And/or just add things like search intent as an additional column.
Summarizing
Be careful with how you use these summaries (as they may get “flagged” as anything from low quality to AI over time).
But if you have something like a study or a lengthy article that you want to feature in your own content (and also let folks know you’ve featured in outreach) in something like a tips list, you can get help there:
You can also ask for an outline of an article if you want to understand it quickly.
Technical SEO: Code snippets (schema, hreflang), robots, .htacess and more
Among the most dangerous ChatGPT prompts are code snippets.
These can be great time-savers, but again, give as much detail as possible and QA, QA, QA!
A simple prompt along the lines of “Wrap FAQ schema around these questions and answers” will get you the code to copy:
Same for different types of schema like organization schema:
I have had various schema come back from ChatGPT that didn’t work when rendered on a live page, so again, be sure to check everything.
You can also have a robots.txt file created:
And create rewrite rules. Be careful, though. (More on this later)
Meta descriptions
Hate creating meta descriptions?
This is really a perfect function for ChatGPT:
This is a quick and simple prompt. Now that ChatGPT can browse URLs, you can provide the URL of your article.
You can also share some example meta descriptions that are performing well in your target search results. ChatGPT can use these as a template to match the style and format.
Alt text
This is another good task for ChatGPT to execute at scale. You can create a prompt that gives you the output you want, and ChatGPT can now scan images and give you a pretty good answer:
Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console and Looker Studio
You can get troubleshooting ideas for these platforms:
Get instructions for building specific reports:
Or even get code to use to interface with their APIs:
Translation
You can translate text to create country-specific pages:
Formatting
Many quick and simple formatting tasks come up where ChatGPT can be helpful. Things like converting a page to (or from) HTML:
You can also take a list of URLs and extract just the domains from them or convert a list of sites into HTML links (or vice versa).
You can also do tasks you might usually handle in spreadsheets, such as combining data or finding a list of cities or states.
Depending on your skill with spreadsheets and workflow, this might be more convenient than a spreadsheet.
In place of VLOOKUP / IF types of functions, you can create a prompt like:
“Create lists of basketball drills from site A and site B, then show me A) the drills they both cover and B) the drills that are missing from each list that the other covers.”
Code for simple tools and widgets
As I walked through in How ChatGPT can help you create content for SEO, you can use ChatGPT to help you build simple tools like calculators that can enhance content, give you a chance to rank for specific terms (like {subject} calculator) and give you something to promote via outreach.
Rewrite content
If you give ChatGPT specific instructions on things like tone and what to include, it can help you rewrite or flesh out content and even add images:
The image generated in this case leaves something to be desired:
While AI-generated images have gotten much better in the last year, you still want to closely inspect anything that’s generated with a particular eye toward things like words and specific details.
Outreach assistant
While ChatGPT isn’t great at finding contact information for you (at least for now), there are some specific outreach tasks it can perform:
A better task may be getting a list of ideas of places to guest post:
Or drafting a template for an outreach email. This is potentially particularly valuable if English isn’t your first language:
Infuse your prompts here with your own tone and content preferences to make sure the template you get is closer to being consistent with your typical outreach emails.
You can even craft an entire auto-responder sequence:
Or you could create different types of outreach lists:
As you work through the outreach process, you can likely find even more opportunities to leverage ChatGPT.
The bad
In my experience, most of the trouble you’ll run into with ChatGPT will be:
Asking the tool to complete a whole-cloth process for you (rather than particular functions).
Not providing enough oversight.
Publications have already been accused of publishing AI-generated content with errors and plagiarized content.
If we had unleashed ChatGPT to do all of our keyword research for us, we would likely not have gotten much traction.
When you try to assign it tasks like strategy, you’ll often get the same kind of boilerplate advice you’d get from a beginner-level X tips article on Google:
And without a lot of human input (specific prompts, editing and likely a mix of human and AI content), you’ll likely get warmed-over content.
Depending on your purpose (and your risk threshold), that may be fine, but in a post-HCU world, it may not be very good.
You may not need your meta descriptions, FAQs or certain articles or pages to be “10x”. But make sure you understand what you’re getting.
The ugly
Some areas, like health-related content or critical tasks, on your site can go sideways.
Dig deeper: Why using AI to create YMYL experts is a REALLY bad idea
Be particularly mindful of ChatGPT’s limitations
Proceed with caution with ChatGPT prompts and SEO.
Get good at creating your own prompts and sourcing inspiration (or productivity enhancements) from prompts other people share.
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