ChatGPT for SEO: Ultimate Guide, Tips & Prompts

Does the rise of ChatGPT signal the end of SEO?

Not at all. In fact, when used correctly, it can make your SEO work a lot easier.

Emphasis on “when used correctly”.

You can use it to help with the brainstorming part of keyword research, rephrasing your content, generating Schema markup, and more.

But you can’t rely on ChatGPT to do all of the heavy lifting for you. The data it has access to is limited—especially in the base version. And it often “hallucinates”, providing inaccurate answers. So you have to be careful.

In this guide, we’ll explore recommended ChatGPT use cases, while also highlighting the tool’s limitations.

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a natural language processing chatbot from OpenAI.

It runs on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, which are two of the most recent and powerful LLMs (large language models) available.

This allows it to hold eerily human-like conversations—and help with SEO tasks.

While this may sound complex, using ChatGPT is quite simple.

All you have to do is:

1. Sign up here
2. Type a prompt in the message bar at the bottom
3. Wait for the bot to respond

Here’s how that’ll look:

Seems simple enough—but how is its response so human-like?

Next-Token Prediction

Large language models, including the ones that power ChatGPT, work by converting text into individual units called “tokens”. Similar to how people comprehend text as chunks of words and punctuation.

So you can give ChatGPT some instructions (or a “prompt”) in regular conversational language, and it will predict what should come next.

This is known as “next-token prediction”.

This also allows it to pick up on authors’ signature writing styles.

So you can ask ChatGPT to write in the style of Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, or any other known author. You can also tell it to act in a certain role, like the role of your target audience or an SEO expert.

However, ChatGPT has its limits.

Not everything it says is accurate. And the base version of ChatGPT, including the GPT-4 model, is trained with knowledge up to April 2023.

Uses for ChatGPT

You can use ChatGPT for:

• Brainstorming keyword ideas
• Creating content
• Writing title tags and meta descriptions at scale
• Generating Schema markup
• Writing regex
• Creating hreflang tags

And more.

You can also use the tool to overcome creative blocks or rephrase your content in a different style. It even has uses in link building.

Those are just a few of the use cases of ChatGPT for SEO. Below, you’ll find a lot more ways you could be using this AI tool, with details on exactly how.

How to Use ChatGPT for SEO

Here’s how you can use ChatGPT to help with your SEO efforts, with some example prompts and tips for getting the most out of the tool:

Keyword Research

As you’re probably aware, keyword research is vital to creating content that ranks. Not only does it inform you of what topics and keywords to cover, it also helps you structure your content better.

Keyword research can also help you better meet the user’s search intent.

To be clear, ChatGPT isn’t the best tool for keyword research.

The base version doesn’t have access to any keyword search volume data at all.

But its results can still be useful from a brainstorming perspective.

You can ask ChatGPT directly for keyword ideas—from long-tail queries to Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. For example:

As you can see, you can attain a list of keywords in just a few short clicks.

While this is faster than more rigorous keyword research techniques, it doesn’t give you as detailed results as Semrush’s keyword research tools, for example.

Like I said, the base version of ChatGPT can’t provide accurate keyword search volumes at all. Some keywords it provides may not be entirely relevant. Others may have zero search volume.

If we put one of these keywords from the above example into the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool, this is what we see:

Which doesn’t look too promising.

That said, this doesn’t happen all the time. Sometimes, ChatGPT provides high-volume keywords.

Plus, zero-volume keywords aren’t as bad as they sound.

“Zero-volume” doesn’t necessarily mean that the keyword has received zero searches. Sometimes, Semrush and other keyword analysis tools simply don’t have data on them.

Some zero-volume keywords could potentially be getting thousands of searches.

Another thing that’s worth noting: ChatGPT’s dataset is limited to pre-September 2021.

That means that it won’t be aware of any keywords or topics that have emerged post-September 2021 that are now relevant to your topic.

Still, you could use ChatGPT as a jumping-off place alongside a premium SEO tool, like Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, to come up with a list of keyword ideas.

You can also use ChatGPT to identify:

Long-Tail Queries

As a reminder, a long-tail keyword is a phrase that tends to be more specific and have lower search volume (as shown in the example about Dalmatian feeding times above).

Keywords Related to Your Target Keywords

On ChatGPT, you can type in “Give me a list of related keywords for Labrador exercise routines,” for example. ChatGPT will then produce a list of relevant keywords, such as:

Semantically Related Keywords

Similarly, you can ask ChatGPT for semantically related keywords (sometimes called LSI keywords).

These keywords are words and phrases that are conceptually similar to your main keyword.

They may not rank for the search query you’re targeting. However, they help to provide context to the search engine on what your content is about. They may or may not be synonyms of your target keyword.

To better understand semantically related keywords, here’s a list of them provided by ChatGPT:

Having a list of related keywords can help you write an article that has a good chance of attracting a lot of traffic, as you’ll be covering more of the subtopics that users might be searching for.

Classify Keywords by Search Intent

You could go a step further and ask ChatGPT to create a table detailing the search intent type of each keyword. The chatbot will then generate a table that’ll label each keyword as either “Commercial”, “Navigational”, “Transactional”, or “Informational”.

This reflects the sort of end goal a searcher is looking to achieve by using the keyword, so you can tell if they’ll fit within the type of content you’re creating.

Will ChatGPT do as good of a job at this as a dedicated SEO tool?

Generally, no.

Don’t 100% of your trust into its guidance. But it can still point you in the right direction, most of the time.

Create Keyword Clusters

You could also ask ChatGPT to organize your keywords into clusters based on semantic relevance.

For example, here’s what we got when we asked ChatGPT to cluster paleo diet-related keywords into groups based on semantic relevance:

While this still comes nowhere near the keyword organization capabilities of Semrush, it’s definitely a start.

Build a Content Strategy

When fleshing out your website, it’s vital to have an overarching content strategy in mind. This includes creating topic clusters—hierarchical lists of relevant topics that you will cover in blog posts.

You want all these individual topics to answer common search queries and also be unique to one another.

If you create too many similar articles, you could suffer from keyword cannibalization. This is when you have two or more pages competing for the same keywords.

So, how do you create a long list of unique content ideas?

ChatGPT can help.

By asking ChatGPT to “provide a list of relevant topics to the paleo diet”, you’ll get results that look like this:

This helps you discover topics you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. You could even get ChatGPT to organize the topic titles semantically or by content type.

For example, you could get the chatbot to organize the content ideas in terms of “blog posts”, “step-by-step guides”, and so on.

From there, you can plan content publishing dates, organize social media posts, and conduct content audits.

Semrush’s Social Poster and Content Audit Tool can help you with those next steps.

Content Creation

So, ChatGPT can’t create and execute your content strategy from start to finish.

But it can help you in several areas of content creation.

Such as…

Generate a Content Outline and Brief

So, you’ve got the content ideas. Now all you’ve got to do is write the content.

We don’t recommend solely relying on ChatGPT to perform this part. But you can get its help as a starting point for your own research.

It’s still vital to perform your own competitor analysis and research in order to create a comprehensive brief. You can Semrush’s Topic Research and Outline Builder tools to find headings that ChatGPT might have missed.

To get a basic outline, you could ask ChatGPT to “create a content outline for a blog post on the paleo diet and diabetes”.

And it will come up with suggested headings:

You can also specify what you want from the article in terms of word count, number of headings, and the general style of the article.

For example, are you looking to create a piece of content with lots of bullet point lists or several tables?

The more specific you get with your prompts for ChatGPT, the better its outputs will be—especially when it comes to generating content outlines.

You could also request ChatGPT to create a basic content brief. You can either instruct it on who the target audience is and what the tone of voice should be, or you can let it help you determine those.

For example:

 

That said, as usual you should do your own research to verify it isn’t leading you down the wrong path.

Write Your Content

We don’t suggest letting ChatGPT do all your content writing for you.

It can give you a rough draft very quickly. But when it does that, it’s just summarizing what it “knows” based on the dataset it was trained on, and then it’s using its next-token-prediction power to write the article.

If you try to get it to write “SEO content,” what you’ll get is writing that’s often repetitive, keyword-heavy, and lacking in originality. Not to mention the issues with inaccuracy that we mentioned before.

It’s also not going to meet Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust).

That said, contrary to popular belief, Google isn’t completely against AI-generated content.

Google recently clarified its stance on AI content creation, stating that:

Basically, as long as your content adds value, it shouldn’t be interpreted as spam.

But you should at least carefully review, fact-check, and edit any AI-generated content you produce.

One good use case for this might be to produce a simple “About Us” section or something else that isn’t made for ranking.

You can then tweak this to better suit your company’s tone and style.

Which leads me to my next point…

Rewrite Content in Your Desired Tone

If you’re struggling to nail the right tone, ChatGPT can help.

For example, let’s say we wanted to make this article more formal:

Or we can take things to the opposite extreme and let ChatGPT show us its fun side:

The point is, ChatGPT can help you tweak or improve your content. Just don’t rely on it to write the content for you without any oversight. 

Remember that you should at least carefully review, fact-check, and edit any AI-generated content you produce.” For instance, if you integrate some of the content generated by ChatGPT into your writing or work with external writers, you can use tools such as Plagiarism Checker to authenticate their content.

That’s why we like this use case much more than the previous one. You can feed it content you’ve already written (so you know everything is accurate), and use it to get over writer’s block and create something that will resonate better with your target audience.

Get FAQs Related to Your Content

An FAQ section in a blog post represents the questions your audience is burning to know the answers to.

This can strengthen the overall value of your article and also also help you rank in the “People Also Ask” section on Google.

Simply ask the bot “What are some common questions related to [topic]?”, and you’ll be presented with a long list of suggested ideas.

You can even ask it to rough-draft some responses to those FAQs for you, like this:

Or, you could use the prompt “Here’s a writing sample. Please list questions you might have as you are reading it”, followed by your writing sample.

For example:

As you can see, you will then receive a bunch of FAQs you could potentially use in your article.

You might choose to feature them as standalone FAQs at the bottom of your content, or you could consider answering them throughout the text so readers aren’t left with questions after reading your article.

If one of the suggested questions is particularly impactful, you could even make it a separate section in your article.

Generate Killer SEO Meta Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Well-written title tags and meta descriptions can significantly improve your search traffic.

They provide context for both users and search engine crawlers. And a compelling title tag and meta description can convince people to click when they otherwise might not.

The text from a page’s title tag is used by Google to generate the blue title link for that page, like this:

While the page’s meta description is commonly used by Google to generate the description below the title link:

You can use ChatGPT to create meta titles and descriptions effortlessly, at scale. Like this:

That said, don’t just blindly use ChatGPT’s work on these. What it writes is often too long.

While there’s no hard limit, in general it’s a good idea to keep your title tags to 60 characters or less. And to keep your meta descriptions under about 160 characters. That way, they’re less likely to be truncated or rewritten by Google.

(You should also carefully fact-check anything ChatGPT writes, as mentioned before.)

But you can still get a lot of value out of this use case by asking ChatGPT to come up with 5-10 different ideas for title tags and meta descriptions for a given webpage.

And then choose (and tweak) the one you like best.

Discover content gaps

To attain complete authority in your niche, you need to identify and fill all content gaps.

By this, we mean literally every topic related to your main keyword, that your competitors may or may not have covered themselves.

With ChatGPT, you could simply type out all your headings and ask the bot to identify content gaps.

Or, you could ask it to come up with a content silo map, from which you can tick off uncharted topics.

For example:

You could go a step further and find more niche content gaps by picking one of the topics listed above and asking ChatGPT the following:

By doing this for each individual topic suggested for the original content silo prompt, you can create a wealth of topic ideas you would never have thought of otherwise.

Read over the suggested titles before you go out and create pages for all of them—you might discover some of them will cannibalize with each other, or there might be no search volume for them.

Discover Knowledge Gaps in Individual Articles

You can also use ChatGPT to identify knowledge gaps found in individual articles.

When you finish writing an article, how do you measure comprehension? In other words, how do you know you’ve covered all bases of the topic?

Do you compare it point-for-point with your competitors and see how it sizes up?

No—that would be a big waste of time.

Especially when you can literally copy and paste your article into ChatGPT and ask it to “find content gaps in this article”.

ChatGPT will then come back with a list of missing topics pulled from other articles, such as:

You’ll then be able to make your article the most comprehensive piece on the internet.

Alternatively, you can copy and paste your own and your competitor’s articles into ChatGPT and ask it to find topics your competitor has covered that you have missed.

Content optimization

You can run your article through ChatGPT to discover new content optimization opportunities.

In case you’ve forgotten: to get to the top of the SERPs, you need to optimize your page in more ways than just adding keywords.

Your content needs to meet the user’s search intent, be unique and natural, feature the right keywords, and be understood by search engines. If not, your webpage will probably not rank. (Although there are always exceptions, like if your site has a very high DA (domain authority).

As we’ve made clear in this article already—ChatGPT can help you do this. But there are other ways we’ve not covered yet, such as:

• Rephrasing: If you’re experiencing duplicate content or plagiarism issues, you can paste the relevant text into ChatGPT and ask it to “rephrase/reword this content while keeping its meaning…”. The bot will then provide a list of alternatively worded sentences.
• Sentiment analysis: You can ask ChatGPT to review your content and determine the overall sentiment of the piece. For example, you could ask it to “assign a positive, negative, or neutral value for the following text…” followed by your article. This will determine whether you’ve achieved the target mood.

Featured snippet targeting

You can further optimize your content by asking ChatGPT to help you land featured snippets—either list, table, or paragraph (it can’t (yet) help with video featured snippets).

The featured snippet, also known as position #0, is the answer to a search query that appears at the top of the search results. As a brand, having your content appear in this snippet can lead to a HUGE upturn in traffic.

It can be difficult to win a featured snippet—but it becomes a lot easier with the help of ChatGPT.

To help with a paragraph featured snippet, you can provide a prompt like:

ChatGPT will then give you a suggested featured snippet that matches the search intent exactly, such as:

You can then weave this suggested snippet into your content. To do this, create a new H2 with the question as the title. Then paste the suggested ChatGPT featured snippet below it.

Don’t forget to edit all of ChatGPT’s suggestions to make them less AI and more human—and more in line with your brand’s tone of voice.

Create Optimized YouTube Descriptions

You can task ChatGPT to create stellar video descriptions to stand out from the millions of other YouTube channels.

Just like meta descriptions, YouTube descriptions need to actually describe the contents of the video. You can achieve this through concise writing and using related keywords.

There are no hard-and-fast rules regarding video description length. However, within the 5,000-character limit, make sure your description is:

• Valuable—Describes the video type, i.e., a tutorial or a vlog.
• Concise—Include minimal fluff.
• Formatted—Use plenty of bullet points, bold/italicized text, and even headings.

Let’s put ChatGPT to the test:

While it doesn’t contain bullet points, you could always prompt the tool to add some in:

Proofread Your Writers’ Work

You can use ChatGPT to proofread and spell-check your work, but it goes much deeper than this.

Let’s say you own a content-writing business. The success of your business is hinged on your employees writing comprehensible, accurate, and well-written articles.

If you can’t deliver on this, nobody will hire you.

Luckily, you can use ChatGPT to read over your content before you return it to your clients.

ChatGPT can also be used to proofread your work to check it is mostly factually accurate (emphasis on the “mostly”).

As aforementioned (and I’ll keep mentioning it) ChatGPT’s knowledge bank is limited. You can’t expect it to check for 100% accuracy, but it can point out areas of your content that may be erroneous. (You can then do your own research to determine whether ChatGPT’s suspicions are correct).

If you’re writing essays on topics you’re not totally familiar with, you can feed your words through the ChatGPT bot.

By simply asking: “are the following paragraphs accurate…”, and then copying and pasting areas you’re unsure about, ChatGPT will be able to confirm or deny your suspicions.

Let’s see response we get when ChatGPT is asked this (the paragraph may look familiar to you):

Here’s the response we received:

Clearly, the machine got confused by how we worded the initial sentence (which highlights the tool’s limitations).

But still, it manages to provide a solid analysis of the accuracy of the copy.

Not only that, but ChatGPT will also give you correction suggestions if it detects your copy is inaccurate. Although there’s no guarantee that these suggestions will be correct, they should give you an idea of how to replace the inaccuracies.

Also, you could feed ChatGPT the communication guidelines of the company you’re working for. You can then paste in your article, and ask how well the guidelines have been followed.

You could create prompts based around questions such as:

• Have all the headings been covered?
• Have all the keywords been included?
• Has the correct tone of voice been used?

ChatGPT is also great for identifying instances of passive voice and rewording them in active voice. It can even find sentences that could be improved AND give you suggestions on how to improve them.

Once again, you’ll want to take its suggestions with a pinch of salt and use some common sense. Sometimes what ChatGPT thinks is a better way to phrase things might be too long-winded or use the wrong kind of language for your piece.

Need Awesome CTAs?

If you’re selling a product or service, you need to round off your articles with a call to action (CTA). This is the end sentence that invites readers to become customers.

They encourage the reader to visit more of your content pages, buy a product, sign up for your subscription, or similar, depending on what you’re offering.

Despite their simplicity on the outside, CTAs are something that content creators get wrong time and time again. They often fail to provoke enthusiasm, and regularly come across as limp and forced.

Here’s the good news: you can ask ChatGPT to create exciting CTAs that evoke a response and fit the targeted search intent.

Take a look at this:

Like all AI-generated content, it’s best to brush this up to better suit your brand’s tone of voice and vocabulary. However, this definitely gives you something to work with.

Link Building

Backlinks are the backbone of any good SEO campaign, and you can use ChatGPT to find and (hopefully) acquire the best ones for your website.

How?

By asking it to find you prime outreach opportunities within your niche.

Backlinks are basically a nod of approval from one website to another. If your domain receives a backlink from another website, they clearly think your content is worth its salt.

While it’s better to receive backlinks naturally, you can get the ball rolling by actively acquiring them yourself.

Here’s where ChatGPT comes in. If you don’t know anything about link building or don’t have an effective strategy in place, you can ask ChatGPT to strategize for you.

For example, you can ask the bot to come up with a list of backlink ideas for your niche, as shown below:

It comes up with these suggestions:

You can use the above selection as inspiration as to who to reach out to.

Unfortunately, ChatGPT is incapable of providing you with a list of specific outreach sites, as shown below:

So, you’ll have to find appropriate domains yourself. At least we have a few tips on where to start looking for suitable sites now!

Create Outreach Emails For Backlinks

As if that wasn’t enough backlink help, you can also ask ChatGPT to compose an outreach email on your behalf.

Your outreach email needs to be solid—it has to stand out from the deluge of other outreach attempts. Most end up in the spam folder, while others that offer genuine value to the recipient are acknowledged. A good outreach email will make it clear to the webmaster why linking to your content can benefit them (as suggested in the prompt below).

ChatGPT can help you create a unique outreach email that you can use to pitch your ideas to other sites.

Start by typing the following prompt:

“I own a [your niche] website. Create me a backlink outreach email template. Explain how linking to my content can add value to other websites”.

It will then create a generic e-mail template, such as:

You can then swap out the blanks with details regarding your own domain.

While the above may seem a little generic, you can expand your prompt to include specific services that your business offers. You can also experiment with the tone, depending on the website you’re writing to. Maybe they’ll appreciate something a bit more stand-out and humorous or perhaps it’s better to keep things formal. Do your research then let ChatGPT help you craft that perfect email.

ChatGPT’s link building potential doesn’t stop there; it’s also pretty handy for helping you land HARO (help a report out) backlinks.

Anyone who’s tried this link building method will know you have to be FAST if you want to be the one who gains the link. Not only that, but you also have to make sure your response stands out from the hundreds of others.

As you’ve seen throughout this guide so far, ChatGPT is pretty good at both of these.

If we want to earn a HARO link, I’d first ask the tool to give me a quick answer to the query the HARO request is about:

Sometimes the output is quite long, so you can ask ChatGPT to shorten it:

You’ll also want to break the request up into different stages, as I’ve done here:

Again, this output is a bit long so I’d ask the tool to shorten this part too.

ChatGPT is also pretty good at coming up with catchy email subject lines so you can ensure your request stands out in the journalist’s inbox. Just ask it to generate a list of subject lines about your topic and choose the one you like the best:

There you have it—a decent response to a HARO request for just a few minutes of work.

Pretty cool.

Get Anchor Text Recommendations

The power of backlinks and internal links is diminished by weak anchor text (the clickable part of a hyperlink).

In the context of your backlinks, anchor text appears on external websites. A site visitor on another website can reach your domain by clicking on the anchor text.

The anchor text is almost as important as the backlink itself. If the anchor text is too long, isn’t related to the content of the linked page, or looks like spam, it may be doing more damage to your site than good.

“Exact match” anchor text (i.e., anchor text that includes your main keyword) is ok, but shouldn’t be overused.

If you’re unsure, you can use Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool to analyze your anchor text and identify weak or spammy anchors that could be hurting your link building efforts.

You can then use ChatGPT to come up with relevant anchor text suggestions, such as:

After this, you can reach out to the webmasters and request that they edit the anchor text to one of the suggestions listed above. Or, you can save these options for future links you’re planning on building.

The anchors ChatGPT provides are also a pretty good starting point for your internal linking strategy. You’ll want to use more exact match anchors for your internal links, but it can be tricky to come up with a variety of options.

ChatGPT will help you out if you give it a list of page titles that you want to link to:

Generate robots.txt Rules

If you don’t understand robots.txt rules, don’t worry—ChatGPT can act as your translator.

robots.txt is basically a text file that search engine spiders read. It informs them what pages to crawl/index and which pages not to crawl/index.

A robots.txt error could cause you crawling and indexing issues. But, if you don’t know how to create a robots.txt file, how can you avoid these errors?

Well, you can simply ask ChatGPT to create robots.txt rules, as shown here:

Not only does this help you understand robots.txt rules, but it also minimizes the risk of creating errors in your file.

You can also use the tool to check your robots.txt file. If you have issues with certain pages not being crawled and indexed, try asking ChatGPT to see if your robots.txt is blocking it:

So, any pages with /wp-admin/ in the URL aren’t being crawled in the example above, which is how it should be.

But if this was a category on my site that we DID want to be crawled, we could ask ChatGPT to edit the robots.txt file accordingly:

Generate .htaccess Rewrite Rules for Redirects

It’s not only content writers whose jobs are (maybe) threatened by ChatGPT; the AI tool is also coming after coders. Okay, not quite, but the tool is REALLY good at helping you write code.

If you want to implement a 301 or 302 redirect on your webpage, you can ask ChatGPT for .htaccess rewrite rules. 301/302 (permanent/temporary) redirects are used when you want to lead users from one URL to a new or temporary one.

You can do this on the .htaccess file, using code created by ChatGPT:

This ensures the successful implementation of the redirect—it also guarantees that you’re sending your web users to the correct location.

You might have noticed that we misspelled the new URL in the prompt (.om instead of .com). ChatGPT picked up on this and corrected the mistake in its output!

But with that in mind, you should always make sure that the slugs or URLs it provides in the code match up with the actual URLs on your site. The tool is really quite good when it comes to code, but it’s always worth double-checking!

Create Regular Expressions (RegEx)

Regular Expressions (RegEx) is a type of programming language that you can use to find text pattern matches. Like most complicated programming languages, you can now generate it on ChatGPT.

When you use a RegEx alongside Google Search Console, you can determine the search queries that drive the most traffic to specific parts of your website.

In doing so, you can find a bunch of new keywords to focus your content on.

Despite how easy Regular Expressions make things, they’re very difficult to understand.

Luckily, ChatGPT can do all of the heavy lifting for you.

For example:

You can then use this RegEx to filter ‘Performance on search results’ on Google Search Console.

In the query filter on GSC, select Custom (Regex) and paste in the “^(who|what|where|why|when|do)b” code.

You’ll then be presented with a list of search queries that start with one of the specified words, as well as the clicks and impressions they’ve garnered for your site.

Generate hreflang Tags

To put it simply: hreflang tags are HTML attributes that tell search engines the geographical location and language of a webpage.

The search engine will then include the page in the results pages for users in the specified location/using the correct language.

If you’ve got multiple versions of the same webpage in different languages, you need to add appropriate hreflang tags to each.

John Mueller described hreflang tags as “one of the most complex aspects of SEO” in 2018—way before the introduction of ChatGPT.

TBH hreflang is one of the most complex aspects of SEO (if not the most complex one). Feels as easy as a meta-tag, but it gets really hard quickly.

— John Mueller (official) · #StaplerLife (@JohnMu) February 19, 2018

Now, you can use AI to generate a list of all the hreflang tags you could ever need:

Once generated, you can insert each hreflang tag into the relevant URL’s <head> tag. Just make sure to replace the example URLs with your own!

Schema Markup

Lastly, you can also use ChatGPT to create schema markup code.

Schema markup is a handy way to help search engines understand what your content offers to web users.

It’s also a great way to win more real estate on the SERPs.

Schema markup code can be used to create embedded features on Google, known as “rich snippets”.

For example, you could use schema markup to make your company logo, business address, or business review rating (amongst many other things) appear on the search results.

This makes your webpage look more professional and attractive to web users.

To acquire rich snippets, you need schema markup code—which ChatGPT can help you with.

For example, if you give ChatGPT this prompt:

You’ll receive a schema markup code, which will look like this:

Which will continue like this:

You can use the Schema Markup Validator on Schema.org to check if the ChatGPT-generated code is correct.

AND, you can even ask the tool where in your HTML file to place the code. Pretty neat.

ChatGPT Browser Extensions for SEO

The fun doesn’t end there: there are a ton of ChatGPT extensions that can help with your SEO efforts.

You can find ChatGPT extensions in the Chrome Web Store, under Extensions.

There are two I’d recommend trying:

AIPRM

AIPRM (Artificial Intelligence-Powered Response Manager) takes ChatGPT a step further by providing you with a library’s worth of prompt suggestions.

These prompts have been premade to generate the most useful responses from ChatGPT for SEO.

For example, you could select the “Fully SEO Optimized Article including FAQs” prompt.

Once you’ve chosen a tone and a writing style, and selected a keyword, you’ll be presented with a response that’ll look like this:

For best results, I’d recommend upgrading to a premium AIPRM account. Writing style and tone options are very limited on the free version, as shown below:

WebChatGPT

Because of the cut-off date of the dataset it was trained on, ChatGPT cannot access up-to-date information. Unless it is specifically fed news from afterward, it remains unaware of changes in the world that have happened after 2021.

This limitation may be fixed in the future, but for now, you’ll have to use the WebChatGPT plug-in for more up-to-date data from ChatGPT.

With this plug-in, ChatGPT has access to web results as well as its own data. This allows it to provide the latest information for your research.

How Has ChatGPT Impacted the SEO Industry?

It’s undeniable that ChatGPT has made it a whole lot easier to execute your content marketing strategies.

As proven in this guide, there are countless ways SEOs can implement the tool into their daily work. It certainly makes the research and writing of content easier—but it doesn’t totally replace the purpose of an SEO expert.

A real person is needed to inject a human element into the content. Humans, by nature, are creative thinkers.

ChatGPT, on the other hand, follows a rigid code and is incapable of thinking outside the box. It cannot come up with original ideas; all of its output is based on the data it has available.

At the same time, ChatGPT undermines the whole purpose of the SEO industry’s biggest playing field: the search engine.

Why would someone use Google—and all the ads, spam, and irrelevant content that comes with it—when it can get an answer instantly that matches their search intent exactly?

It’s the very question that put Google on “red alert” when the chatbot was first released. With no search engines, what purpose will the SEO industry serve in the future?

Luckily, there’s space for search engines and ChatGPT to coexist.

This is best proven by looking at the positive and negative effects the AI tool has had on the SEO industry:

Pros:

• Article planning—You can use ChatGPT to come up with heading suggestions, ideas for title tags, keyword suggestions, and so on. Basically, it can do all the preliminary work, while writers can focus on the actual writing part.
• Domain coding—Unfamiliar with how to create hreflang tags, robots.txt rules, or .htaccess rewrite rules? You can request ChatGPT to write out complicated coding for you.
• Meta tag creation—If you’re struggling to convey what your content is about through meta tags, you can ask ChatGPT to create expressive meta titles and descriptions. Through a little tweaking, you can create meta tags that boost both user click-through rate and search engine comprehension of your site.

Cons:

• Anyone can become an SEO expert—You no longer have to fully grasp concepts such as .htaccess and Regular Expressions as ChatGPT can do this for you. While this is a benefit for some, it makes it more difficult for experts to achieve a competitive edge.
• Poor writing—Google has long battled against spammy content, and this has become a lot harder with the introduction of ChatGPT’s human-like prose. However, its writing lacks originality and is often repetitive and keyword-stuffed.
• Prone to duplicating content—ChatGPT works by using its limited pre-saved knowledge to answer questions. It’s incapable of coming up with original material. Therefore, it’s prone to repeating what it has already told you, which can get frustrating.

Overall, ChatGPT is helping to move the SEO game forward, but you’ll still need to take caution when using it and make the most of premium SEO tools too (as I’ll show you next).

Is ChatGPT the Only SEO Tool You’ll Need?

Although you can (and perhaps even should) use ChatGPT for SEO purposes, it’s far from the only SEO tool you’ll need. (So don’t go and cancel all those subscriptions to premium tools just yet).

While you can use it to conduct basic keyword research, come up with meta descriptions, and create rough content briefs that match search intent, you can’t 100% rely on ChatGPT.

Its writing can be vague, inaccurate, and quite robotic (funnily enough).

Plus, you can’t use ChatGPT to perform more advanced SEO tasks. To conduct site audits, backlink analysis, and competitor research, you need a premium SEO tool.

While I’d encourage its use to make your SEO job easier, there are other tools I’d recommend above (or alongside) it.

Semrush, for example, offers greater end-to-end content assistance. It can help you find keywords that will actually make a difference to your writing, analyze your backlink profile, and conduct competitor analysis.

These are just some of the things Semrush can do that ChatGPT can’t even come close to.

FAQs

How much does ChatGPT-4 cost?

As of April 2023, OpenAI offers different pricing for ChatGPT-4:

1. Individual Users:
   • Free Version: This provides access to the GPT-3.5 model with unlimited messages, interactions, and history. It’s available at no cost.
   • Plus Plan: Priced at $20 per user per month, the Plus plan includes access to the more advanced GPT-4 model, faster response times, a larger context window (32K tokens), and additional features like DALL·E image generation and advanced data analysis tools.
2. Businesses and Developers:
   • Team Plan: For teams, the cost is $25 per user per month when billed annually or $30 per user per month when billed monthly. This plan includes everything in the Plus plan with higher message caps and additional team collaboration features.
   • Enterprise Plan: Designed for larger organizations needing the most advanced features and customization options. The pricing for this plan requires contacting OpenAI’s sales team for a quote.

For developers and businesses using the GPT-4 API, the cost depends on the volume of usage, measured in tokens. The pricing for model usage varies, for instance, the Davinci-002 model costs $2.00 per 1 million tokens.

Note: Prices can change. For the latest information, visit OpenAI’s website.

Has ChatGPT affected Google traffic levels?

ChatGPT hasn’t affected Google’s traffic levels so far. As of late 2023, Google’s search market share remained dominant, and ChatGPT’s traffic constituted only about 2% of Google’s web traffic. Despite a minor decrease in Google’s global search market share, from 92.34% in October 2022 to 91.53% in October 2023, this change is not necessarily attributable to ChatGPT.

However, the emergence of the AI-powered chatbot put Google on “code red” when it was first released. ChatGPT has the potential to answer questions more accurately than Google. However, it’s not yet clear whether ChatGPT has had any real impact on Google’s traffic.

How can I mitigate the risks of using AI-generated content in SEO?

You could be penalized by Google for using AI-generated content if it fails to meet its quality standards. The search engine has realized that AI can indeed be used to produce helpful, informative content so it’s not reasonable to put a blanket ban on AI-produced content.

With that said, you can reduce the risk of Google penalties by redrafting everything that AI produces, and only using the tool to help you create the base of an article, i.e., the headings. Although you can feed it sections of your work and ask it to write it in a different style or tone, you should never ask the tool to generate the content for you and copy and paste it straight onto your website.

How can users ensure that they are using ChatGPT ethically and responsibly in their SEO work?

You can ensure that an SEO content writer is using ChatGPT ethically by running their work through Originality, AI Writing Check, or another AI detection tool. ChatGPT often pulls data directly from its data sources, so it may be flagged for plagiarism. You can, therefore, identify AI-written copy using a plagiarism checker.

When proofreading ChatGPT work, you need to ensure that all facts and statistics are relevant and up-to-date. ChatGPT operates on out-of-date knowledge, so in a lot of cases the information it provides will be inaccurate.