You’ve most likely heard about ChatGPT. This program has been used by many people to generate content for their websites and even boost their search engine results. However, if you want to use ChatGPT for SEO, you must first comprehend what the tool is capable of.
While ChatGPT cannot perform appropriate keyword research for you (yet), it can assist you in brainstorming content ideas. ChatGPT, when used correctly, can be an incredible tool for creating high-quality content that helps you rank well (plus it works with WordPress!).
In this article, we’ll provide a no-fluff explanation of how to use ChatGPT for SEO. We’ll go through the tool’s limits as well as how it can help your site rank higher. Let’s get started!
Can you use ChatGPT for keyword research?
Currently, most versions of ChatGPT cannot connect to the internet to seek up current data. This means that when you enter a query, the response you receive is based on obsolete data.
Some users currently have access to ChatGPT plugins that pick up the most recent information. Similarly, third-party solutions that use the ChatGPT API allow you to connect the software to the internet. In most circumstances, though, you are limited to the data provided by the version you are using.
In practice, this limits the tool’s utility for activities such as keyword research, assessing search patterns, and determining user intent. If you rely on ChatGPT for keyword research, you’re likely to get erroneous results:
Modern keyword research tools include a plethora of information, such as recent search volumes, competition levels, and more. This information is critical for establishing a smart content strategy, yet ChatGPT cannot supply it to you (at the present).
Viable ways to use ChatGPT for SEO in 2023
Now that we’ve covered the reasons why you shouldn’t use ChatGPT for SEO, let’s look at what you can:
- Plan content clusters
- Generate seed keywords for each cluster
- Help with content creation
- Improve your content formatting
- Come up with titles and meta descriptions
1. Plan content clusters 📅
Content clusters are sets of interconnected articles that discuss a specific topic in more depth. Take a look at our blog, for example, and you’ll find that we have multiple clusters. These include hosting reviews, WordPress technical training, email marketing, and many more.
Creating content clusters might assist you in providing relevant information to your target audience. Each cluster corresponds to a possible inquiry from your users, and within each cluster, you have material that provides answers and solutions. The question is, how do you decide which clusters to prioritize?
You should have a good understanding of what people are interested in if you know your specialty. If you want to be more detailed, you can research competitor sites, check up common searches in your niche, evaluate keywords, and do other things.
ChatGPT can assist you in streamlining the process by identifying potential content clusters for your niche:
We encourage that you include these responses into your brainstorming process. Furthermore, you should concentrate on themes that are of interest to your audience and can help you rank.
For example, if you’re a fitness practitioner, you can use ChatGPT to determine which content clusters are viable and which aren’t. If you depend exclusively on the data provided by the program, you may end up focusing on topics that are either irrelevant to your audience or have too much competition.
2. Generate seed keywords for each cluster ⌨️
The words or phrases that best define the core theme of each content cluster are known as seed keywords. Most of the time, these are not the keywords you’ll be focusing on in your content.
Some ideas for seed keywords for a nutrition and diet blog are “clean eating,” “whole foods,” “balanced diet,” and “healthy recipes.” The particular keywords you wish to target, on the other hand, will be determined by characteristics such as search volume and level of competition.
Some examples of long-tail keywords in the nutrition niche may include:
- Can pumpkin recipes be healthy?
- A healthy chicken breast recipe
- Are air fryer recipes healthy?
All of these are instances of real-world searches. Each subject cluster should include a list of seed keywords that give you an idea of the kinds of topics you wish to cover.
ChatGPT can help you generate seed keyword ideas but not particular ones because it lacks access to current search traffic data:
We propose using seed keywords to locate similar queries if you have access to keyword research tools. The results of those searches will steer you in the proper direction in terms of the problems and solutions that online users are seeking for.
3. Help with content creation ✍️
There is a lot of debate regarding how, when, and whether AI should be used for content creation. Many websites already use ChatGPT to post articles and write copy. So the question is whether you should.
You can give ChatGPT a topic idea and a keyword, and it will generate a decent article about it. In rare circumstances, it may even perform admirably. However, it is nowhere close being able to replace an expert in that field.
You don’t even have to take our word for it, because ChatGPT concurs:
ChatGPT is still in the stage where it can return incorrect information or deliver general responses. You can, however, utilize it to create preliminary drafts and outlines for your posts:
This can be really useful for content brainstorming. Then you may look at what people are looking for in regards to the topic you wish to write about.
For instance, you may utilize keyword research tools to look at related searches for terms like “plant-based diet.” Take the information and compare it to ChatGPT’s ideas, and you’ll have a full article!
4. Improve your content formatting 👨💻
One of the more intriguing ways to use ChatGPT for SEO is to feed it information and ask it to interact with it (rather than depending on its built-in expertise). You can, for example, input ChatGPT a badly structured paragraph and ask it to output a table or a list to make the text simpler to comprehend.
To demonstrate how successful this may be, we requested ChatGPT to construct a table comparing.co vs..com domains based on an article we published on the same subject. Rather than merely asking ChatGPT to use its own data, we pasted the entire article into the query box. Here’s what it gave me:
The tool picked which differences to highlight and how to arrange them, then it created the table using information directly from the article. We could have done it manually, but ChatGPT saved us time and gave us a starting point.
The similar strategy can be used to help you improve formatting in a variety of additional ways. Asking ChatGPT to build a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section based on an article is one example, as is dividing many paragraphs with distinct subheadings.
As usual, remember that you must feed the tool the information that you want it to use. Don’t be afraid to enter a lot of information into the ChatGPT query field. Many users have claimed that it can easily manage up to 500 words (roughly) per request .
5. Come up with titles and meta descriptions 📝
Creating optimal titles and meta descriptions is one of the most difficult components of maintaining a blog. These aspects have a huge impact on your clickthrough rate, so make sure you get them right.
So here’s yet another way to use ChatGPT for SEO. Assume you’re writing an essay about how to start a healthy diet. You can use the program to generate some title suggestions:
For best results, try to provide detailed prompts. For example, when we asked it for attention-grabbing titles, it returned a list of catchy headlines.
You can ask the tool for dozens of ideas just as easy as you can ask for a single title and meta description, so have fun with it. Your site’s statistics will tell you which pages receive the most clicks in the SERPs over time, allowing you to tweak post titles based on that knowledge.
Conclusion 🧐
AI tools like ChatGPT are already transforming the way we create web content. However, it is critical to understand how they operate and their limitations.
We advise against utilizing ChatGPT for keyword research at the present because you may not be able to acquire up-to-date information.
🚩 However, there are numerous alternative ways to use ChatGPT for SEO, including:
Content clusters are being planned.
Making seed keywords for each cluster
Assisting in content generation.
Improving the formatting of your material.
Creating title and meta description choices