I’ve been publicly quiet on my opinions of Chat GPT, the phenomenally successful AI that has set the world alight over the past few months. The reason for that, as always, has been an exceptionally busy work and private life.
Being a single parent with a young child is so rewarding, but does include having to drive 100 miles a week to do the childcare duties, the school run etc. That takes time out of vital working hours and has to be balanced by working odd hours before and after the usual 9 to 5, often with missing valuable lunch hours to make up for lost time.
Additionally, working at a digital marketing agency is intense. It’s not about the hours you do do but the magnitude of the effort you need to put in to the massively varied workload – hosting, domain & DNS management, conducting keyword research, formulating tactics, planning marketing strategies, actually doing the SEO work, both on-page and technical SEO, researching and writing website content, managing colleagues, thinking about, formulating, and writing up processes and procedures, etc. etc. etc.
And then there’s running a small digital studio in the background for almost 25 years where there are occasional DNS, hosting, and email issues to help clients with. I rarely design any longer but have been building an ecommerce website for a friend.
So it’s been a bit busy to talk about the latest AI sensation.
Busy Life? Try ChatGPT
With all that going on, you’d think ChatGPT would be the answer. Well, I did receive the accusation the other day from my SEO deputy “I know you hate ChatGPT” and I instantly corrected that wrong assertion. Here are my thoughts…
Copywriting and SEO
As both a long-term SEO practitioner and a copy writer, my past 20+ years have involved a significant amount of each discipline. I’ve written thousands of articles, blog posts, and news pieces over the past two decades, each well-researched and hand-crafted, always trying to offer readers a comprehensive view of the content presented.
My philosophy of providing helpful content was in place long before Google’s recent “Helpful Content Update” algorithm. In fact, I can anchor it to a point in time being around 2007. At that time I worked at a newsdesk, publishing another agency’s content on the website I managed. The content was “thin” and I looked at it from a user’s perspective – did it tell me all I wanted to know, was it credible, did it cite sources, did it link to those resources, could I download the report it talked about or visit the websites of those mentioned, read more, download something?
My MD at the time had a similar approach to commerce and, when I proposed new ideas, primarily website features, he always asked if it passed the “so what” test. For those of a certain age “so what?” was a harsh retort. But as a simple business tool, it helps – Is your idea going to make a difference to the company’s bottom line?
Going back to the thin content we paid for, the vast majority of the time the answer to all those questions about being comprehensive, helpful, and beneficial, was a simple “no”. So I presented my findings to the board, passed the “so what” test, and took the news provision in-house. It was a great success. For the next 8 years I managed a newsdesk that often beat many much larger competitors in terms of ranking and traffic. Copywriting and SEO skills took the business to ever new heights and it was a lot of hard graft. Glory days indeed.
That Content Farm Feeling Again
In the midsts of my hardcore content and SEO days, other website owners latched on to the concept – produce tons of content and rank well in the Search Engine Rankings Pages (SERPs). This was the dawn of the “content farm”. Websites lured in hapless writers with offers of $5 per article, or $5 per 300 words. People churned out content and websites filled up with this endless “stuff”. The now de-famed Tour de France cyclist Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong website at the time was about cycling and cancer survival. It turned into a content farm full of irrelevant junk, WikiHow published some 30 different posts about “how to boil an egg” and dominated every long-tail ranking for these terms, all just to get the ranking and traffic.
It was a strange time. I lurked in the forums where posters would all try and game the SERPs. I saw so many tactics to boost website rankings including triangulation, link farms, etc. Content farming was a big topic at the time. It even got the attention of Google’s then CEO Eric Schmidt who called the internet “a cesspool”, from the fact that there was so much rubbish online.
I feel that those times have come back.
Using Chat GPT to Churn Out Content
It’s that content farm feeling again. Since its launch in late November, the web has been awash with talk about Chat GPT. It’s a brilliant tool and has been used for everything from writing job applications to dissertations. And it has fooled a lot of professionals and even the systems designed to detect AI-generated content.
In the world of websites and SEO I’ve seen tutorials on “how to generate 563 blog posts in a day”. I feel that we are experiencing those dark days of the content farms again. Maybe that’s why I was accused of “hating” ChatGPT. I don’t. But nor am I in love with it either.
It is a tool. And tools can be used for both good and for ill. I can see the time-saving uses of ChatGPT and have used it to create outlines for content, to do general research for articles. But I am reticent about using it for generating content. That’s not because it’s supposedly a threat and will “take away” my copywriting skills from me because I will always have those. It’s about the fact that those who cannot think, research, or create using their own skills will rely on AI to do this all for them. It’s lazy. And it’s cheating.
The same person who said I’m anti-ChatGPT is an evangelist who is both very intelligent and has put ChatGPT through its paces, even training it, as you’re supposed to do with generative pre-trained transformers, to copy others’ tone of voice.
ChatGPT Doesn’t Have…
Whilst ChatGPT is incredibly versatile it does not have people’s memories nor their experience. If you haven’t written something down and published it on the web, as ChatGPT uses for its sources, then how can it ever “draw from experience”? It has none. There can be no “when I were a lad” tales nor funny anecdotes because those are exclusively human. AI can be trained to pretend it has those traits, but in the end it is artificial.
ChatGPT cannot write in the style of many people from previous generations because there is very often nothing “publicly available”. As stated at the beginning of this post, it’s the same here too. I do not journal publicly every day, so any “me” to train from and pretend to be me does not exist. The only person who can tell you my tales of the last 25 years as an SEO is… me.
E-E-A-T
And this is exactly where ChatGPT fails to fulfill E-E-A-T criteria. E-E-A-T is Google’s framework for content, from web pages to full websites. Does the content display experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust?
ChatGPT has no first-hand experience of doing SEO for the past two decades. ChatGPT did not build its first website in 1998. ChatGPT could possibly be “an authority” on a subject, except, again, where are more than twenty years worth of knowledge other than that scraped from other sources? As for being trustworthy, it’s commonly known that ChatGPT suffers from “illusions”. LLMs are only as good as their training data, and if there was anything that got vacuumed up in a crawl that was simply not correct, it can be regurgitated.
So only you, as a professional, has all the authentic traits to demonstrate E-E-A-T. Remember that and use your experience and expertise liberally.
Google, Microsoft, and More?
Whilst ChatGPT may very well have “taken the world by storm” it is not the be-all and end-all. Whilst Nir Eyal says “first to mind wins”, other LLM-backed chatbots will turn up. And just as Google dominates search and Microsoft very much wanted to, so ChatGPT will be challenged for its crown.
Google has already issued an internal “code red” which is an existential alarm alerting staff that ChatGPT is a threat. And so Google Bard is the Mountain View giant’s version of ChatGPT. My Spanish PPC Manager did ask what on earth a bard was – I explained along the lines of a musical storyteller, a wandering minstrel if you must, and he just didn’t like the idea, which is fair. A rival to ChatGPT should be some sort of Oracle, although there are potential legal and IP issues there with the Texas IT behemoth.
As for Copilot, it’s ChatGPT for Microsoft, quite literally white-labelled as Microsoft is a heavy investor in OpenAI, ChatGPT’s creator.
Tonight, Matthew, I’m a Prompt Engineer
Another great outcome of the emergence of ChatGPT is those early adopters who are trying to become the tool’s new experts. I see this happen with every new tech release as everyone races to be the first to produce, in this case, the “ChatGPT cheat sheet” or the “ChatGPT prompt sheet”.
It was a huge fad with Web2.0 as social media and User Generated Content (UGC) made it big. The number of people that positioned themselves as “social media gurus” was quite amusing, especially in the very early days. “I know how to use something” was a huge boast, and an amusing one with tools so feature-poor in their infancy.
Still, it proved good for many, and I’m probably only envious that I don’t have the time to throw myself into adding guru mode to my SEO game play. I’ll stick to being slightly behind the curve, ignoring the discarded fails and picking up the real wins.
But prompt engineering is quite funny – I know how to ask questions is the new godmode.
Conclusion
It’s early days yet, very early days. And aside from churning out content and simple HTML, ChatGPT is useful for generating title tags, meta descriptions, keyword and competitor research. It’s not a fully-fledged SEO helper just yet, but I’m sure we’ll find uses for it.
Watch this space…
If you want to leverage AI for your business and still benefit from 25 years of SEO experience, call me on 07730 499 539.