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How Bloggers Can Use ChatGPT for SEO Success

You’ve seen the social posts, you’ve heard the hype, and now you’re wondering – can ChatGPT help me with SEO on my blog? While ChatGPT isn’t quite the magical paneca to all your SEO woes, it does have the potential to save you a ton of time. The key is working smarter (not harder) and using excellent prompts.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. As an affiliate, I earn a commission on qualifying purchases.

What exactly is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an AI-powered content generation tool that creates humanlike text from questions asked by users. The tool uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to provide relevant content.

There are pros and cons to ChatGPT, of course. On the plus side, it saves you time by quickly generating certain types of content and providing helpful ideas, which frees you up to focus on more important tasks. The major con is that ChatGPT (as well as any AI tool) is not a fact checker; it will often completely make up information.

How can bloggers use ChatGPT for SEO?

Even with the limitation mentioned above, ChatGPT is still incredibly valuable for bloggers. Whether it’s developing keyword ideas or crafting optimized meta descriptions, ChatGPT can provide loads of useful content.

Here are 7 use cases, all of which I’ve tested myself. This includes a new-to-me idea that I discovered on the latest Authority Hacker podcast episode about ChatGPT prompts and have started to implement.

1. Keyword research

You can use ChatGPT to generate a list of keywords related to a particular topic. While it won’t have data like volume or competition, you may find that you can discover keywords you didn’t yet stumble across in your other keyword research tools. You can then take this data and look it up in your keyword research tools to find ideal options for your site.

For example, you can prompt ChatGPT with something like “Write a list of trending topics related to (insert niche)” or “Write a list of technical terms related to (insert niche).”

You can see I did this below related to triathlon training.

A list of words in chatgpt related to triathlon training.

While many of these are topics I have covered, I see things like “aerobic capacity”, “time trial”, and “threshold training” which I haven’t specifically covered in individual posts, and they’re not phrases I remember previously stumbling upon when doing keyword research.

I can then take these and go over to KeySearch (or SEM Rush, or ahrefs, or whatever you use) – and see if there are any good options for posts. When I looked up threshold training, I see that it has 480 US searches/mo, and a competition score of 27 – which could be a great informational post option for my run/tri site. (Learn more about how to do keyword research using tools in this post.)

A screenshot of keyword research for the term threshold training.

2. Help you outline blog posts

You are probably familiar with looking at the People Also Ask section in Google to find questions that you can answer specific to a topic, to ensure your post is as comprehensive as possible. For example, if we roll with the example above of “threshold training”, here’s a screenshot of the People Also Ask section:

The people also ask queries for the query threshold training.

You might know that you can also use tools like Answer the Public or Answer Socrates to help with these.

But you can also use ChatGPT too! This can give you additional questions that may not be included in the PAAs or other sites, but might be relevant. This helps you provide even more value to readers. For example, here’s a list of questions that ChatGPT came up with regarding threshold training:

Questions about threshold training for triathlon created by chatgpt.

I see a ton of valuable ideas there that I could take and put into an outline for a blog post about threshold training. (Sometimes, the questions might also prompt an additional blog post idea on a sub-topic or related topic.)

3. Write meta descriptions

When you publish a blog post, you’re probably used to writing a meta description via your SEO plugin, like Yoast. Meta descriptions provide a brief summary of the content and (hopefully) entice users to click through to your page in search results. ChatGPT can quickly help you craft optimized descriptions, catchy descriptions.

Keep in mind the outputs by ChatGPT are often longer than the 155 character count that a meta description is limited to. In this case, I usually just say “make shorter” to get an option that typically fits (or requires less culling). Here’s an example you can see related to the threshold training post idea:

An example of a meta description crafted by chatgpt.

It may seem silly to have an AI write a few sentences, but I think it can save the mental energy of these tasks, especially when you batch them.

4. Discover missing topic ideas on your site.

Let’s look at two of my favorite prompts for ChatGPT.

First is “Create a sitemap for a website about (insert niche)”. You can get an idea of what niche blogs in this area cover, and discover untapped opportunities for your own site.

For example, I asked ChatGPT to create a sitemap for a website about food allergies. Here’s what it came up with:

A screenshot of a sample sitemap created by chatgpt.

If you had a blog covering food allergies but didn’t have a silo about each major type of allergy – dairy, soy, eggs, etc – that would be a great cluster of topics to work on.

A second prompt you could use is “Create a content strategy for a blog about (insert niche)”. For example, let’s say I was going to create a blog solely about egg alleries. Here’s some of what ChatGPT suggested:

An example of a content strategy created by chatgpt for an egg allergy website.

As you can see, there are a ton of great ideas in here, many of which could be further broken down and expanded upon. For example, the idea of “eating out with an egg allergy” could be extrapolated into “Egg Free Menu Items at (Insert Restaurant)” and you could do an entire series of these for different places.

In both of these prompt examples, all the topics won’t be relevant to every site, but it can give you ideas for things that may be missing on your site or a direction for moving forward.

5. Link Building Outreach

Need to send some outreach emails for guest posting? Why not use ChatGPT to help with these! (Prompts to Authority Hacker for this idea!)

You can tell ChatGPT the person you’re trying to reach out to, the goal of your email, and maybe some fun anecdotes or personal touches to add. Then let it write the email for you, and prompt it to adjust to fit your tone and personality.

For example, here’s a random prompt I used, pretending I’m going to reach out to my pal Megan at RD2RD:

“Write an outreach email to Megan at RD2RD asking if I can write a guest post. Include a thank you for the weekend we went snowboarding with her family. Make it personal and casual. Provide topic ideas.”

Here’s the first outreach email it came up with – kind of stale, and didn’t have the right business idea.

First example of a link building outreach letter from chatgpt.

I then prompted with “Adjust to make more fun. Also, include topic ideas that are specific to dietitian entrepreneurs.”

Here’s the updated version I got, which was much better. And this took all of 30 seconds total, start to finish.

An updated link building outreach letter after re-prompting.

6. Blog title ideas

Stumped about what to name a blog post? ChatGPT can help you come up with an interesting headline that grabs attention and hopefully generates click throughs.

For example here’s what I got when I asked it to provide title ideas for a blog about habits of successful dietitian entrepreneurs:

Blog title ideas created using chatgpt.

7. Get help updating posts (or optimizing upcoming posts)

You can also play around with pasting an old blog post into ChatGPT, and using the prompt “What information is this post missing about (topic)?”

You might find that it comes up with ideas for improvements that may help you create a more comprehensive article in the update.

For example, I pasted an article about what you should eat the night before a race into ChatGPT, and it noted: “The post doesn’t mention the quantity of carbohydrates, protein, and fat to be consumed during the pre-race meal” — and that is true.

While I mention eating a meal with mostly carbs and protein the night before, I didn’t give specific quantities of those macronutrients or portions of food. That might be something I update in the post.

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to updating posts. You can use this same strategy on posts you’re currently working on that haven’t been published yet.

Should you use ChatGPT for full blog posts?

Any artificial intelligence use for blogging should come with human oversight. People often think it’s as simple as clicking a button once and boom! You’ve got a whole blog post.

Unfortunately, that will leave you with a pretty sub-par post. That’s the type of content Google demotes; content that’s autogenerated without human input.

But if you are guiding an AI tool, fact checking, adding relevant unique viewpoints, etc….you can vastly speed up your content creation. I prefer Jasper for working on those types of long form blog posts (see my full Jasper review), but ChatGPT could be used as well. The key is to create amazing, helpful content (regardless of whether by a human or a combo of a human + AI).

If you do use any AI content in blog posts, be sure to run it through a plagiarism checker. I also recommend running it through a scanner that analyzes AI content, like Origniality.AI. My goal with AI content is to not actually be detected as AI, because I’ve added enough uniqueness to the post. I’d like to think it’s working well, since much of my mostly-AI content is ranking well.

(You may have different opinions on this and that’s fine. I’ve had people adamantly tell me Google does not rank AI content. Meanwhile, I have a blog post sitting on page one right now in which I literally say “I wrote this using AI” in the post. Again, I’m always modifying and guiding it though.)

Additional Uses

Outside of SEO, there are so many options for ChatGPT and other AI tools (again, huge Jasper fan) to speed up our workflow. You could use AI to…

  • Create social media copy
  • Write email newsletters
  • Generate ad copy
  • Create product descriptions
  • And more!

The Bottom Line

ChatGPT can be an incredibly useful tool to help you with SEO, from coming up with blog titles to keyword ideas to link building outreach. While you can technically use it to generate a full blog post, a one-click AI-generated post wouldn’t be best practice for SEO. You should always guide, fact check, and add your own unique flare to create content your readers will love.

Note: The photos in this post contain lists of words and blocks of text. If you need a plain-text version of these for accessibility purposes, please contact me and I’m happy to send that over.

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2 Comments

  • Janice

    Hi Chrissy, Thank you for this article! I tried out chatgpt to do some brainstorming for recipe ideas for my site – it seems there’s some classic and popular salads that I haven’t covered it 🙂 Thanks for this very helpful article!

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