Why ChatGPT may not help SEO — Explained by a simple example

There have been a lot of posts about how to use LLMs — ChatGPT, Bard, Claude — to help with SEO, especially to generate or extend keywords on a page. For example, an LLM may give “pocket watch” with Vintage, mechanical, timepiece, pocket, chain …… With the help of API or plugins, one can simply process a bunch of pages. Cool, right?

For the short term, yes. For the mid or long term, simply extending the keywords may not do your SEO any good, or even be harmful. Why? Let’s get into a simple example.

I randomly grab two product title of women’s dresses from Amazon.com:

1. Women’s Tie Back Off Shoulder Wrap Layer Ruffle Short Sleeve Mini Dress
2. Women’s Summer Short Sleeve V-Neck Floral Short Party Dress with Pockets

With the help of Google Bard, I get 20 extended keywords for both product titles:

1. mini dress, off shoulder dress, tie back dress, wrap dress, ruffle dress, short sleeve dress, boho dress, summer dress, casual dress, party dress, cocktail dress, elegant dress, sexy dress, women’s dress, fashion dress, trendy dress, new dress, sale dress, clearance dress
2. women’s dress, summer dress, short sleeve dress, v-neck dress, floral dress, party dress, pocket dress, casual dress, boho dress, beach dress, cocktail dress, elegant dress, sexy dress, women’s fashion, trendy dress, new dress, sale dress, clearance dress

Now, we can look into both product titles and extended keywords. We can see that 13 out of 20 keywords generated are the same. As for the product titles, they share only about 1/3 words(4/12 for product 1, 4/11 for product 2). After the keywords got extended, from the view point of a search engine, based on the text crawled, we may easily get the conclusion that the similarity between the two products increases significantly, i.e., the two products become indistinguishable.

So, using LLMs for SEO make the pages tend to be similar. This is not only bad for customers but good for SEO optimizers. Actually, the case is not hard for search engines to solve. A penalty function could be pretty easily applied for those pages with a set of saturated keywords. Therefore the rank weight for those pages will be lowered.

So, before cheerfully applying LLMs for the SEO of your pages, Think thoroughly!