The company’s artificial intelligence tool OpenAI has stirred up the digital hornet’s nest for many reasons and opens up quite a few questions about how ChatGPT copywriting will impact SEO.
With the arrival of ChatGPT, many questions arise: Is it less creative than human copywriting? Where is the limit of its reliability? Is it legal to use this tool on a professional level? Will it destroy jobs for copywriters?
Time will answer all these questions and ask some new ones. Once the waves of this digital tsunami have calmed down a bit, then maybe it would be a good time to answer some questions, from the most basic ones to those specifically related to SEO copywriting.
Table of Contents
What is ChatGPT?
Raising this very question in the chat of this platform, this is what ChatGPT replies in its own words: “ChatGPT is an AI-powered language model developed by OpenAI. (…) ChatGPT is designed to generate human-like responses to text inputs in a conversational manner, allowing it to respond to questions, engage in small talk, and even participate in goal-oriented tasks such as question answering and summarization.”
And although this answer in English is more than correct and its accuracy, unquestionable, when asking the same thing in Spanish we appreciate a less human-like language, with expressions that do not exist. We are not going to go into detail, but it is in these small details that we can begin to see the flaws of this tool.
ChatGPT is neither the first nor the only artificial intelligence focused on text creation, open to the general public and used at a professional level. Jasper, Ellie, Mara or Chatsonic were already there with their virtues and flaws. Jasper, in addition to writing texts automatically for blogs or social networks, works as a grammar checker or plagiarism detector.
What is ChatGPT for?
This artificial intelligence offers a world of possibilities since its launch at the end of 2022. We are going to highlight a series of functions that we have found interesting for a first contact with the tool.
Having chat conversations
When you start playing with ChatGPT you can tell it’s smart. Very smart. While other automated chatbots don’t know how to respond to all kinds of human interactions, When you start playing with ChatGPT you can tell it’s smart. Very smart.
While other automated chatbots don’t know how to respond to all kinds of human interactions, ChatGPT comes through like no other AI:
Solving queries like an Internet search engine
Oh my God, they’ve killed SEO! Once again we would like to point out the I of ChatGPT’s AI. It is able to provide very accurate answers to all kinds of questions in a matter of seconds.
But watch out, ChatGPT is not as accurate as it may seem. Yes, it has an answer for everything BUT, not necessarily everything it answers is true. Here’s an example to prove my point:
Of the five companies mentioned, not one of them is located in this city. However, he recommends that we verify the information so that we do not take anything for granted.
Working as a human copywriter
Let’s put it simply: ChatGPT writes much faster than any human copywriter, with no spelling or grammatical errors, and it doesn’t lag behind when it comes to being creative. In less than a minute, ChatGPT delivers a text like this one:
But don’t be fooled (despite that the most hot-headed SEOs may already be drooling about this). This is not an infallible copywriter: human intervention is essential, and it remains to be seen how the search engine algorithm will recognize and deal with websites that use AI-generated texts.
Translating texts to other languages
Although there are other automatic translation tools that are more reliable and have much more experience, ChatGPT does a great job when it comes to fulfilling this type of task.
To take a very random example, this is how the first sentence of Cervantes’ Don Quixote translates into Galician:
And this is how it has been translated in its first edition, according to Wikipedia, which allows us to verify that it is not misguided despite not being a professional translation:
Nun lugar da Mancha de cuxo nome non me quero lembrar, non hai moito tempo vivía un fidalgo dos de lanza en estaleiro, adarga antiga, cabalo fraco e galgo corredor.
Obeying very precise instructions
For all of us who are dedicated to digital marketing, ChatGPT can be an ideal tool, since it solves all kinds of tasks. When it comes to answering technical questions, it goes a step further than what conventional search engines can offer in their first search results:
Can we trust ChatGPT?
Yes and no. Well, not entirely. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. As a conversational tool, although it can interpret instructions and give exact answers to specific questions, it has room to make mistakes or be manipulated:
Moreover, ChatGPT does not have the same amount of accumulated information as search engines such as Google, and will not answer all our questions. Or as we mentioned before: sometimes it generates made-up answers that do not match reality.
Case Study: ChatGPT would not write songs with Bizarrap
To make ChatGPT’s strengths and weaknesses visible, let’s put on a sweatshirt, a visor and the dark glasses of music producer Bizarrap. Does the song he has with Shakira ring a bell in the room? Let’s ask it how much he knows about the singer and her personal life:
With this answer we confirm that ChatGPT has as a great weakness at the thematic level that it is not at the cutting edge of current events… But to be honest, if you insist on the question, the answer is much more sincere and prudent:
If we ask ChatGPT to be creative and put itself in the shoes of the 2011 Shakira, it does it like no one else:
Thank you, ChatGPT. But… what if we ask you to step into the shoes of the jilted Shakira of 2023?
To sum up: two of ChatGPT’s major limitations are current events and its moral limits. For the first issue, there will undoubtedly be improvements in the near future; for the second, it will probably be more difficult to fine-tune this aspect.
If it were up to ChatGPT’s compositions, we would live in a world where only Shakira’s love songs would be played and we would be left without dancing to her session with Bizarrap. That’s how hard it is.
Do texts generated by ChatGPT penalize SEO?
The million dollar question. The key question is whether ChatGPT plagiarizes content as human editors –hum!– can do. In principle, texts generated by ChatGPT are original content.
A human copywriter is able to write texts based on the experiences and documentation they accumulate, their interpretation of them and their writing style. The ChatGPT algorithm will always start with the advantage of having more documentation and writing faster than any human.
The key differentiator will be in the interpretation and style of writing, where a professional, flesh-and-blood copywriter can make a difference and deliver more original, on-target content.
Although ChatGPT is a true SEO copywriting machine in the literal and metaphorical sense, an experienced and talented human copywriter will (still) stand out from the AI for its ability to combine words to both dazzle search engine spiders and appeal to the feelings of web users.
What Google says about ChatGPT in SEO?
ChatGPT’s breakthrough, Microsoft’s acquisition and its integration with Edge and Bing search engines was a complete domino effect that caught Google off guard. Since then, the big G company has been lagging behind its competitors in the field of AI-generated text.
In early February 2023, the Google blog addressed the behavior of its search engine with websites that include AI-generated content. The answer is clear: quality content will always be rewarded, regardless of whether it is produced by humans or AI tools.
In other words, Google will not penalize texts generated by ChatGPT, as long as they are original content and respect its EEAT concept: Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust.
This is not Google’s only response to ChatGPT’s success: in February it announced the launch of Bard, its own AI-generated chat to try to stand up to the competition and provide its users with the same solutions ChatGTP is offering.
How to use ChatGPT for SEO?
The functions that ChatGPT can perform in the SEO world cover all kinds of tasks. To review some of the most useful in this regard, we will list the following.
Original copywriting
The most basic and obvious task that has already been used by more than one SEO to make their experiments, performed at different levels and for all types of topics. ChatGPT obeys all kinds of precise instructions on the style and length of the text.
Rewriting of existing texts
For those SEO strategies that involve the massive publication of pages with similar keywords. In the agonizing task of rewriting texts with similar content, having a tool that does it automatically is a great help.
Calculate keyword density
In addition to writing texts for us, ChatGPT can be used to evaluate how the text fits according to SEO criteria. We can ask it about the length of the content generated by the tool and also get information about the keyword density. If we can, it will also take care of SEO optimization of a text with H1 headers.
Keyword research
Another use that can be given to ChatGPT is that it can help us in the analysis of related keywords. This is not the best use, since this tool fails both at the level of current events and tendencies (compared to Google Trends) or much more exhaustive data (SEMrush or Ahrefs).
Generating files and tags
There are many up-to-date listings of prompts (phrases-instructions used as input to get very specific answers) that can be used in ChatGPT. In this way, this tool can generate custom robots.txt files, .htaccess files, hreflang tags, sitemap.xml…
Is ChatGPT going to kill human copywriters?
ChatGPT is neither the first nor the only conversational language and automatic typing model, but it is probably the one that has had the greatest media impact. This is because its first free version is versatile and powerful like few others: it works in different languages and writes at high speed.
As Umberto Eco wrote in his essay on mass culture, the popularization of automatic writing tools can lead one to adopt two positions: to be an apocalyptic or to be an integral part of it. There are those who are extremely suspicious of the benefits of the tool and those who are trying to squeeze the most out of them to stay ahead of the competition.
We will have to wait until the end of 2023 to make a real evaluation of the consequences of ChatGPT: how its paid version will evolve, the reaction of the competition and so on. It is clear that it has a tremendous potential to contribute to the work of an SEO copywriter… to the point that it can not only swallow up the SEO copywriter, but the SEO itself.
