SEO Strategy Unleashed: Leveraging ChatGPT for Content Optimization

0:00A couple days ago on the podcast, I talked about the fact that Google penalizes you if you write AI content. it. Now, I've been corrected by a number of people in our Facebook group who have told me about an update that Google is not actually penalizing AI content. So today on the podcast, I'm going to cover that update what Google has said. I'm also going to talk about what I personally have done to get AI content to rank on Google. So if you're interested in this juicy story and why this is relevant to your search results, stick around. But also if you are interested in what it takes to get an article or any piece of content to rank on the front page of Google, especially if you are creating that piece of content with AI, you'll probably want to listen to this podcast.

0:39So the news comes around February, I believe Google essentially said in a update, we've explained publicly several times that we do not penalize AI generated content in search. Today's blog post was just a reiteration and clarification on those statements. Now this comes in slight contradiction to what John Mueller said back in April 2022, when he said content generated with language models like GPT-3 would be considered spam by Google. And like other automatically generated content, it'd be downgraded in search results. So a lot has happened since then, obviously. And I think Google has now officially kind of put out what its actual position is on AI generated content.

1:20And it is, you know, not going to be universally categorized as spam. And they're not going to be downranking it in all of its search results. So I think that this is really an inevitable move, As I mentioned on an earlier podcast, before I knew about this update, I was saying, you know, it's kind of ridiculous, because eventually everything is going to be written by or assisted by AI. And I think that another thing to consider is just the fact that with this new Google Bard integration in the new integration, they'll be adding to search results, essentially, you know, if it would be pretty hypocritical of them, if you know, every single thing written by AI was downranked by users, but they're promoting AI content to the absolute top of the world.

2:01with their Google barred AI results. So it would be kind of contradictory. So it makes a lot of sense for them to do this. And overall, I just think this makes a lot of sense because this is the new way that people are generating content. It doesn't mean it's all spam. It just means that people are using these assistants to create better quality or faster or unique styles, whatever people are going for. But AI definitely helps to speed up the creative process, in my opinion. And I feel like I'm more creative and can create more tools. So, you know, whether it's automated, each piece of content is going to be evaluated according to Google's EEAT scale.

2:40So Google has a scale to determine how quality a piece of content is. They don't care if it's generated by AI or if this is handwritten, especially because, you know, generated by AI, you might use ChatGPT to help you write 10 different paragraphs. But you've researched, you know, the heck out of what those paragraphs talk about in a way that is, you know, adds a lot of value that no one else is talking about in a piece of content. And so, you know, it wouldn't really make sense to de-rank that sort of content, especially if, you know, let's say you write a paragraph and you send it to ChatGPT and say, hey, rewrite this in a way with better grammar that, you know, highlights X, Y, and Z.

3:13It really is your piece of content. You're just getting a little help on, you know, some of the grammar and whatnot. And if they were able to detect that that was written by ChatGPT and de-rank you, that would be pretty brutal. So in any case, this new, this, the scale, the EAT scale is experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness. So any text automation has to be, um, and any even handwritten content will go through the scale to be measured, um, for how valuable it is. They said AI has the ability to power new levels of expression and creativity and to serve as a critical tool to help people create great content for the web.

3:48This is in line with how we've always thought about empowering people with new technologies, Google wrote. And this also kind of fits with this new AI strategy of really heavily integrating AI tools into search and pretty much all of their different platforms, right? Like if they're integrating AI into Microsoft or into Google Docs and, you know, helping you write documents with AI, it'd be kind of, I don't know, it definitely seemed very contradictory that you couldn't ever post that content that you use them to create anywhere online without it getting deranged. So I think a really big flood of kind of bad and mediocre AI content could definitely be trying to push its way to the top of search results right now, which I think may be a really big threat to Google and their business model right now.

4:36But despite all of the criticism that people are getting, Google search results are still considered to be, you know, based off of this is nothing new is what I'm trying to say. So when all of this spam happens, like there was older methods for creating spam content and trying to get it ranked to the top to try to, you know, get rankings and throw ads and all sorts of things in there. And Google is really good at discovering spam or low quality content. And so if it's a high quality piece of content written by AI or ChaiGPT, fantastic. It will rank well. And otherwise, it will not. So I think this is a really good move by Google.

5:11So I want to talk about some things that I personally have done to rank at the very top of Google for a number of terms. So if you are interested in, you know, ranking things at the top of Google or you're interested in, you know, why things are ranking, this might be interesting to you. So essentially, my previous company was called Self Pause. It is an AI life coach. And for a number of years, it was an app where you could record your own positive affirmations. You could listen to positive affirmation meditations and that sort of thing. And then when the AI, when ChatGPT came out and we saw the power there, we got an API essentially to DaVinci originally.

5:49Then later on, you know, we've upgraded. But we integrated and we developed an AI life coach that you could talk with and it could help you work through your problems. And so anyways, in this whole kind of movement, I really wanted to make sure that we were ranking number one for the keyword AI life coach. So if you want to see what that piece of content looks like, you can go on Google right now and search for AI Life Coach. And right now, depending on where you're searching from, we typically rank spot number one or number two. And frequently, we're kind of the featured section of the top. So what we did, because if you go to that page, that entire page is written by AI.

6:33All of the content on our page is written by AI. and so what we've done to rank that and also what I've done to rank hundreds of other pages is essentially we get the page to be originally we get ChatGPT to write an outline of the content on the page so we'd say like hey I would like you to write a page about x y and z what would be a good content outline with subcategories and so it writes out like you know five six subcategories to a page and then you get it to write about you know write a couple paragraphs about each of those topics so it writes them out now as far as google and ranking on google goes you want to make sure there's some sort of i've talked to a lot of copywriters that are like you wouldn't use chat gpt as your only salesperson so why would you get it to write all your marketing content so i actually believe that it can be really powerful and the strategy we ended up taking with this is at the top of every AI content generated article, we put an ad for our app, and an ad to download our app.

7:38So regardless of whether the article itself sells our product, there's an ad at the top. So if people are interested, they can see that and otherwise they can get the content that they're interested in below. And usually we'll try to weave in the product, write a paragraph about the product within every article, I think is the best way to do that on every piece of content. But if not, if you have kind of like a big ad at the top, that's a really good way to push people towards it and then still have the ability to, you know, share your content below. In any case, if you want to rank at the top of Google, what you're going to want to do, get that big article.

8:14Now, this is a less competitive keyword because AI Life Coach is kind of a new area and a new field. But for more competitive things, right, like we we ranked for the word, um, on the first page for the word affirmations, um, or positive affirmations. Um, doing that, we actually ended up having to write a 10 ,000 word article, um, about affirmations. We broke it up at the top of the page at self pause.com slash affirmations. If you're interested in looking at what that piece of content looks like. Um, but we have an entire, uh, kind of at the top, a list of, you know, what this article will cover.

8:50And it has hyperlinks to the different sections because the page is just super, super long. And we tried to create a really rich piece of content discussing every little bit of information. We have embedded YouTube videos that are on the topic. And I think something that is an interesting little hack is embedding YouTube videos that have a lot of views on that topic. So if you go find like, for example, the most popular video about affirmations on YouTube with a million views, and you embed that it's going to show google that like uh it almost makes your web page seem more popular so in any case um and you can embed youtube videos onto any page that's just uh within youtube's terms so um we have images we have subheadings i think the better piece of content is selfbuzz.com slash affirmations and you can just see this massive article with all sorts of you know we have listed out different affirmations for different categories we have ads within the actual article itself for our app and And then this is just like such an interesting thing, but like for some reason I created, so essentially I had VAs using ChatGPT, Jasper and some other AI tools.

9:58You know, before ChatGPT came around, I was actually doing this with Jasper and some other AI tools, but we had them creating this content. So I had VAs and I taught them how to generate content and what to ask and whatnot. And they were generating the content and posting it because it was a lot of work. and then once they had done that it wasn't getting a ton of traction still until I did one thing and this is really random but if you're if you're interested in you know ranking websites or articles on google I added an FAQ section so frequently asked questions and if you look at the very bottom of the page on selfpause.com slash affirmations you'll see that there is an FAQ section or so.

10:38And those questions, they're called rich schema. So essentially what you do is you set your frequently asked questions, which I've gotten them all written by chat GPT. So, you know, it's like, what are affirmations? Why are affirmations important? Are affirmations found in psychology? And there's like responses. All of those are written by chat GPT. But when you do, when you set up those frequently asked questions on a webpage and set them as schema, what they'll actually do is show up inside of Google's search result, but below your listing. And this is honestly one of the best, uh, SEO Google hacks, but you've seen this before, right?

11:12When like you're on, you search for something on Google, there's a bunch of web listings, and then there's a bunch of like dropdowns to kind of get like quick answers to that question. So that's this, these FAQ schema. Um, this is often what, uh, makes those up. So if you search for affirmations and you find us, you'll see what I'm talking about below that Google listing where it has some of these questions and answers below. So once I started doing that on all of our articles, and by the way, I wrote hundreds of articles and had them all link to each other. So they all had a link to another article that we'd written.

11:46So that's just a good SEO link hygiene, linking from relevant articles to relevant articles internally on your site. but once we had that going our traffic started to climb and I believe that over the last six months you know we so we did a lot of work to get a lot of these articles generated I think up until maybe I think our people were working on this last year for a number of months but in December we kind of stopped working on it and it started to take off so our traffic went from you know maybe 66 clicks a day on some of our content, all the way up to 500 clicks a day on some of our content, and it is now, you know, continuing to grow.

12:33So I think SEO, so I mean, I guess I bring this up to say that this does validate the fact that Google is not deranking AI written content. And I will also be to be fair, I, you know, I was worried that they would. And so I was using things like Quillbot and other tools to try to like hide the fact that it was AI written content. And a lot of it, I would have a, you know, a human go back and read and fact check and whatnot. As soon as I saw an article was starting to rank or get any sort of traffic. But I think that this is just a really interesting case study on the fact that Google is not currently penalizing AI content.

13:10And you can still rank really well do really well using chat GPT. We essentially, you know, almost we're getting close now to it's like 8x now but we're getting close to almost 10xing our daily clicks to our website just by using chatgpd to write a lot of content and so it's been a really big help for organic marketing and i think this is an area that copywriters and people in marketing are going to continue to want to follow and keep a close eye on because i think there is some massive potential for the people that are jumping on this early and doing this now