How Beneficial is ChatGPT for SEO?

In today's digital world, SEO has become a crucial element for businesses to grow their online presence.

An important aspect of SEO is content creation, and with the emergence of ChatGPT into the mainstream, this AI-powered chatbot has allowed businesses to create well-written and articulate content in a matter of minutes.

But how beneficial is ChatGPT for SEO? Is it better than human written content? Let’s find out.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an AI language model created by OpenAI, that is designed to answer your questions, generate text, and provide you with suggestions to any query you may have, in a natural and humanistic manner.

When you ask ChatGPT this question yourself, you get the response:

“ChatGPT is a platform that allows people from all over the world to connect and communicate with each other. It is an innovative and user-friendly chat service that offers many features such as private messaging, group chat, and video calling. With ChatGPT…”

Sounds pretty human, right?

However, from an SEO perspective, it’s a little bit more complicating than asking it a question and copy-pasting the answer into your blog or webpage.

How To Use ChatGPT

Due to its exposure to diverse text sources, that are accessible to the public, ChatGPT possesses the capability to produce essays on a vast range of subjects.

Although this may sound ideal, it’s important to note that the primary constraint of ChatGPT is its unreliability in generating precise information.

This stems from the fact that it solely predicts the succeeding words in a sentence or paragraph on a specific subject, without prioritising its accuracy.

So, although it is an incredible tool that can be extremely beneficial for you and your business, it’s important that you know how to use ChatGPT.

Don’t Ask it About Certain Subject Matters

ChatGPT is programmed to avoid some subject matters that are deemed inappropriate, offensive, or illegal. These may include topics related to pornography, hate speech, discrimination, violence, terrorism, and illegal activities.

Remember That it Has Built-In Biases

OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, have acknowledged that the system has demonstrated political bias, offense, and other objectionable behaviours.

A crucial factor to keep in mind is that it is programmed to prioritise being supportive, honest, and non-threatening. This type of programming can influence the answer to steer clear of negativity, and even though this sounds like a good thing at first, this approach could shift the tone of a blog or article away from being impartial, to more opinion based.

You Have to be Very Specific

For ChatGPT to produce original, quality content, or content from a specific perspective, comprehensive instructions are necessary, otherwise you’ll end up with a quick summary that isn’t beneficial to you or anyone else.

Using ChatGPT for SEO

Like most things in the world, ChatGPT has its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages

ChatGPT can be useful for some SEO practices. These include:

• Crafting bases for blog posts

• Curating images

• Generating meta descriptions

• Revising existing content

• Suggest keywords to target for blogs or web content

ChatGPT is also beneficial for Technical SEO. It can:

• Generate lists of outreach targets, emails and free tool ideas

• Help with schema markup and robots.txt directives

• Redirect codes

• Build widgets and free tools to promote

Disadvantages

Ultimately, ChatGPT is not designed to be used for SEO purposes. It can most certainly assist you in generating high-quality content, as mentioned previously, but it doesn’t include factors such as keyword research, website structure, content quality, backlinks, and user experience.

It's important to understand the potential risks to rankings and organic traffic, when using ChatGPT generated content in different ways.

Some disadvantages include:

• The lack of an E-E-A-T factor

• It can be factually inaccurate or low-quality content

• The entry barrier for content creators is now lower, meaning that more mediocre content will populate the internet

• It has the potential to create mediocre search results

Let’s expand on these disadvantages.

Lack of an E-E-A-T Factor

Google identifies the four key factors that contribute to high-quality content as experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, commonly referred to as E-E-A-T. However, given the nature of AI-generated content, it is difficult to conceive that it would meet these standards, especially for "your money or your life" (YMYL) content, which includes critical topics such as financial and medical advice.

Considering the potential dangers of AI-generated responses to such topics, it is essential to evaluate the credibility of the content beforehand. One should ask whether the AI-generated content possesses the necessary experience, expertise, or authority to provide an effective solution for people searching for these queries.

Factually Inaccurate or Low-Quality Content

ChatGPT utilises pre-programmed knowledge to produce responses. This knowledge can originate from various sources such as articles, books, and websites.

This constraint can result in several challenges, including the possibility of outdated or inaccurate information. Additionally, since ChatGPT cannot ensure complete comprehension of user inquiries, there is a risk of irrelevant or erroneous responses.

Moreover, ChatGPT lacks human insight and may struggle to grasp complex concepts. It may also generate clumsy phrasing and grammatical errors.

Lower Barrier For Content Creation

AI-generated content exacerbates the problem of low-quality content, making it easier for anyone to enter the content creation field without critical thinking or creativity.

As a result, we may witness an influx of new, budget-friendly content creators flooding the internet and potentially overtaking quality and established content creators.

However, this won’t matter too much, thankfully. On August 18, in their Helpful Content Update, Google said it will aim to reward pages that provide useful information and resources to users. The update focuses on E-E-A-T; relevance and usefulness; visual presentation; and accessibility.

By building credibility through external links, creating well-structured content, and ensuring pages are accessible to all users, businesses can improve their page rankings and provide better experiences for users.

Mediocre Search Results

In the near future, we could potentially see an internet where every webpage is filled with content generated by AI. As previously explained, this could result in a decline in the overall standard of search results. Devoid of human insight and E-E-A-T/YMYL factors, the quality of the answers provided by AI would be subpar.

That's why it's still crucial for people to be an integral part of the content creation process. Without the guidance of people, quality and original content will plummet.

So, How Can I Properly Utilise ChatGPT for SEO?

ChatGPT is a tool, not an answer. It’s fantastic at a lot of different things and can save you time when coming up with ideas, writing lists, creating bases for content, etc.

However, AI still has a long way to go and a lot to do before we can fully rely on it.

Recently, Google's AI chatbot, Bard, was found to have provided inaccurate information to users, according to an advertisement for the company. The ad revealed that Bard's responses to certain questions were incorrect, leading some to question the reliability of AI chatbots in general. As a result, they lost $100 billion in market value.

So, to summarise, SEO content that is researched and finely curated by experts will always be better than a chatbot, although they are a great and helpful tool you can utilise for a lot of different situations.