
What Exactly Can You Do With ChatGPT?
Unlike the majority of other chatbots out there, there are lots of things that you can get ChatGPT to do.
You can find a list of what it can do here but these include:
- Writing code
- Fixing broken code (and explaining WHY it was wrong!)
- Answering questions that you ask it
- Writing poems
- Writing short stories
- Providing explanations of things
- Translating language
- Correcting grammar
- Simplifying text
- Extracting keywords from a block of text
- Summarising text
- Creating a recipe from a list of ingredients
- Generating ideas for you
As you can see, the opportunities are endless and there’s huge potential for the tasks that you could undertake using it.
But for marketers and SEO’s, perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of ChatGPT is its ability to write human-like content. So let’s dive a little deeper into that and take a look at what ChatGPT can write for you.
What Can ChatGPT Write for You?
In short, just about anything. It can be used to write sentences, paragraphs, and even entire articles or documents.
It all depends on the quality of the information that you put into it.
The more detail you put in, the better the result.
For example, if you provide ChatGPT with a prompt or topic, it may be able to generate text related to that prompt or topic. Alternatively, if you provide ChatGPT with a specific set of inputs and outputs, it may be able to learn to generate text in a particular style or format.
So far I’ve seen examples of ChatGPT writing blog posts, essays, poems, short stories, news articles, summaries and even opinion pieces.
Sky News got it to write an article about itself and The Guardian got it to write an opinion piece for them.
So, if ChatGPT is able to write long-form content it begs the question, could ChatGPT be used for SEO? Could it write copy for landing pages, blog posts or even white papers for you?
Can ChatGPT Be Used for SEO & Creating Content?
In theory, the answer is yes.
With 2023 fast approaching and many other sites and bloggers etc. providing their SEO predictions for 2023, I decided to see if ChatGPT could create something similar. I asked it to write a blog post for me about SEO predictions for 2023 and here’s what it came up with:
The post covers voice search, structured data, AI and machine learning, Mobile-first indexing, the importance of local SEO and the role of content.
All very feasible things to be included in such posts. Not bad!
It’s a little short though at only 381 words. As such, I asked it if it could make the post longer, and it did, expanding on each point and creating a post that was nearly 600 words.
With the addition of an introduction and a conclusion, the post would be good to go. And guess, what? I asked it to provide that as well, and it wrote both out for me:
So there you have it, an 800-word blog post that could be created and published on our blog within half an hour. Crazy!
You might be thinking (like I was) that with the quality of content that ChatGPT can produce, this could solve some of your content marketing prayers!
But, there are a couple of catches.
Firstly, it’s not right all the time!
For example, after hearing through the grapevine that it’d get it wrong, we asked it who won the 1998 World Cup, and it told us that it was Brazil.
Now, I may have only been 10 years old at the time, but I’m pretty certain it was France!
So, before you start going ahead and getting ChatGPT to write your content for you, you’ll need to think about whether the content is actually going to be accurate and whether it’s something you’d want to put your business’s name behind.
Secondly (and perhaps more importantly), there are issues around AI-generated content, with Google actively working on technology that can detect when content has been AI-generated.
Google’s John Mueller said back in April 2022, that content that is automatically generated via AI writing tools would be considered spam and could lead to a manual penalty.
He stopped short of saying that Google could automatically detect when content had been automatically generated by AI, but did say that if Google’s webspam team came across such content, then they’d be authorised to take action.
So, before you start using ChatGPT to create all of your content, you may want to think twice!
How Could You Use ChatGPT for SEO & Content?
Despite Google frowning upon users creating automatically generated content using AI, there are in fact, several ways that you could use ChatGPT to help you with your SEO & Content Marketing.
For example, you may not want to write an entire blog post using it, but it could help you to generate ideas for your blog post.
Let’s look at an example of how this might work.
I told it that I wanted to write a blog post about keyword research tools and asked it which ones I should mention.
This is what it came up with:
Now I have a list of tools that I could write about for my blog post.
But, as it only provided 5 tools, I then asked if there were any others that I should include, and it gave me 5 more:
Pretty impressive.
Not only can it come up with suggestions for what you could include in your articles or blog posts, but you could follow the same process as above and ask it for suggested headings to use within the post itself as well.
Then, you could easily have a great starting point for your article, with 10 suggested tools to write about for undertaking Keyword Research with suggestions for the headings of each section.
Talking of keyword research, this leads me to the next way that ChatGPT could be used for SEO.
Can ChatGPT Be Used for Keyword Research?
In short, ChatGPT can be used to help with your keyword research efforts.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you could use ChatGPT specifically for undertaking your entire keyword research, as you wouldn’t have other metrics like Search Volumes, Keyword Difficulty etc. but one way that you could use it for keyword research is right at the beginning of the process when trying to generate keyword ideas.
For example, I asked it to find potential keywords to use on a page about SEO Services, and it came up with the following list of keywords:
Within seconds, you have a useful list of keywords that you could then put into a keyword research tool and start digging around with.
Better yet, you can also take some of these and ask ChatGPT to come up with long-tail variations of these keywords.
This is particularly useful as you may find that some of the keywords it comes up with are ones that you’d have never thought about.
Pretty useful huh!
Can ChatGPT Write Meta Descriptions and Titles?
Another way in which you can use ChatGPT to help with your SEO and Content marketing is to get it to help you with writing meta descriptions and titles.
I asked it to come up with some suggestions for page titles that included the term SEO Services, and this is what it came up with:
Now, whilst all of these might not be relevant for your business, you can still get ideas of the types of phrases or words that you could include in your page title.
The same can be said for meta descriptions.
Here are 5 meta descriptions that it came up with for an SEO services page:
Again, whilst you might not want to copy these exactly, you can use them to generate ideas for the types of terms or phrases that you may want to include, as well as the types of Call to Actions to use.
How to Use ChatGPT for Ad Copy
Coming up with compelling and engaging copy for your ads can be tedious.
Luckily, ChatGPT can help you here too.
I asked it to write some Google Ad headlines based on the keyword SEO services and then once it had given me some examples, I asked it to make them more compelling. Here are the results:
It even explains what it has done and why, telling me why the ads are more compelling than the first ones that it came up with.
Once again, you might not want to copy these directly, but they can provide you with inspiration for the kinds of words to use in your ads to drive more conversions. The same can also be applied to descriptions.
Conclusion
So, whilst you may not want to use ChatGPT to write all of your content for you, with the risk of being penalised by Google, you can use it as an assistant for other SEO activity and the opportunities are only as limited as to what you can think of!
Let’s recap.
Here are the ways you can use ChatGPT for SEO:
- Generating keyword suggestions
- Generating long-tail keyword suggestions
- Writing and suggesting Meta Descriptions & Titles
- Generating Heading suggestions for your pages/posts
- Write compelling Ad Copy
What do you think? Are there any other ways that you could use ChatGPT for SEO? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Leave us your thoughts in the comments below or feel free to email me: sean.nichols@sitevisibility.com. We’d be happy to include any other ideas in this post!
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