If you’ve used ChatGPT for any period of time for tasks like creating content for SEO, you’ve likely noticed a few things:
It’s great and a major time-saver for some tasks.
It’s much worse than what you already do for other tasks.
To get the most out of it, you must understand how it works, be willing to refine your prompts (sometimes several times), and QA the platform’s output.
All of these things are true when using ChatGPT for keyword research. To help you navigate the process, let’s explore:
Keyword research functions ChatGPT is good at (with specific prompts).
Keyword research functions ChatGPT is not good at.
How to QA your keyword research output from ChatGPT.
You’ll leave this article with specific keyword research applications for ChatGPT, plus a framework for incorporating the tool into your SEO processes.
How to use ChatGPT for keyword research
An important thing to understand off the top: ChatGPT does not have access to search volume and other metrics the way keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner, Semrush and Ahrefs do.
That said, ChatGPT can be highly useful for several keyword research functions.
Keyword brainstorming and topic ideation
One downside to traditional keyword research tools is that your competitors (and often more authoritative sites than yours) are using the same tools and targeting the same keywords.
As you build out a list of topics and keyword targets, the right ChatGPT prompts can help you find largely untapped pockets of keywords.
{Topic} for dummies
If I were starting a website about pickleball and wanted to get some broad ideas for what to write about, I could use some creative prompts to get ideas from ChatGPT on where to start:
Obviously, this isn’t a list of keywords, but it could function as a general site structure and give me ideas for building keyword clusters.
{Topic} conference agendas
Similarly, asking ChatGPT for conference topics targeting a specific persona in my niche provides some interesting ideas:
Quick and dirty competitive research
ChatGPT doesn’t have the most recent data and isn’t a comprehensive keyword research tool. But it can help me gain a quick sense of a niche’s competitive landscape and get started with high-level ideas:
Plus, more ideas for different topics and sub-niche:
Social media and influencer research
I can continue to get a lay of the land in this niche by looking at social media accounts on platforms like X:
However, keep in mind that while ChatGPT can now crawl the web when prompted, the data is from October 2023, which isn’t current.
X also paused Open AI access as of Dec. 4, 2022:
Not surprising, as I just learned that OpenAI had access to Twitter database for training. I put that on pause for now.
Need to understand more about governance structure & revenue plans going forward.
OpenAI was started as open-source & non-profit. Neither are still true.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 4, 2022
I can also look at Reddit:
This can be even more useful if you dive a little deeper:
The output is great as specific angles for articles or FAQs.
You can also get a quick view of influencers and thought leaders:
Then I can dive into more topic ideas and learn the topics they tweet and talk about:
Next, I can start to pull this all together by combining prompts and asking ChatGPT to give me a summary of its research:
I’ll be honest: I run a lot of ChatGPT prompts, and some of the output is infuriatingly bad.
If you hired a VA to research a niche and provide high-level topic and category ideas for a new site, this result would be acceptable.
Similarly, with ChatGPT, better prompts lead to better information, so you must take accountability for your input.
Brainstorm actionable keywords
We now have interesting high-level category and “sub-niche” data. So how do we convert that into an actual list of target keywords?
ChatGPT can’t give you estimated search volume and keyword difficulty data. While they aren’t perfect metrics, you can waste time and resources if you’re “flying blind.”
We can use ChatGPT to prepare a list of “seed keywords” to run against our favorite keyword tool:
Next, I used a prompt to clean up the list (“Perfect, take these keywords and convert them into a list of just the keywords that I can easily copy and paste.”) and dropped them all into Ahrefs, looked at matching terms, and filtered for terms with a keyword difficulty of 5 or lower for my new site: