GPT and local SEO //

ChatGPT is able to assist with many SEO tasks. “Help”, being operative.

It is important to recognize that:

• ChatGPT may be able to help you with a few tasks that you are currently performing.
• Understanding how to make the most of AI tools (and how to avoid the pitfalls) will become a valuable SEO and marketing skill.
• ChatGPT is plagued with many issues and warts. ChatGPT (or any other AI tool) can’t perform all functions without your supervision.

These are all the same rules for local SEO. ChatGPT was not designed to be a tool for local SEO. ChatGPT will not be able to perform certain local SEO tasks as well as other tools.

ChatGPT is able to help with many local SEO tasks. Some of these may surprise you. This article will discuss four areas where ChatGPT can and cannot help.

1. ChatGPT and Google Business Profiles

Local businesses have many options for optimizing their Google Business profile (GBP).

ChatGPT is not able to interface directly with your listing. However, it can help with the following:

Categories of the Google Business Profile

You can quickly get ideas for categories by looking at the work of your competitors. Let’s find out if ChatGPT could help.

This is a good list of nearby cheese shops. Let’s see what ChatGPT has to say about their GBP categories.

It’s quite impressive and quick! ChatGPT outputs may not always be accurate.

It is not connected to the internet and can sometimes produce incorrect answers. According to the FAQs, it has limited knowledge about the world and events beyond 2021. It may occasionally produce biased or harmful content.

I was curious to know how this information came about.

Uh-oh. ChatGPT isn’t connected to the internet.

This is a topic I have already highlighted. However, if you ask ChatGPT how it got the answer, it will often give a summary of how one might get it. It can’t be exactly how ChatGPT got it.

This was also the case in this instance:

Okay, now tell me how ChatGPT generated these categories.

It was right! It was able to see that two of the ChatGPT competitors listed aren’t.

ChatGPT’s local SEO capabilities are severely limited by this. The information it has access will often be out of date, so you need to be careful with the outputs.

You should not use the tool to find out information about local businesses.

ChatGPT can help with idea generation, provided you are willing to vet them.

Google Posts Content

ChatGPT can be used to create posts for your business profile if you remember what Google has said about AI content, and all its potential downsides.

This is a great option, as many local businesses have employees who are busy and can wear multiple hats. Writing may not be the best skill for some.

ChatGPT does not currently follow your specified word count or character counts. The output will generally correspond to what you asked. However, if you provide 750 words, it may return 400-500 results.

It’s not bad at all! You can see that ChatGPT listed several types of cheeses in the post. Make sure you check! Your prompt will produce a better output if you provide as much information as possible.

Videos

ChatGPT can help you with video content ideas.

You could use it to help you write a script for your video.

Products

ChatGPT is able to create descriptions in GBP for your product features

Questions and answers

ChatGPT can also be used to answer questions in your Google Business Profile’s question and answer section. Be careful.

ChatGPT might incorrectly state certain things in this section. It’s better to answer them yourself if you have the time and are able to write concisely.

ChatGPT is able to help you structure your answers if you have difficulty writing them and have many questions. Make sure to correct errors.

Your prompt should have better context to produce useful results.

You can edit the answer to make it more like how you want to answer these questions.

2. ChatGPT and Google reviews

Local SEO is all about getting as many high quality reviews as you can. ChatGPT is a great tool that can help.

To encourage reviews, create an email template

You can get customer reviews by emailing and handing out handouts.

Make sure you are familiar with Google’s guidelines for user reviews so that ChatGPT outputs comply with these guidelines.

(As you might have guessed from the previous warnings, you need to proceed cautiously and vet your output!)

Analysis of review sentiment

ChatGPT can quickly highlight the best and worst reviews. This can be very useful for local businesses in several ways.

• You can highlight positive testimonials or problems by quickly listing the worst and best reviews. Different customers have different standards when it comes to star ratings. You might be able to identify a problem in a 3-star review or find great quotes from a person who left a 4-star rating by looking at sentiment.
• You can also see the customer reviews of competitors to yours and get a quick idea of what they love or hate about your store. This information could help you decide what marketing copy to include or how to improve your business.

You will need to insert reviews into multiple prompts if you have more than 2,000 characters. This can be corrected using the API.

I then copied all of the reviews that I had grabbed, and pasted them into ChatGPT. Each chunk was approximately 2,000 characters. You can export your reviews to your GBP account. Copy-paste and scrape reviews from competitors.

Here’s the output

This section is great for anyone with many reviews. You could also combine reviews from your competitors to make it easier to analyze.

If it were my business, I could get positive reviews to put on a store poster and testimonial page on my website. Negative reviews can help me identify specific problems that need to be addressed.

However, if there were only one competitor, or a group, I would also have good takeaways.

• Cheese lovers in the area want variety, knowledgeable staff, and high-quality cheese. This may seem obvious, but I can highlight those features in my marketing around my store. This analysis may reveal a certain item or feature that is unique to my space.
• Imagine people getting frustrated by the quality, pricing, or policies of their competitors. These things can be highlighted in my marketing copy with a slogan or quality guarantee offer.

Response to reviews

ChatGPT is a great resource for reviewing reviews and can help you get started if you are unsure of what to write.

Here’s an example of a positive review response:

Negative reviews are also welcome

3. ChatGPT and on-page local SEO

ChatGPT is a tool that can assist with traditional content, SEO tasks and some keyword research prompts.

These can also be applied to local SEO tasks.

Topic ideas

ChatGPT is a great way to start brainstorming ideas, but you will need to validate it against a keyword research tool that includes competition and search volume data.

To get some ideas for general topics, I prefer to use a few broad prompts.

They also write about the following topics:

You can then get more topic ideas for your website:

It’s not bad at all! This is a great starting point for ideas.

Schema

different schema might be appropriate for your site depending on your business type. ChatGPT will help you quickly create the schema.

ChatGPT-generated schemas can be unpredictable. Make sure you have someone to QA the code.

This data will become available in 2021. If you have any questions about address, phone number or hours, please either manually input them or use another tool.

Locator pages

Be careful with location pages after recent Google updates . However, they can still be useful for local businesses if done correctly.

(Be sure to follow the steps before you create many pages containing ChatGPT-generated content for specific locations.

We can first quickly compile a list with the names of all the towns.

We can then get a list relevant terms (basically what we have determined our core keywords be):

ChatGPT can give us information about the shop and its relationship to the town.

Some information may not be correct or out of date, so I will verify it. These are still great additions to my town-specific page on my cheese shop. These are just a few ideas of business types I can think of.

ChatGPT can also generate meta descriptions for these pages when I’m ready to make them live on my website.

4. ChatGPT and link building in your area

Local Links and Citations are key signals to local search.

You can find ideas for organizations you would like to sponsor if you are willing to review the lists.

Award to win or join organizations:

ChatGPT is also available to give me a feel for the top websites in my area.

They also write about local businesses.

It is obvious that openings, new offerings and charitable donations are all highlighted on these sites. This could be a great idea to pitch for a story.

ChatGPT can also be used to assist you in writing outreach emails, whether you are pitching stories or looking for a resource.

Keep in mind the key features of ChatGPT and you will be able to find other apps for the platform that can help you make your local SEO efforts more efficient and effective.

The post ChatGPT can help you with local SEO was first published on Search Engine Land.