News and Insights
Unlocking the power of ChatGPT for SEO
May 5, 2023
ChatGPT has been the talk of the town recently in many circles, and for good reason. This game-changing technology holds huge potential to shape the future for better or worse. Whilst without a crystal ball it’s impossible to predict its impact, being at the forefront of technological advancements is usually a safe bet. Here at FINN Partners, we’ve been investigating and testing ChatGPT’s potential for SEO, and we’re excited to share some great tips for using it to reign supreme in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a large-language model developed by the team at Open AI. This model was developed using AI technology and is designed to act as a virtual assistant of sorts. You ask it questions and it has the incredible ability to generate human-like text and have a conversation with you. With this functionality ChatGPT can be used in many different ways, including for search engine optimisation (SEO). Both marketers and businesses can leverage ChatGPT’s ability to understand and generate natural language to improve their website’s visibility in SERPs and drive additional traffic to their site.
What are the advantages of using ChatGPT for SEO
One big advantage of using ChatGPT for SEO is its ability to process and understand vast amounts of data incredibly quickly. Marketers and businesses can use ChatGPT to analyse their web content, identify content gaps and areas for improvement and possibly to generate new content (more on this later!). ChatGPT can also be used for other areas of SEO, including keyword research, metadata optimisation, blog briefs and a range of other roles.
As ChatGPT can generate text responses to prompts, it can be used as an asset when improving the quality of website content. Better website content can help with every stage of the marketing funnel, from acquisition to conversion to retention.
In addition to this, ChatGPT can be integrated with tools such as CRM systems and analytics platforms, to help businesses better understand customer behaviour and develop a better service offering and make higher-quality decisions through data.
ChatGPT presents an advantage for your SEO strategy as it will help with streamlining parts of the process. The platform has the ability to leverage or replace certain steps of current processes. Though even where ChatGPT ‘replaces’ some of the work, marketers still want to be reviewing the results. Our role is not removed. By integrating ChatGPT into research and creation processes, marketers will have more time to dedicate to other steps or processes that can’t as easily be supported by ChatGPT.
Using ChatGPT for keyword research
ChatGPT can be a formidable tool when conducting keyword research, here’s how:
- Generating keyword suggestions – ChatGPT is good at generating keyword ideas. Simply plug a seed keyword or phrase into ChatGPT and ask for similar keyword suggestions.
- Identifying long-tail keywords – Long-tail keywords are more specific and less competitive than short-tail keywords, though will often have lower search volume – think “men’s black basketball trainers” as opposed to “trainers”. ChatGPT can help businesses identify additional long-tail keywords and develop content around these to drive further traffic to a site.
- Keyword clustering – this is the process of grouping similar keywords together – e.g “men’s black basketball trainers”, “white basketball trainers” “basketball trainers” are different keyword phrases, but all represent searchers who want to buy basketball trainers. To use ChatGPT to do some of the legwork here, simply write “cluster the following keywords based on relevancy”.
Always remember to sense-check the ChatGPT results, and cross-reference them with Ahrefs, SEM Rush, Brightedge or whichever good ol’fashioned SEO tools you use. Remember, the current beta version of ChatGPT isn’t connected to the internet, so it doesn’t have the latest data. Yet!
Content creation and ChatGPT
A large part of SEO revolves around creating high-quality content. Not only does this help to attract and retain visitors to a website but it also signals to search engines that a website is relevant and valuable.
ChatGPT could be a useful tool for content marketing services. It can be used to generate content ideas, content briefs, product descriptions and even help write the content itself.
Additionally, ChatGPT can optimize existing content by identifying and addressing any gaps or areas for improvement.
One big advantage of using ChatGPT for content is its ability to generate large amounts of content very quickly. This can help businesses keep their content fresh, and diversify the type of content, which is good for user experience and keeping people engaged. This might be a potential task for the future though, ChatGPT isn’t quite at the stage where you want to use content it produces straight off the bat. It has the tendency to generalise with the statements it makes. When using it for content creation you’re better off using it as a starting point rather than for the whole piece. If using ChatGPT to help with content consider the prompts you’re using; make sure they give a clear direction of the article you want. Also make sure to cast an eye over the response it produces to check you’re happy with what it says. You can then proceed with regular SEO optimisations.
Optimising meta tags
Meta tags are HTML tags that provide search engines and potential visitors with information about a webpage. Optimising meta tags for specific keywords is important for SEO as they help a web page rank within the SERPs for those specific keywords. ChatGPT can help optimise meta tags in the following ways:
- Analyzing the content of a webpage to identify and suggest the most relevant meta tags for a page.
- Generating a list of potential meta tags, such as title tags and meta descriptions based on a seed keyword or phrase.
- Re-writing meta tags to make to make them more engaging and compelling.
It is important to note that any final title tags, meta descriptions and H1s should be checked by a human and follow SEO best practice to accurately reflect the content on the page.
Writing and debugging Schema and markup data
Schema markup is a type of structured data that is usually added to the HTML code of a website to provide search engines with more information about the page. Two key goals of Schema markup are:
a) to help search engine crawlers better understand the content on a page
b) to obtain featured snippets, which are a type of search result box that appears at the top of a Google search results page.
Whilst there are many online markup generator and testing tools, often the process of debugging a Schema with error messages can be time-consuming. That’s where ChatGPT comes in – simply paste the Schema with errors into ChatGPT with a command such as “please correct this Schema” and let the tool do the work!
ChatGPT helps with backlink building
Backlinks are links from other websites to a business’s website, for instance, other websites linking to the FINN Partners site. They are an important ranking factor for search engines, especially Google as they signal to the search engine that the content on the website is credible and viable, acting as upvotes to a website.
The process of building backlinks can be long and laborious, with compelling content having to be researched and written before being outreached to potential sites to be published. ChatGPT can assist here in several ways:
Helping with titles and content topics
One of the key pillars of backlink building is creating high-quality content that is relevant, interesting and shareable. By leveraging ChatGPT for ideas and suggestions, SEOs and linkbuilders can develop compelling content more rapidly.
Helping generate personalised high-quality outreach emails
Creating emails to send to webmasters and publishers can be a time-consuming task. ChatGPT can be used to do the heavy lifting here, creating the bulk of the email outreach copy, which can then be checked by a human before sending.
Finding relevant industry events
Speaking at industry events can earn you some juicy backlinks from high-authority sites. However, finding the right events can be laborious. ChatGPT can help here too, quicky creating lists of annual events to target.
The dangers and risks of using ChatGPT for SEO
ChatGPT can be a powerful tool in an SEO’s arsenal, but its use comes with risks.
Foremost amongst these is that Google may penalize websites that use AI-generated content, which it recognises as a form of spamming. According to the Search Engine Journal, Google says “AI Generated Content is Against Guidelines”.
Numerous clients approach us for help recovering their website rankings after they published AI content. AI content is not only extremely difficult to index (getting Google to show it in their results pages), but it also doesn’t rank well when it does.
Another issue is that even if Google doesn’t impose a manual penalty against websites that use AI-generated content, such as ChatGPT, it is likely they use a soft marking system to determine if AI-generated content is being used. This means that it could be much more difficult to rank human-written content in the future because Google marked the website as a previous publisher of AI content.
The extent to which Google is able to detect AI-generated content is still a mystery. But whether you’re a business or a marketer, one thing is for sure – caution is key.
In summary
Should you use ChatGPT for research? – Yes! It can be a valuable tool to help gather and collate information as well as generate new ideas.
Should you use ChatGPT for non-crawlable content? – Yes! This can include content not used on a website, such as email and messaging copy. ChatGPT can assist in the laborious tasks of creating emails and messages.
Should you use ChatGPT for content writing? No! For the reasons highlighted above. We believe the risks outweigh the benefits, as it violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Was this article written by ChatGPT?
If you’re still with me at this point, a question you might be asking is who wrote this article? Using ChatGPT to write this article did cross our minds, and we used it in the research process. But we found the content it produced to contain errors and inaccuracies. Also, our concerns about Google penalising our site meant we decided to do the writing ourselves!
If you fancy having a chat to us about your SEO and what you can do to improve it, do get in touch. Our SEO team loves keeping up to date with the latest industry trends to find ways to help clients improve their visibility in the search results.