How to Use ChatGPT for SEO

ChatGPT is taking the world by storm for content creation. While I don’t recommend posting articles written by AI, ChatGPT can be a useful tool to help in the writing process. Used correctly, ChatGPT can help improve the writing process and increase your website’s SEO. In this post, we’ll see how to use ChatGPT for SEO to help you get the most out of this popular AI content-creation tool.

What is ChatGPT

ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Developed by OpenAI and released to the public in November of 2022, ChatGPT-3 is an artificial intelligence chatbot designed to respond to detailed instructions.

It is limited in its knowledge, though. The information it pulls from was compiled from the web in 2021. Also, it doesn’t fact-check that information and it has no interest in the outcome. This makes its factual accuracy somewhat uneven.

It’s free to use, and even with its drawbacks, ChatGPT-3 is still a useful tool for SEO. GPT-4 was released in March of 2023 and greatly improves upon ChatGPT-3. GPT-4 is only available to ChatGPT Plus users. We’ll use ChatGPT-3 for our examples.

How to Use ChatGPT

Before we see how ChatGPT can help you with SEO, let’s see how to use ChatGPT. Fortunately, this is a simple and painless process.

Create an OpenAI Account

First, go to the ChatGPT website and create an account. Once you’ve created the account, you’ll see the editor where you can enter your request. You’ll see some information including examples, see what ChatGPT can do, and what ChatGPT can’t do. Enter your request in the field at the bottom of the page.

The ChatGPT UI

Once you’ve entered your request, ChatGPT will develop an answer and display it on the screen. In the example below, I asked ChatGPT how to use WordPress. It gave me a 6-point answer that stepped through the process on a high level. It informed me this was the basics to get started and that I could find many resources online. You can rate the results by clicking the thumbs-up or thumbs-down icons on the right of the results. My previous questions appear in the left sidebar. I can also click to create a new chat, clear the conversation, upgrade to Plus, see dark mode, and see the FAQ.

You can also have it regenerate a response, which gives new content. You can then ask for information based on the suggestions it provides, which results in a better answer or an expanded answer. Fortunately, it will also make suggestions, which can improve what you’re asking for and refine the results.

Include Specific Information

ChatGPT will give you what you ask for. To get the most out of your answers, be specific about what you want. Tell ChatGPT if you want a list, an article, a comparison, etc. If you need information based on SEO, be sure to include this in your query. For example, rather than ask for an article title, ask for an article title for the best SEO using your keywords. It can also create content in the style of someone else that you specify. Include instructions to sound like that person.

How to Use ChatGPT for SEO

There are lots of ways ChatGPT can help improve your SEO. We can use it for posts, pages, the content within the posts, content within specific pages, meta, image descriptions, and lots more. Keep in mind that ChatGPT is artificial intelligence and is not always correct. It’s limited in its knowledge and it doesn’t fact-check. Use the information it provides as a guideline and do your own research to confirm it’s correct.

Now that we know how to use ChatGPT and understand its strengths and limitations, let’s see how to use it to help with SEO.

Generate Title Ideas

Interesting titles with effective SEO can be difficult to write. They seem simple, but they need to inform the reader and entice them to click without sounding spammy or like click bate. Ask ChatGPT for a title and a meta title for a specific page or content. Describe the page or article. The example below lists title ideas for articles about using ChatGPT for SEO.

Generate Content Ideas

Describe your niche and audience, and then ask for content ideas that match. ChatGPT can provide a list of topics to keep you busy and it would be the type of content your audience is looking for. I asked it for article ideas, and it listed possible titles.

Next, I rephrased the query to list topic ideas and it provided a new list.

Create Descriptions

Ask ChatGPT to provide an SEO-ready description of your content. This can be used as your SEO excerpt, for social media, and emails.

For a shorter version for use in excerpts or small social media posts, specify a character count.

Discover Keywords

Describe the post you want to create and ask ChatGPT for a list of suggested keywords. You can use these keywords in your content and use the list to generate blog post ideas. This one can be tricky, though, because it can give you out-of-date information or provide false information. For example, it might give you a list of the most searched keywords and none of the words have any search volume. Always use it as a starting point and check the search volume with other keyword tools. Here’s an example with a list of SEO keywords.

Discover Related Keywords

Once you have your target keywords, enter the keywords you’re using and ChatGPT for a list of related keywords. The list that ChatGPT provides won’t include every possible word you’ll ever need, but it will provide lots of words to spark ideas for new directions or topics you may not have considered. I asked in the same chat as the one above for a list of related keywords.

Create Post Outlines

Provide a list of information you want to include in the article and ask ChatGPT for a structured outline with an SEO focus. Follow that outline to create your post. You might need to remove, add, or move parts of the outline to create a post in your style, but it can provide a good place to start. You can also ask it to expand on any point you want.

Improve Content Quality

Once you’ve created your content, paste it into the field and ask ChatGPT to clean up your writing. It can suggest edits, shorten sentences, remove redundancies, improve grammar, correct spelling, and more. This makes it an excellent tool for proofreading. It can even convert your writing into writing formats such as MLA, APA, and Chicago. Place the portion of text you want ChatGPT to correct in quotations and provide the instructions of what you want it to do.

Generate Topic Ideas

Ask for topics that are related to a specific topic. This can provide you with a list of topics to write about within your niche. It can provide the topics that people are searching for, so you’ll know the most important topics to include in your content strategy based on what the audience wants the most.

Image Alt Descriptions

Ask for alt descriptions of each image individually. Describe the image, title of the article, and provide the keywords you want to target, and then use the portion of text you need. This one took several tries, and I’d still only use a portion of the text, but it does work well for ideas.

Generate FAQs

This is a great way to find the questions people are searching for about a specific product or service. You can get a list of questions and answers that you can rewrite for your website. I asked a simple question, but you can include more detail and ask for improved SEO.

Next, I asked for the FAQs to be written with improved SEO in mind and it gave me a new list with some SEO tips.

Create Short Content

Short content, such as descriptions, ad copy, website copy, product descriptions, etc., can be difficult to create. A few words need to make a huge impact. Use ChatGPT as a starting point and write it to match your brand.

Generate an SEO Strategy

One of the advantages of ChatGPT is the ability to ask complete questions and receive complete answers. Ask ChatGPT to help you develop your SEO strategy. Include a description of your business, customers, and goals. The more detail you can include the better.

Create Emails

ChatGPT can also create emails to help grow your reach. Describe your post and ask for an email that users are likely to open and share.

Generate Schema

Schema is the code that lets search engines know about your website. They can learn about your content to show your website in the correct search results. They can also learn about your location, which is crucial for local SEO. However, be careful using ChatGPT for local SEO as it can provide incorrect information. In the example below, I asked ChatGPT to create the schema markup for a bakery website.

You can find the questions to ask for your schema by searching for your keywords and then looking at the Answer Cards that Google provides. Also, look at the section that shows what people also ask. Provide the information about a page along with the instructions and it will provide the code you can paste into your site.

Run a Link-Building Campaign

Provide ChatGPT with the names, URLs, and domain names of people you want to contact. You can use ChatGPT to write the code that will use this information and find their email addresses for you. This will take several steps and the process will depend on the app or service you want the code for. As an example, paste the code as a formula into Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel along with the rest of the information and hit enter.

What Not to do with ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a powerful tool, but it can’t do everything. For example, it doesn’t browse the web, so it doesn’t have access to the latest data. It only knows what it has already been taught. Its writing can sound bland, and it can promote false information. With this in mind, there are a few things you shouldn’t do with it.

Don’t Completely Replace Human Writers

Writing still needs to feel personal and relatable. It needs to sound like your brand and be backed by experience. It should be unique. If it’s bland, no one will read it or come back to your site, and gaining and keeping that traffic is the point of the content in the first place.

Don’t Post Full Articles Written by AI

The articles will sound like boilerplate content. It will sound like everything else on the web because it is. Readers will feel like they’ve read the article somewhere before, probably because they have. Also, your readers can ask AI for the same article you did. For SEO, your articles need to stand out from the crowd. Use correctly, ChatGPT can help.

Don’t Believe Everything AI Says

AI doesn’t care about accuracy. It’s just summarizing what it sees on the web, and let’s be honest, there might be a thing or two that’s not accurate on the web. Also, it can make up information and present it as if it were true. This includes fake facts, quotes, citations, and more. Furthermore, its information can be out of date.

Don’t Plagiarize

Plagiarism is a very real danger with ChatGPT. After all, it got its knowledge from the web and summarizes what is already out there.

Ending Thoughts

That’s our look at how to use ChatGPT for SEO. This is an interesting and helpful tool. Keep in mind that it’s just a tool and it’s not perfect. Always use ChatGPT as a tool and not a writing replacement. If you post what AI writes, then you’ll sound like everyone else and not like yourself. You’ll still need your content to sound like a real person wrote it and that it’s part of your brand. It should still match the tone of your brand and relate to your audience. ChatGPT is a powerful tool, though, and used correctly it can save time and improve your SEO.

We want to hear from you. Have you used ChatGPT for SEO? Let us know about your experience in the comments.

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