It’s perhaps no exaggeration to say that the biggest hype storm in months has swept the world with the launch of ChatGPT. The artificial intelligence-based language model makes English super easy to communicate with and answers almost any question.
But the question is, how can all this be used in SEO? Before we get our diving suits on and dive into the deepest depths of AI-based search engine optimization, let’s take a look at what ChatGPT is.
What is ChatGPT?
Perhaps the easiest way if it gives the answer itself.
“ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI. It is designed to answer questions and engage in conversation with humans in natural language. The model is trained on a massive dataset of text from the internet, which allows it to generate coherent and contextually appropriate responses to a wide variety of questions and prompts. ChatGPT is part of a family of models known as GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which are widely used in natural language processing applications.”
It’s true that it’s a bit sloppy in Hungarian (at least for now), but it still gets the point across. Basically, you can ask anything, whether it’s a recipe for a soup, the big questions about planting radishes or what Aristotle would think about mobile phones.
How can you use ChatGPT for search engine optimization?
Now let’s look at how you can gather the wind of ChatGPT in the sails of your SEO.
1. Create content
Content production is a problem in many places, as there is no capacity for copywriting. Now, even ChatGPT is not yet able to do this, but the signs are very encouraging. You need a person to proofread the text, as it is very often imprecise or monologues unnecessarily, but a skilled proofreader can remedy this.
Furthermore, it is not clear exactly what Google’s position is on AI-generated content. Last year, in 2022, Google spokesperson John Mueller said that the search engine considers AI-generated content to be spam and as such, a violation of the company’s policies.
But now news has emerged, also from Mueller, that Google is not penalising content created by AI. So it is better to be careful and rephrase the text generated by ChatGPT.
But the good news is that it’s great for brainstorming, whether it’s a headline idea or an entire year’s content plan.
It can also write great social media content and even write the script for you if you want to make a YouTube video.
ChatGPT is also a great tool for online shops with thousands of products, as it can help you write product descriptions as well as category descriptions.
But here again, the advice is to always check the text you receive with a professional.
2. Keyword research and analysis
In addition to developing a content strategy, another very useful feature of ChatGPT is keyword research.
All you have to do is open the chatbot, type in a few relevant, industry-specific keywords and ask it to provide you with additional, related keywords.
The results are quite astonishing.
The platform also saves us from monotonous work such as organizing keywords.
3. Developing a content strategy
It’s very interesting and useful (maybe even a bit scary) how the platform can give good advice on content strategy.
Of course, you may reasonably flash that red light in your head when you think about it: “what if my competitor is doing exactly the same thing?”.
This is why you should not rely solely and exclusively on ChatGPT. You can draw ideas from it and vary the order, but you should never implement suggestions without asking questions.
4. Generate schema code
Schema.org (or structured data) are special snippets of code that help search engines understand and display website content in search engine results pages (SERPs).
These codes can be used to structure different types of data, such as addresses, dates, products, articles, videos, recipes, people, etc. It is worth knowing that structured data is embedded in the HTML code of web pages and helps search engines to interpret the data more easily, so that better rankings in search results can be achieved, as well as various features such as rich snippets or AMP pages.
There is no lack of schema generators, but ChatGPT is one of the best because it requires few instructions and saves you a lot of time. Simply copy and paste the content and ask it to generate a schema code.
Note that it also offers help at the end. It’s amazing.
5. Create meta descriptions
Although there are industry rumours that Google ignores meta descriptions in organic rankings, it does display these descriptions in the snippets of search results.
So it’s actually in your interest that each page has a unique meta description, as this can improve click-through rates.
So you can use AI to write these short little descriptions that will save you a lot of time.
6. Generating heading ideas
ChatGPT can generate not only headlines, but also H2 H3 headlines for the content.
To do this, you should specify the main keyword, the main topic and the style and wording you want to use. It is best to write two or three examples on this.
7. Write Alt text
“alt text” or “alternative text” is a short description that you can write for images on web pages, and as such helps visually impaired people to get information from the image. It also helps search engines to better understand the content of images, which is an important SEO ranking factor.
If you have thousands of pictures, that means thousands of alt texts, which are no small amount of work and time to write each one. However, ChatGPT can help you with this too, if you enter the keywords and describe which images you want to text for.
The future is uncertain
In the first 5 days of its launch, ChatGPT has already reached 1 million users. It may not sound like much at first, but put in context, it’s a different story: it took Netflix around 3.5 years, Facebook 10 months, Spotify 5 months and Instagram 2.5 months.
Some SEO experts predict that in the next 2-10 years, many typical outsourcing or junior jobs such as legal, financial advice or accounting will be done by AI.
The real power of ChatGPT lies in its ability to provide direct answers to questions through a very simple user interface, and all in a few milliseconds.
But the future is still very uncertain. Bill Gates, for example, has stated that “ChatGPT will change the world as we know it today”. But what that means exactly, no one knows.