Using ChatGPT for SEO

Is ChatGPT a great opportunity to speed up your SEO activities? And if so, how can you best use ChatGPT within your SEO activities?

That’s what we discussed in episode 38 of the Majestic SEO podcast with Garrett Sussman from iPullRank, Alizée Baudez from alizeebaudez.com, Jo O’Reilly from Salience, Ken “Magma” Marshall from RevenueZen, and Gabriella Sannino from Level343.

Watch On-Demand

Listen to the Podcast

Transcript

David Bain 

How should ChatGPT be used for SEO? Welcome to the Majestic SEO podcast and livestream. I’m your host David Bain and today we’re talking ChatGPT for SEO, specifically is ChatGPT a great opportunity to speed up your SEO activities, and if so, how can you best use ChatGPT to enhance what you’re currently doing? So let’s get straight in there and introduce today’s panel, starting off with Garrett.

Garrett Sussman 

Hey, everyone, Garrett Sussman, demand generation manager at digital marketing agency iPullRank. I’m the host of The SEO Weekly and the Rankable podcast and excited to talk about this new technology that’s impacting all of us in SEO.

David Bain 

Indeed, thanks so much for joining us. Next up is Alizée.

Alizée Baudez 

Hello, everyone. I’m Alizée. I’m a French international SEO freelancer, a consultant, adding keywords to the list as an SEO would do. And yeah, I’ve been playing around a little bit with ChatGPT for a couple of months. I learned a lot, and it saved me tons of hours, so I’m excited to talk about this as well.

David Bain 

Sounds exciting, and also joining us today is Ken.

Ken ‘Magma’ Marshall 

Hey everybody, Ken ‘Magma’ Marshall, you can ask me about the ‘Magma’ on LinkedIn. I’m the Chief Growth Officer at RevenueZen and everything that has to do with organic growth, acceleration and marketing I’m all about, including SEO. As a CGO I’ve been tinkering with the ChatGPT since it came out, and I love to talk about the pros and the cons, so I can’t wait.

David Bain 

Absolutely. Thanks, Ken. And also with us is Jo.

Jo O’Reilly 

Hi, I’m Jo. I am the Digital PR manager at Salience Search Marketing, based in the northwest of England. I was very concerned about what ChatGPT would mean for for my industry, but I’m becoming I’m becoming warmer to the idea of it being used for productivity and not to hopefully replace myself and my team. ChatGPT is quite a mouthful until you get used to it isn’t.

David Bain 

Maybe one of the questions should be should it be rebranded for the general public? Let’s see if we get to that. And also joining us today is Gabriella.

Gabriella Sannino 

He Gabriella Sannino, I’m the co founder of Level343, an international marketing and SEO company out of San Francisco. I’ve been doing this over 25 years. So when ChatGPT came out, I was like, ‘wow, a new toy – let me take a look’, so I’m really, really excited to dive into today’s conversation with a bunch of pros that I follow.

David Bain 

Shall we go back to the first to introduce himself Garrett. So Garrett, how big a game changer is ChatGPT for SEO?

Garrett Sussman 

Well, I think it the thing I’ll caveat everything with is that we are at the nascent of these types of tools. AI generation tools have been around for 10 plus years. That said, I feel like the accessibility of ChatGPT that it doesn’t have like the friction that you’d have from some of the other paid tools is going to open up a lot of productivity opportunities, efficiency opportunities, and I think it is a paradigm game changer in the way that we can create content. It’s not a replacement, but it’s a tool, and I think it’s going to open up so many opportunities for SEOs and content creators alike.

David Bain 

Gabriella, you were saying beforehand that you’re getting people that are not involved in tech or the SEO industry asking you about ChatGPT?

Gabriella Sannino 

Yeah, as a matter of fact, I have a couple of friends that are professors here, whether it’s Berkeley or Stanford, I mean, I don’t mean to name drop, but those are the top universities in San Francisco, and they’re calling me because they know I work online and I work with SEO and content marketing, and so on and so forth. One of the questions was ‘how can I tell if my students are doing their papers with ChatGPT?’, and I said, ‘Why do you care?’. Ultimately, if they’re doing the homework, and they’re actually learning something, and because it’s only going to give them so much information, they’re still going to have to do the research, they’re still going to have to verify, they’re still going to have to give you resources, they’re still going to have to go back to ‘is this true?’ That’s one of the things that I’ve noticed, a lot of the different ChatGPTs out there, the chat bots, from Wordlift to Jasper, they’re giving you the sources, and that’s a game changer for me. I’m no longer having to just listen to what this bot is telling me. I can verify it. I’ve embraced it a little more, as Alizée or Jo said earlier, she wasn’t sure whether she’s warming up to it, but I’m totally warming up to it.

David Bain 

Alizée, do you care if your students use ChatGPT to do their homework?

Alizée Baudez 

Absolutely not. On the contrary, the students I have are in master’s degrees in business, and some of them in IT, if they don’t use it right now, where the consequences of them using it, are maybe having some little issues with the school administration, well they might be behind the wave when they start working, and I don’t want that for them. So that’s what I actually, I just tell them again, and again, try it, use it, if you have an idea submit it to ChatGPT. In the worst case, it works and you learn something, or you gain a couple of hours, or, like in my case, you start learning Python, when it’s been on your to do list for the past three and a half years, and you decide to try it out with ChatGPT and you actually learn something and create tools that actually helps you productivity. So yeah, it’s just full of opportunities, and it’s going to be there, so they might as well get used to it.

Ken ‘Magma’ Marshall 

That’s got to be the attitude, right? Like how big of a game changer, it’s like, okay, when Technical SEOs are super upset when Moz and Ahrefs comes out with these problems, they can’t charge five grand anymore for a checklist, and then all of a sudden, you get no code tools like Bubble and developers are like it’s the end of the world. Well, they’re gonna happen anyway, progress doesn’t stop, so let’s sort of lean in and tinker and figure out how we can use this stuff, right? So we don’t get left behind, I think you’re all spot on.

David Bain 

Is ChatGPT going to replace SEOs in a couple of years time Ken?

Ken ‘Magma’ Marshall 

I’ve been saying this for what, three, four years now that SEO as a function will continue to change and morph into more about user experience, user engagement, mapping and search experience. We’ve already seen that with all the algorithmic updates with RankBrain and these different user experience type updates. But I think people get so caught in the weeds of their identity, that I’m an SEO and I do these things to game Google’s system, versus how can I leverage knowledge and technology and human ability and bandwidth to help people move through their customer journey or user journey. That’s all that I really care about, is helping users and customers solve problems. So yeah, I do think they’re going to be replaced, they’ve always been replaced by tools, but the ones who don’t get replaced are more like, I’m the director of this tool, and the adviser, the trusted advisor to my client or user, and they win because they use the tools to augment themselves properly. So that’s what we’re doing over here, or trying to.

David Bain 

Jo you work in Digital PR, specifically Reactive PR and Newsjacking. Are you actually actively using ChatGPT In your content generation?

Jo O’Reilly 

Yeah, I was really worried that it would be a negative thing that you would see people newsjacking really quickly by just creating this content that they haven’t checked on ChatGPT, and they’d be using it to kind of snipe people that were, you know, doing really well thought out helpful analysis, and actually, I don’t think that is the case. Journalists that use this content are the smart people, they can tell a really good thought out piece of thought leadership from something that’s been generated quite quickly and perhaps is missing context or missing human lived experience, which much like SEO, journalism is about speaking to people about their experiences. But actually, there are there are things that I’m using it for subject lines, if I’ve got to newsjack, a story and my my energy is going into creating that content, checking that content, getting it signed off from a client potentially, I don’t always have the time I would like to spend to create that really, really witty subject line. We’ve been trialing using the product for that and it’s working really well. It’s not quite got the hang that it needs to be a really short snappy piece of writing yet, but it can generate enough of them that we can then as humans, edit them and chop them down, and we’ve got a list to pick from. For newsjacking, it does have its uses, but content creation alone isn’t isn’t really one of them.

David Bain 

So how do you practically use that? To actually get it to learn what you like and how to improve on what it’s done previously. Do you actually continue on the same thread of the conversation to do that?

Jo O’Reilly 

Yeah it’s training it I guess. You ask it for a couple of subject lines around a topic, and it’ll come back with something maybe 15/16 words long. That’s too long for a headline, it’s too long for an email subject line, so I’ll just go back to it and say, ‘can you can you give me this again, but in less words?’ and eventually if enough of us are doing that, journalists and Digital PRs, it will learn and it’ll get quicker.

David Bain 

Very quickly I’m sure if there are 10s of 1000s of journalists doing the same thing, if not more. Garrett, how do you actually practically use ChatGPT yourself at the moment?

Garrett Sussman 

Firstly, a big caveat which we all touched on it at the end of this is that understanding the limitations of the tool is really important when you go to content creation, we’re not at a point where you can just create an entire blog post and expect it to have value. So I use it primarily in short bursts of short snippets of content that are easily editable but easily verifiable, because a lot of folks are trying to use these workflows as shortcuts. We’re realizing that at this point, that technology still requires a lot of human hand holding. So to Jo’s point, a lot of ideation to inspire me to take my content to the next level, because the reality is, ChatGPT is trained on so much information started up to 2021 on the Internet, including things like Reddit, so there’s a lot of content out there that can be helpful, especially using it specifically for evergreen content. I also like creating use cases with it to basically have it spur my creativity for specific support evidence without necessarily linking, but ideas of how things can be supported in a usecase perspective. This is just touching the surface, I’m not going to get into all the technical SEO opportunities there, but those are my main use cases right now.

David Bain 

Ken, with your role as CGO, how do you practically use ChatGPT in a growth type role?

Ken ‘Magma’ Marshall 

For me it was about treating it as a playground. I mean, they literally have a playground for OpenAI. But here’s just a few things off the top, my head that Jo and Garrett mentioned. So you’re going to be doing PR, I was like, Okay, I’m a b2b SEO agency and I want to do some guest posting, I need a list of 20 companies that offer guest posting, and they need to mention that on the site, and it was able to replicate that. So that’s some PR targets, very basic content workflows. Here’s a target term, create an outline for me with this tone of voice. After you create that outline, I want you to make it in this, this is our brand voice like and codify or codified it. This is our brand voice. Now rewrite the outline for our brand voice. Now create section by section, like Garrett said, an article for me based on the outline you just gave me. So that’s content production, I wanted to see if I can make tools with it. So coding, somebody mentioned that, that’s brilliant and so I wanted for buying a home. So I made a home loan calculator, and a few different prompts, right and gave me the values, the average mortgage prices in San Luis Obispo, and then it built the form of that with those averages. So I mean, that’s just a few things, and that’s what my role has been playing with the upper and lower limits, knowing that the tool can only realize about, you know, 5,000 pieces of text in terms of previous history of training, so you can’t train it endlessly, and then it can only create about 1,000 words at a time, so don’t try to create a 5,000 word blog post, it can’t do it. So really just exercising those, you know, the tool and figuring out what its limits are has been my my day to day for the last few months.

David Bain 

I would imagine that a great opportunity could be to actually train it on a very specific task, and then ideally be able to sell the ability to do that task to someone else or to have multiple people train them on a specific task to actually get them very, very good at that specific task and sell that. Did you see that ChatGPT may actually evolved in that kind of way?

Ken ‘Magma’ Marshall 

I absolutely think ‘prompt engineer’ will be like an up and coming hot job. I don’t know what the other top five jobs will be but I just know like VAs will change their titles to like ‘prompt engineers’, and they should. It’s really amazing and some people don’t have the time to learn how to train these very specific nuanced prompts to Garrett’s point, there’s way more limitations I think that people realize like, then the opportunities right now for that interface. I think the AI, the language model is great, but the tool is very limited. So I think that’s going to be a pretty big opportunity, and I think people should charge people for things they know how to do.

Garrett Sussman 

To Ken’s point, actually, when you’re asking earlier about whether SEO you know whether ChatGPT is going to replace SEOs, I think if anything, it’s going to evolve, you know, it’s really hard to predict the role of an SEO in the future, whether that’s more of a kind of merging of editor, content creator, strategist, because you also mentioned, Ken, this idea of like mapping out your keywords. Gianluca Fiorelli, who is iloveseo.net wrote this great post in June about the messy middle, and how Google is continually trying to refine our queries and whether they integrate Bard at some point. As an SEO, we’re always going to have to have that human strategy of addressing every point of the funnel, and that’s just going to look different as these these generative tools kind of evolve.

David Bain 

I love Ken saying that VAs are going to be changing their job titles to prompt engineer and then perhaps doubling their hourly rate as a result of doing this. Alizée, what kind of prompts have you been using and then what kind of tests have you been training for?

Alizée Baudez 

So I’ve tried a few things. In terms of pure International SEO, I’ve tried doing translations just to see how it was doing. No good. Well, good for the simple stuff. I asked it to translate a piece of text from the New Yorker that mentioned the word turbocharged, which is very complicated to make make sense of in another language. The result was appalling. So anything that has some figurative speech is not good. I’ve tried doing some cultural adaptations for content ideation. So asking it to create content for a bakery in Strasburg, or bakery in Bordeaux, which are two very different places and so two very different types of pastries. It wasn’t capable of giving me anything that would differentiate, but then I tried it about a gardening blog in Finland and a gardening blog in Morocco. And it understood that the problems gardeners in those two countries are facing would drastically different. For Morocco, it suggested some content around irrigation, and for Finland, things about the type of produce you might want to have in cold climates, and things like that. So I found a few things here and there.

I’m still figuring out exactly what to do with it. There’s also been a lot of conversational stuff about ‘teach me how to do this tool in Python’, because I want to understand and do something that is useful for me and that I understand. I also use it as a colleague of some sorts, as a sounding board. Because as a freelancer, I’m very alone in my day to day, and sometimes I’m just not sure, and you get in your head and you think about things and you’re not sure what to do, or you’re not sure how to say things or to write an email to a client when it’s eight o’clock, and you just want to go and eat dinner, that kind of thing. I just put out my ideas, my bullet points in there and ask ChatGPT to do something for me, and that helps massively to simplify my to do list, to make it a breeze. It really helps those little tasks that I would spend hours on, and the ones you think about all day long, procrastinating to the very last minute, because you really don’t want to do them because they’re just so simple, but you really don’t want to do them. For those things, ChatGPT has been a lifesaver and has helped massively with just the mental health even side of freelancing honestly.

David Bain 

Gabriella, you talked a little bit beforehand about the dangers of using ChatGPT for certain tests, so what is your tests that shouldn’t be automated using ChatGPT?

Gabriella Sannino 

Ultimately, there are a few things that I’ve been discussing with a couple of colleagues where we do use ChatGPT, whether it’s to give us a block of content, because we were stuck or we couldn’t think of something new. One of the things that I’ve noticed is the translation. I mean, even Google Translate doesn’t get it right all the time. So, especially when it comes to cultural nuances, the differences between the north of France versus the south of France, same thing with Italy, same thing with the Middle East. So in that aspect, they still haven’t become sophisticated enough within the parameters of what the prompts are and the prompts aren’t.

Another thing that I actually even told a friend of mine, which one of my colleagues gave me a link where it gives you the prompts already, because a lot of people have no clue how to use the prompts. It’s a wonderful website, it’s got examples from q&a, grammar, corrections, summarizing text to commands, and maybe they should get paid more can because they are going to become engineers, when it comes to creating the prompts that are needed. So in that aspect, one of the things that I shy away from, because SEO does take a lot of time, and a lot of people think you turn it on and walk away and automate it. But, that’s not what automating means, especially when you’re responding to q&a. So that’s another way that that we’ve noticed, people are using it, where it provides automated responses to common customer inquiries. It’s great boom, you ask the questions, and it gives you three, four answers, and guess what? That’s done. And you throw up the q&a of the back end, you give it to your web developer, and you say, here’s some Q and A’s, please add them to our contact page in case people have some questions. So in that aspect, it’s great, but you still have to go back and you still have to read and you still have to make sure that the recommendations, as I mentioned, whether for the gardener from Finland versus the gardener in Morocco, if it’s actually true.

I don’t want to go outside of SEO, but we’ve seen what it’s done outside of SEO, where it’s pulled in political figures that supposedly said this, but they didn’t, so there’s some dangers there. But within SEO, I don’t know. I love it, I’m a big ChatGPT cheerleader.

David Bain 

I’m staying on dangerous for a second. Does anyone have any concerns about the facts ChatGPT actually comes up with, and whether or not maybe politically or the information that they come up with is based upon some kind of angle, but not necessarily completely impartial? Does anyone have that kind of concern? And if so, do they do any checks on the content and the answers that it comes up with?

Jo O’Reilly 

One of the things, obviously working with journalists day in day out, and you know, I used to be a journalist, myself, and if anyone knows anything about the libel laws in the UK, misquoting anyone, whether it be a politician or a head of business is a genuine risk. It could sink a company or it could sink an agency if you get a libel suit slapped on you in the UK. So use it as a researcher, that’s what it is. I think it was a Alizée that said she treats it as a colleague. If I had a junior colleague that I was employed in a research capacity, I would take their work, and I would use that to inform my work, I wouldn’t be publishing it. without checking it, I wouldn’t be sharing it with journalists or with business leaders, for example, without fact checking it and verifying sources.

One of the things that one of my team, one of my data analysts has been using it for is asking it to suggest data datasets. His job for me used to be that he would go away and look the datasets that we could do big data, lead digital PR campaigns out of, and he said when he first started using it, he was asking it for this data. But he realized that actually, it’s far safer to use it to get it to suggest for places where he can look for the datasets where he can then go off of the platform and take that to Google take that elsewhere to an academic journal and and see it in its natural habitat rather than just trusting that the data that was being provided was was accurate and could be used for for a campaign.

David Bain 

What about using ChatGPT in conjunction with other software? I’ve been a fan of Zapier in the past, and I’ve used it to tie lots of different pieces of software together, I noticed that you can connect to open AI with Zapier. I haven’t actually tried it yet, but is anyone actually actively pooling ChatGPT together with other software to increase the effectiveness of its parts?

Alizée Baudez 

I’ve actually tried it with Google Sheets and Danny Richman‘s tool about generating alt tags for images, and then I created another one to generate meta descriptions and meta tags, just to have a look at what the results were. It saves me a lot of time just having that first basis to work from, and it works well, for me. You just have to ask ChatGPT to explain to you how Appscript works and then integrate it. But I see it as an educational project first and foremost, an educational project myself, and then it results in the tool that actually saves me hours and hours, then it’s great, but at least I will have learned something. So that’s the way I’ve used it with Google Sheets so far.

Ken ‘Magma’ Marshall 

I haven’t integrated it with any of their API functions, but I think there’s some efficiencies that people in our industry can use. I think Gabriella and Jo hit it spot on that the QA (quality assurance) is terrible, and then it literally just lies with inaccurate information, and it doesn’t know any better, right, so every time we do any piece of content, it automatically gets ran through a plagiarism tool, through Grammarly, and even if you just blanket accept it, it’s almost always going to be better than if you don’t. ChatGPT for Sheets and Google Docs, that extension is amazing. Let’s say you have a seed keyword list or you need a list of things to be pulled and imported into your tools that can format the headers for you, and then auto generate each column based on information you’d want to query in your tool, right? So I think there’s a lot of efficiencies like that of tools you can use to augment the limitations that anyone can use and use for free in most cases, but I’d be interested to hear about more advanced use cases if anybody’s got them.

David Bain 

Garrett, Jo, or Gabriella, anything else you’d like to add in terms of tools and marrying ChatGPT with other software?

Jo O’Reilly 

I really did like what Alizée was saying actually about using it as a teacher. I’ve spoken to colleagues, friends, people in the industry and they are doing exactly that. They are getting the program to train them on things that perhaps they don’t have time to go into a course in. Perhaps they don’t have the resources inhouse where they work or they’re a freelancer. So yeah, I am really fascinated, like Ken said, by some of the more advanced use cases I am seeing and the API’s people are using with it. I will be a very interested observer, but I would not be the leading light on that at this stage.

David Bain 

It’s experimental for everyone at the moment, isn’t it? Gabriella, did you want to add anything to that?

Gabriella Sannino 

Actually, no, I’m piggybacking on what everyone has said. I’m the cheerleader waiting for the next wonderful article or API integration, so we can test it. I’m not techie at all, I leave that to my techie team, but I have started to look at other tools that are integrating and not to give people plugins. There’s a couple of Italian engineers, of course, I’m gonna plug my people, but look at topically.io. They grab all the keywords and they do mapping. And Andrea Volpini with WordLift, he’s doing all. So I’m letting the real people that know how to play with this, do it and I’m just following.

Garrett Sussman 

To Gabriella’s point, the whole API is a different animal than ChatGPT because with the API, you start to get out of the limitations of that interface in that sandbox. So for instance, on LinkedIn, I’ve been seeing Kristin Tynski of Fractl has been posting some fascinating Python scripts. One usecase that was really interesting was all around audience research and persona development. So basically, being able to train it to spit out the persona type that you want for the industry niche, all different types of insights and attributes for that persona that you can then use to map out the content for your keyword strategy. So there’s a lot of opportunities and creativity once you get outside of the ChatGPT interface, and you’re using the API for those tools.

Beyond that, I think beyond SEO, there’s going to be a lot of content creation opportunities in terms of social and as Ken was mentioning, around voice and brand, really being able to train it on larger libraries of your own documentation to then produce more accurate voice and brand content that you want to create. So I expect that to accelerate. And then we’ve seen a lot of weirdness with Bings integration, and Sydney, and it’s going to be interesting to see how that ultimately impacts SEO in general in the way that people use search, which I think we’ll touch on.

David Bain

I’d also like to talk a little bit about how this is impacting the way that you use employees or outsourcers, for example, do you actually come up with a system yourself and give them the system and ask them to do it? Do you give them more leeway into actually coming up with a better way of managing ChatGPT? Gabriella, you mentioned that you’ve got a couple of people that, that do some work for you, how have you gone about this?

Gabriella Sannino 

Well, I use a couple of tools, not just ChatGPT, I use Jasper and I use Semrush. They have a content development template for SEO, so I take a couple of things, for example, I’ll take a title, drop it into the template, and then Semrush gives me some ideas of other places that are working on the same thing, gives me links, so I look at that, it also gives me entity keywords, so I take a look at that. So I grab the titles, the URLs, the entities, I put together a synopsis and I send it to the writer and I say, write this for me. You could do that with any writer now, because you have so much more information than just ‘here is the topic, here is the synopsis’. Now we have not just a meaning to the article, but relevance, and now we have a way to put it all under one umbrella, where we have entity, knowledge graphs, links, resources, etc. So my editor now just has to go in and make sure the grammar looks good, make sure that the image is fine. So it’s cut not just our workload, but also our budget. I no longer have to pay the editor, the writer and the coder to make sure it all works, because I’ve already checked off a couple of things that the ChatGPT has done for us. So, in that way, it has helped.

And I know that a couple of my tech guys have used it for structural data, to double back and check it, you know, and again, you have to know how to ask, because I said, well, it doesn’t work. I’ve tried it, I said, you know, do this, and it didn’t give me anything. And so she came back, she said, you’re asking it wrong, this is what you need to ask this is the following structured data can be added to a surface page, and you give them the service page, you know about that particular keyword in the city. And then boom, all of a sudden, I got all this code, which is ‘foreign’ to me. I have no clue what it means. I know you’re supposed to put it on the page, but it gave me all the important information, the name, the description, the image, the services, the type, the city, I was blown away. I was like, wow, so now we don’t need to hire that extra, step because my techy person has to go back and check it, but it’s cut her time, by hours, hours, especially when we have huge sites that we have to either audit or we have to, you know, write new content for.

David Bain 

Ken, what Gabriela said there, you’re asking it wrong is absolutely key, isn’t it? Because if you don’t, I guess give enough context and asking the right manner, then you’re not going to come up with the optimal manner. So do you have a kind of a set of questions and a way of setting up that you provide team members with an order in order to optimize their their use of ChatGPT?

Ken ‘Magma’ Marshall 

I think that’s so funny, because I’ve had those moments and heard them from the team as well of like, this doesn’t do X, Y, and Z. And I’m always like, I think the fallacy there is that we don’t know enough to know what we don’t know. So let’s not assume that it can’t do something rather, we don’t know how to tell it what to do. And so I think the first step for us was really just after I got done playing with it is saying, Okay, everyone has to play with this, I don’t care how you play with it, but you’re gonna go play with it. And we’re going to integrate this in the near future. So tell me what you come up with. And everyone’s confused and a little frustrated, and like this thing doesn’t work, then it’s like, okay, we gave them some parameters. So we’re going to create an article, and everyone’s gonna bring their favorite about their favorite subject, and you give them a sandbox. So an SOP, you know, little operating procedure of, well, here’s how to make, make it make you a brief and suggest terms. And so I think just getting people to understand why you’re using any new tool, or new process is the first step the buy in the explanation, letting them play then, they can inform the process, but you have to give them a playground or a sandbox to sort of exist within or I think it’s overwhelming, if you’re not a CTO who’s sort of a mad scientist, like, it can be overwhelming, and maybe they don’t want to fail. So for the team members, I think, setting the stage, giving them somewhere to play and, you know, a sandbox set of procedures, and then refining it with like very intentional coaching and training is the way to go. And that’s sort of how we’ve, we’ve done it internally. But you know, without the right understanding of something, the nature of it any tool, you’re not gonna be able to get the right output. And so we always challenge our thinking, I still do myself, but also the team. You can’t say this doesn’t work, you have to continue beating your head against the wall with other people’s help, until you definitively know that it doesn’t, after you feel a level of mastery. And I think that’s a much more beautiful way to exist than just saying something doesn’t work, so to speak.

Garrett Sussman 

That’s such a good point, Ken. I mean, it’s all about experimentation right now, and everybody’s experimenting. We’re all learning how to do it, and there’s no real instruction manual, because one word in your prompt can change the output. You just think about search, like if I go to Google right now. And I asked, you know, is coffee bad for you? Versus if I ask is coffee good for you, I’m gonna get two different sets of search results. And the same thing applies to ChatGPT. So the way we typically think about it is setting the context, you know, like what information needs to be, whether it’s voice and brand, or who’s speaking or what you’re trying to answer, give me examples of what you expect the output to be, if you can because it’s machine learning, right, you’re trying to give it, this is what I’m looking for, and then what is the actual output. So if we’re saying you want an essay, you want five bullet points, you want, three examples, you need be specific. If anything, ChatGPT is going to make us all better communicators, I hope because we all suck at actually explaining what we want, whether it’s from colleagues or users, consumers, whatever. This really forces you to be literal, and be intentional to Ken’s point, say exactly what you’re looking for. And that’s, that’s one of the best ways that I help, talk to our colleagues or clients or whatnot.

David Bain 

Jo, you’re nodding away there with quite a bit before Ken and Garrett was saying anything you’d like to add?

Jo O’Reilly 

I think that yeah, the point that this has experimented, and we’ve all experimented, and we will, we will our mad scientists here, I think it was Ken that use that terminology, which I like. I think for me, though, it’s, it’s leading by example. So my team aren’t going to feel comfortable to spend the time experimenting or to test these theories unless I am. And I think that’s what kind of got got me to kind of jump in headfirst after being quite, quite hesitant at first about whether I wanted to implement this as part of our work in life. And wherever I wanted to kind of trust that this would become part of our part of our day to day work with, you know, SEO and Digital PR. I think, you know, we’re talking about sort of students at least, I made that really good point that it’s going to be here in the future and people will be left behind. And I don’t want my junior team members to be left behind by at all that’s going to become really integral potentially, to SEO and Digital PR and potentially digital marketing in general. I had to kind of jump in and start using it so that they would feel comfortable that they would feel that it’s allowed, we were allowed to spend that time and we were allowed to try and fail when it doesn’t work. And lastly, that point about it, making us better communicators. One of the things that I am trying to get better at with being a leader in and just in my personal life and my day to day life is being a more effective communicator. Whatever role I’ve done, whether it be a journalist and PR or a content creator, it communication is key to that and anything that can anything that can fine tune my communication to me is something that I want to be a part of, and I want to learn from so yeah, I really enjoyed that at that point.

David Bain 

Lovely. Okay. Now, as a final question, I’m going to ask everyone, how will ChatGPT impact the future of SEO? So you have a minute to think about that. But just before we get to that question and Alizée, just a little thoughts on how you actually use ChatGPT or encourage your students or outsource workers to use ChatGPT. So do you like to give people a set of prescriptions in terms of these are the prompts that you should probably use or do tend to leave students and outsource workers to is and see what they come up with?

Alizée Baudez 

So the way I see it is that this type of tool can do a lot of the boring work for us, which leaves some computational human brain power left for creativity, which is what we are good at as humans. So I don’t give prompts or things to my students, because they already have 1,000 ideas a second, it goes really fast in those classes. So I just tell them to, well, sorry, Gabriella to throw spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks. Apologies. But just to try it, anything they have on their minds, to be creative, because using creativity with superpowers, just can can only do good. So that’s kind of the way I see it, is just to tell them to try anything they want. And that’s the way I see it as well. Anything I have in mind, I’ve tried doing knitting patterns with ChatGPT, I’ve tried doing recipes, I’ve tried doing loads of things, anything that comes to mind, I just try it out and see what happens and see how it behaves and see how I can fine tune the prompt I’m giving it. So it’s more about experimenting, being the mad scientist, as everyone said, which I absolutely love that that analogy. And remember that it’s one tool that can give us give us more time to think about those creative things that we as humans are capable of doing that these tools cannot yet maybe we’ll see.

David Bain 

Well, we’ll see indeed, because the final questions I mentioned for everyone is how will ChatGPT impact the future of SEO? So let’s go back to Garrett for that one. Garrett what’s your thoughts?

Garrett Sussman 

So I think there’s two angles that I’m thinking about it. One is a sort of democratization of content creation, if you think when it comes to image creation, if you use Midjourney, like I’m not an artist, but I can design all sorts of really cool things, all of a sudden, I think for people who aren’t necessarily writers, by nature, it’s an opportunity to explore their own creativity in a craft that they might not be great at. On the other hand, I think if you are a great writer or a content creator, in the context of SEO, you’re going to be able to differentiate from everyone who is using the tools, whether it’s through augmenting your own creativity and then just leveling up. But at the same time, EEAT when it comes to Google and SEO: Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. That’s still going to be human. I don’t think that’s going to be negated by this tool in anytime in the near future. So I don’t think SEO is dead. But I also don’t think that it’s 100% roses, rainbows and unicorns.

David Bain 

Alizée, roses, unicorns, SEO is dead, or somewhere in between. Where do you lie?

Alizée Baudez 

I’m on the unicorn side of things usually. I think it will change the way we do SEO, because it will simplify or gain more productivity on all those tedious tasks, and help with creativity, as I mentioned. I haven’t been in SEO for as long as other people in this in this in this webinar. But I haven’t seen the SEO community gathering around the topic is much in a long time. And it feels like we’re starting to remember that we all had a common goal, and we can all be friends and creative together. It’s been a long time since people have gathered around the topic as much and found it exciting as much. So I’m very curious to see where everyone’s going to take this.

David Bain 

Ken, what are your thoughts on how ChatGPT will impact the future of SEO?

Ken ‘Magma’ Marshall 

Yeah, I love what you just said about being a unicorn, I’m very optimistic about technology as well. I could echo what Garrett said, but I think the two biggest things are one. I’ve always said this, that people should always try to find their zone of genius, and hang out and play there. I think we get so bogged down. I mean, content can be beautiful and more creative, typically, but in SEO with like the tactics, and none of that ever mattered. It just was gimmicky for a while because you could do it. And it kind of worked a long time ago in SEO. But what I would say to people is one think outside of the tactics and how it can augment your day to day workflow to allow you to be creative, and stay in your zone of genius. That is the ultimate goal, I think, for workers not to take pride in the minutiae, even though you have to do that sometimes it’s really those big leaps and creative leaps and bounds. And the second one is being expansive in your thinking. So if you’re not a coder, and Gabriella, I love how you speak about that the techies because I say things like that in my head to the nerds. But if you’re not thinking about if you have a small business client who’s in real estate, like I use that example, could they have a tool that can help potential new homebuyers in a way that you would have had that not shell out five grand for a developer, but now you can serve your customers, your users better? Could you learn something that you couldn’t, as a small business owner or something like that, or an SEO? So be expansive, and you’re thinking of what your role is? And saying, how can I make my clients experience or the users experience better? And then the second thing is, how can I get rid of some of these really detailed tasks that I don’t enjoy, but that take up half of my day. So I can really go have fun and stay in my zone of genius. So that’s what I’m trying to do every day. And I would encourage everybody to do the same.

David Bain 

Lots of nuggets there. Ken, thank you so much. Jo, what are your thoughts on how it’s impacting the future of SEO?

Jo O’Reilly 

I think what we’ve really established here is you can go very fire and brimstone with this SEO is dead, it’s the end or you can be very rainbows and unicorns. I’m going to elect to be a rainbow today and chase a unicorn or chase a rainbow. I think that it can be an incredibly powerful productivity tool for Digital PRs, content creators, SEOs. I think that it can enable us to get down to the meaningful work that we do the meaningful human element of what we’re able to do, and spend more time really finessing the stuff that we’re good at. Or, as Ken and Alizée both said, learning something new, getting really involved in learning new skills and what it can teach us and how it can open up our roles, and what we do, that the points can made about small business owners and the powerl this puts into their hands. Or perhaps people in developing countries that don’t have the money for the kind of SEO tools that perhaps we do in the West. These tools, we all know we spend a lot of money on them. Could this democratize things a little more and open the playground and level those playing fields? So yeah, interesting to see what will happen with it.

David Bain 

Gabriella?

Gabriella Sannino 

I started when there was no SEO, so I had to embrace that when Google came out with SEO, then I had to embrace the next shiny little tool over here, and I don’t know how many times I heard SEO is dead through the years. So as Ken said, SEO is constantly changing, and it’s probably going to change again, and it’s a matter of which way are we going to go with that it evolves regularly, often fed by technology, the latest ChatGPT, the latest information. So I think a AI tools like ChatGPT will become just an extra tool to put in your wheelhouse. So it just is going to be with better data perspective, right? So I used to tell people, oh, it’s like throwing a noodle on a wall, except this time, it’ll be a targeted noodle. It’s not just going to be a noodle. Right. So those are some wonderful things that I’m excited about. But there is a future, it just depends on how you want to use it. Just like anything, you know, we embrace Google, and now we’re all kind of like, well, Google, maybe Bing is better. And I’m just kidding. But you know, Bing has been coming out with some pretty interesting things with their little ChatGPT. But that’s another discussion altogether. But yeah, I do see that many people you know are throwing noodles testing I love that scientific mad scientist comparison, because it is very much still a new regardless of whether we’ve been using it for the last year, six months. Look at look at how SEO has, you know moved from, you know, EAT now to EEAT. Right? It’s like we’re constantly coming up with new acronyms new this new that. Ultimately we’re trying to help the client period. And if ChatGPT is going to help me do that, then let’s go with it.

David Bain 

Well, it certainly sounds like there’s gonna be a part two for this discussion. There’s so much that can be shared that has been shared, you know, wonderful thoughts from our panel here as well. I’ve been your host for the day. And you’ve been listening to The Majestic SEO Podcast with Garrett. Garrett, where can the listener find out more about you and where to find you?

Garrett Sussman 

Yeah, iPullRank.com. You can find me on the Twitter‘s and the LinkedIn just just named Garrett Sussman. Twitter is where I hang out the most trying to do the LinkedIn thing really hard to make it happen.

David Bain 

Super thanks for coming on Garrett. So Alizée, where can people find you?

Alizée Baudez 

Same as Garrett, Twitter or LinkedIn using Alizée Baudez, and my website, alizeebaudez.com, if you want to check out what I do,

David Bain 

Thank you Alizée, and Ken?

Ken ‘Magma’ Marshall 

LinkedIn is where we hang out, so hit me up anytime. Everything I’ve ever learned is on our resource center. So we try to share knowledge openly here at RevenueZen. Or reach out. Consultations are always free, as they should be. We’d like to help first and decide if we’re a right fit. So reach out and definitely talk to me about ChatGPT because it’s like one of my favorite topics right now.

David Bain 

Thanks so much, Ken, and Jo.

Jo O’Reilly 

I can be found on Twitter, it’s at Jo Marie O’Reilly and that’s my @ on everything so you can find me there.

David Bain 

Thanks so much for coming on Jo and Gabriella.

Gabriella Sannino 

Hi, you can find me definitely on Twitter. I’ve been trying to embrace LinkedIn a little more. You can also find me at level343.com.

David Bain 

Thank you everyone for coming on. If you’d like to join us next time, sign up at majestic.com/webinars and of course check out the other series at SEOin2023.com.

Previous Webinars

Follow our Twitter account @Majestic to hear about more upcoming webinars!

Or if you want to catch up with all of our webinars, you can find them on our Digital Marketing Webinars page.

Back