I was watching a podcast with Seth Godin on as a guest and I think he summed up where we are with AI in the marketing world perfectly.
“…what AI is capable of doing right now is replacing an enormous range of mediocre human work…”
And that is the big pitfall I see many SEOs and website owners stepping into.
I love ChatGPT (and Claude and Perplexity and Watson…), but everyday I’m seeing SEOs misuse it.
Even worse, I’m seeing “SEO influencers” and “gurus” share ideas and prompts that just flat out won’t work with today’s AI large language models (LLMs).
Here are some common mistakes I’m seeing SEOs make in using AI for SEO. I’m going to focus on ChatGPT, but these same mistakes apply whether you are using ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or any of the other LLMs out there.
Mistake #1: Telling ChatGPT it is an expert
I see this one all the time, and it is one way I quickly separate people who really know how to use tools like ChatGPT from those who really do not understand how LLMs work.
🚨 Whenever you see someone share a prompt that starts with “You are an SEO expert with 20 years of experience…” it is a red flag. Alarms should go off. You can probably safely ignore anything else they have to share.
Telling ChatGPT it is an expert in something doesn’t make it true or make it suddenly become one.
And it certainly has no idea what the difference is between an SEO with 20 years of experience and one with 2 years of experience.
💡 You can get it to behave a little more like an SEO expert if you give it more context and guidelines to work with.
✅ For example, I have several documents I have put together over the years that include SOPs and strategies I like to follow when doing different SEO tasks. I can attach these files as knowledge for ChatGPT to follow to behave a little more the way I would want it to; in short, like me.
Mistake #2: Asking ChatGPT to behave as if it had access to data it simply does not have
This is the second most frequent mistake I see among those in the SEO community sharing prompts and ways of using AI for SEO.
🚫 Take a prompt like “What are the most popular search terms around the topic of project management tools?”
💡 ChatGPT has no access to search data in Google, Bing, or any other major search engine. It also has no search data from a tool like Semrush.
I actually saw someone a few weeks ago share a collection of prompts on LinkedIn that contained this “gem”:
🤦♂️ Sadly, this post had hundreds of likes, 100+ reposts, and 200 comments.
Will it give you an answer? Yes. ChatGPT will rarely say that it cannot do something or suggest that it lacks the data to provide an accurate answer to a question you pose to it. Instead, it will happily hallucinate results for you.
Is ChatGPT useless for keyword research? No. Absolutely not.
👋 But be aware when it comes to keyword research that ChatGPT cannot do things on its own such as:
- give you search volumes
- identify search intent
- tell you the best long-tail keywords to target
- tell you what topics or keywords your readers will like more
However, it is absolutely great for brainstorming keyword and topic ideas.
👉 But you need to dig deeper into those keywords and do further research.
What you can do is combine what it provides with a tool like Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool to build a list of keywords, export that list into a CSV file, then feed that file back to ChatGPT.
You can chat with that file and ask it questions about the keywords and it has some actual data to analyze and work off of.
Now you are cooking with fire 🔥🔥.
Ask it things like to cluster terms together, design a content plan around those terms, or determine which terms it recommends prioritizing and why.
Bonus: Mistake #3: Asking ChatGPT to write articles
Since AI writers first launched, going back to before ChatGPT, people have been trying to get it to write articles for them.
I’m sure you have seen people sharing prompts like this one:
Write a 1,000 word article about “how to create an online content strategy”.
I remember a lot of people gushing over the content they were creating with JasperAI with prompts like this a few years ago.
If you actually read any of the content these prompts generated, it was terrible.
First, it would never hit the word count asked for.
Second, it would only write very boring surface level sort of content. Lots of headings with just 2-3 sentences under each.
Well, although LLMs like OpenAI’s have come a long way in just a few years, these sorts of prompts still don’t work well.
Does that mean you cannot generate good content with AI? No. Not at all.
👉 However, you can’t do it in just one prompt.
🧑💻 You need to create a real workflow just like a writer would.
An example workflow for generating AI content might look something like this:
- Ask ChatGPT to research a topic. You can either ask it to search the web itself or feed it articles you want it to understand and utilize in its thinking.
- Now tell it using this research that you want it to create a content brief for a piece of content about the topic you have in mind. Be specific. Explain your goals for the piece of content and who you are trying to reach. Give it a template of what a content brief should look like. I’ll attach an example of what I mean by a content brief below.
- Give ChatGPT specific writing and brand guidelines. These include tone, style, etc. It’s a good idea to set up a specific writer GPT for each separate project you work on with these guidelines and any other necessary instructions embedded in its knowledge.
- Using your writer GPT, feed it your content brief and ask it to write one section at a time. Have it expand on sections or rewrite parts as you see necessary.
- Once you are finished, you can also run it through Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant or a tool like Frase for additional suggestions.
Example content brief:
