Is ChatGPT content good for SEO?

I’m sure you’ve heard of ChatGPT by now, and maybe you’ve even logged in and played around with it a bit. Have you wondered how to use it to make your life easier and if ChatGPT content is good for SEO? If so, you are not alone. I’ll admit I’ve wondered the same thing. As a longtime professional content marketer and SEO, I initially found myself very skeptical of ChatGPT.

I’ve been in the industry long enough to see other AI tools come and go. I’ve seen people buy low-quality content from offshore resources, and the thing is, you don’t win at SEO without really great content today. Sure, crummy, thin content was fine over a decade ago, but things have changed a lot over the years (thankfully!)

Google has updated the algorithm many times and even had a few significant updates, including penalties for spammy link building and low-quality or thin content. Google wants to have high-quality content on the websites that it ranks high and that its users visit. And for years, that means they’ve said no AI content.

When ChatGPT first came out, I was hesitant to use it because I was concerned it could hurt SEO performance, and I’m not willing to risk that for myself, my clients, or my students.

Since then, Google has said you could use it, but you have to work with the tool and can’t just copy/paste what it gives you. As I’ve worked with it for a while now, I’ve played around to see how it can help with SEO and content marketing without risking performance issues or penalties for doing things wrong.

Now that we’ve talked a little about the initial concerns with AI content development, let's get back to the question:

Listen to the podcast episode here - 

Is ChatGPT content good for SEO? 

The answer is... it depends!

(Rachel here. By the way, ChatGPT wrote this next part for you, but I’ve edited it for factual and grammatical errors – there were quite a few.)

Watch the video on this here: 

Content Development in ChatGPT

As a language model, I'm designed to generate high-quality, informative content optimized for search engines. However, the quality of the content ultimately depends on the input and guidance of the user.

Please provide me with accurate and relevant information and clear instructions on optimizing that content for SEO. I can help you create content that is well-optimized for search engines.

Rachel here – the quality of the generated content depends VERY heavily upon what you use as your prompts. Simply asking it to create a blog post or write sales copy for you doesn’t provide good results. You want to give insights into your audience, what they need to know, how you help them, etc. I did a whole podcast episode titled ChatGPT, a friend or foe to your SEO; check that out, too. The other thing you want to think about is the fact that the information in Chat GPT is not new. It's sourced from information already available on the web, which means your content is not truly unique if Chat GPT or another AI tool creates it for you.

Google has said to use these tools as helpers but don't have them write content for you. They're not able to produce the level and quality of content that we need. Google removed a lot of spammy AI-generated content from their index in the spring of 2024. As with all new technologies and potential SEO hacks, people tried to take advantage of ChatGPT and other AI tools and created SEO content at mass scale, and published multiple articles a day on their websites. And, for a short period of time, it worked. They ranked and got traffic to their sites, but Google quickly adjusted the algorithm and went after those sites and the low-quality content and removed it. 

Remember, Google is a business, and they make money by selling ads. If people stop using Google as their search browser, then they won't have an audience for the advertisers. Google wants to ensure the websites they rank at the top of the search results provide valuable, helpful content, and a good user experience so that searchers continue to use Google rather than one of their competitors. If you want Google to show your website at the top of the search results, you have to do your part, which is to create helpful content for your potential visitor and optimize it for Google. 

Using ChatGPT for SEO

However, I can help you with on-page optimization, including optimizing your title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags and ensuring your content is well-written and informative.

Rachel here – In my tests, ChatGPT did this; however, the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions didn’t meet Google’s Best Practices or use the correct keyword every time, so be wary of having the tool write them for you. If you’re unsure what the best practices are for them, that’s OK; I’ve got a Beginner's SEO Guide that walks you through everything you need to know to get started with SEO on your website or blog. Get your copy here. 

I have seen ChatGPT do a better job with Title Tags and meta descriptions as it has evolved and grown. Many of my students now have the tool to create the first drafts and then simply review them to make sure they meet best practices, which saves time. 

SEO Concerns with ChatGPT

One important thing to remember when using a language model like me for SEO is to make sure that the content you generate is original and unique. Duplicate content can harm your SEO efforts, so checking for the same content before publishing it is essential.

Rachel here – there’s much duplicate content generated by ChatGPT in my testing. I found the same information almost any time I asked about similar subjects. You must watch closely and edit to avoid duplicate content, which is a big no-no in Google’s world. The other concern is the amount of incorrect information and what those in the SEO industry call hallucinations, where ChatGPT and other tools make stuff up completely. If you're using it to help with your content ideas, just double-check the facts. You don't want to publish incorrect information. 

How Can You Use ChatGPT for SEO Content?

Overall, using ChatGPT content for SEO can be a great way to save time and resources as long as you provide me with accurate information and clear instructions for optimization.

With the right strategy and approach, you can use ChatGPT and other AI tools to create high-quality content optimized for search engines and help drive traffic and conversions to your website.

Rachel here –I don’t use ChatGPT for content on my website, blog, or clients. It’s faster for me to write myself than to use the tool and do the editing. However, some of my students are finding it’s faster for them to use it for a rough draft and then edit until they’re happy with the results. I have seen too many errors with the content that it creates to feel comfortable using it to create content. But it can help save you time in many other ways. 

ChatGPT for Content Brainstorming

I’ve found it’s great for brainstorming and idea generation, along with outlines. You can easily have the system give you a design for a blog post or a list of 10 blog ideas for a specific niche, allowing you to be ready to write in minutes and not have to worry about staring at a blank screen again, which is excellent).

So, don't be afraid to dive into the world of SEO and content marketing! With some knowledge and creativity, you can create engaging and well-optimized content for search engines. And who knows — you might even enjoy optimizing content for SEO. Good luck!

Rachel here – final thoughts – ChatGPT can be a fantastic tool to help speed up your SEO Content creation process. It can generate keyword ideas, title tags, meta descriptions, content topic ideas, blog post outlines, and more. It can take a piece of content you have and offer ways to update or expand upon it. It can help you repurpose content, write social media captions, and more. However, I don’t think ChatGPT content is good for SEO as it comes out of the system. You still need to edit it and be part of the process, but it can be a great, free, or cheap assistant, and that can save you time. 

Final Thoughts on ChatGPT and SEO or Content Marketing

Verify the keywords it suggests and make sure you can rank for them. Use the outline to write your blog post or edit the rough draft it generates for you. Don’t simply copy/paste the blog post that GPT generates for you to rank high in Google’s search results. You will be disappointed. You still need high-quality content to win with Google, and ChatGPT isn’t there for now. It may be someday, but today, it’s not. Use it as a great tool, let it help you, and speed up the process, but don’t think you can hand all your content development over to the machine and get rankings. It won’t work.

Finally, I edited a lot of the copy from ChatGPT for grammar – there were over 100 errors. It’s a good starting point but not a complete SEO content development solution. 

Podcast Episode Transcript

Hi and welcome to this week's episode on the Simple SEO Content Podcast, where we're going to talk about Chat GPT, and is the content that it creates good for SEO? Are you going to get good results and rank at the top of Google if Chat GPT is creating your content for you? I'm your host, Rachel Lindteigen, and I'm so glad to have you here listening to me this week on the Simple SEO Content Podcast.

So, let's jump in real quick. If you're not familiar with chat GPT, it is a new AI tool that has taken off by storm. It is a great tool that can be of a lot of help. It does have the ability to do things like write blog posts, write papers, and all of that. So now there's a lot of buzz around the content itself that chat GPT is creating, and is it good enough to write content for you that will rank? Can Chat GPT then also take it a step further and do your search engine optimization on those content pieces, creating your title tags and your meta descriptions and all the different pieces of it for you? Can it even tell you what keywords to use? No, but there are things you can do with Chat GPT that are going to make your life a lot easier. That are going to make it easier for you to make better content for your ideal customer.

But I don't want you to just have Chat GPT write blog posts. I don't want you to suddenly start doing five blog posts a week. I'm going to do a daily blog post, and I'm just going to tell Chat GPT to write it for me. Copy and paste, and boom. You're not going to get the results you're looking for. Yes, you're going to create a lot of content, but it's not going to be content that's really helpful. It's not going to be super relevant, and you run the risk of having a lot of duplicate content if you and your competition start doing the same thing. So in the research that I've done just playing with Chat GPT, trying to understand it and see what you can do and how it works and what can you do that's not going to get you in trouble with Google I see a lot of repetition in the content that Chat GPT puts out. That's why I say I want you to be really careful. I've tested it on multiple blog posts. I've asked it to write blog posts for me, and then I asked it to write another blog post on a similar subject but with a different twist, and there's so much repetition and duplication between the two that you're not going to get great results from it. It's just not there yet. That doesn't mean it won't be at some point in the future, but as of right now, it's just not there. So why do we even worry about chat GPT and hurting our SEO?

So your SEO, as you know, is your search engine optimization. That's how you're getting targeted, relevant traffic to your website. Your content is what Google looks at and shares with people. They share your website and it's your content that's drawing them in and then the way that you're optimizing it. So if you're asking chat GPT to do it for you and it's creating content that's not high quality or it's not super helpful, it's not super relevant, it's not detailed, it doesn't give the information that your ideal customer needs, they're not going to spend time reading it. They're going to come to your site, they're going to see it, and they're going to bounce. Bounce means they come, they look at one page and they leave because there's no value, and they're going to leave quickly, which means your average time on site is going to plummet because they're not finding what they need. Those are engagement metrics that Google looks at to understand how well people engage with your website. So if you have a high bounce rate and a super low time on site, they're not going to rank you high, and you're not going to get a low bounce rate and a high time on site with crummy content because your ideal customer wants good content. They don't want to waste their time.

Think about yourself when you go to read a blog post, or you go to watch a video, or listen to a podcast like this. You want to learn something. Your consumer wants to know what's in it for me, they don't care why you're writing it or copying and pasting it. They want to get value. Google is very, very focused on high-quality content, new, relevant content, and helpful content. Those are the most important things to Google when it comes to ranking your content really making sure that it's great quality and, as of today, the quality coming out of chat GPT is not there. It's just not yet. It may be in the future, but it's not today. Google has historically said no AI content. You will not win; you will not rank high if you're using AI content. Now they have come back, and they've changed that a little bit since chat GPT came out in 2022. They're now saying, yes, you can use tools like this. However, you still need to be involved in the process. You need to ensure that this is still really great content, it's helpful and it's useful and your ideal customer is engaging with it. So, how can you use chat GPT to create content faster? This is really where I think it's gonna be the sweet spot for tools like this.

You can ask Chat GPT to help you with the brainstorming. So if you know who your ideal customer is, you know what your content pillars are, and you're trying to plan out your content for the month and you're not sure what you wanna cover, you can ask chat GPT to give you 10 blog post ideas for your ideal customer and your content pillar. You can ask it to give you keyword ideas you could potentially use for this ideal customer and this content pillar. You then are going to want to go and verify the keyword ideas that it gives you. You're gonna wanna do actual keyword research on it, the way that I teach you, by going and seeing who's showing up in positions one, two, and three on Google. How similar are they to you? Do you have a really good chance of ranking for that keyword or not?

You're still gonna wanna be involved in the process, you can take those 10 ideas that Chat GPT has given you, and you can use those as a guide to help you figure out what blog posts you wanna create this month for each of your pillars. Maybe there's one in there that's really engaging and exciting, and you're like, oh gosh, I hadn't thought about that before. You can ask Chat GPT to help you outline that blog post. So if there's an option that it gives you that you like, then you can say, hey, would you help me outline what should I include in this? And then from there I want you to actually write the post yourself. Don't ask Chat GPT to write it for you, but you can have it help you with the brainstorming. You can have it help you with the outline. You can have it help you.

Take the posts that you've written, and you can put them back in there and ask if there's anything else you should add. Is there a semantically related search or semantically related keywords that you didn't add? Is there anything that you're missing? You can ask it to take your headline and make it more exciting. You can ask it for headline variations. There's a lot that you can do, but no, the content that comes straight out of it when you ask it to write a blog post is not ready to post.

Now I've tested both ways, where I've just asked it to outline, and I've also asked it to give me a first draft or to create a draft of a blog post. I personally find it's faster to go with the outline and write it myself than to try to edit what the tool is giving me and turn it into a blog post that I would use because there's so much repetition in it. It's not got the perfect personality. It doesn't really understand the nuance of communication. It's a robot, it's a machine. There are limitations. So test it, play with it, use it. But don't just think I'm going to use Chat GPT. I need nothing. I don't need my content writer anymore. I don't need to worry about learning SEO because chat GPT can do it all for me. 

It can, but you're not going to get the results that you're looking for. If you want to get results meaning you want to rank at the top of Google, you want to get traffic to your website, you want that traffic to convert you still need to make sure that you are involved in the process. It's going to be very important that you focus on creating really great content that's super helpful, that provides value, that anticipates the questions your ideal customer is going to ask, and then you want to make sure that you're optimizing that content for the keyword that you've chosen. And I want you to do your keyword research and choose your keyword before you write any content because that way, you're going to make sure that you're creating content that has an audience that's already looking for it. There's no point in creating content and spending time writing blog posts or creating videos if there's no search demand for that term. I want you to make sure you are always writing and creating your content for your audience and that there is interest in it. Then, you're going to optimize it.

You can ask ChatGPT to help you with things like writing a title tag and writing a meta description. However, I found that they don't follow best practices, so it's really important for you to know what those SEO best practices are. So, as a reminder, your title tag is 60 characters maximum, and that includes your spaces. Your meta description is a maximum of 160 characters, also including spaces. If you don't have my SEO content quick start guide. Yet go ahead and grab it. Go to the website, etchedmarketing.com/freebies tab and you can get it, or DM me the word SEO on Instagram and the chat bot will automatically send it to you. It's awesome; it's super easy for you. And then, while you're there, make sure you get signed up for the  free SEO 101 class. 

So do not copy-paste content out of ChatGPT. It's not good enough quality for you. But use it as a tool. Have it help you write your outlines, guide your posts, and give you ideas for titles. Have it help you with the brainstorming. Give it a list of titles you're thinking about and ask it to make them more exciting. There's a lot you can do with it, but you cannot as of today, you cannot publish the content that comes straight out of it and expect to get good results from Google. It's not the quality that you need. Maybe someday, but not for now. Thanks for being here this week. If you have any questions, DM me on Instagram. I'd love to chat and I will see you back here next week.

Updated July 2024 to add transcript and information about Google's latest AI spam update.