How to use ChatGPT effectively in your SEO strategy

Join our SEO Apprentice, Fiona Artwell, as she tells you how ChatGPT can benefit (and hinder) your SEO!

ChatGPT is the topic on everyone's minds. With the rise of AI in creative areas of the digital industry, marketers are wondering what developments such as ChatGPT mean for their own disciplines.

While my colleagues have been discussing ChatGPT in detail on our podcast, I've been considering how ChatGPT might influence the way we work within SEO. Will ChatGPT understand enough about organic performance to provide usable content, or should we be exercising extreme caution?

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that can answer questions and assist you with tasks such as composing emails, essays, code, and much more. Usage is open to the public free of charge because ChatGPT is still in its research and feedback phase. 

As ChatGPT is a powerful language generation tool this means that it can be used for a variety of natural language processing tasks, including search engine optimisation (SEO).

However, SEO is a complex and constantly evolving field, which requires a deep understanding of how search engines work and what factors they use in order to rank websites effectively. This means that, like any piece of technology, ChatGPT has its benefits and drawbacks when it comes to being used for search engine optimisation. 

How can ChatGPT help for search engine optimization (SEO)

One of the main benefits of using ChatGPT for SEO is its ability to generate unique content that is optimised for search engines. This can help increase a website’s visibility and drive more traffic to it. This can be useful for creating content for websites and blogs, as well as for generating meta tags and meta descriptions. ChatGPT's other benefits include:

• Being useful for keyword optimisation, as it can be trained to understand a particular industry or topic, making it easy to identify and incorporate relevant keywords into content,
  
  
• Generating a wide range of text, including product descriptions, blog posts, email subject lines, and even entire articles. This can help diversify the content on a website, making it more likely for content to rank well in search engines. 
  
  
• Summarising long-form content into shorter, more consumable text. This can help to improve the user experience on a website, making it more likely that visitors will engage with the content and return to the site, therefore, decreasing bounce rate on specific pages with relevant content. 
  
  
• Integration into content management systems, which allows the automation of content creation and optimisation,
  
  
• Being fine-tunable to work with multiple languages and dialects, which can be an advantage for businesses targeting a wide range of audiences across the world,
  
  
• Being able to generate content in bulk. This can be useful for businesses that need to produce a large amount of content on a regular basis. ChatGPT can be used to quickly generate articles, blog posts, and other types of content, which can then be edited and optimised for SEO purposes (leaving content specialists free to work on stand-out, hero pieces).

Drawbacks of ChatGPT for SEO 

However, while ChatGPT has many benefits for SEO, there are also some drawbacks to consider. 

One of the main drawbacks is the potential for low-quality or irrelevant content. ChatGPT is a machine learning technology, which means it is only as good as the data it is trained on (and the person asking the questions). If the training data is low-quality or not relevant to the task at hand, the generated content will likely also be low-quality or irrelevant. 

While ChatGPT can be used to generate high-quality text, the technology does not have the ability to add the personal touch or creativity that a human writer can. This can be a drawback for businesses that want to connect with their audience on a personal level as the content written by ChatGPT may not have a personal feel to it. 

ChatGPT is trained on a wide range of text data, but it may not always have the ability to understand the context of the content it is generating. This can lead to errors or inaccuracies in the text which would require editing and proofreading, to ensure that the information given is accurate, useful, and relevant to the context. 

Another drawback is that ChatGPT is that it is not yet advanced enough to understand the intent behind a search query to generate a perfect response. It is still not fully capable of understanding the user's intent and this can result in irrelevant information, or content that falls out of favour with Google's Helpful Content Update - something we covered at the end of 2022.

Is ChatGPT useful for SEO strategies?

ChatGPT is a powerful piece of AI technology for SEO, but it has its limitations. It is important to keep in mind these drawbacks and be aware of the potential for low-quality or irrelevant content.

However, despite its drawbacks, when used correctly and in conjunction with other SEO tools and expertise, ChatGPT is a powerful tool that can be used to strengthen organic performance, as it can help to streamline processes and identify keywords and topics. With its ability to generate content, optimise keywords, summarise long-form content, and automate the process, ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for SEO and content professionals looking to free up time spent on these tasks, and apply their skills to looking at broader strategies.

Businesses should weigh up the benefits and drawbacks of using ChatGPT for their SEO, consider how it fits into their overall content strategy, and use this software in conjunction with other SEO best practices to achieve the best possible results.

Plus, it’s free and easy to use for both beginners and advanced users, so there’s no reason not to give it a try!

Wondering how best to incorporate new technology into your digital marketing strategy? Get in touch with our experts.

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