ChatGPT is top of mind for many people in the content creation and SEO spaces – and even seems to be a developing obsession inspiration to Google itself.
The biggest question for SEOs and people trying to create content to drive traffic from search engines is obviously:
How can ChatGPT help create content for SEO?
ChatGPT performs a few specific functions that can help you with content creation for SEO like:
- Writing whole SEO-focused blog posts, articles, and landing pages.
- Generating research you can use in SEO-focused content.
- Performing specific SEO tasks to support your content creation, like keyword research or content clustering.
- Creating embeddable elements and enhancements within your content to make the articles better and more linkable.
Sounds good, right?
The flip side is that while ChatGPT can be incredibly useful in some SEO content creation scenarios, it can also introduce risks for your sites. (Not to mention, it is still quite bad at several tasks.)
This article will walk you through some functions you can use to help you create content for SEO, alert you to some of the risks associated with some of them and discuss the areas where you might be better suited to use a different tool for the job.
Writing blog posts with ChatGPT
ChatGPT can write entire blog posts in a few minutes (and is not super humble about it if the output it generated is any indication):
Google has said their primary concern is whether AI content is “helpful” and that all their guidelines and recent updates (including E-E-A-T) will apply to AI content.
They recently wrote about this again, explicitly saying there is no “ban” on AI-generated content in Google search results.
As with many things in SEO, if your question is “does AI content work” the answer is really “it depends.”
If you have a very authoritative site like Bankrate or CNET, there might be a class of topics where AI content can rank very well, potentially even with minimal editing.
If you’re an independent publisher cranking out thousands of AI-generated blog posts, or you’re just a less authoritative site pushing out lots of AI content, you may not be so lucky (see Mark Williams-Cook’s example in the first comment here):
As you can see his graph was moving up and to the right for a while (until it wasn’t).
If you’re running a business, you also have to worry about the accuracy of ChatGPT’s content, as you would with in-house or freelance writers.
There are many things that it just gets wrong, as the tool itself will admit:
So whether you can run with intact ChatGPT content is a question of what you’re trying to accomplish and your risk threshold.
Creating subsections, meta descriptions and short content blocks
While you want to be careful with the amount of content you let ChatGPT run wild on, you can do a few things to make the content it produces more useful:
- Specific prompts: Give very specific prompts about