Capitalizing on the new and emerging technologies when you work in an environment so fast-paced as SEO is essential if you don’t want to lag hopelessly behind. Learning is a constant and never ending process for a SEO marketer. In recent years, thet ‘it’ technology is generative AI. Its uses are numerous and widespread and more and more SEO marketers find themselves in need of mastering ChatGPT and other similar tools for their work. In this article, we will look into details of what ChatGPT can do for you in terms of more efficient link building and how to jumpstart working with it.
ChatGPT Crash Course
ChatGPT is an advanced natural language processing model, created by Open AI company. It is trained to understand and imitate natural human speech and generate a coherent response based on an operator input. In other words, you ask it a question or give it a task and it performs it for you. For example, you can ask it to give you a brief overview of something, explain a complex topic like you’re five, generate code in a particular programming language or organize a huge array of disjointed data into a spreadsheet, thus saving you a ton of manual work. Of course, the most important part here is ‘based on an operator input’. This means that the quality of ChaptGPT’s output still largely depends on how well you formulate your query. Making a query, or as it is usually called, prompt engineering, is a science in itself.
Today, you can access ChatGPT 3.5 for free and a more advanced ChatGPT 4 for $20 a month. The usage is unlimited within these license plans. The differences between ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 include the following:
- ChatGPT 4 includes DALL-E, Open AI’s image generation AI. Although both versions have image generating capabilities, ChatGPT 4 uses more advanced ones.
- ChatGPT 3.5 is trained on data which dates before January 2022
- ChatGPT 4 features significant improvements in understanding context, generating more coherent and contextually appropriate responses, and reducing biases and errors in the output
By the way, this image was generated by us by ChatGPT, as a reply to a query: can you generate a meme about the use of ChatGPT in link building?
After that, we asked ChatGPT to make it more specifically about link building in SEO:
This is just an example to illustrate that refining your query to get a more tailored output, trying out this or that settings combination is the way to work with ChatGPT.
What Can ChatGPT Do for Your Link Building Campaign?
Now, let’s get more specific and see what ChatGPT can actually do for your link building. In fact, quite a lot and covering a very large array of tasks.
1. Analytics and Strategy Refining
One of the major things ChatGPT can help you with is take a birds-eye objective look at your link building strategy, analyze it and give a very firm assessment. The more specific your query is and the more refinements you add to it, the less generic ChatGPT’s recommendations are. It is also perfect for defining blank spots and overlooks in your strategy, which are usually caused by the human factor. Of course, this will require some experience in composing queries and feeding data to ChatGPT, but it is a way of trial and error for everyone. Still, even when you are absolutely sure of your prompt engineering skills, you shouldn’t take ChatGPT’s advice in this respect as an absolute truth, keep in mind that a human still is capable of distinguishing much finer nuances of context than an AI.
2. Automating Communication and Repetitive tasks
Automation is the aspect where ChatGPT’s input can be the biggest and probably most valuable, as it can save a huge amount of time and effort. Especially in areas where things don’t need to be very tailored, like writing template-based responses. ChatGPT can help you automate communication and actually do it with a rather personal touch. This can greatly improve the coverage and the speed of your outreach campaigns and communication with link sources, influencers and partners in general. When it comes to routine tasks done in bulk, ChatGPT can enhance your work by eliminating the chance of a human error.
3. Improve Research
Another area where ChatGPT is of tremendous help is research. AI is much better at Googling than regular search engines and does it quicker by scores. It also has a vast limitless ocean of information at its disposal and is able to process it almost momentarily which far surpasses human capabilities. Another great advantage is that it can tailor the response for you specifically. For example, if you don’t have time to read a huge article, you can just ask ChatGPT to recap it for you. It can explain a very complicated topic in simple words. It can present the data in a format that suits you best, such as infographics, bullet list of key takeaways or a poem. Researching with the help of ChatGPT is also the skill that has the smallest learning curve, so you can start using it in your link building work right away. You can research your competition, link building prospects, strategies and many other things.
4. Content Generation
Texts and images of different styles, various supporting contents such as graphs, tables, infographics, even gifs and videos. All of this can be generated by ChatGPT. There is a caveat of course, usually, it is still largely possible to determine if the content is AI-generated, especially when it comes to images. It does require some degree of visual and contextual experience in the matter, though. But hey, the situations are different. It’s not always that content you do for SEO requires a very personal human touch. Sometimes you need to generate things en masse, for example, headers or anchor texts, short texts or generic press releases. ChatGPT can help you with all that and generally, if your query is precise and specific enough, the output will be of a steadily good quality. The gist here is this: you can use ChatGPT when the uniqueness of content is not the key issue.
For instance, here we asked ChatGPT to write a limerick about link building and a hokku about Serpzilla:
5. Analysis-Driven Decision-Making
ChatGPT can greatly improve your strategy-making process by gathering and organizing analytic data for you (and saving you a lot of time on this research). You can not simply ask it to gather data and present it in a comprehensible way, but also analyze it. For instance, if you have asked ChatGPT to gather the most trending link building resources for your domain, you can also ask it to sort them by relevance to your product, by domain authority and other metrics and create a suggested priority. You can ask it to follow up with a strategy of obtaining links from these resources. You can also analyze your link-building costs and ask ChatGPT to offer budget optimization solutions, alternatives and other means to save money.
6. Backlink Profile Analysis
The good news here is that ChatGPT is capable of analyzing your own or your competitors’ backlink profiles on the level that is on par with the industry standards and you won’t have to pay extra for that. This is especially relevant if yours is a small business and licensed versions of enterprise level tools are way out of your budget. However, there is a catch. For ChatGPT to be able to give out precise, unbiased and fact-checked responses, your queries need to be composed in a certain way and you have to be very knowledgeable about the backlink analysis field in general and metrics in particular. Consider it as one of the more advanced tasks that you can try out when you have gained some good experience working with ChatGPT in simpler and more direct tasks.
7. Audience Engagement
ChatGPT is great in generating responses to users on various forums and social media and this is definitely the task where you can make people feel heard without actually personally reaching to them. A lot of comments usually are typical and require typical answers. ChatGPT is great in making typical answers slightly different, imitating a personal touch.
Best Practices in Using ChatGPT for Link Building
Even if you don’t know the first thing about ChatGPT and have never looked it in the face, it has been trending so much that talks about its ethical use have probably reached you as well. So, chances are you’ve heard that there’s a lot of controversy about using ChatGPT. Here are some best practices that will allow you to use ChatGPT in your line of work with link building in a safe and efficient way.
- Set Clear Objectives
When you very transparently understand what you want to achieve with your link building campaign, how much time and resources you want to spend, when you set up realistic goals, it is much easier to break this strategy into particular tasks and understand which of these tasks can be automated and delegated to AI. This will help you to avoid spending time on ChatGPT with results you won’t be able to use.
- Get Experience with ChatGPT
While working with ChatGPT may seem like a simple exchange of queries and outputs, you will soon realize how sensitive the output is to your input. Before you start with actual serious tasks, try your hand at designing various prompts, refining them and see what works best. Start out with more straightforward tasks and be sure to critically assess any output. For instance, try first to generate relevant arrays of keywords for a particular search query, sort them by various factors such as audience age, location, relevance, etc.
- Familiarize yourself with Ethical Issues and Considerations
There’s much material already about the ethical use of ChatGPT. Open AI claims that ChatGPT 4 has far more improved safety measures against misuse. Still it is important that you are aware of the compliance and ethical issues that exist and are relevant for your jurisdiction.
- Focus on Improvement rather than on Generation
While it’s fun and great to generate various content with ChatGPT, if you absolutely need to avoid the stigma of ‘AI-generated’ and want your content to be unique and human-made, ChatGPT still can help you out a great deal. For instance, you can use it to generate content ideas instead of content, enhance your brainstorming sessions and have it analyze your existing content for areas of improvement.
- Employ ChatGPT in Tasks Where Uniform Content is Required
There are plenty of link building tasks where uniqueness is not an issue, for example, answers in various FAQs and forums, typical social media interactions, guest post pitches and outreach, communication you carry out for link reclamation or broken link fixing, etc. This is where ChatGPT can easily craft typical messages and save you time.
- Continuously Learn and Adapt
AI is the tech sphere that develops faster than average technology progress, in fact, sometimes it’s so fast it takes a specific effort to catch up with it and stay afloat. Make sure you stay tuned about important AI-related developments and monitor their progress. By the way, it’s a perfectly legit task for ChatGPT. Just ask it to give you the digest of all the recent AI news and new developments that are relevant for SEO, link building, and your domain.
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Conclusion
Harnessing the power of Generative AI in link building holds a huge potential. For SEO marketers it is a perfect time to seize the opportunity and to advance their skill sets and greatly optimize their link building routines and workflows.
