Bonus Episode: AI in a Marketer's Workflow with Chris Long

Chris Long is the VP of Marketing for the Go Fish Digital team. He works with unique problems and advanced search situations to help clients improve organic traffic through a deep understanding of Google's algorithm and web technology.

In This Conversation We Discuss: (50 Characters)

• [00:45] Intro
• [01:07] ChatGPT for SEO
• [02:28] ChatGPT for more technical things
• [03:07] Utilizing ChatGPT for auditing
• [04:26] Setting up a Shopify site with the help of ChatGPT
• [06:00] Figuring out your category page strategy
• [07:16] Generating feedback from ChatGPT for page setup
• [08:08] ChatGPT for product reviews
• [08:55] Using ChatGPT to import third-party data
• [09:36] Prompting ChatGPT to create a visualization
• [10:47] Using ChatGPT for CRO and SEO
• [11:29] Embracing AI as marketers
• [12:51] ChatGPT as a baseline for every marketer’s output
• [13:12] Marketers on ChatGPT as part of SEO workflow
• [13:56] ChatGPT vs a strong technical SEO
• [14:55] Weak mathematical functionality of ChatGPT
• [15:26] Verifying ChatGPT’s content accuracy & sensitivity
• [16:00] Checking information quality for health & finance
• [16:34] Drawbacks of taking ChatGPT at face value
• [17:46] Technical skills made accessible by ChatGPT
• [19:01] AI tools help create new custom solutions
• [19:32] How to reach out to Go Fish Digital

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Most-awarded, data-first digital agency in the United States by the Global Search Awards gofishdigital.com/
• Follow Chris Long on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/chris-long-marketing/
• Follow Chris Long on Twitter twitter.com/gofishchris

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Transcript

Chris Long  

I think the ability for ChatGPT to really empower everyone as marketers to become a community of creators.

Chase Clymer  

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. 

And today we're bringing back Chris Long from Go Fish Digital. And we're going to talk about the most hype, fun thing I could think of recently, how to use ChatGPT for SEO. Chris, where do we want to start this conversation?

Chris Long   

Oh, man. Well, first, thank you so much for having me back. And really, yeah, when you think about ChatGPT for SEO, I think to start, a lot of people have a fairly limited view of how to use ChatGPT for SEO. 

A lot of times it's about how I can use ChatGPT to create as much content as possible or to create these long-form blog articles? In the way we've been using that, that's really been less of the way we've been using it, but there are just so many different exciting ways, right? 

From an SEO perspective, you can use it for really almost anything in your day-to-day life that you're working on. So a lot of it's about figuring out your workflow and what fits into your workflow. So great practical applications would be using it for just even basic things like keyword research, right? 

You can use it to figure out and prompt it and say, hey, what are some topics? What are some blog articles I could write around this topic? What are some of the top publications around this topic? And then go source articles from there, right? 

You could use it for feedback on your content, right?

You can use it to give ChatGPT information or your 2,000-word article and say, hey, how do I make this content better? Don't write the content for me, but how can I actually improve the quality of content? You can use it for even more technical things, right? 

If you are comfortable with crawling directives in your Shopify site, you're not sure how to block Google from crawling a certain directory, you can use it to say, Hey, I don't know how to write this robot. Text command. 

Can you write that for me? There's really limitless ways that you can use it for SEO. 

It's just really a matter of finding your individual workflow and then figuring out how you're going to fold into your process.

Chase Clymer   

Absolutely. Let's talk a bit more specific, right? So obviously it's Honest Ecommerce, a lot of our listeners either own or work with an eCommerce store. If you picked up a new client today and they were an Ecommerce store, how would you utilize ChatGPT in an audit? Sure.

Chris Long   

So one of the biggest use cases we found for ChatGPT with Ecommerce sites is scaling, especially title tag and meta description creation. Especially if your site does not have a strong SEO benchmark, and especially if you're a larger site. 

So one of the ways in which we can use it is you can actually set up a Google Sheets function that links to ChatGPT's API, and I can send the link afterward for you all to review. But basically how you set it up is you have a sample prompt at the top of your Google Sheet. 

You set up a custom script that connects to ChatGPT's API. Then you can set up basically dynamic logic that allows you to send information, such as information about your URL, your target keyword, your target title tag or meta description. 

And then you can have that sample prompt to actually say, hey, ChatGPT, here's our URL, here's our title tag, here's our meta description, here's our target keyword. Please create me a title tag for this individual row. 

And then you can use dynamic logic to do that for every single row in the spreadsheet. Basically, what it does then is it makes a drag and drop.

So if you have a large Shopify site, you could basically export all of your collection pages in the Google crawl, set up this function in the very first row, have that logic set up currently, drag and drop, and then ChatGPT will run all of that, all of your prompts through its API and then return sample title tags and meta descriptions. 

In theory, if you had even a thousand page Shopify site or a thousand different collection pages, you could get some type of baseline optimization in about 30 minutes' time between all of them. 

So that's one of the most exciting ways I think the Ecommerce sites can use it, especially if you don't have great SEL. 

Now I'd recommend cross-referencing every single one that you make and checking, does this make sense? What are competitors doing right? Are there better ways to tweak it? Especially with meta descriptions, it's a great way to just get started. 

But it's a great way just to have a baseline thing. So instead of just starting optimizing a thousand products or collections from scratch, you can run it through ChatGPT's API and have a foundation to start from. It's one of the favorite ways we use it for Ecommerce sites.

Chase Clymer   

Absolutely, yeah. I believe I saw a video of you doing this on LinkedIn, and that's what prompted me to reach out to you because I thought it was so cool. 

Now, let's take it a step further. We've got this store and we've optimized the meta tags. We've optimized based upon ChatGPT's recommendations. And we're moving on, what are some more advanced tactics to building your SEO presence on Google if you're starting from zero? 

Which a lot of Ecommerce agencies are when it comes to this... Not Ecommerce agencies, but Ecommerce brands when it comes to SEO. 

Let's be real, most brands are built upon paid. Seo is like an afterthought. So we're talking about a more mature brand. After you do these baseline optimizations, what's usually the next trick? 

And not a trick, but the next step.

Chris Long   

Yes, the next step. And it can be a variety of different things, right? The next step would be one, really figuring out your category page strategy, right? 

So if you're an Ecommerce site and you know you want to sell dresses, for example, or a certain type of dresses, let's say it's wedding dresses, right? You can start using ChatGPT to really figure out how you're going to create content clusters around those. 

So hey, I'm an Ecommerce site that sells wedding dresses specifically to this demographic. Give me recommendations for 50 different category pages that I should be creating. ChatGPT will give you that information. 

As well, you can also use it to get feedback on your current page set up. One of the plug-ins that I've really enjoyed is what's called the Link Reader plugin. 

Function is similar to browsing, but in our experience has just been a little bit stronger. The Link Reader plugin will then give ChatGPT access to actually crawl and access the content of the URL. 

So then what you can start doing is plugging in your URL, competitor URLs and saying, hey, what features in my page? What features can I add to my page to make my site stronger for SEL?

And then it might give you ideas in terms of adding product reviews or in terms of adding internal linking modules or you can do the same with competitors. Hey, this competitor ranks really well. Here's their product page. 

What are they doing that we could be doing on our site? So really having ChatGPT almost acts more like a personal assistant to advise upon your SEO strategy than something that's just creating content. As well, you could use it to get sentiment about product reviews, right? Obviously, you'll have your star rating, but if you're interested and you work on the product team of an Ecommerce site, you might want to know what's wrong with this individual product or what could be improved. You can just export reviews. 

You could export 50 reviews, plug them into ChatGPT, and say, Hey, give me the overall sentiment of how people assess this individual product and then it will create high level highlights for you in terms of common user feedback. 

Those are a couple of the ways that are, especially using that link reader plugin, just that advanced functionality is really helpful. And I guess the final way would also be using ChatGPT for more analysis type of tasks.

Chris Long   

So ChatGPT also has a code interpreter plugin as well. The code interpreter plugin that basically allows you to import third-party data, such as Excel files directly into ChatGPT, and it can do some light analysis. 

An example of something we've used has been basically exporting Google search data from an Ecommerce site and then Google Ads data and then saying, hey, ChatGPT, here's their Google Search Console data, here's the rank, here's our ranking data, our average position, how many clicks and impressions we get, and also in the second tab, here's our Google Ads data that gives you the cost of how much we're spending on Google Ads and the revenue we're generating from given keywords. 

And then making them prompted to do is say, hey, create a visualization of our scatter chart that says, Where do we rank poorly? But we are spending a lot of money in terms of Google ads and are generating a lot of revenue. 

And then ChatGPT's code interpreter will then be able to create you a nice visualization that gives you some really nice visual insights of, hey, you don't rank very well for this individual keyword. Maybe it's bridal wedding dresses, but you spend a lot of money on it, and you generate a lot of revenue from it from Google ads perspective.

Now you can know to fold that more into your SEO strategy. Now you have data to support, hey, we need to really focus on this page because we know it's a key revenue driver for our business.

Chase Clymer   

No, absolutely. That's amazing. I was at a conference in Austin a few months ago for The Whalies, the Triple Whale was putting it on. 

And Sarah Levinger was speaking about psychology in consumer ads, and she was doing something really interesting with ChatGPT who's similar to this. 

This would probably be more for ChatGPT for CRO, I don't know. But she was taking all of the review information from a website and putting it into ChatGPT and then asking it for where are the similarities, where are the fears, uncertainties, and doubts, and finding copy things to help drive hooks for copy and advertising. 

But you could also use this to help drive headlines for SEO to help inform content creation for SEO ranking as well. 

I think you hit the nail on the head, though, ChatGPT can be the best personal assistant when it comes to doing this stuff. 

But you obviously are a huge adopter of this stuff in your workflow and your practice. Do you think ChatGPT or AI, in general, is going to take your job any day soon?

Chris Long   

Yeah, that's a great question. And there's a lot of different headlines on it. 

Everything from AI is going to take all of our jobs to ChatGPT could never replace me. I think the marketers that are on the forefront of this that are learning how to use ChatGPT that are digging in are going to be the ones that are just better set up for the long term, right? 

There's been different marketing trends throughout the year, right? From Web3 to cryptocurrency, all these different concepts. 

I think AI to us is one that's 100 % going to stick and is here to stay. I think that marketers, whether you're on the paid side or the SEO side, whatever, really need to be learning how to embrace AI to empower it to do their jobs better and more efficiently. 

I think those will be the marketers that are set up for success in the long run, the one that can talk to their VP of Marketing and talk about how they can 10X their output or make their output more effective by using these tools. 

Because I believe now, and Ryan Fishkin wrote a great article a while ago about how ChatGPT is now the baseline level of content, right? 

Your content to rank in Google search needs to be at least as good as what ChatGPT can spit out because now that it's been democratized. I'd argue that that goes even further too. 

Our output as marketers needs to be at least what ChatGPT can produce, right? 

Just by default, by some lazy prompting because I think the marketers are going to thrive or are going to be set up for success. 

But we are seeing more and more certainly we have some unscientific data points to suggest that more and more marketers are using it. I took a poll back in March on my LinkedIn and just asked if SEOs were using ChatGPT as part of their regular SEO workflow. 

About 52 % of people said yes that they were, and then retook the poll back in June of this year, so a couple of months after that number changed to 72 % of people said that they were using ChatGPT as part of their regular SEO workflow. 

So we're definitely seeing more adoption of it in the SEO community, likely a lot more adoption across the marketing community as a whole.

Chase Clymer   

Absolutely. Now let's talk about what ChatGPT can't do. It's not true - AI. Artificial intelligence doesn't actually exist. It can only do what it tells you. 

So where are things that ChatGPT falls short and to where you feel that it's good to have an SEO behind this tool to actually help you make informed decisions around your business?

Chris Long  

Sure. So I think the next question with the Ecommerce side, it's that there are certain things you can do with ChatGPT when it comes to technical SEO, but it's very... It could not produce the same level of output as a strong technical SEO could, right? 

ChatGPT is not going to be saying, Hey, here's your Ecommerce pages, and these are the ones that are having indexation issues, and this is the reason why you could probably get close to that. But as a straight out replacement for a technical SEO, I think it's very challenging to do, at least with the current state. 

Not saying it can't get there, though, but that's probably one of the big things in terms of tech SEO. It's harder to replace. As well, I think things where ChatGPT falls short. 

One is math. The math functionality is not amazing. It's not saying two plus2 equals 4 because it knows 2 plus 2 equals 4. It's saying 2 plus 2 equals 4 because everything I've read up until this point suggests that 2 plus 2 equals 4. 

So I'd be very hesitant to use it for really a lot of heavy mathematical functions in that regard.

Of course, there are interpreters, but just using StraightChat to be the GPT-4 for that. You definitely need a plugin or something to use it as well. 

The other thing, of course, is the content accuracy and is the content accuracy. Especially the more sensitive conflicts you're writing about. So if you are having an Ecommerce site and it is a health supplement, you can work on a health supplement of some kind. 

If you are going to path and using it for content generation, you want to be very careful about what ChatGPT is outputting, what you're putting on your site. 

You want your content team, your SEO, whoever's in charge of copy to really verify everything that ChatGPT is writing because it will just make things up and sound very convincing. I think that the information quality is something that, especially as it pertains to health and finance, if your Ecommerce store overlaps with any of those topics, you need to be very careful about the content quality you're outputting because ChatGPT definitely is not always right. 

Even if it's 80 % correct, there's still that 20 % margin of error, which is certainly not insignificant.

Chase Clymer   

Oh, yeah. Chatgpt is a professional bullshiter. I have used it to help me write a lot of content, but I edit it to oblivion. 

It's a fantastic tool for going from zero to one to get rid of that blank page syndrome where you don't know where to start. But I would never publish anything that creates for me without reading it and proofreading it and making it actually say what I wanted to say. 

It's funny how sometimes it just veers off topic.

Chris Long   

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And you'll do a task where you say, Hey, ChatGPT, find someone, Dr. Fee, who's a famous long-term SEO participant, did a session at SearchLab where he talked about how he asked ChatGPT about four examples of CEOs that have forwarded the effectiveness of SEL. 

Chatgpt gave him a very convincing answer with citations. All of them never happened, and those citations, those external links pointed to blank pages that didn't actually exist. 

So obviously taking it at face value can be very, very dangerous and can be a responsible thing to do.

I think the big thing, another big thing for ChatGPT, for SEO, and for really all marketers is that I think one of the biggest powers of it is that it makes technical abilities a lot more democratized, right? 

I don't know how to code, but I was able to create a Chrome extension that's great for basic SEO data from a page, a title tag, meta description, freshness date within about 30 minutes of debugging. 

Our co-founder, Dan Hinckley, was able to take that extension and run it back through ChatGPT's API and get an extension that actually gives SEO suggestions for title tags and meta descriptions that they use directly in the extension. 

Screaming Frog is probably the most common SEO tool that a lot of people use, whatever your level of experience ChatGPT is going to open that tool up, where now you can... You can say, hey, I want to scrape the breadcrumbs structure data from REI's site, write me a sample X-path on how to do that. 

I think one of the biggest benefits for SEO is that if you need a Python script, if you need a screaming frog extract, you need a custom tool or whatever it is, you can have ChatGPT to create that for you.

And as long as it's pretty basic, it can do it. So it might take a little bit of time, QA and debugging, but we've been able to create tools in a matter of days that have taken our team months to create. 

So I think the ability for ChatGPT to really empower everyone as marketers to become a community of creators, I think that's one of the strongest abilities or exciting possibilities of these new AI tools is going to really inform a community of creators and allow us to create custom solutions that we might not have had before.

Chase Clymer   

Awesome. Chris, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your knowledge and true, in the trenches, usability of ChatGPT within SEO. 

If I'm a listener and SEO is a concern of ours in the near future and we want to reach out, what should we do?

Chris Long   

Sure. You can reach out to us at gofishdigital.com. If you're looking for any type of SEO support as well, I post on LinkedIn. I post SEO tips about five times a week, you can follow me on LinkedIn at chris-long-marketing/.

Chase Clymer   

Yeah, Chris is a fantastic LinkedIn follow. Everyone go do that. Chris, thank you so much.

Chris Long   

Thank you so much for having me, Chase. It was awesome.

Chase Clymer   

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

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Until next time!