Is It Okay To Use ChatGPT and AI For SEO On Your Website? – 190

Jesse Dolan: It is. We always want to edit it. We always want to make sure it's unique. We want to make sure it's accurate. When we work with clients, we're always very specific, right about what the intent of this page, what keywords are we going after. So we definitely massage all of that. And so broadly there, I would say yes, in that sense, the way we use it, we think AI is very useful for SEO. They're very advantageous for SEOs.

Welcome back to Lo SEO Tactics, where we're bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I'm your host, Jesse Dolan here today with Sue Ginsburg. Sue, what are we going to be talking about on the episode here today?

Sue Ginsburg: Today we will be talking about something that I think everybody is hearing about these days, ChatGPT, and our question comes from an audience member and a listener who asks us, has your agency started using ChatGPT? Why or why not? I recently started to use it and I find it very useful. I want to get your take on it. I love your podcast, by the way. Thank you Alfredo Gomez for the question. And I am positive that you are not the only business owner and person out there who is wondering about this question. And the quote of the day is, "if you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong." That's a quote from Charles Kettering, American inventor, engineer and businessman. And while a lot of us think, if I've always done it that way, it must be a great way. I like this perspective. It's probably wrong.

So no surprise. Since ChatGPT four came out earlier this year, we've gotten this question a lot from colleagues, from clients, from business owners. Suddenly everybody's become a copywriter and business owners want to know if that's how we're creating content, is it really that easy? And can they create content now using ChatGPT, now that it's available, pretty readily available. We welcome this question and appreciate that our clients are willing to embrace new technology to create content for their websites because technology can make things a lot easier, more convenient, and when it's used properly, it can really help get the job done.

AI is definitely here to stay while ChatGPT increased awareness of AI, it seems like suddenly everybody knows about it. It was being used long before this year. For those who know how to use it. It can be and is a valuable tool for many things, when it comes to SEO and optimizing your website for the keywords that you want to be found for. Let's ask the expert and see what Jesse has to say about whether it's effective to use AI to create content and how that will impact your SEO.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah, I mean, the short answer to that is going to be yes, it is effective to use AI, I guess a right way and a wrong way to use it, just to be super binary on that and drill it down and we'll talk here Sue. I got some examples of how we use it, how we've been using it before ChatGPT. But real quick, I liked your quote of the day. I was just reading something in the last couple days about this science experiment. Got this somewhere on Facebook or Instagram, so I didn't fact check it for everybody. But the concept here was pretty interesting as a story and hits right on your quote. There was, let's just say seven monkeys that the scientists put into a cage, with a ladder. At the top of the ladder, they put some bananas. Obviously the monkeys want the bananas, so they'd go up and get them, and what they started doing is whenever a monkey would go up that ladder, they had sprinklers in the cage and they would turn them on to soak all the other monkeys.

And over time, as soon as a monkey would start to go up that ladder, the other ones would just grab it and just hit it, get physical and make it not go up the ladder. The monkey wanted to banana, of course, but the other monkeys didn't want to get wet. And so they got this behavior that going up the ladder was bad. And what they started doing is they would take a monkey out of the cage and put a new one in and they stopped with the sprinklers. And what happened is the learned behavior. So then the new monkey would be like, oh, a banana. I'm going to go get that thing up on the ladder. The other monkeys would grab it down and beat it. Like, no, you can't go up there. Well, that monkey didn't know why it had never gotten wet.

It didn't understand the little sprinkler thing, but after that happened a number of times it realized going up the ladder is bad. And over the course of the experiment, they replaced all the monkeys. So now all the monkeys in the cage with the ladder, with the bananas on top, none of these monkeys were getting wet anymore from the sprinkler part of the experiment, but they had all been trained on the behavior that going up the ladder is bad. And that the example right there is if you just do it the way we've been doing it, why don't we go up the ladder? Well, we just don't around here. It's bad. We don't know why, right? It's bad. Even though in that case, there was no consequence anymore. They weren't doing the sprinkler. So it's kind of ironic and timely with your quote, at least for me personally, because it's just always challenge.

Why do we do things a certain way? The reason can't be that's how we do it or that's the process. If we can't figure out that there's a reason for this, there's a benefit or an advantage or whatever it is to stay safe, then it's okay to challenge why you're doing the thing a certain way, and obviously, as you always do, this quote really applies today's episode with AI.

Hey, Jesse, with Local SEO Tactics, joined here by Kyle Roof. Kyle's going to be coming on in a few weeks to do another episode. It's been about two years since Kyle was on for his last interview, and this time we're going to be doing a site tear down.

Kyle Roof: The purpose of this is also to demystify and to say it's not fairy dust, it's not magic. It's actual concrete things that you can go in and do and better with your SEO, and that's kind of, I know guys like yourselves and myself, that's all we're trying to do, that that's the whole message. It's just like, let's make this accessible and let's make this doable, and it doesn't have to be magical. Let's get some SEO done and let's just do better in our SEO and do better sites. Let's go make money. Let's go make money.

Jesse Dolan: If you want to submit your site to get in the running for Kyle to give it a review, tear it down and share some tips, go to localseotactics.com/kyle, it's K-Y-L-E, and submit your site.

So that tie in aside, I just thought that was pretty cool to share and timely. With this, yeah, we pivoted a while ago using AI as soon it was available for the past few years really. There are I think two schools of thought out there in SEO. There's the whole question and concept of is it safe to use AI for SEO? Is it advantageous? And there's almost this sense of meaning that it's automated. Because yeah, there is AI out there. One of the ones I'll reference here quite a bit probably is jasper.ai. We use that, and there are other tool that can connect with utilities like Jasper to help automate your SEO.

And a lot of people are out there using it right now. I'm sure anybody listening or watching can do a Google search and just find some AI automation, SEO type recipes, tools, connectors, things like that. And in that sense, it'd be kind of a push button solution where you identify a page, what keyword on the page right now, create the content for me, tell me where to put that content on the page. You could really have AI make all these decisions for you. In our mind, in our use so far, in our recipe, that's not effective. Not saying it can't be. We've talked Sue on other episodes about depending on your market, you like your geographic market, I should say, depending on the product or service keywords you're going after, your brand. That's going to kind of dictate some of what you need to do for your own SEO campaign and your own SEO efforts.

And because of that, right now, we don't think there's an AI that's just straightaway advanced enough to just push button, automate everything. It can do a lot of work for creators, for SEOs, but you still need in this point in time, at least here what April, 2023 timestamp. You still need a talented and competent human being to be able to edit this content, to assess what we're going to do with this, where to put it. It's definitely making our job easier from a content creation standpoint, but I would say no, SEO's not effective. Just going straightaway, broadly just kind of set that answer aside just because there is no one single solution, universal solution in SEO. Everybody's a little bit different, so you got to curate it Now within that, yeah, we're a proponent of SEO. I didn't mean that we're a proponent of AI.

Of course, we're a proponent of SEO. That's what we do. But yeah, we've been using Jasper for years. We've used other tools before that to spin content to try to rewrite content. And really for us, at the end of the day, we're doing that because we have a lot of talented people on our staff, as you know, Sue at Intrix, providing SEO, performing SEO, and all the things related to it. What we don't have is a staff of just pure content writers, and that's a skill. Anybody out there who's listening or watching that's ever tried to create an article, tried to write something yourself, write, whether it be creatively or for business purposes, an essay, a nice long email, whatever it is, there's some energy and some skill and some talent that goes into creative writing, and we're just not set up for that at our agency to have people that are just specialized in that.

Now, we have good talented people, good grammar, good english, and are creative that can do good writing, but we found early that using AI like Jasper and now in present terms ChatGPT, to help create and write some of that content was a no-brainer for us. We definitely don't just publish things that AI creates. We have kind of turned our own personal talent and labor in the creative writing space to be more of editors than creators. Whether before maybe we would job out a piece of creative writing, maybe something on Fiver, maybe something on whatever, some kind and gig board, get a blog post created, get an article created, whatever. We would edit that and massage that and make sure that works for the client project that we're working on. Well now we can use AI to help create that same thing, and in a lot of times it's just as good if not better than some of the mid to lower end gig jobs that we are paying people for.

That being said, we are not confident in just putting that stuff up on pages as is. We always want to edit it. We always want to make sure it's unique. We want to make sure it's accurate. When we work with clients, we're always very specific, right about what the intent of this page, what keywords are we going after? So we definitely massage all of that. And so broadly there, I would say yes, in that sense, the way we use it, we think AI is very useful for SEO, very advantageous for SEO, and can benefit your SEO. That being said, I do want to go through the weeds on a couple points here for what we think is maybe good ways and bad ways to use it and some general best practices. Now that being said, again, this is April, 2023. We are on the bleeding edge of this AI revolution of using ChatGPT and everything else.

So what we record today Sue may be different in six months. We may have different opinions. It may be advancing, who knows. So usually on this show, we try to stay away from any late breaking stuff or things that may go out of date sooner than later. But to your point, we've had a lot of pressure and a lot of discussions around AI and using it for creative writing for content. So nonetheless, we wanted to address it here. Okay, so broadly speaking, again, don't use AI to straightaway automate your SEO. It's attractive to look at that. That's the easy button, but I kind of labored on earlier. You really don't want to do that. You don't want to give up processes. What we do use it for is creative writing, and I kind of have two buckets here, short form content and long form content.

I want to go through a few examples for everybody just so you can see how we use it on how you might be able to use it. Long form content, we're talking there, blog posts, articles, emails, whether it be if I'm going to write an email to Sue, that's a complex email, not just a quick one-liner or small paragraph, maybe it's through a client or a prospect. You can use it to help you craft an email or even an email sequence. The logic that's in ChatGPT is something that we've been very impressed with in a sense of you can tell it what your intent is, you can have a conversation. You can give it a lot of context saying, I'm going to develop an email sequence for people who opt into a ABC form on my website. This is the kind of person opting in.

I want to craft three emails with these three different messages and kind of lead them down this journey on these emails. Go write me these three emails so you can kind of feed it information and then ask for a sequence in that sense. Again, it doesn't mean these emails are going to come ready to just slap into your funnel and your automation and send them off. We still want to curate everything, look at it, rewrite it, edit it, things like that. But those are three examples I had where we've used, and it's can be advantageous to lean on AI for creating long form content. And when I say blog post, I should say too, that can be a webpage, it can be an article. Really anything though that's kind of a lengthy form of content.

We also use it a lot in short form content. And what I'll mean by that is social media posts, maybe the text that's going with a photo or video, captions for posts, Google posting on your GBP, things like that. And then if we think back to a webpage for SEO, maybe headlines or sub-headlines within your content, maybe you have a nice paragraph or paragraphs of texts that you made and you say, "Hey, I need some SEO headlines that fit with this. Here's my primary keyword," and you can use ChatGPT to rip off, say, give me 10 headlines and you can pick the best one. And that, by the way too, as an aside, is a trick that we use a lot too. It's not just having it create something. It's create multiples of something and then you can pick the best one or kind of rearrange them, put them together always good too.

In addition to headlines, you can kind of use that same process to create bullet point lists. That's a big thing we do for SEO is a bullet point list of items related to your keyword, things like that. And then another kind of sideways way to use this, which I kind of just alluded to a little bit, is reorganizing or repurposing any of your content. So the recording we're making right now is Sue, we know this is going to end up on YouTube. We know this is going to end up in a podcast for everybody listening, and we also know that we put a transcription of this on our website, localseotactics.com for each episode. What you could do is use AI to rewrite that transcript into a traditional blog post, if you will, more of an article format. You could have it kind of change the tone to have it come off in a different way, whatever you want. You can take existing text, in this case, a couple thousand words, a transcript, and you can have the output change into a non-transcript format or things like that.

So it's a great way to reorganize or repurpose existing content. You could tell it to pull out some FAQs. You could make a summary, executive summary of this conversation. There's a lot of things you could ask it to do with existing content as well. And speaking of the podcast here, we've used it to help formulate questions for interviews, maybe a certain flow, kind of story boarding an episode, things like that. Really anything in that creative space, if you could think about the energy that you spend as a content creator or a writer, leveraging AI to help you do some of that initially or speed it up is always great.

Yeah, I think that's pretty good. I pulled something off here, Sue. I think this was from Jasper's website. They had a good blurb, but I thought it was pretty much on point speed up your content pipeline by writing 80% with Jasper and 20% edited by you. And I think that kind of speaks to really, if we distilled that down, what we're talking about here, right, is you're not going to let the system, the AI, do everything for you, but man, it can create a lot of content for you that you can sit down and edit. And it's a lot quicker to edit a five page piece of creative writing than it is to create five pages at the end of the day. So yeah, I hope that helps everybody out, that's how we use it, where it's good, where it's bad, and a little bit of our opinion mixed in there too for how to use it.

Sue Ginsburg: That's great. Really great. Okay. If you remember one thing and one thing only, remember this, technology tools that save you time are great as long as you know their limitations. AI is far from perfect and should be used with caution in order for it to work properly for your business. You don't want it to impact your business negatively. You still need the human element. So as Jesse said, use it to create, still use yourself, your team to do the editing, make sure that it's accurate and it's right, and it'll work for you. So quote of the day, again, "if you've always done it that way, it's probably wrong." Charles Kettering, American inventor, engineer and businessman, and Jesse's monkey story.

Jesse Dolan: Don't forget the monkeys in the ladder. No, I got all kinds of random analogies and stories like that to match up. Good question. Good topic. For everybody else listening or watching, if you have a question or a topic you'd like us to address on the show, just go out to localseotactics.com, scroll down to the bottom, click the link to submit a question. If we use your question on the show, you'll get at least a t-shirt, if you call in the question and leave a recording that we can then play the audio on the show. We're going to send you off one of our fancy new water bottles here. You can see them holding it up on video. If you need a reason to go out to YouTube and check us out, that's enough reason right there, just to see that bad boy.

But no, we love hearing the questions from our listeners, from our audience, and the main point is we're here to help you out. So if you've got something on your mind that we haven't addressed, guaranteed somebody else out there has the same thing on their mind, let's talk about it. Go on out to localseotactics.com, click the button for submit a question and get you on the show. We'll talk about it.

Should say too, Sue. Last but not least, anybody, if you enjoy our content, the questions Sue brings, the content we put out here, the answers, the help. We'd love to get a review from you. Same thing. Go out to localseotactic.com, click the button for review. I mean, you can read our recent reviews if you kind of want to get pumped up and hear what people say. Likewise, we have all the links for Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Facebook, wherever you want to leave us a review. We'd love to get it. And then we'll read them on the show as we get them as well. So anything else you want to add, Sue, before we wrap it up?

Sue Ginsburg: Nope, I think that covers it.

Jesse Dolan: Good to go? All right, thanks for jumping on, Sue, and bringing that. Everybody for listening, thanks for tuning in, and we'll catch you on the next show.