Originally published in October 2023 Chris Long's Whiteboard Friday post on ChatGPT captures a pivotal moment in AI's recent history. We're republishing it to highlight how swiftly we've adopted AI tools into our workflows, while showcasing the enduring value of the insights in navigating today's AI landscape.

Hi, my name is Chris Long. Welcome to another episode of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're gonna talk about five different ways that you can use ChatGPT to enhance your SEO processes. 

First one we're gonna talk about is featured snippet optimization. ChatGPT is really, really good at creating these succinct summaries of overall topics but really capturing a lot of information within those summaries.

One way we've had a lot of good success using it is let's say you're optimizing for the featured snippet for index funds, it's actually telling ChatGPT, "Hey, create a two to three sentence summary of index funds. And the rules are always use an is statement and always start both sentences with the target keyword of index funds." Generally ChatGPT is really, really good at creating these summaries and it's a fantastic use case to create these succinct summaries that are really gonna translate well to featured snippet opportunities. 

The next way you can use ChatGPT to enhance your SEO is getting feedback on content. I think a lot of the way we think about using ChatGPT is only a content creator but I think that's a more limiting belief. One of the ways we really like to use it at Go Fish Digital is to really have it give feedback on content that we're optimizing. So for instance, if you're writing an article on how to break and running shoes, you can actually paste that article into ChatGPT and say, "Hey, how do I make this content better for the user?" And it'll actually give you sections you could add, it might say, "Hey, create some FAQs around running shoes or add a section around common problems around running shoes." And really, instead of using it to create new content, right, using that as a guide, a personal assistant, that's really helping you leverage how you can get the best quality of the content that you already have.

The next way that you can use ChatGPT for SEO is really enhancing your knowledge base. I think that's another underrated aspect from an SEO perspective. In SEO, if you think of all of the great minds that write really long, sometimes more technical articles. For instance, the late great Bill Slawski used to write really long articles that analyzed Google patents. And what we've been doing is testing and running 'em through ChatGPT and saying, "Hey, explain Bill's article to me like we're in high school," and ChatGPT is able to create a really, really succinct summary that's actually helpful. In essence, this really democratizes content from thought leaders like Bill or Google's documentation.

As an industry, becoming and enhancing our technical SEO skill sets is a challenge. ChatGPT helps democratize that content by making it more accessible for everybody. 

Next way I recommend using Chat GPT for SEO is Screaming Frog extractions. I think ChatGPT is really gonna open up Screaming Frog for a lot of SEOs. For instance, if you want to extract elements from a page, whether that's the breadcrumb list structured data, whether that's author biographies, previously you were required to know XPath or some type of other extraction method.

Now with ChatGPT, you can plug in the HTML that you're trying to extract. Say, "Hey, write me an extract code." And Screaming Frog will be able to create you an XPath that will work in about one minute's time. It's really gonna open up tools and allow us as a community to really create more extraction information, more extraction prompts, than we've been able to before. 

Final way I recommend using ChatGPT for SEO is really creating your custom tools. I think one of the biggest powers is that ChatGPT is going to empower us to be a community of creators and create technical solutions regardless of what our technical background might be. So for example, you could have ChatGPT actually create you your own custom Chrome extension. I was able to, with limited coding knowledge, be able to create a Chrome extension that extracts basic information like the page title, H1 tags, publish date, all in about 30 minutes time with a little bit of debugging.

And you could also create your own Chrome extension that really suits your individual needs as a search marketer. As well, you can use it to create tools that can help you scale out your own processes. Using ChatGPT, we actually created our own Google Sheets function that runs information through Google or through open API, through CGPT's open API. Basically, what you can do is, in the Sheets function, that will allow you to create custom title tags and meta descriptions, using ChatGPT, making it drag and drop directly in Google Sheets. And we'll link that article in the video description should you wanna run through that process.

Learn more about how to connect ChatGPT APIs to Google Sheets.

So I think there's a lot of really, really great use cases for ChatGPT when it comes to SEO that's even more than just creating new content. There's a lot of really creative ways you can leverage these tools. I believe the SEOs that are leaning into it, learning how to use these tools, are gonna be the ones that really see success in the long term.

So thanks for joining me everyone, and that was this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday.