Sam shows how to use ChatGPT for SEO tasks like keyword research, topic clusters, and metadata without replacing human judgment. ChatGPT outputs need editing for accuracy, brand voice, and EEAT signals. He warns against copying competitors and demonstrates with a Boston food blog example.
Questions this video answers
3.6 million views.
About 18 months.
April 2023.
April 2024.
May 13, 2024.
Chapters
In 2023, a marketer did something pretty awesome, but also really unethical. Our protagonist, let's call him Bob, used AI to create an SEO heist. The process was pretty simple. He downloaded the sitemap of his competitors websites, turned the entire list into blog titles, and used those titles as prompts for an AI content generator like ChatGPT. To cut to the chase, he used the hard work of real people to create duplicative versions of their website and successfully siphoned 3.6 million views away from the original source. A success, but definitely not cool. And it's worth noting his success plummeted after 18 months. So I'm telling you this because ChatGPT is a tool, but not a replacement for human thought. The content it generates isn't reviewed or tested by experts, which makes the results in the hands of our good friend Bob kind of money. That is definitively the wrong way to use ChatGPT. So let's talk about the right way. Specifically to boost your SEO, a great place to start is to use ChatGPT to begin your basic keyword research. Use a prompt to come up with a group of keywords related to your business. I'm going to make up a business just so I can explore how it all works. So let's say I'm trying to boost the SEO for a new blog about my favorite food in the city of Boston, because what would be better than getting paid to eat someday? I'm going to prompt it for 10 keyword phrases and see what it comes up with. Pretty sweet, right? But you'll notice that these aren't necessarily helpful in and of themselves, because when I check this list in Semrush's Keyword overview, the search volume on some of these is so low or non existent they're probably not worth my time. But I do notice that Food Tours Boston has some volume and looks like the keyword difficulty is low enough that I might have a shot at getting content based around this idea ranked highly. So now I'm going to ask ChatGPT to create a topic cluster related to this keyword and see what it comes back with. And holy cow, that's a lot of topics and subtopics. One way I like to narrow things down is just to do my own casual Google search for the ones that catch my eye and see what comes back. If there aren't any notable results, it might be worth pursuing. Now I feel like I've got a good place to start in building SEO authority for this keyword. I like this Tips for enjoying a food tour in Boston, so I'm going to start there. You can use ChatGPT to help you generate new headline ideas tied to your keyword, for example. Boom. You can take it further and ask for help crafting outlines and even the content itself, but where's the fun in that? Remember, this isn't a replacement for the human work, it's a facilitator of it. We'll get into more of its shortcomings in just a bit, but basically ChatGPT is prone to simple grammar errors, factual inaccuracies, and so nothing it spits out will contribute to your site's eeat. If you don't know what that stands for, it means experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness. Eat is the marquee metric that Google uses to determine the quality of your page, so that's why it's essential to keep a human expert in the process for the sake of quality control and accuracy. Luckily, There's a free ChatGPT bundle at HubSpot that includes some incredible resources for using this tool, including this handy content refinement checklist that makes it super easy to be sure you're double checking the AI's output in all the right ways. Okay, so here's another place ChatGPT can be super helpful, which is generating structured data or the schema markup for your website. Basically, it's the code that you can insert on the back end of your page to help search engines deliver the best results when you pop up in search. I'm terrible with code, so this has been a huge help. I think one of the most exciting parts of ChatGPT is is that it can take on some of the duller aspects of building your SEO. Like metadata. Honestly, I hate writing metadata, it's so boring. So instead I'll prompt it to create metadata for our food Tour blog along with some meta title options. It's a little flowery, but it's a great starting place with some edits and tweaks. It'll be good to go. In my research I found that ChatGPT can be helpful for performing some competitive analysis, like this search I did for other Boston based food writing. Now that I have this comprehensive list, I can branch off and do further research on the people I'm going to have to outperform in the search rankings. This is all great stuff here for sure, but what about ChatGPT's limitations? Like I said earlier, ChatGPT is not a replacement for human work because as cool as it is, it's pretty limited. First and foremost, it's widely known for responses that are either completely incorrect or out of date, since its base of knowledge only goes back so far. For instance, at the time I'm making this video in April 2024, ChatGPT's last update was April 2023. That's a whole year. A lot can happen in a year. If someone told you a year ago the Barbie movie was gonna be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, would you believe them? The food blog example I've been using is fairly low stakes, obviously, but if you're using this for something with more impact, it's critical you keep fact checking all the data that it spits out. Facts are obviously important, but ChatGPT's other major limitation is that it's just generic. It has no context for what it's spitting out, and thus no real voice or point of view. That's why the human element is so critical. In the age of content creators and social media, generic is the opposite of what builds a brand. You want all your content to match your company's brand, whether it's snarky or professional or witty or whatever. You can still use ChatGPT to brainstorm or even create the skeleton of your content, but you're going to need to spice it up with your brand's particular flavor. Plus generic keyword stuff. Content doesn't work like it might have back in the early 2000s. Google will detect these things as spammy and it could impact your rankings. Enough about the negatives though. Are you ready for one final tip? Most businesses benefit from having an FAQ page on their website answering common questions from customers about their products or services. ChatGPT is an excellent resource for predicting the kinds of things your customers might ask, like if you were running a donut shop, for example. Not going to lie Talking about this fictional food blog has unleashed some cravings for me, but as you can see, in two seconds I got a list of common questions that I could easily incorporate into my website that will not only be helpful for any customers visiting the page, but also potentially boost my SEO authority. ChatGPT is an exciting tool, especially for small businesses who are light on resources. Whether it's time, money, or people power. This can be a really powerful assistant in making some of the more menial tasks of marketing your business just a little bit easier. But remember, it's not an all encompassing solution. Think of it as a head start in the race, but not a shortcut to the finish line. And definitely check out HubSpot's free guide to ChatGPT for businesses. It's got everything you need to get started taking advantage of this miracle of technology. There's tips on creative ways to use ChatGPT for your business, templates to help you create the most effective prompts, and tons more. Have you already taken ChatGPT for a spin in your business? Let me know in the comments below. Now, if you'll excuse me, I got some prompting to do, my friend. Until then, I'll see you next time. Sam.
