ChatGPT vs SEO

Hey there,

ChatGPT has been the talk of the town in all of 2023. Honestly, I love it too. I enjoyed building some really cool products using it.

But, it has also raised a few questions. Is it the end of Google? Specifically, is it the end of SEO?

I am sure you are asking yourself: should we even focus on SEO as a marketing channel?

My answer: YES.

You see, I love SEO too. It drives 600,000+ in monthly traffic, resulting in 50%+ of leads for Flexiple.

I will tell you why I believe SEO will survive and how ChatGPT will affect it. Not just that, I will also share 21 lessons on how you can dominate SEO.

Ok, back to ChatGPT vs. SEO.

Generative AI needs Creators

First, let me get this out of the way. Will ChatGPT affect SEO? Absolutely. There is no doubt. Generative AI as a whole will eat up some share from “search”.

BUT, Generative AI itself also depends on the ecosystem of Google Search.

You see, it is this ecosystem that incentivizes creators to buildd an ever-expanding knowledge base on the web. And Generative AI feasts on this freely available knowledge to increase its own capabilities.

So, the collaboration between Google and creators will thrive. It has to. With it, even SEO will.

ChatGPT as the frontend

ChatGPT (technically, “GPT”) is a language model. Basically, its goal is to generate human-like text through prediction. And there is no denying that using GPT generates really well-written content.

So, that is only what it should be used for: “to write content”. Beyond that, we should power it with our own “knowledge base”.

For e.g. Say you are a travel blogger. Using ChatGPT to directly generate a blog on “Best places to visit in Portugal” is the wrong approach.

Instead:

• You should write about your unique experiences & opinions yourself without worrying about the quality of your writing.

• Then, use that as the source of knowledge and ChatGPT as the content writer to generate a blog.

Of course, you can extend this example to any industry or niche. The marketers who do this will be the SEO winners.

Quality on the web will improve

Overall, ChatGPT will force the average quality of content to improve on the web. With everyone having the power of GPT to write their content, fluency of writing is likely to become a point of parity.

As a result, Google (& other search engines, lol) will focus on the overall knowledge base of your website. Not so much on the general written presentation of your content.

What should I do as a business owner?

Well, I am sure that’s the main question you want the answer to. Here’s my summary:

1. Start using ChatGPT as the content creator right away for your SEO efforts.

2. However, use it only as the front end. Use it to write & present information beautifully, but it should be powered by your own knowledge base.

Long-term, each website ranking on Google search will be a version of ChatGPT running on its own knowledge base.

21 SEO lessons to dominate SEO

With that in mind, you still need to know the rules of SEO to dominate the game.

So, I documented the lessons that I learnt from scaling Flexiple’s traffic from a few hundred to >600,000/mo.

Instead of sharing it as a long text, I thought it would be much easier to digest as a mind map. So, here you go:

Here’s a high-res version of it: Mindmap link

Best,
Karthik

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