How ChatGPT Can Suck For SEO

By now, you’ve probably heard of ChatGpt which was only launched last November. Since that time, it has become the fastest website in history to reach 1 million users. With promises for everything from quick content to clean coding, ChatGPT has been held up to do everything except your laundry.

But, even as I type this, my full hamper is staring at me. I think it’s mocking me. ChatGPT is useless in this fight.

It’s impossible to escape the hype of ChatGPT. And it’s easy to see why. ChatGPT delivers an AI powerhouse of information to users in seconds. No longer considered a futuristic Sci-Fi scenario, people are stoked about its uses in their daily lives! From healthcare to law, ChatGPT holds the possibility of automating and modernizing monotonous daily tasks.

Naturally, this excitement extends to business owners trying to outsource tasks related to their SEO. Technical SEO like code snippets and creating backlinks through content can bog down busy business owners. But before you hire ChatGPT as your in-house SEO help, it’s time to learn more about it. There are some serious limitations to relying on ChatGPT for all your SEO needs.

What Is ChatGPT?

First, let’s establish exactly what ChatGPT is. ChatGPT is a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to have human-like conversations with its users. An intensive deep learning model, ChatGPT learns as humans provide feedback on its responses. But ChatGPT does much more than chat. It can also write essays, construct code, compose emails, answer questions, and more. The options are limitless!

As impressive as it is, ChatGPT is not in its final form. ChatGPT is currently free because it’s still learning from users during this research period. Since its launch in late 2022, millions of users have used ChatGPT in their daily lives. As more people feed ChatGPT information, the better it gets.

5 Ways to Use ChatGPT for SEO

Given its time-saving capabilities, you’re likely ready to use ChatGPT for your business. There are several ways to use ChatGPT for SEO. It’s a particularly useful tool for brainstorming and assisting you with code. See these specific examples for ideas.

1.    Get keyword Ideas

For as long as the internet has been around, keywords have been an important part of the internet. Both SEO and Google Adwords campaigns depend upon having a strong keyword strategy for your website and your ads. ChatGPT is useful for generating a list of keywords and phrases that people might use to find what you do.

2.   Generate outlines

Writer’s block can strike at any time. ChatGPT is not a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer yet, but it can give you some unique ideas to inspire you. ChatGPT can take into consideration your target audience and the purpose of a post. From there, you can ask ChatGPT to give you a brief outline of a blog post. Or have it come up with a few headline ideas. Start plugging in your own knowledge and sources to create interesting content based on their suggestions.

3.   Generate actual content

Since ChatGPT can remember your conversation, all you need to do is to as the AI to take the outline previously provided and write content using that outline. It will provide content that is often surprisingly good (although not always). It can create any type of content you need from brief product descriptions all the way to books depending upon what prompts you give it.

4.    Content editing

After editing a blog post or landing page for a while, it’s easy to miss critical errors. ChatGPT can look at your content with new eyes. Ask ChatGPT to proofread your work once you’re finished. Allow ChatGPT to scan it and clean up any grammatical errors. If it finds sentences that are clunky or boring, it can make suggestions to improve your writing as well. Enter a block of text from your blog post and ask ChatGPT to improve the tone to be more witty or informative, for example. Get new ideas to rewrite your content with the tone you’re looking for.

5.   Data Troubleshooting

Situations arise with clients that aren’t always straightforward. In the same way ChatGPT can brainstorm content ideas, it may be able to answer general tech questions for you. Use ChatGPT to provide insights on complex data analysis issues. ChatGPT can analyze datasets for insights and provide commentary on code. Create data dictionaries with ChatGPT as well if you need help categorizing your data.

As always, ChatGPT could have biases when analyzing data, so take their analysis with a grain of salt. You also should be aware of any sensitive business information before giving it to ChatGPT. Consider altering the data before uploading and only using the output for data analysis troubleshooting.

5 Serious Limitations to ChatGPT

Of course, ChatGPT can’t do it all. (Reference my laundry example earlier!) There are some legitimate limitations to using ChatGPT for SEO. Mainly, the issue lies when you try to make SEO do the heavy lifting for your SEO strategy instead of using it as a tool to assist you. Here are some examples of limitations:

1.    ChatGPT is not connected to the internet

In case you didn’t know, ChatGPT does not connect to the Internet. This is apparently by design although Bard, which is Google’s AI tool is connected.

Instead, ChatGPT relies on feedback from its users. Considering the nature of SEO, this is problematic. The current iteration of ChatGPT only contains knowledge up to 2021. If you’re trying to keep up with evolving keywords, you won’t be able to do so with ChatGPT.

This also means ChatGPT also can’t scan your website and fully understand it. SEO work is all about contextualizing your website and using keywords that make sense to search engines. Relying solely on ChatGPT means your SEO lacks that important context, as the technology can’t understand your website in the grand scheme of the internet like your friendly neighborhood SEO expert can.

2.    ChatGPT suggests keywords but has no conception of volume.

Keyword research is always evolving and can be a daunting task. So, it’s tempting to ask ChatGPT for some assistance. ChatGPT may give you a quick idea of what general keywords might work for your company. At first glance, these keywords might look right. But ChatGPT can’t give you an idea of the keyword’s volume or recommend long-tail keywords that are more realistic to rank for.

For example, say you’re a digital marketing agency. If you’re looking for keywords for your business, you might ask ChatGPT to give you ideas. The number one suggestion would likely be “digital marketing.” ChatGPT doesn’t know that this is an extremely difficult and competitive keyword phrase to rank for. If you went off this keyword suggestion without questioning it, you’d have a hard time ranking in search engines for any relevant and realistic keywords for your business.

3.    ChatGPT can give seriously inaccurate information

ChatGPT has a reputation for being smart and intuitive. But don’t be fooled: it’s just flat-out wrong sometimes. If you’re using ChatGPT to write headlines, you might get headlines with extended character counts. If you copied and pasted these headlines, you’d be over the character limit. Or you can get blog posts with dated information. Since it’s not connected to the internet, ChatGPT may give an extremely confident, but outdated (read: absolutely wrong) answer. Given the fluid nature of SEO, you can’t rely on information from 2021.

Even worse, AI like ChatGPT is not free from biases. Not only can you potentially get inaccurate information for your SEO strategy, but it can be biased or harmful as well. If your website is targeted towards a sensitive topic, you’d have to be especially wary of the content ChatGPT produces for it. ChatGPT learned from other humans. Therefore, ChatGPT can hold the same biases and misconceptions some humans do.

4.    Search Engines Don’t Like Repetition

If you’re exclusively using ChatGPT to generate landing pages and blog post content for you, search engines won’t like that. Search engines like Google reward originality and uniqueness. If everyone starts using ChatGPT to create content, it will become duplicative.

Google wants unique, helpful content. Initially, the powers at Google said AI content was a no-no, but they’ve since backed off and said, “Oh, ok, as long as the AI-generated content is helpful, we don’t really mind.” But, do you trust that? The jury is still out. There are some respected SEO nerds out there who have created websites with AI content that seem to be doing well, so maybe that’s true.

5.   Lack of Human Appeal

No matter how much it may try to convince you, ChatGPT is not human. This is yet another reason to err on the side of caution when allowing it to take over SEO writing tasks for you. Recent research shows that ChatGPT tends to be wordy with its answers. While humans preferred ChatGPT answers to medical and finance questions, they wanted straightforward human-written responses for medical queries.

Simultaneously, ChatGPT cannot understand sarcasm or irony. Remember that ChatGPT is creating content based on feedback from humans, but it lacks the nuance we provide as humans. Certain sensitive subjects like medical information should be written and peer-reviewed by a human.

What does the Future of ChatGPT mean for SEO?

As everyone adjusts to the existence of ChatGPT and other AI tools to help with SEO, it’s anyone’s guess how it will evolve. One thing is for sure: artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere. If you haven’t started to use ChatGPT yet, now is a great time to start. Start playing around with ChatGPT to experiment if you haven’t yet. Now that you understand the best practices for using ChatGPT and its limitations, you must learn how to ask for what you need.

When ChatGPT first came out, there were all kinds of clamoring about how it would be the death of SEO, but honestly, people have been clamoring about that now for a decade or longer and it’s still one of the most powerful ways to drive targeted website traffic to your business.

Chances are, ChatGPT will become an integral tool for your SEO strategy in the future. No one can say they’re an expert at using such a new tool yet despite some claims by people out there. But the best SEO nerds in the near future will be those who know how to leverage ChatGPT into their handy assistant.

As a side note, we should be clear that we’re not anti-AI in the least. If anything, we are always looking for that shiny object that makes our lives easier. All we’re saying here is that ChatGPT isn’t the end all be all that was originally hyped.

So, how does ChatGPT fit into my SEO strategy?

With exciting new technology like artificial intelligence, it makes sense to explore its uses for your business. ChatGPT provides some convenient shortcuts and brainstorming features for SEO. If you’re experiencing writer’s block or need some help with your code, ChatGPT serves as a handy assistant.

However, using ChatGPT to handle your entire SEO strategy for you is a disaster waiting to happen. Without the ability to contextualize your website and a lack of new knowledge, ChatGPT can spew out embarrassing nonsense. Like all new technology, it’s important to take it with a grain of salt. Trust your instincts about SEO before readily applying anything ChatGPT tells you to do with your strategy.

Still need help with your SEO strategy? We can help. Make It Loud knows how to get business to your website. Since the days of the yellow pages to now, we’ve helped businesses target the right customers. Call us at 678.325.4007 for a free digital marketing consultation to learn more.