Back when I first started publishing on my first site over 10 years ago now, I thought I was an SEO expert because I learned there are these things called “keywords” that “search engines” like “Google” use to rank sites.
Yeah — I was basically an expert.
*Cue uproarious laughter
As you know, SEO is an extremely complex and ever-changing discipline that publishers need to learn if they want to build a truly great site. One of Ezoic’s SEO directors recently told me that most publishers could probably realistically expect to make around $1,000 dollars/month in ad revenue from a site after about 12 months of consistent publishing. Not a ton of revenue; but enough for a serviceable little side hustle income.
But making more than that? Consistently earning thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars a month from a site? That’s the tough part; and it’s virtually impossible to do without great SEO (although it’s easier if you’re rich, famous, or both).
But for the rest of us, SEO can feel like learning rocket science; it’s always changing, it doesn’t always make sense, and there are very few ways to completely understand if something is working or not. Not to mention the enormous amount of time-consuming tasks like writing/testing metadescriptions, title tags, keyword phrases, and a dozen other important SEO metrics. You could realistically hire a dedicated employee to run your site’s SEO — and many sites do.
That’s why we’re so excited to teach you about how ChatGPT can instantly and dramatically improve your site’s SEO — with strategies that can work for any site, no matter how small/large, or niche/broad. SEO is one of those skills that always seems to pay off with practice, so I encourage you to watch Ezoic SEO Director Robert Karow’s recent webinar on this topic here — it’ll be well worth your time.
Let’s begin. First, let’s cover a few basic questions:
What is ChatGPT?
If you head over to ChatGPT and ask it what it is, here’s what it might say:
“ChatGPT is a large language model trained by OpenAI that uses artificial intelligence to generate human-like text in response to a given prompt or conversation.”
Essentially, ChatGPT is a learning language model that can help you with your site based on the tremendous amount of data it has learned from crawling the entire internet — and it can accomplish these tasks with lightning speed.
How Can ChatGPT Help My Website’s SEO?
Let’s go a bit deeper. When I asked it how it could help my website’s SEO, here’s what it spit out:
As an AI language model, I can provide you with some specific ways to improve your site’s SEO:
- Keyword research: I can assist you in finding the best keywords for your site by analyzing your content and suggesting relevant keywords that can help improve your rankings.
- Content optimization: I can help you optimize your site’s content for search engines by suggesting changes to your content that can improve your site’s relevance and search engine rankings.
- On-page optimization: I can help you optimize your site’s meta descriptions, titles, headers, and other on-page elements to make them more search engine friendly.
- Technical optimization: I can help you identify and fix technical issues that can affect your site’s search engine rankings, such as broken links, duplicate content, and site speed.
- Link building: I can help you identify relevant, high-quality sites that can link back to your site, which can help improve your site’s authority and search engine rankings.
- Competitive analysis: I can help you analyze your competitors’ websites and their SEO strategies to identify new opportunities to improve your site’s rankings.
- Local SEO: I can help you optimize your site for local search by providing you with insights into local search trends and helping you create content that is relevant to your local audience.
As you can see, there is no shortage of how ChatGPT can help your site, especially with managing SEO tasks.
Now that we have a better idea of what ChatGPT can do, let’s get more specific with how you can actually use it to help your site using specific prompts.
Write Article Content
Perhaps the most obvious use for ChatGPT, publishers can use ChatGPT to write article content for their site.
There are a few things to know about this. In the past, Google did not think much of AI-generated content, and had very strict policies against it. But with the explosion of popularity and quality for AI-generated content, Google has eased back on its policies and now appears to look at most AI content in a fair and balanced manner.
Of course, publishers must still curate and edit any content written by ChatGPT to make sure it’s accurate, high-quality, and sounds like it’s from a real human. This is why we recommend pairing a grammar tool (like Grammarly) with ChatGPT:
Step 1: Have ChatGPT write an article about a topic
Step 2: Run the content through Grammarly and fix any grammar, typos, or errors
Step 3: Repeat steps one and two
Step 4: Make a final edit to make sure it comes across as written by a real human
This process does a few things. First, it creates massive amounts of content for you very quickly. It also ensures you’re not polluting the internet with an abundance of low-grade semi-accurate AI-generated content. Most importantly, it allows you to create a unique, personal article by giving you the final touches at the end to make sure it’s truly high-quality.
You should also use specific and unique prompts with ChatGPT; otherwise, your AI-generated content will sound awfully similar to other topic creators in your niche asking ChatGPT the same questions.
As Ezoic SEO Director Robert Karow mentioned in his webinar training, you should probably have ChatGPT write each paragraph of your article one at a time, for the most specific, accurate, and contextual content. For instance, instead of asking ChatGPT to “write an article about best practices to purchase a home in 2023,” you should create an outline of the article and have ChatGPT write specific content for each point:
- Current house prices in your local area
- Biggest house-buying mistakes
- Little-known strategies that could have a huge impact
Your more specific prompt might be, “Write a 500-word article about how a young married couple can start saving for a house. Make the tone professional and informative, and include at least three sources for your information.”
This way, your content remains fresh, unique, and to the point.
Write SEO Metadata/Tags
Another crucial yet potentially confusing SEO task is to have optimized metadata and SEO tags across your site. This can be incredibly time-consuming and difficult; you probably have a large number of active pages on your site(s), and the prospect of having up-to-date metadata and tags across your site can feel exhausting.
This is another task ChatGPT can do. When I asked it to create metadata and title tags for a site on San Diego travel, here’s what it gave me in 30 seconds:
I suppose I could’ve figured this out on my own. But even with my specific SEO background and the (not cheap!) SEO tools I happen to have at my disposal, it could easily take me an hour or two to figure this all out.
ChatGPT can create high-quality metadata based on real-time evidence and spit out the information in moments. You could do some (or all) of this yourself with various tools and data, or you could let ChatGPT do most of this work for you. But remember: ChatGPT doesn’t always know with absolute certainty if a title (or metadata tag) is fully SEO-optimized; it’s a new tool and still processing tremendous amounts of data. It’s not an easy task to scan most of the known internet!
Speaking of arduous tasks:
Time-Consuming Tasks
One of the fundamental disciplines of SEO is testing: A/B testing, split testing, trying out new strategies and analyzing what worked and what didn’t.
This takes time — a lot of time. You may have to wait for your site traffic to hit a certain threshold of traffic to make fully informed decisions whether something worked, or perhaps you need to wait for certain seasons, events, or seasonal trends to fully measure if what you’re doing is working.
I was a successful publisher for many years, and eventually my personal groove was writing two or three 2,000-word articles a week. That took a lot out of me, and it was only a couple articles a week! Doing SEO research, testing different strategies, comparing data, all takes an enormous amount of skill and time — better to let an automated machine run the tasks for you if you can.
You can let ChatGPT do a lot of work for you — optimizing your content for SEO, brainstorming content ideas, keyword research (more on that below), etc. When it comes to your site’s SEO, what is taking the most time? Can ChatGPT do it for you — or at least part?
Run Keyword Research
The most successful SEO strategies allow sites to start ranking for short tail keywords, which have the highest search traffic. Once you have multiple pages consistently ranking on page one for multiple short tail keywords, you can realistically expect to have strong, consistent traffic.
One of the best ways to start ranking for these short tail keywords is to rank highly for lots of related long tail keywords; once Google sees you’re an authority on the supporting topics of a larger topic, it will be more likely to place your content in more search engine results pages (SERPs).
But how do you know what short tail and long tail keywords to target? You could find some inspiration from expensive SEO tools…or just simply ask ChatGPT.
If you run a site about travel in San Diego, here’s a sample prompt you could use:
“I have a website about San Diego travel. What short tail and long tail keywords should I try to rank for?”
You could then get even more specific, asking for more answers:
This gathers all these important SEO targets for you. From there, you can simply start creating content (using ChatGPT!) based on these keywords. It’s important to remember that ChatGPT does not truly know if a sequence of words os an actual long-tail keyword for a particular topic, due to the fact that it does not have full access to keyword search volumes.
Still, it’s simple, fast, and takes away much of the stress and confusion about creating optimized content.
Create Coding For Website Schema
There are a plethora of SEO schema examples; you can apply specific SEO schema to nearly every type of site. Essentially, it gives search engines more data to use when assessing your site.
Knowing what type of schema to use for your site is crucial. As you can see, there are plenty of SEO schema examples:
- Product markup (critical for ecommerce sites)
- Search action (seen frequently on publisher listings or ecommerce sites)
- FAQ schema (answer popular questions right on the results page)
- Event schema (we’ve seen real estate clients use this for open houses)
- Recipe scheme
- Reviews schema
- Video schema
To implement SEO schema might take a bit of coding and website programming work, which can be very intimidating to even the most veteran publishers. But ChatGPT can create this code for you in seconds, directly for you to paste into your site’s coding as a URL!
You can see a direct training for how to implement an FAQ schema here (at the 35:00 minute mark).
Competitive SEO Analysis
One of the most important words any publisher needs to remember about SEO is “authority.”
Google and other search engines heavily favor the concept of “authority” over almost any other metrics. If you know what you’re talking about, odds are you’ll see more traffic build over time.
Virtually every niche and topic on the internet has become saturated with publishers and content, and there will always be competitors in your niche attracting your target audience. One of the best ways to overtake and surpass your competitors is to conduct a competitive SEO analysis of their site, and see how you can outperform them.
ChatGPT makes this process extremely simple and viable. Before, you might have to purchase expensive tools and research large swaths of data about your competitors before you really had any idea about their position and yours. Using ChatGPT, you can quickly see some crucial data about your competitor:
This analysis and evaluation could quickly become a time-intensive, expensive process that might still be inaccurate. Instead, you can use ChatGPT as a free tool to conduct this research for you, revealing how you can begin to outperform major competitors.
In Conclusion
This is just a small sample size of how ChatGPT and other AI programs can conduct high-level, time-consuming SEO tasks with serviceable accuracy. As Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian recently put it, we are in “the first minute of a new game” when it comes to AI programming, especially for digital publishers. This entire concept is still brand new, and everyone is still just starting to figure the most basic fundamentals.
It’s also important to remember that at the time of this writing, ChatGPT is still an extremely new tool; users have noted the tool is occasionally liable to make up information than admit it doesn’t know.
In the near future, a lot of extremely complicated and difficult website tasks can probably be performed with high accuracy by programs like ChatGPT. The sooner you can learn the language of these new AI tools and the faster you can begin using their help for your site, the better positioned you and your site will be for long term, sustainable success.
