SEO specialist made redundant by ChatGPT?

Context is everything

“This article was written by an AI in 3 seconds” was an article on RTLnieuws in December 2022. This is both encouraging and problematic.

The positive aspect is that the article was published at the right time for the right target audience. The context was exactly right. People still had little knowledge of this type of AI, and the article immediately shows what it can do.

What is the problem with having texts written by AI? There are plenty of people who use this approach to grow a business online. Think of an SEO specialist who has ChatGPT write texts to quickly create various blogs and publishes them one-to-one because the content is not incorrect. Or a social media specialist who quickly creates and schedules various posts. The pitfall this creates is that producing content gradually becomes an end in itself. Of course, that should not be the case, but when you can get things online in a fraction of the time, it is tempting to step up the pace.

One of the key responsibilities of a marketer is to show the value of the company to your target audience, with the aim of encouraging people to choose your company to purchase a product/service. Whether you are an SEO specialist advising on publishing certain blogs online or, for example, focused on publishing content on social media, you should always take your target audience as your starting point.

Who is leading whom?

AI lacks the context that you do have. You know your target audience. And you can actually use artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT in two ways.

With the first approach, the chatbot leads and you lose your connection with your target audience. An example is: “Give me 5 topics I could write about for people who are considering a new kitchen.” You could then use these as blog posts and on your social media channels. The chatbot is leading here because you passively take in the information and get to work with it. What you receive is not incorrect, but with this type of question, you get little original content and consequently lose your connection with your target audience. If all is well, you can describe your target audience much more specifically.

With the second approach, you build on that. You are leading because you are actively creating content for your target audience. For example, you take the ten most-read blogs or the social media posts most shared by your target audience. You then use AI as a tool to discover patterns behind this success. You can also generate new ideas based on your list, assess them and decide which ones to develop further. It may take more time, but this allows you to address your target audience more effectively and precisely.

Publish with purpose

Publishing with purpose is key. You know which KPIs are important to your company and which KPIs you are responsible for. You also know who your target audience is, and a tool such as ChatGPT can help you with this.

When you use the KPIs as your starting point and have collected the data, you can determine your priorities from there and decide what you want to work on. Think of growth opportunities and areas where you are still underperforming. Once you have mapped this out, you can divide it into various tasks and concrete deliverables, such as creating new landing pages, blog articles and social media posts. Here, the data and your assessment are leading. You can then use the data and insights to guide ChatGPT.

If you want to reach your target audience, it is not about covering ground, but about addressing them at the right time and in the right way. ChatGPT can help you with this process, but your input as a marketer remains crucial.

At Aspen Digital, specialists are already accustomed to working with (search)data and translating this into concrete actions to achieve optimal visibility in Google. The time-consuming factor is not always writing an advisory report or a blog article, but the analysis process that precedes it. AI is merely a tool for this process and can speed it up, but it is certainly not a replacement for the specialist, because you as a specialist know the context and the objective.