If much of your conversations with your local-direct clients are by phone or email, rather than face-to-face...here's a little tip about how artificial intelligence...ala ChatGPT might be of assistance: Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

COMMENTARY

How AI Can Speed Up Your Search Marketing

• by Scott Walldren , July 28, 2023

The following was previously published in an earlier edition of Marketing Insider.

Because the new AI is conversational, you can train it to follow specific rules, styles, teThe flexibility of ChatGPT can speed up key elements of search marketing, from idea generation to metadata tagging, product descriptions, regional content, and more.

Because the new AI is conversational, you can train it to follow specific rules, styles, terms, and tones. And because ChatGPT retains information about product features, you can automatically apply feature descriptions to different sizes and versions of individual products.

That makes it simple to optimize product pages on your website and Amazon. Instead of writing descriptions, meta tags, page titles and more for each SKU, you can plug ChatGPT into Google Sheets. It will generate accurate tags for thousands of products in minutes.

If you’re stuck on what to write, ask the AI to create a draft you can work from (for example,  “Can you create a punchy 160-character or less meta-description that describes an all-natural foundation makeup product?”). Since ChatGPT can generate content tailored to reading level, you can ask it to create a simpler version (e.g., “seventh-grade level”) to evaluate.

ChatGPT can also streamline the research process. Say you’re researching a product or a SEO topic, and you need to ingest a lot of information at once. You can ask ChatGPT to read a set of articles and summarize what’s different about one vs. the other.

It all works as long as humans are monitoring, revising, and building from the AI output. Don’t let AI write your SEO posts entirely, because Google currently considers such posts to be spam. Content that is overtly keyword-optimized, and doesn’t sound particularly human, will trip the wire.

What’s more, if you use AI to help write a post, Google requires you to disclose it somewhere on the page. It remains to be seen how readers will feel about this—will they look down on a company that admits to using AI to write its content?

Similarly, for anything complex, like a nuanced product description, AI’s role is just to get a human started. Even rote copy and metadata tasks need human screening. AI can miscast facts and use confusing (or offending) turns of phrase. So, run the content through a text-to-speech generator and listen for errors.

ChatGPT is brand new, and right now, we’re all in the trial-and-error phase. One area of great potential is localized SEO content. It’s possible AI can tailor national and/or global messages to individual locations -- unaffordable to do so by hand -- so search draws high-potential clients even more reliably.