How to Use ChatGPT for SEO: A Beginner’s Guide

You’ve probably heard of ChatGPT. Many people have been using this tool to generate content for their sites and even improve their search engine rankings. However, if you want to use ChatGPT for SEO, you’ll need to have a firm understanding of what the tool can and cannot do.

While ChatGPT is unable to do proper keyword research for you (yet), it can help you brainstorm content ideas. If used properly, ChatGPT can be an amazing tool for creating high-quality content that helps you rank (and it works with WordPress!).

Can you use ChatGPT for keyword research?

Right now, most versions of ChatGPT can’t access the web to look up current data. This means that, when you input a query, the response you get is based on old information.

Currently, some users have access to ChatGPT plugins that pull recent information. Likewise, some third-party tools that use the ChatGPT API enable you to connect the software to the web. However, in most cases, you’re limited to the data provided by the version that you’re using.

In practice, this limits the utility of the tool for tasks like keyword research, analyzing search trends, and understanding user intent. If you rely on ChatGPT for keyword research, chances are you’re getting inaccurate data:

Modern keyword research tools provide you with a wealth of information, such as recent search volumes, current levels of competitiveness, and more. This data is essential to developing a smart content strategy, and it’s not something that ChatGPT can provide you with (at the moment).

Viable ways to use ChatGPT for SEO in 2023

Now that we’ve talked about the ways in which you can’t use ChatGPT for SEO, let’s discuss what you can actually do with it.

1. Plan content clusters
2. Generate seed keywords for each cluster
3. Help with content creation
4. Improve your content formatting
5. Come up with titles and meta descriptions

1. Plan content clusters 📅

Content clusters are groups of interlinked articles that cover a particular topic in more depth. For example, if you take a good look at our blog, you’ll notice that we have several clusters. These include hosting reviews, technical tutorials about WordPress, email marketing, and many others.

Creating content clusters can help you provide relevant information for your audience. Each cluster corresponds to a question that your users might have, and within each cluster, you have content that provides answers and solutions. The question is, how do you figure out what clusters to focus on?

If you know your niche, you should have an idea of what people are interested in. However, if you want to be more thorough, you can analyze competitor sites, look up popular searches in your niche, analyze keywords, and more.

ChatGPT can help you streamline the process by narrowing down potential content clusters for your niche:

We recommend that you use these responses as part of the brainstorming process. Plus, you’ll want to focus on topics that interest your audience, and which can help you rank.

For example, if you’re a fitness professional, you can take the content clusters that ChatGPT suggests and figure out which ones are viable and which ones aren’t. If you rely solely on the data provided by the tool, you might end up focusing on topics that your audience either doesn’t care about or that have too much competition.

2. Generate seed keywords for each cluster ⌨️

Seed keywords are the words or phrases that best describe the main topic of each content cluster. In most cases, these are not the keywords you’ll be targeting in your content.

Some seed keywords for a nutrition and diet blog might include options such as “clean eating,” “whole foods,” “balanced diet,” and “healthy recipes.” On the other hand, the actual keywords you want to target will depend on factors such as search volume and level of competition.

Some examples of long-tail keywords in the nutrition niche may include:

• Can pumpkin recipes be healthy?
• A healthy chicken breast recipe
• Are air fryer recipes healthy?

Those are all examples of real-life searches. Each topic cluster should have a list of seed keywords that provide you with an overview of the types of topics you want to cover.

ChatGPT can help you come up with ideas for seed keywords but not specific ones, as it can’t access current search volume data:

If you have access to keyword research tools, we recommend you use seed keywords to find related searches. The results you get from those searches will point you in the right direction in terms of what questions and solutions users are looking for online.

3. Help with content creation ✍️

There is a lot of discussion about how, when, and if to use AI for content creation. A lot of websites are already relying on ChatGPT to publish articles and write copy. So the question is, should you?

You can feed ChatGPT a topic idea and a keyword, and it will come up with a passable article about it. In some cases, it might even do a good job with it. However, it’s nowhere near the level where it can replace an expert in that niche.

You don’t even have to take our word for it – ChatGPT agrees:

Right now, ChatGPT is still at the stage where it can return false information or provide generic answers. However, you can use it to come up with rough drafts and outlines for your posts:

This can be incredibly helpful for brainstorming content. You could then look at what people are searching for in relation to the topic you want to write about.

For example, you might use keyword research tools and look at related searches for queries such as “plant-based diet.” Then, take that information and compare it with ChatGPT’s suggestions, and you can turn it into a comprehensive article!

4. Improve your content formatting 👨‍💻

One of the most interesting ways in which you can use ChatGPT for SEO is by feeding it information and asking it to interact with it (instead of relying on its built-in knowledge). For example, you can feed ChatGPT a poorly formatted paragraph and ask it to return a table or a list to make the content easier to digest.

To give you an idea of how effective this can be, we asked ChatGPT to create a table that compares .co vs .com domains based on an article we published on the same subject. Instead of simply asking ChatGPT to use its own data, we entered the whole article in the query box. Here’s what it returned:

The tool chose what differences to highlight and how to format them, and pulled information directly from the article to create the table. We could have done this manually, but ChatGPT saved us a bit of time and provided us with a starting point.

You can use the same approach to help you improve formatting in several other ways. Some examples include asking ChatGPT to create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section based on an article, or even dividing numerous paragraphs with unique subheadings.

As always, it’s important to understand that you need to feed the tool the information you want it to use. Don’t be scared to add plenty of details into the ChatGPT query box. Many users have reported that it can handle up to 500 words (approximately) per request without difficulty ^[1].

5. Come up with titles and meta descriptions 📝

One of the most challenging aspects of running a blog is coming up with optimized titles and meta descriptions. These play a significant role in your clickthrough rate, so you’ll want to get these elements right.

So, here’s another way you can use ChatGPT for SEO. Let’s say you’re writing an article about tips for starting a healthy diet. You can ask the tool for some title ideas:

Try to provide detailed prompts for better results. For example, we asked it to provide attention-grabbing titles, and it gave us a list of snappy headlines.

You can ask the tool to give you dozens of ideas just as easily as asking for a single title and meta description, so go ahead and have fun with it. Over time, your site’s analytics will tell you what pages are getting the most clicks in the SERPs, and this will enable you to refine post titles based on that information.

Conclusion 🧐

At the moment, you might be unable to get up-to-date information from ChatGPT, so we advise against using it for keyword research.

🚩 However, there are a lot of other ways that you can use ChatGPT for SEO, such as:

Do you have any questions about using ChatGPT for SEO? Let us know in the comments section below!