How to Use ChatGPT for SEO

As a Content Marketer heavily invested in the world of SEO, you've probably started wondering how ChatGPT and Google Bard will impact your job. That's a fair concern. If you don't know how they work or how to use AI to do your job better, you risk falling behind in your career.

Content marketers and SEO specialists who learn to adapt AI to do better at their jobs are far more employable — and are far more likely to nab those career boosts. ChatGPT will not replace your job, but a marketer who knows how to use AI to be more efficient will.

Don't panic. We'll teach you how to be the top dog marketer who uses AI and wins the job over laggards.

How ChatGPT Works: A Non-Technical Explanation

A lot of people think ChatGPT is like Skynet from Terminator or the machines from The Matrix. It's not an all-knowing super intelligence that's going to enslave us (yet).

ChatGPT relies on AI models called Large Language Models (LLMs). OpenAI trained these models on the internet.

At a very high level, LLMs predict the next "token" given some text.

For example, if I say, "We complete each other's..." and pause, you might say, "sentences." Or maybe you watched Frozen one too many times and say "sandwiches" instead.

Why did you do that? You've read so much that you just know what's going to come next. LLMs are doing the exact same thing, except they've read the entirety of the internet. It turns out that if you train LLMs on enough data, predicting the next word starts to show something that resembles "intelligence."

So now you can use natural language prompts to answer questions, roleplay scenarios, write drafts to emails or essays, hold conversations, explain code... you get the idea.

It's similar to that old "infinite monkey" theorem. The logic goes that if you had infinite monkeys pressing keys at typewriters forever, they would eventually write stuff on Shakespeare's level.

How Much Can You Trust ChatGPT?

Great, so now that you know how ChatGPT works, you'll be able to better understand what it can and cannot do for you.

As of May 2023, ChatGPT is trained on data up to 2021, which means:

• Its knowledge is dated. This will be updated as newer models come out, but it will likely never be in real-time. You can't ask about something that happened last week.

• It can lie, make up answers or "hallucinate." Because it randomly generates the next token or string of words related to your prompt, it can and will make up stuff that sounds convincing but isn't true.
• It doesn't have access to data. You can't ask it about home prices, company valuations, or keyword search volume. ‎‎‎But, with ChatGPT plugins, you can give it access to read live data. It can perform operations, analyze them for you, and answer your questions.

What Can You Use ChatGPT for in SEO?

ChatGPT can offer quick and basic SEO assistance when you're short on time (which is often).

1. Keyword Extraction From Text

This is a handy trick to identify and extract an article's primary keywords and get an idea of what it's about.

My prompt for the below example was, "Extract the keywords from this article:" and then I pasted the article's body in.

2. Title Generation

Racking your brain for the perfect title for your article? ChatGPT can help you write titles based on the context of your piece.

3. Generating Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions

Much like the above, ChatGPT can help with crafting metadata.

My prompt for the below example was, "Can you write a meta title and meta description for this piece on product repositioning?"

4. Expand on Talking Points

The AI can help you dive deeper by expanding on a point and can even follow a writing framework.

5. Summarize Other Articles

I find this super helpful when I need to skim-read a bunch of articles. You can ask the AI to condense the result even further if you want to.

The prompt I used for the below example was: "Please summarize this article into bullet points."

6. Editing And Correcting Grammar

Grammarly license who? Let ChatGPT do some proofreading for you.

What Can You NOT Use ChatGPT For in SEO?

ChatGPT is not advanced enough for thorough SEO checks. There are a bunch of things that it can't do for you:

• It can't give insight into data like keyword volume. As I've mentioned, it doesn't have access to search data.
• It can't write complete articles for you that will drive traffic. With Google SGE on its way, Google doesn't need purely AI-written content. It can do that on its own.
• It can't do internal linking. It doesn't have access to your site.
• It can't tell you what pages need an update. It doesn't have access to Google Search Console results.
• It can't analyze dozens of pages at once. Its context window is too small for this.
• It can't analyze audio and video. It needs to be combined with other tools to get a transcript on a video or audio first.
• It's a lot of work. ChatGPT is not deeply integrated into your workflows, so it's a lot of switching tabs and copy/pasting. Chat is also not the best user interface for a lot of problems.

So yes, ChatGPT can do a whole bunch of SEO tasks for you, but you can't rely on it alone.

There's A Better Way to Use AI for SEO

Worried ChatGPT is too limited and can't do everything you want it to do?

Letterdrop uses ChatGPT's models like GPT-4, amongst others, live keyword data, and your company's own proprietary data like call transcripts and marketing sites to help you truly automate your content SEO problems.

Letterdrop can do things like automate internal linking, detect pages in need of an SEO refresh, and automatically suggest sections that will increase your information gain.

It's a tool built to take a lot of jobs to be done in content SEO off your hands, so you can focus on more strategic and creative work.

Use AI Tools to Free Up Time

You can stop doom scrolling through Twitter threads on Generative AI now.

Tools like ChatGPT are just that — tools. It can take some mundane SEO basics off your hands, which leaves you more time for high-level strategy and more impactful work.

Think of ChatGPT as a 24/7 intern that can ready and synthesize information very fast.

AI is here to stay, so you can either learn how to use it to your advantage or fall behind.

Letterdrop makes use of GPT-4 technology and, with it, can take SEO automation to the next level. Talk to us to let AI really do the heavy lifting.‎