How to Successfully Use ChatGPT for SEO

Updated Johannes C. -1 Tallied Votes 142 Views Share

Large Language Models (LLMs) can significantly improve your SEO success and at the same time lower your workload. Here are the Dos and Don'ts of using ChatGPT for SEO.

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What's the best way to integrate AI into keyword research? How to create engaging content with ChatGPT? And what other ways are there to streamline your SEO with LLMs?

Here are my 2 cents on the topic as an SEO consultant with 15 years experience. The following guide offers some (maybe unexpected) ways to integrate AI into your workflows, while at the same time improving quality and reducing hours.

#1 Trouble Shooting

One often overlooked way to boost your SEO is to use ChatGPT for troubleshooting. It is excellent at helping you fix technical errors – pretty much anything that might affect the Core Vitals in Google Search Console or lower your score on the web.dev checker. Got a weird CLS- or LCP-error affecting your WordPress site? Need to fix someone else's PHP code on a 9-year-old stand-alone page? Talk it through with ChatGPT and you might be surprised how easy some fixes come these days.

I previously used to spend countless hours looking through old threads on different message boards when troubleshooting. Now it's one short chat with my assistant, and I usually find more elegant fixes than before too. To clarify: ChatGPT does not "fix" anything by itself. But it assists you in locating the source of an error and resolving it. Of course, you have to provide the context, goal, and, if applicable, relevant code snippets.

#2 Keyword Research

Keyword research is still a mostly "manual" task – and I use quotation marks here because it has relied on various tools since the beginning of SEO – such as the Google Keyword Planner, list generators, suggestion-tools, etc. In my opinion, AI hasn't really impacted the initial steps and strategies of keyword research yet. However, ChatGPT and other LLMs are good at identifying things you might have overlooked.

When I start to compile my keyword list, I show every column of the list separately to an LLM and ask it to suggest additions. This helps me to identify expressions that I might not have considered. The rest of the process is mostly as before: I use a tool from pre-AI times to automatically compile all possible combinations of my keyword columns. After checking the search volume for all those phrases, I am left with a list of potentially useful keywords. This list I show to an LLM once more, just to double check that I didn't miss anything obvious.

There is a variety of plugins for keyword research with ChatGPT available, but in my experience, they don't contribute much more than the standard version (4o at the time of writing).

#3 Content Writing

Using LLMs for creating written content is a controversial topic – on the one hand, it can be difficult (if not impossible) to identify texts written by AI; on the other hand, AI is often applied so unprofessionally, that it is painfully obvious when a text was written this way. Even worse, we have seen content like that rank much higher than it should for a while. Google tried to address the issue with a core update to its algorithm earlier this year, but there is still lack of consensus among SEO experts as to how successful this was.

In my experience, LLMs can be helpful for phrasing if you provide the right input, structure, context, and ideas. Don't try to have the chatbot come up with the content for the text, it will most likely spit out something bland. Give it clear instructions and it will provide fitting phrasing for almost every context, or at least be able to suggest (sometimes better) alternative formulations that you can use to improve your own writing. Moreover, it's best not to try to make an LLM write an entire landing page at once. Better take it step by step and only ask for single parts/slides/paragraphs/headlines etc. Also: Claude is much better at this than ChatGPT at the moment.

#4 Image Generation

If there is one thing I am certain about regarding Google's search algorithm, then it is that it absolutely loves relevant, unique photos and illustrations. DALL-E is great for generating images that just perfectly fit the content of your site, and it also makes it much easier to create your own infographics.

Please note that DALL-E couldn't create an entire infographic, as it is not meant to accurately visualize data, and it has serious troubles spelling anything correctly that is more than a few characters or words. For such things, we still rely on image editing software. But DALL-E can provide individual elements, icons, frames, etc. and ChatGPT is helpful for bouncing ideas for data visualization.

If I use a photo generated by AI 1:1 on a website, I always adjust the dimensions and filename and delete the metadata – just to be sure I don't make it too easy for bots to identify it as generated content. You're not sure how to delete a file's metadata? Ask ChatGPT! ;)

Conclusion: Increase Quality & Decrease Hours

I'd estimate that AI tools have improved the quality of my work in SEO by at least 20% and slightly reduced my hours at the same time.

Other ways of successfully integrating AI into SEO are definitely on the horizon, and I'd advise all SEO professionals to familiarize themselves with the latest tools and to stay up to date. In my opinion, AI is today approximately where the Internet was in 1998, and the landscape will most likely continue to change rapidly. Hence, what works today might not work tomorrow – bear that in mind when developing your long-term SEO strategies. Stay flexible, keep learning, and be prepared to adapt as AI continue to evolve.

rproffitt commented: Why read what no one wrote? +0
Digitalmarket9 commented: Use ChatGPT for SEO by researching keywords, generating content, crafting meta tags, creating FAQs, and optimizing existing content. +0
jkon 636 Posting Whiz in Training Featured Poster

I have seen hundreds of eShops (with many admins in each) on my company's platform , fail to set proper meta tags in the CMS and never bother to do so for individual products or entire catalogs. The strange thing is that they expect —and some even live—their businesses through e-commerce, yet they don't bother. They can spend an extraordinary amount of time and money photographing an apple next to a suit, developing theories about why this attracts the end consumer, or making numerous demands on our S&D (Sales and Demand) department to have an icon half a centimeter to the left (no, we don't measure web design by centimeters). However, when it comes to writing a simple phrase for the title, some basic keywords for a product, and a decent, small description, they simply won't do it.

So, over the years, we have developed several techniques for our system to produce meta tags for a product, a web page, or a category on its own, using whatever data it has, when no admin bothers to do it. I am waiting a little longer, and then, in the case that an admin still hasn't bothered to set these tags, the system will call one or more AI services to feed them with the text, images, and videos, and get a decent, unique, descriptive title, a simple, concise description, and some keywords for it.

This of course will be worse than what a human would write but better than what a human wouldn't

commented: Smart approach, thanks for sharing! +0
commented: Thanks for sharing! +0
Dani 4,310 The Queen of DaniWeb Administrator Featured Poster Premium Member

I am of the opinion that meta tags are next to useless for SEO nowadays.

Google officially stopped using meta keywords back in 2009 according to https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag and I’m pretty sure they give very little weight to meta descriptions for at least the past decade.

Devsharma -1 Newbie Poster

Create a list of relevant keywords for your niche using ChatGPT. Provide it with topics or seed keywords, and ask for related terms or phrases.

Ask ChatGPT for keyword variations or long-tail keywords to target different search intents.

jkon 636 Posting Whiz in Training Featured Poster

I am of the opinion that meta tags are next to useless for SEO nowadays.

Dani I have the same opinion ... almost.

We use this three meta tags in more contexts than just the html title , description , keywords meta tags. In brief , we use them in:

  • The created ld+json for metadata on different schema.org types based of what this page / page view of the web app , is about (webpage , article , product , products list etc)

  • The other meta tags that we create , e.g. open graph tags.

  • In the final footer html section as h1 for title , h2 for description and h3 for each keywords. This final footer is marked as footer section (<footer>) and is in the bottom of the view , but it is the first thing in the body. Every other header elements the page view needs to output will be h4 or h5. In this way each page view has at least descent h1 , h2 and h3 tags , we don't mock google bot since it is marked as footer , and because it is the first thing that the bot reads in the body most often it bears more significant (Google is little ambiguous about that , but because it is h1 , h2 , h3 and also the first thing in body I believe it makes a difference) .

In the last one , I have make many tests over the year of how Google bot interprets this way , and although to make a test on those is difficult I tend to believe that being honest but creative with what you serve as html affects positive an app.

There are more on this story but I believe that this simplification expains why I strongly consider those meta tags to be important.

(thank you for your comment Johannes C. , its always great to read your articles)

Dani 4,310 The Queen of DaniWeb Administrator Featured Poster Premium Member

For sure, we use Schema.org very heavily here at DaniWeb. I don't necessarily consider those meta tags, although I suppose they could be perceived as such.

As far H1, H2, etc. tags, those are semantic HTML elements, and definitely not meta tags.

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