If you’re spending your valuable time blogging or writing copy for your website, you want it to get found. The way your content gets found is by using keywords in your writing.
With the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT and their use in blogging — of which I’m a huge fan — you might be tempted to try to use them for blogging keywords research.
But you may not want to.
That’s what we’ll cover in this article – why you shouldn’t use ChatGPT for keyword research and what you should use instead.
Understanding Keyword Research (Just the Basics)
Keywords are critical to getting your blog, website, etc. found. They are the words that people type into a search engine when they’re looking to answer a question.
Thoughtfully including targeted blogging keywords can help your content get found. A lot goes into keyword research, and it requires more space than I have in this article. I wanted to mention the basics. There will be a follow-up post about keywords soon.
Why You Want to Skip Using ChatGPT for Keyword Research
ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool that can help with a lot of things, including:
- Topic brainstorming
- Drafting outlines
- Initial drafts
As tempting as it may be, you shouldn’t use ChatGPT as your only keyword tool. It just doesn’t provide enough information.
When choosing blogging keywords, two of the main metrics you use are volume (how many people search for that keyword) and difficulty (how hard it is to rank for the keyword).
ChatGPT won’t reliably give you either of these.
For example, if I ask ChatGPT for keywords related to type 2 diabetes, it provides a list including:
There’s no information about how many people search for the keywords or how difficult they would be to rank for. If I chose one of these keywords without further research, I’d have no idea if people are actually searching for it, how often they’re searching for it, or how hard it would be to rank for it.
If I go to Keysearch and ask for “type 2 diabetes,” it shows this:
The “Volume” column tells you how often it is searched for per month, while the “Score” column tells you how difficult it is to rank for this keyword (the redder the color/higher the score, the harder to rank).
If you were a newbie or relatively new blogger, the only one you might be able to rank for is “type 2 diabetes icd 10” because of its low difficulty score.
When You Should Use ChatGPT for Keyword Research
Despite its drawbacks, there are times when ChatGPT can help with blogging keyword research.
First, when you need help brainstorming keyword ideas: if the keyword you’re targeting is too difficult to rank for, and the keyword research tool you’re using isn’t giving you better ideas, you can ask ChatGPT for help.
Let’s say you want to write a blog post about a type 2 diabetes diet. In Keysearch, that has a volume of 14,800 and a difficulty of 52. That would be hard to rank if your blog is new/doesn’t have a high authority score yet.
I could ask ChatGPT for some ideas for keywords like “type 2 diabetes diet.” When I did this, one of the suggestions it provided was “type 2 diabetes meal ideas.” I plugged that into Keysearch and found the suggestions were still too difficult.
Then, I decided to filter the suggestions in Keysearch by difficulty and put a maximum difficulty score of 35. The one keyword left was “gestational diabetes meal ideas,” with a volume of 720 and difficulty of 35.
That’s actually a great opportunity for a new blogger to write an article and get ranked in search engines.
Second, when you need the common name of a term. As dietitians, we do a lot of medical writing, and sometimes those terms get stuck in our heads. A simple example is that your ideal reader may not know that “diabetes mellitus” is the same as “diabetes.”
If you’re mind is stuck in medical terminology land, you can ask ChatGPT for the common way to say the term.
For example, if you were writing a blog for people who were recovering from a pressure injury and couldn’t remember the common name, you could ask ChatGPT, “what’s the common term for pressure ulcer.”
ChatGPT replies:
Brainstorming is one of ChatGPT’s strong suits. Even though you shouldn’t use it as your only way to choose keywords, it can help you brainstorm keyword ideas.
If you shouldn’t use ChatGPT to choose keywords, what should you use?
Keyword Research Tools You Should Use
If you’re going to be blogging or doing content creation as a business generation strategy, then you need a dedicated, paid keyword research tool. At a minimum, a good tool will help you:
- Research keywords
- Provide volume and difficulty
- Give ideas for alternative keywords
The main keyword research tools on the market include:
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Moz Keyword Explorer
- Keysearch
- Ubersuggest
Comparing these would take a lot more space than this article allows. You can also find all sorts of in-depth reviews online. That said, I’ll give you my brief thoughts on the ones I’ve used.
SEMrush: SEMrush is the most powerful and expensive tool on the list. I used it for a year and found that it did what I needed for keyword research but was WAY more than I needed. It got to the point where I felt totally overwhelmed when using it, so I switched to something simpler.
Ubersuggest: I chose this after leaving SEMrush. It is simpler while still being powerful, and the lifetime purchase price is relatively inexpensive. I used Ubersuggest for well over a year before deciding to try something else. Part of my reason for switching was that the layout is too simplistic.
Keysearch: This is my current keyword research tool. I like how easy it is to use and how powerful it is. The layout makes more sense to me while providing all the information I want on one screen.
When choosing a keyword research tool, I’d recommend:
- Decide what’s important to you; what features do you need and want
- Blocking out some time on your calendar for research and giving yourself a deadline to make the decision
- Trying out at least three tools and seeing how you like each one; the tool needs to meet your needs while making sense to you
- Choose one by your deadline
- Use it and see how it goes; if, after using it for a while, you decide you don’t like it, switch to another one
If you’re not sure that the one you’ve chosen is right for you, sign up for a month and try it out (just put a reminder in your calendar to cancel it if you don’t like it). Signing up for a month is a low-risk way to try a tool without making a year-long commitment.
What’s Next?
While AI tools like ChatGPT are fantastic for sparking creativity and getting those initial ideas flowing, they just aren’t cut out for the nitty-gritty of keyword research. Think of them as your friendly brainstorming buddy rather than an SEO guru.
To bring the power of keywords into your writing, you need the power and precision of dedicated keyword research tools. Investing in a keyword research tool like SEMrush, Keysearch, or Ubersuggest (or one of the others), you’ll have the information you need to choose the right keywords for your content so it gets found by your ideal readers.
This doesn’t mean you should throw out ChatGPT when it comes to blogging keyword research. You can combine ChatGPT’s brainstorming with the analytical muscle of specialized keyword research tools to get the best of both worlds.
If you want to learn more about using ChatGPT for something it excels at — blogging— download my free ebook, which is full of prompts to help make your blogging easier. You can get the ebook here.