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Search Engine Land » Platforms » OpenAI » ChatGPT »
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If you’ve used ChatGPT for any period of time for tasks like creating content for SEO, you’ve likely noticed a few things:
All of these things are true when using ChatGPT for keyword research. To help you navigate the process, let’s explore:
You’ll leave this article with specific keyword research applications for ChatGPT, plus a framework for incorporating the tool into your SEO processes.
An important thing to understand off the top: ChatGPT does not have access to search volume and other metrics the way keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner, Semrush and Ahrefs do.
That said, ChatGPT can be highly useful for several keyword research functions.
One downside to traditional keyword research tools is that your competitors (and often more authoritative sites than yours) are using the same tools and targeting the same keywords.
As you build out a list of topics and keyword targets, the right ChatGPT prompts can help you find largely untapped pockets of keywords.
{Topic} for dummies
If I were starting a website about pickleball and wanted to get some broad ideas for what to write about, I could use some creative prompts to get ideas from ChatGPT on where to start:
Obviously, this isn’t a list of keywords, but it could function as a general site structure and give me ideas for building keyword clusters.
{Topic} conference agendas
Similarly, asking ChatGPT for conference topics targeting a specific persona in my niche provides some interesting ideas:
ChatGPT doesn’t have the most recent data and isn’t a comprehensive keyword research tool. But it can help me gain a quick sense of a niche’s competitive landscape and get started with high-level ideas:
Plus, more ideas for different topics and sub-niche:
I can continue to get a lay of the land in this niche by looking at social media accounts on platforms like X:
However, keep in mind that while ChatGPT can now crawl the web when prompted, the data is from October 2023, which isn’t current.
X also paused Open AI access as of Dec. 4, 2022:
Not surprising, as I just learned that OpenAI had access to Twitter database for training. I put that on pause for now.
Need to understand more about governance structure & revenue plans going forward.
OpenAI was started as open-source & non-profit. Neither are still true.
I can also look at Reddit:
This can be even more useful if you dive a little deeper:
The output is great as specific angles for articles or FAQs.
You can also get a quick view of influencers and thought leaders:
Then I can dive into more topic ideas and learn the topics they tweet and talk about:
Next, I can start to pull this all together by combining prompts and asking ChatGPT to give me a summary of its research:
I’ll be honest: I run a lot of ChatGPT prompts, and some of the output is infuriatingly bad.
If you hired a VA to research a niche and provide high-level topic and category ideas for a new site, this result would be acceptable.
Similarly, with ChatGPT, better prompts lead to better information, so you must take accountability for your input.
We now have interesting high-level category and “sub-niche” data. So how do we convert that into an actual list of target keywords?
ChatGPT can’t give you estimated search volume and keyword difficulty data. While they aren’t perfect metrics, you can waste time and resources if you’re “flying blind.”
We can use ChatGPT to prepare a list of “seed keywords” to run against our favorite keyword tool:
Next, I used a prompt to clean up the list (“Perfect, take these keywords and convert them into a list of just the keywords that I can easily copy and paste.”) and dropped them all into Ahrefs, looked at matching terms, and filtered for terms with a keyword difficulty of 5 or lower for my new site:
Now that I have some terms with difficulty and search volume, I can go back to ChatGPT to help add some information for these terms:
ChatGPT had some issues generating this table, but ultimately the output is pretty impressive:
Now, I can also get some other interesting keyword data on my new list of terms by asking, “Can you tell me how many posts are in each sub-topic and how many fit into each level of search intent?”
Many times you may balance your content output across categories, business lines and support for different tools or products. This is a handy way to sum up that information quickly.
Finding specific keywords to target and appending different modifiers to your terms to grow your list are critical aspects of keyword research.
A common application is to generate a list of geo-modifiers and marry those with a target term:
You can also get a list of size modifiers and apply that to different terms:
As you can see, you then need to layer in some additional prompts, give examples, and ask ChatGPT to clean things up to make these usable, but it can help you skip a step and give you some new ideas for modifiers.
Many tools will create content briefs and grades for your content based primarily on what’s currently ranking well in search engines.
I use multiple tools in my day-to-day work, which can be pretty expensive.
We can use ChatGPT to compare our keyword set to the terms being targeted on posts ranking for specific terms.
Again, it is not a native SEO tool, so data will differ from what those tools use.
And you can get more specific advice with a follow-up prompt:
Here, I could run through multiple articles ranking on the first page for this search term, ask ChatGPT to pull out themes and common terms used in the headers for each, and then surface the most popular phrases across the articles:
For a smoother and more scalable experience in prompt-heavy tasks, you may want to use the OpenAI API. Have ChatGPT generate the code for you (now using Canvas):
Reminder: Proceed cautiously when dealing with programmatic APIs that cost money or credits. QA everything the tool spits out.
Another keyword research function for ChatGPT is to help SEOs interface with different keyword tool APIs:
For my new pickleball site, I could grab an extensive list of low domain authority sites ranking for some pickleball terms and then run them through this script. (Always make sure you extensively QA any code ChatGPT generates for you.)
If you’re not very technical, you can get step-by-step instructions and ask the tool how to complete a generic task:
Not relevant for my new pickleball site, perhaps, but if I want to do some keyword research on my data, I can get ChatGPT’s help with the Google Search Console API to find search queries that may need their page or article:
The GSC API isn’t the only way to get keyword data using ChatGPT.
Like the GSC API, using regular expressions (regex) within Search Console can be a great way to unearth keyword targeting opportunities:
ChatGPT can instruct you on how to build specific tools for keyword research. (Again, always QA and proceed with caution!)
The examples above demonstrate how valuable ChatGPT can be for keyword research. The price is free to $200 a month, so it is worth trying out.
In my experience, the platform tends to fall flat in three core areas of keyword research:
Here are a few specific suggestions to help:
Caveats aside, SEOs will likely find useful keyword research applications with ChatGPT.
Ask yourself these questions to determine how to use the platform best:
Think of ChatGPT as a virtual assistant. Understand that you’re ultimately responsible for the implementation of any data or code it generates.
Consider the tasks you need to complete, the things it’s likely capable of and try them out when it makes sense.
Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
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