ChatGPT For SEO: 7 Best Practices to Save You Time11 min read

As digital marketing continues to get more competitive, harnessing ChatGPT for SEO is one way that you can stand out from the crowd.

From optimizing your content to devising effective keyword strategies and conducting detailedsearch engine optimization (SEO) audits, ChatGPT can be advantageous for a range of different content marketing strategies. Its AI will not only save your SEO team a lot of time; it will also make your content more data-driven and better targeted towards your audience.

In this article, we’ll explore how to use ChatGPT for SEO. Each section offers clear, actionable steps that you can implement immediately.

Let’s dive in.

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TL;DR

• Utilize ChatGPT to create comprehensive outlines for your content, ensuring a well-structured and organized approach.
• Leverage ChatGPT’s capabilities to generate initial content drafts, saving valuable time for content creators and editors.
• Personalize outreach emails for effective link building using ChatGPT, making your communication more relevant and engaging.
• Verify facts, review output, and edit content for accuracy and clarity, as ChatGPT is not a substitute for human creativity and editorial oversight.
• Utilize ChatGPT for spelling and grammar checks, supplementing with human editing to ensure error-free and polished content.
• Combine ChatGPT with BacklinkManagerto automate and enhance the link building process, ensuring high-quality and relevant backlinks.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT, short for “Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer,” is an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. Capable of simulating in-depth human conversations, sourcing information from the internet, and even generating ideas, its sophisticated approach makes it particularly useful for complex tasks such as creating, debugging, and optimizing code, or answering complex mathematical queries.

The latest version, ChatGPT-4, builds upon the strong foundation set by its predecessor. What sets ChatGPT-4 apart for the SEO industry is its ability to produce more targeted and specific content.

While ChatGPT-3 is free and highly capable, the advanced features of ChatGPT-4 come at a cost. However, the investment is justified by the superior quality of its output, and as such ChatGPT has become a valuable tool for businesses seeking less generic content.

How to use ChatGPT for SEO

SEO is a time-consuming task, but with the right AI tools, much of the manual work can be automated. One such tool is ChatGPT. By leveraging its capabilities, you can save valuable time and focus on the higher-level strategic decisions that will drive your business growth.

In the following sections, we present seven actionable tips on using ChatGPT as an SEO tool We’ve made sure each tip is practical, easy to understand, and ready for you to implement right away. We’ve also included screenshots with each tip, demonstrating specific prompts you can copy to guide ChatGPT effectively.

1. Keyword research

Brainstorm keyword ideas

Finding fresh and relevant topics to write about can be a challenging and time-consuming task. With ChatGPT, you can automate this process to a significant extent. Here’s what a prompt could look like for a SaaS business selling integration software:

If this hasn’t given you enough ideas to get started, you could follow up this prompt by asking for some additional related keywords, as follows:

Remember: this is a brainstorming process to give you a starting point, not your final list of keywords. After you’ve collected a list of potential topics, you can use tools like Ahrefs to further refine these based on SEO factors such as:

• Search volume: This tells you how often people are searching for a given topic. Higher search volumes mean more potential traffic to your site, but may also indicate higher competition.
• Keyword difficulty: This estimates how hard it will be to rank for a particular keyword. If a keyword has a high difficulty score, it may be challenging to outrank established pages.
• Cost-per-click (CPC): This is the amount advertisers are willing to pay for each click on an ad related to the keyword. A higher CPC can indicate that a keyword is more valuable.

Build a keyword list around search intent

Once you have a provisional list of keywords ready to go, it’s generally advisable to target keywords with a commercial search intent in the first instance. This means that there’s a high probability that the search in question was made with the specific intention of finding something to buy. The ROI on commercial content is normally higher than on content that’s created solely for informational purposes.

You can use ChatGPT to classify your keywords based on search intent, as follows:

TRanslate Keywords into other languages

For multinational businesses creating AI content in multiple languages, you could even use ChatGPT to give you a quick translation of your keyword list. In this example, we’ll imagine that the integration software business wants to translate its commercial keywords into German:

2. Create quick outlines

While it’s unwise to get ChatGPT to write AI-generated content without any human input, it’s a great tool for making an outline that you can give to a professional content writer. Editors and content managers can use ChatGPT to create outlines far more efficiently than they could do manually.

AI professionals are already making prompts that businesses can use to generate outlines for SEO content. Here is one such example:

If you want to generate your own prompt, make sure that it includes the following elements:

Specify your requirements: Start by providing clear instructions to ChatGPT about your target audience, the desired tone of the article, the complexity level (perplexity), and the degree of creativity or randomness (burstiness).

Create H1s, H2s and H3s: You can instruct ChatGPT to create titles (H1), headings (H2), and sub-headings (H3) for the blog article. For example, you might say, “Generate an outline for a blog article about ‘Choosing the Right Accounting Software,’ including H1, H2, and H3 headings.”

Include relevant links: If you want to include internal links in your blog article, you can provide a list of links from your website to ChatGPT. You can also specify the anchor text you’d like to use for each link. For instance, you could say, “Include this link (URL) in the section about QuickBooks with the anchor text ‘read more about the benefits here’.”

3. Create the first draft of your content

After creating your outline, you can leverage ChatGPT to draft the initial version of your blog content. However, keep in mind that while ChatGPT is a powerful tool, it isn’t perfect, and your input and editing skills will still be needed.

Due to the character limit of GPT, it’s best to draft your content section by section. Use the headings and sub-headings you created in your outline to guide your prompts for each section of the blog.

To get the most out of ChatGPT, make your prompts for each paragraph as detailed as possible. Here’s an example from a blog about digital nomadism:

Remember that ChatGPT has a knowledge cutoff (as of September 2021 for GPT-4), so some information may be outdated or factually inaccurate. It’s crucial to verify any facts or data provided by ChatGPT. Also, the language used can sometimes be vague or fluffy. It’s the role of a good editor to transform this into clear, concise, and useful content.

substantiate your argument with statistics and data

If ChatGPT’s automatically-generated content still doesn’t have enough substance, a good editor can prompt the AI to give you some stats, data and reputable sources to beef up your content. Sticking with the same digital nomad example, here’s what a prompt could look like:

4. Change up tone

One of my personal favorite parts of using ChatGPT for SEO is the tool’s ability to create content in a variety of different tones. You wouldn’t necessarily expect an AI tool to be capable of humor, but ChatGPT certainly is! It understands irony, sarcasm and various other advanced tones that could previously only be conveyed by a human writer.

To illustrate the point, let’s start with a prompt for a simple paragraph for a blog article for an e-commerce store:

“Brand X” and “Brand Y” are a bit vague, so let’s replace these with some real brand names:

Here’s where the fun starts. You can use ChatGPT to render this same text in a multitude of different styles. So here’s the same text delivered with sarcasm:

Ok, perhaps not the most professional copy! Let’s ask ChatGPT to render this for a serious, corporate audience:

If that’s a bit too heavy for your audience, you can ask ChatGPT to make it lighter and add some humor:

You can also instruct ChatGPT to build in metaphors or other wordplay:

As you can see, you’re really only limited by your imagination here. You can use ChatGPT in this way to play around until you find the tone that fits your brand the best.

5. Help With Spelling and Grammar Checks

Utilizing ChatGPT in your content creation process can serve as an effective preliminary measure to check grammar and spelling. When you run a piece of text through ChatGPT, it generates output that follows linguistic conventions and spelling rules, reflecting the vast amount of data that it has been trained on. Here’s an example of ChatGPT running a spell-check on a paragraph from a web page about umbrellas:

Beyond spelling and grammar, ChatGPT is also a very useful tool for making style and word choice suggestions. Here are the suggestions it made for the example paragraph about umbrellas:

Note that ChatGPT isn’t a complete substitute for a human editor. The model’s output may not catch every error, particularly those that are subtle or highly context-specific. Therefore, it’s advisable to have a final review by a human editor, ensuring that the content is not just grammatically correct but also accurately conveys the intended message.

6. Spare Your Writers From Writing Short-Form Content Aimed at Search Engines

There are some types of SEO content that are not especially stimulating for human writers to create, as they’re produced primarily for machines like Google, rather than for human readers. Some of these types are SEO titles, meta descriptions, and FAQs.

• SEO titles are the titles that appear in search engine results, which should ideally be catchy and include relevant keywords.

• Meta descriptions provide a brief summary of a page’s content and show up in search results under the SEO title. They need to be concise, engaging, and include pertinent keywords.

• FAQs, or Frequently Asked Questions, are sections on a webpage where common inquiries about a product, service, or topic are answered.

ChatGPT can be helpful in drafting this sort of content. This not only saves time but also spares your writers from the monotony of creating machine-oriented content. They can then focus their creativity on refining and editing the generated drafts, ensuring the output is both search-engine-friendly and engaging for human readers.

Here are some example prompts for a blog post about social media scheduling tools, starting with the one for SEO titles:

This is a prompt you could use to get ChatGPT to write a meta description:

Finally, here’s a prompt that will auto-generate an FAQ section:

7. Content promotion and link building

SEO is not a “set it and forget it” process. Even after publishing your machine-generated content, you’ll need to to promote it and build high-quality backlinks to enhance your website’s visibility.

ChatGPT can help in crafting an effective link-building outreach template. By providing its artificial intelligence with key details about your content and the type of sites you’re aiming to build connections with, it can generate a clear, persuasive, and professional email template that outlines your proposition.

Here’s an example prompt for a company that sells onboarding software:

But where ChatGPT truly shines is in personalization. Instead of sending the same generic message to all potential link partners, you can use ChatGPT to customize each outreach email. Feed it some information about the recipient – perhaps something you admire about their website or a piece of content that caught your attention. ChatGPT can weave this into your outreach email, making it more personalized, relevant, and likely to catch the recipient’s attention.

Continuing our example, let’s imagine we wanted to personalize this email and send it to a blog that reviews onboarding software:

And if you’re unsure of what websites you should pitch for link building, ChatGPT can give you some initial ideas for that, as well:

Once you’ve started sending emails out, you can use Backlink Manager’s CRM feature to track the conversations and measure how many links have been built over time.

Wrapping Up

Utilizing ChatGPT for SEO is a powerful way to streamline your content creation and link building process. It helps with brainstorming content topics, creating effective outlines and drafts, and producing critical SEO elements like SEO titles, meta descriptions, and FAQs. ChatGPT can also be a support tool for link building, through crafting and personalizing outreach emails. However, it’s important to remember that while ChatGPT can effectively automate many tasks, human creativity and editorial oversight remain vital.

Coupling ChatGPT with a comprehensive tool like Backlink Manager can dramatically speed up your SEO process. Backlink Manager takes the hassle out of link building, providing a centralized platform that does away with cumbersome spreadsheets and manual tracking. By effectively combining the powers of ChatGPT and Backlink Manager, you’re well on your way to creating a robust, efficient, and successful SEO strategy.

Want to see how Backlink Manager can revolutionize your SEO? Book a demo today!