Can ChatGPT or Claude teach you how to do SEO? Can AI do SEO for you?

Do you find yourself wondering if Claude or ChatGPT (or another AI tool) can either teach you how to do SEO or just do it for you? If so, you're not alone. I get the appeal. I really do. I recently tested out both Claude and ChatGPT to see if they could either teach me SEO or do SEO on a website and have it work. Listen in to see what I found out and learn what AI can help you with and what it's limitations are when it comes to SEO. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. It's Rachel here, and I'm so glad you're here with me again today. Let's jump right in because today we're going to talk about can Claude or chat GPT or another AI tool teach you how to do SEO and do it in a way that it will work. You will be visible, you will get traffic, your business will grow. And it takes all that extra time and effort and everything off of you because let's be real, it sounds super appealing as we talk about it right now, doesn't it? So let's figure out, because I'm getting this question more and more often, and I'm using AI tools in my teaching for simple SEO content students, and I've got them using them in many different ways to speed the process up, but. Can it teach you? Can it do it for you? So I ran an experiment recently because I really wanted to be able to see, is it possible, are we at the point now that AI can teach you how to do all of this, which would save you time and effort? All sorts of things. So I went and I took one of my new students' websites and I logged into chat and I also logged into Claude. And I said, I want you to help me learn how to do SEO. I wanna do SEO on my website. This is my site. And so I gave it the site and I asked each of them. Kind of to walk me through, what do I do? Can you teach me how to do SEO on this website? And they both said, sure, of course. Absolutely. Like they were so confident that they could teach me how to do this. So I was like, oh, okay, maybe this is gonna work. Let's see what's going on. So it went through. And each tool gave me recommendations. And honestly, the recommendations were fairly similar. I'm gonna talk more about what chat GPT recommended than what Claude recommended, but they were pretty similar. So chat, GPT said, sure, I can absolutely help you with this. I would love to. I know all about SEO. And so it told me all sorts of things that I needed to do if I was this business owner to help my website rank higher on Google. It walked me through. I should choose key words. I should use them in these different places. I should create content. It went as far as to give me recommendations for what type content to create. What was interesting to me is neither tool asked me a single question. Neither one of them asked me did I know what the domain authority of the site was. Had I tried to do any SEO on it before, had I considered any key words? Neither of them asked me anything about my competition, my niche, my ideal customer, none of that core foundational strategy. Ever came into play with anything that the AI tools asked me or recommended. 'cause honestly, they didn't ask me anything. They just gave me blanket recommendations following best practices. Kind of, sort of, some of it was even a little outdated was things that would get you in trouble with Google today, but like there was this. Crazy amount of information, and honestly, even for me, as somebody who's been doing this for 15 years, I found their responses overwhelming because it was like, yes, I can teach you how to do it, and then it walked through basically. Everything you would wanna do. And then it started telling me to make some changes to the site, and I could tell they weren't even checking out the site because it was like, well, you probably have this, you probably have that. Your calls to action might look like this. They might look like that. So it was just this very general information. It was not tailored specifically to the site. The other thing that I saw. As I kinda slowed it down and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's go through this a little slower. Let's actually like focus on it. Let's see. You know, can we do just the homepage for this site? So then it started giving me, giving me keyword recommendations. And what was amazing to me is again, it gave me keyword recommendations, but it didn't ever ask me. About the industry, the niche, the ideal customer who we wanted to connect with, um, how authoritative the website was, what type keywords we wanted to rank for it. Never asked for anything. It just scanned the site and said, oh, it looks like you do X. And so then it gave me all of these recommendations. Now, the site that I. Was a student who is a financial coach and she works with entrepreneurs, helping them to really understand their numbers. So as we're going through this, it's telling me, don't go after financial coach. Don't go after this. Don't go after that. Try this word instead, do this word instead. And I would ask it like, why? How do you know that this one will work for me? And it would give me all this reasoning, but again, it wasn't understanding my niche, my person, my anything. Then the more interesting part was it started to hallucinate. It started making stuff up. It actually started talking about, well, you are right. You know what? This one, we should go after X, Y, Z, because I know that's your niche. And it's like, no, that's not the niche. That has nothing to do with the niche that actually is somebody else. So it was giving recommendations that were not even for this same student site, because it really didn't know what was going on. Then it also, at one point completely changed the niche, so it was giving recommendations for keywords. Then it also cut out half of the potential reach for this business because it suddenly started suggesting doing things like financial coaching for women entrepreneurs rather than just financial coaching for entrepreneurs. Great, if you want to target and only work with women, but this coach does not only work with women, so. Yes, they can help, but they can't teach you how to do it. They're going to give you so much information at once that it is completely overwhelming. Plus, there's nowhere to ask, like really? You can ask it a question and get clarification, but. If you've played around with the tools very much, you know that when you ask it a question or you call it on something, it will just kind of apologize and say, oh yeah, you got me. I should have thought of that. And then it'll give you a whole other huge list of things to do, and half the time it changes its recommendations completely. And so you end up, I ended up feeling incredibly frustrated with it, and I'm like, okay, I know how to do this. I know what questions to ask. I know what it's missing. And I cannot make this work. So as somebody who's brand new, who doesn't know what questions to ask, who doesn't know where to go, who doesn't know how to do all of these things, who's trying to learn it for the first time? I fear that it's gonna be incredibly overwhelming. But I also fear that the problem is that you don't have the background knowledge to know what it's missing or what it's telling you. That's incorrect. One of the things that I've seen pop up recently, and it's a recommendation coming specifically from chat GPT, I'm seeing sites that have white text on top of white background. Now, this is an outdated tactic, but it's something that chat, GPT obviously was trained on somewhere because they get some good and some bad information. We're gonna be honest. So this is considered black hat, which is considered a cheater tactic. It's something called cloaking, and that's when you create content. You have words, but you can't read them on the actual website because you put them on the same color background, so they're only there for the search engine. They're not there for the visitor. That's against Google's rules and has been against Google's rules since I think 2012. So it's been against the rules for a long, long time, and it's something that's starting to pop up as chat. GPT is teaching people how to do SEO. So the bottom line with the experiment that I did, honestly, it was very fun. I had a good time. I enjoyed it because I got to look and see. And understand what can these tools do? What are their limitations? Is there anything more that I can train? 'cause I've created two custom GPTs for my students. I've got guidebooks that teach them how they can use those tools. And I wanted to see was there anything else that they could do to make it easier for them? But what I've come to realize after doing this test is like, no. There really isn't. You do need to be the one who's in control of your overall strategy. You need to be the one who's determining what keywords you're gonna use on your site, and you have to take the time, and it does take a little bit of time to understand how to choose the right keywords, how to pick the right ones, because again, remember we have to think about like. What words is our ideal customer searching with? Which of these words would represent the best opportunity for our business? Which ones tie the closest to our products and services that people are gonna search with, that we could potentially rank for? You know, high on Google's page one that we could potentially create the right type of content for to be included in AI overviews and all of that. There's so much that goes into it. There's so much nuance, especially to keyword research, that it's really important that you understand that. And I know it's hard at first, and it takes a little while to wrap your head around it, but once you understand it and you're doing it on a regular basis, it becomes really easy. What you can do, so don't have chat. GPT or Claude teach you how to do SEO. They're gonna tell you they can do it and they're gonna be so confident and so friendly. You know, they are friendly tools, but they don't know your business. They don't know your niche. They don't really know live. Insights as to what's happening in the search results right now for your particular keyword or your niche. This is the part that still needs to be manual for right now. I'm hoping that at some point in the next couple of years, they will be better at this part of it, and I keep testing it in different ways, trying to see is there a way we can use them to do the keyword research part. So far there's not, but. Go ahead and use them to help you once you've figured out what you're targeting. So join me in simple SEO content. Let me teach you how all of this works. And then use the custom GPT that I've created because they're gonna stop you. They're gonna ask you questions. They're going to say, okay, I can help you with keyword research, but who are we trying to target? Which, you know, what's the website? What information do they need to know because they're trained? To make sure that they have the right information to help you so that they're not changing your niche on you. They're not cutting half of your reach by moving you to female entrepreneurs only. They're not hallucinating and changing your niche completely from entrepreneurs. To entrepreneurs who make six figures and still feel broke because that's literally what they did, what chat GPT did as I was working on this, trying to figure out if it could help me optimize this page for this particular student. So I know it's really exciting and the thought of doing it is very appealing. Having a tool do it for you, especially when it's something that's like, you know, I don't really know that I wanna learn how to do this. But I wanna remind you, this is the most important part of your online visibility. Do not outsource your strategy for what type of content you're creating, what you're doing on your website, which keywords you're targeting. Really own that part of it. And then use the tools to help you. So we use the tools to write title tags and meta descriptions. We use them to brainstorm content ideas. We use them to. Brainstorm AI search optimization tips. Um, we use them for content outlines. We use them to review like our blog post versus somebody else's to help us understand why they're ranking higher than us. All of that type stuff, we can use it for. The ones that I've created are trained how to do that following best practices, following everything that you've learned in the program. But your chat, GPT, your claw, your perplexity computer. Now, if you wanna invest in perplexity computer. Have at it, but it's $2,400 a year right now. It does say that it can do some of this, but I'll be honest, I've not tested it because at that price point, my students are not gonna be buying it. They are targeting that product. So you may have seen those ads on social media. You may be getting them on Facebook or Instagram. That target market for that product is really enterprise, which means like the agencies that I used to work for, or the type clients that we worked for, where they have a large team and they're using that to kind of parse all of their different data and really help them understand what to do from a strategic standpoint. Again, anything that tells you that AI is going to be able to create the content for you. It is not going to be the level of content that you need to rank. Well, in Google's ranking algorithm, we've had several core updates or AI spam updates, things like that from Google over the last couple of years that have really pulled a lot of that low quality AI generated kind of what they're now calling AI slop. They've pulled a lot of that out of the overall. Uh, search index just because it's not high enough quality. So don't have quad or chat. GPT teach you how to do this and then just go straight through it and be like, yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. You wanna tell me what to write? Yeah. You wanna write those blog posts for me? That'd be even better because it's not gonna work. It sounds appealing. I know it does. Believe me, I sit down to write content or to record a podcast and I'm like, man, I wish AI could do this for me 'cause I don't feel like it today. But we have to do it, at least for now. Maybe in the future we won't. But for right now, in order to get the quality of the content that we need to be able to rank, to get the visibility, to get the traffic, to build our businesses, we still have to do this ourselves. So if you have any questions, you wanna learn how to do it, you wanna learn how to do as much as you can with AI helping you doing as much heavy lifting as possible. Join me in simple SEO content. We have a new group that is. Kicking off, we actually are doing a challenge week this week where we're talking about all the different things that are tied to SEO and content and using AI and all of that. So join me in that. I'll put the link in the show notes or in the description. You can also find the link on the website. Go to etched marketing.com/freebies. The very first thing will be the free SEO class. There's a bonus lesson each day this week, as well as webinars tomorrow and Thursday. Plan on joining me in simple SEO content. I'll teach you how to do this. I'll help make sure you have the foundational steps and then I'll show you how much of it you can automate with AI so that you still get the results, but we free up as much of your time as possible. Alright, that's it for today. I'll see you back here next week. Bye for now.