How AI is Changing SEO

New technologies are introduced every day, but few have the impact of ChatGPT, the Open Source AI natural language processing technology that can create documents, software code, recipes and much more using simple natural language text queries. With new applications being discovered every day, our focus will be specifically on SEO and how the two technologies may affect one another going forwards.

How AI is Changing SEO

Overview

If you ask ChatGPT, it describes itself as a large language model created by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc.  So basically half the company wants to advance AI research and the other half wants to make money.

It was designed as a conversational AI tool that can understand and generate natural language text, covering a wide range of applications, including chatbots, language translation, and content generation.  To complete its tasks, it draws on approximately 300 billion words stored in databases across the Internet including a massive 570 GB of data sourced from books, Wikipedia, research articles, web texts and websites. 

According to the New York Times,  Microsoft announced a major investment in OpenAI which is believed to be around $10 billion dollars, which is in addition to the $3 billion it has invested in the company since 2019. It is estimated that OpenAI’s current value is approximately $29 billion. 

Microsoft is also leveraging OpenAI’s technology in its Bing search engine to extract information from the Internet and present natural language answers to questions in addition to links. It also recently announced Bing’s new ChatGPT-like feature which enables users to actually converse with the search engine including follow-up information and adding contextual information to their search.

Other major technology companies such as Apple, Meta and Google are also betting heavily on AI, with Google announcing Bard in 2023. Powered by their Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) technology, Bard is currently open to trusted testers only and is anticipated to become publicly accessible in the coming months.  It was developed to leverage Google’s vast internet knowledge base to provide what they term “fresh, high-quality responses.”

The bottom line is that AI is already here and having a huge impact on our lives much faster than anyone expected.

Common SEO & AI Use-Cases

In general, ChapGPT is used for a number of basic applications such as:

• Having a conversation
• Creating content
• Writing software code
• Answering questions

It also has the ability to adjust its answers and content based on the tone, sentiment, writing style and target audience described in the query. Of course, our interest here is in SEO and how ChatGPT features can help implement SEO programs faster in a more accurate, cost-effective manner.

Website Content Generation

Use ChatGPT to generate high-quality, unique, and keyword-rich content for your website to improve visibility and search engine rankings.

Content Briefs

Comprehensive content briefs can be generated by making sure to include the goals, target audience, and keywords to include in your article.

Blog Posts

It's very impressive how ChatGPT can write blog posts that are highly informative, interesting, and keyword-rich, to attract more quality traffic to your website and improve your conversions and search engine rankings. It also provides optimization for FAQs and Glossary Entries.

Meta Descriptions

Use AI  to create the most effective meta descriptions for your web pages to ensure that search engines are correctly summarizing the content of the page to improve click-through rates.

Title Tags

These tags can be generated by ChatGPT for each web page to make sure the proper title is displayed in search results and improve your click-through rates.

Keyword Research

ChatGPT is a great resource for lists of relevant keywords for any target audience. It can also help optimize FAQs, topical and long-tail content for better search engine visibility.

Advanced SEO & AI Use-Cases

Just like ChatGPT can be used to write the code for a mobile app instead of an article about mobile phones, there are also a number of advanced SEO techniques that can be simplified by using AI. Here are just a few examples:

Clickbait

Clickbait refers to content designed to entice people to click on a link or visit your website. Many times this includes specialized calendars or calculators for specific industries. ChatGPT can help create these applications by generating code based on user specifications. Check out this cool video from Gotch SEO to understand some of the possibilities:

Webpage Schema

ChatGPT can help create a web page schema by generating structured data markup in various formats such as JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa. It can assist with identifying the appropriate schema type for the web page, as well as the properties and values required to provide a complete schema. It can also offer guidance on how to properly implement the schema and improve its visibility in search results.

Keyword Clustering

By collecting large sets of keywords from various sources such as search engines, social media platforms, and other online resources, ChatGPT helps create effective keyword clusters. After preprocessing and measuring the semantic similarity between keywords, it can then apply clustering algorithms such as K-means, hierarchical clustering, or DBSCAN and evaluate the quality of the clustering results using silhouette, coherence, or purity metrics.

Featured Snippets

These concise summaries that appear at the top of Google's search results page, are designed to provide users with quick answers without clicking through to a webpage. ChatGPT can provide content suggestions, optimize content for the featured snippet format, as well as monitor snippets for a given keyword and provide updates on their status. 

Competitive Analysis

ChatGPT can analyze the content, keywords and featured snippets of competitors to identify opportunities for improvement and optimization.

Marketing Automation

Have ChatGPT write emails, LinkedIn posts and tweets to promote content on various channels. It can also create messages tailored for each stage of the sales funnel which can be triggered by specific actions using marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot and Salesforce.

Strategy Creation

SEO Strategy and Content Strategy documents should be the cornerstone of any digital marketing program. Make sure to provide all the relevant information in a ChatGPT query to create SEO and content strategies that are optimized for your business and target audience.

Limitations

While ChatGPT is truly impressive and already has many practical applications, it is still a work in progress and has certain limitations that should be taken into consideration.

• Since its intelligence is artificial it can only provide useful information when the query is phrased in the proper manner. Asking vague or inaccurate questions usually results in receiving equally unreliable answers.
  

• ChatGPT seems to react pretty quickly to a query, especially considering how much data it can access. Still the information is limited and dates back to Sep 2021, meaning that any current marketing data or recent quotes are not available.

• Since all the information is provided in plain text, there are no hyperlinks to check sources or find supplementary information.

• For now Google is accepting AI created content as long as it abides by their EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) guidelines. Taking into account that ChatGPT is backed by their arch-rival Microsoft, it is very possible that these guidelines could change and become penalized content going forwards. For those who are worried about using AI-generated content, try QUILLBOT! which takes AI-generated content and makes it seem like it was written by a real person.

• ChatGPT does a pretty good job but always requires additional editing to get it right and sound more compelling for the target audience. 

• There are no product reviews or stock recommendations - although some claim that is possible if you know how to come up with the right query.
  
  
• For now it is only in English, but more languages are sure to come as the technology matures.

The Future of SEO & AI

Now that we’ve presented some of the major intersections between SEO and AI, many are asking whether AI will eventually make websites and SEO irrelevant. Our answer is an emphatic “No”, although certain webpage and searches will probably be affected.

For example, for websites, we expect that most existing Glossary & FAQ pages will eventually lose relevancy as users will be able to get very specific and more accurate answers using AI-based queries.

In terms of search, we often emphasize the difference between search terms and search intent.  When analyzing where AI can effectively do a better job than traditional listings from a search engine, we must concentrate on the search intent.

Search intent refers to the reason why a person performs a specific search query. Understanding the different types of search intent can help us better understand where search engines and where AI will be more effective:

1. Informational intent: This type of intent is when a user is searching for information on a specific topic. The goal is to learn or gain knowledge about something. Examples of informational intent include "What is the capital of France?" or "How to bake a cake?"
   
   
2. Navigational intent: This type of intent is when a user is looking for a specific website or webpage. The goal is to navigate to a particular site or page. Examples of navigational intent include "Facebook login page" or "Amazon Prime Video."
   
   
3. Transactional intent: This type of intent is when a user is searching for a product or service with the intention of making a purchase. The goal is to find a specific item or service to buy. Examples of transactional intent include "Buy Nike running shoes" or "Book a hotel room in New York City."
   
   
4. Commercial intent: This type of intent is when a user is researching a product or service with the intention of making a purchase in the future. The goal is to compare prices, features, and reviews before making a decision. Examples of commercial intent include "Best smartphones of 2023" or "Top-rated laptops for gaming."

Per the table below, at least for now it seems that navigational, commercial and transactional search intent will remain highly relevant for search engines, while informational intent will be best served by AI based platforms such as ChatGPT.

In terms of content creation, as stated above, for the time being, ChatGPT can be used to help create blog posts, glossary entries, FAQs, social posts and virtually any type of online content. It is important to take into consideration that constructing the right queries and a bit of editing are required for most AI-produced content. 

One must also keep an eye on Google, however, since their acceptance of AI-based content may change, which could retroactively penalize content produced by ChatGPT going forwards. 

For those who are interested in more information about natural language AI technologies and their applications in digital marketing, check out some of the resources below:

AI Content Detector:
https://writer.com/ai-content-detector/

A short list of use cases for utilizing ChatGPT in marketing:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7016307706231726081/

Quillbot – rewrite AI text in a human fashion:
https://quillbot.com 

To make sure your SEO efforts are in line with AI’s ground-breaking effects on search technologies, contact KeyScouts today and start taking advantage of AI to improve your search results.