ChatGPT or AI is everywhere these days. While they can be extremely useful tools, they aren’t always 100% accurate. For this blog post, I ask ChatGPT to provide me with “Common SEO questions.” I share the questions and short answers the AI chatbot provided me with and share my thoughts on the accuracy of the answer.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of optimizing your website to improve its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
I can’t refute much of this answer as it is a softball question.
Why is SEO important?
SEO is crucial because it increases your website’s visibility, drives organic traffic, and helps build credibility and trust with your audience.
In short, none of this is wrong. I feel like this is a short pitch answer where as there is more to SEO than just these four items. SEO is also important because it can help your business target it’s traffic to the right audience as opposed to simply “drive organic traffic.” SEO is also important for helping improve user experience through technical SEO, which this answer does not mention.
What are keywords and why are they important?
Keywords are words or phrases that people use in search engines. They are important because they help search engines understand the content of your website and match it with relevant searches.
I think the answer needs to go into more detail about using phrases as keywords. Nowadays, a whole question is so commonly input into a search engine as opposed to a word or two.
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to optimizing individual web pages to rank higher. It involves elements like meta tags, headers, content, and internal links.
If you’re learning about SEO and don’t have much knowledge in the area, I’d find this answer to be very confusing. What is a meta tag, what are headers, what is considered content and who knows what in the world an internal link is.
What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO involves activities outside your website to improve its ranking. This includes link building, social media marketing, and influencer outreach.
First sentence, is fully true. I have a lot of problems with the second sentence and feel like this answer does not help an individual learn about off-page SEO.
How does link building impact SEO?
Link building increases your site’s authority and credibility by getting other websites to link back to yours. High-quality backlinks can significantly improve your search rankings.
This answer does not share what link building is. Link building was mentioned in the previous answer, but again, if you are new to the industry or learning, this answer leaves you with more questions.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO focuses on improving the technical aspects of a website, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and the correct use of robots.txt and sitemaps.
This answer is lacking. It does not mention Core Web Vitals, which Google now focuses on. While site speed is important and a mobile-friendly website is a must, there is a lot more to technical SEO that needs to be looked after.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO focuses on optimizing your online presence to attract more business from relevant local searches. It includes claiming your business listings and optimizing for local keywords.
This is the basis for local SEO, but it doesn’t mention utilizing local schema markup as a powerful tool for local SEO.
What is a sitemap and why is it important?
A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website. It helps search engines crawl your site more efficiently and find all your content.
While true, I think this could be confusing to someone who has never seen a sitemap before. It is possible they could just create a new page on their website that lists all the pages on the site, but that is not what Google, or any search engine, is looking for here.
What is the difference between organic and paid search results?
Organic search results are unpaid listings that appear based on their relevance to the search query. Paid search results are advertisements that appear at the top of or alongside the organic results.
The search engine results page is so much more than just organic and paid search results now. There are local listings, answer boxes, and even AI-generated answers, which makes this question and answer seem too simplistic.
How long does it take to see results from SEO?
SEO is a long-term strategy, and it can take several months to start seeing significant results. The timeline varies based on the competitiveness of the industry and the effectiveness of the SEO efforts.
I believe this is one of the most accurate answers to this list of questions.
With the message I sent ChatGPT, I received a lot of short answers for each of these questions. Due to this, I found it hard to find much wrong with the answers; the larger issue is they were lacking in much detail that doesn’t make them very beneficial for a user. When I did ask ChatGPT to answer some of these questions individually and received longer answers is when I noticed some issues with the answer.
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