Mastering Keyword Research with ChatGPT: A Comprehensive Tutorial

You’ve been browsing the internet and haven’t heard of ChatGPT? That can’t be true.

ChatGPT is a large language model-based chatbot launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. Since then, ChatGPT has gained massive popularity, boasting over 100 million users.

But what’s even more interesting is that ChatGPT can be used for a variety of tasks, like content generation, proofreading, market research, and AI art generation.

And it doesn’t stop there.

If you are an SEO or content marketer, you can also use ChatGPT to research keywords and generate content ideas.

And that’s exactly what we’ll teach you in this blog post.

This post will cover the benefits of using ChatGPT for keyword research, its limitations, and how to use ChatGPT for keyword research (along with prompts).

ChatGPT vs Paid SEO Tools: Benefits of ChatGPT for Keyword Research

ChatGPT is a free SEO tool that can be used for keyword research and content ideas.

AI-generated content may not sound as good or authentic as handpicked wording. But it still produces results that are better than most other tools in the market.

Here are some of the benefits of using ChatGPT for keyword research:

1. Cost-Effectiveness

ChatGPT offers a cost-effective keyword research solution as it is free or at a fraction of the cost compared to many paid SEO tools.

For budget-conscious users, AI-powered keyword insights are attractive because they do not require significant financial investments.

2. Ease of Use

ChatGPT is user-friendly for all, even those with limited SEO knowledge, unlike complex paid SEO tools.

The tool’s simple prompts allow users to generate keyword suggestions without extensive setup or training. All you need is to enter your prompts.

3. Unrestricted Usage

While some paid SEO tools may have usage limitations or subscription tiers, ChatGPT offers unrestricted access to all users.

There are no limitations on the number of keyword queries or restrictions based on subscription levels, so you can generate as many keywords as you want.

4. Long-Tail Keyword Discovery

ChatGPT excels at discovering long-tail keywords, which are often more specific and targeted than broad keywords.

Paid SEO tools may focus more on popular high-volume keywords, but ChatGPT’s AI-driven approach can uncover valuable long-tail opportunities that lead to higher conversion rates.

5. Real-Time Interaction

With ChatGPT, you can interact in real-time to fine-tune your keyword research. You can experiment with different prompts, receive immediate feedback, and adjust your queries.

ChatGPT’s Limitations for Keyword Research

While ChatGPT is a powerful tool for keyword research, it also has certain limitations.

1. Dependency on Prompts

ChatGPT relies on prompts to generate responses. The quality and relevance of the keywords provided depend on the accuracy and specificity of the prompts given.

If a prompt is unclear or ambiguous, it may elicit irrelevant responses.

2. Limited Context Understanding

Although ChatGPT can somewhat understand the context, it may still struggle with complex or nuanced queries. It occasionally provides keywords that are irrelevant or not fully aligned with the intended context.

3. Risk of Repetition

ChatGPT may sometimes generate the same or similar keywords repeatedly, especially if the prompt phrasing is not varied enough.

This approach could miss out on valuable keyword suggestions.

4. Lack of Real-Time Data

ChatGPT’s knowledge is based on pre-existing data up to its last training cut-off in September 2021.

It does not have access to real-time data, trends, or updates; as a result, it might suggest outdated or incomplete keywords.

5. Keyword Difficulty Analysis

ChatGPT offers no direct insights into keyword difficulty or competition levels, vital factors when prioritizing SEO keywords.

Using ChatGPT as a Keyword Research Tool

As mentioned earlier, ChatGPT is a language model-based chatbot; it doesn’t include any built-in keyword research tools. So, to get keyword suggestions, you need to master your prompting skills.

Here are some tips for using ChatGPT as a keyword research tool:

Generate Keyword List

If you’re new to finding keywords or exploring a new topic, you know how tough it can be to come up with a list of words that fit.

That’s where ChatGPT comes in handy.

With ChatGPT, you can generate hundreds of thousands of keyword ideas in just a few seconds. All you need to do is enter your prompt and let the tool do its thing.

For example, if you are exploring content ideas about “blogging,” you can use a prompt like this:

Prompt: “Can you give me a list of keywords related to <your keyword>?”

As you can see, ChatGPT has generated a list of keywords that include the word “blogging.”

However, if you do not get the result you want, you can always tweak the prompt or hit the regenerate button.

You Can Generate Long Tail Keywords

The long tail is a term used to describe a list of specific keywords that have low search volume but high conversion rates.

As the name suggests, they are longer than seed keywords and contain more words.

These keywords help you get traffic from people looking for something specific.

For example, you can ask ChatGPT to generate long tail keywords for the seed keyword “blogging.”

Prompt: “Can you generate up to 20 long tail keywords for <your keyword>?”

ChatGPT will then generate a list of long-tail keywords, like: monetization strategies, maximizing blog traffic, SEO blog writing, start a blog for business, etc.

To be honest, the output of ChatGPT is pretty impressive.

Extract Keywords From Other Content

You can also use ChatGPT to get an idea of your competitors’ keywords in their content.

This is a great way to see what keywords are popular within your niche and get ideas for future content.

But, before you rush to a website and copy its URL to use in ChatGPT, remember that ChatGPT can’t crawl any links (though Google Bard can). So, you’ll need to copy the entire section manually.

Here’s a simple prompt you can try.

Prompt: “Imagine you are a professional blogger. Can you scan the entire section and find some keyword ideas for me to use in my content? I need both seed keywords and long-tail keywords.”

The result? It’s amazing at how much valuable information you can get from this simple prompt. You can see the result in the screenshot below:

Finding Latent Semantic Indexing Terms

LSI, or latent semantic indexing, is a way to find synonyms for your seed keyword.

This is handy when you want to expand your content with related long-tail terms but slightly different from what you initially searched for.

For example, if you are writing an article on honeymoon destinations, then you might also want to cover topics like “Sunset views” and “Tropical paradise”.

So, to get LSI keyword ideas, enter the following prompt into ChatGPT:

Prompt: “Can you generate some LSI terms for <your keyword>”

I am impressed by how many related topics they give me. These are all LSI keywords that I can use to expand my content.

Using Chat GPT For Keyword Clustering

You can also use ChatGPT to cluster your keywords.

Keyword clustering is a strategic approach that involves categorizing interconnected keywords. It’s particularly handy when facing an overflow of ideas and desiring a more refined direction.

To provide an example, I’ve utilized the Keyword Surfer extension to generate a substantial collection of more than 100 keywords associated with the topic of “digital marketing.”

Then I asked ChatGPT to group them using the following prompt.

Prompt: “Can you group the following related keywords. And create a table with names: Group Name, Keywords, and Search Volume.” <your keywords>

Here’s the result:

Using the Alphabet Soup Method to Generate Keyword Ideas

The Alphabet Soup method is a fantastic way to quickly generate heaps of keyword ideas. The cherry on top? It’s endorsed by SEO pros like Neil Patel, Brian Dean.

The method uses Google’s autocomplete feature to generate keywords that begin with A through Z.

You can do the same with ChatGPT.

Here’s the prompt you can use.

Prompt: “can you give me popular keywords that include “digital marketing” and have a letter starting with ‘A’ in them?”

If the output looks good, type all letters from B to F.

Prompt: “Great. Can you give me five sets of keywords, each starting with a different letter from B to F?”

The result should look good. Now try the same thing with G to L and M to S.

Using ChatGPT To Expand Keywords With Patterns

You can also use ChatGPT to generate a list of keywords with patterns. This will let you add words such as “best” or “cheapest” to your keyword lists.

1. Question Patterns

You can use the question patterns to generate a list of keywords that include who, what, where, why, and how.

Prompt: “Generate 20 keywords that contain any of the following “who, what, where, why, how, and will” to describe “digital marketing.””

2. Comparison Patterns

You can use comparison patterns to generate a list of keywords containing “better, faster, cheaper, alternatives, etc.”

Prompt: “Generate 20 keywords for SEO that include the word “for” or “vs.”, “best”, “top”, or “review”.”

You can compare a specific company with another or its alternatives for a more detailed approach.

Prompt: “For the most popular SEO tools, “vs” what are some of their main competitors?”

Using ChatGPT’s Ready-Made Prompts

Till now, you’ve learned how to create your prompts for keyword research.

However, if you’re not feeling creative or want to take the easy way out, there are plenty of ready-made prompts available that you can use.

Head over to your ChatGPT dashboard and start a new chat. You will see there are over thousands of pre-made prompts available.

We don’t need to explore every prompt on ChatGPT, so we can use the search function to find those relevant to our purpose.

So, enter the word “keyword research” into that search field, and you’ll get all of the prompts related to keyword research.

For example, I am selecting the “Best Keyword Research in One Click” prompt to see what it offers.

I entered the topic “make money online,” and it gave me 30 long-tail keywords along with search volume, keyword difficulty, and search intent.

The results were quite impressive. It appears that any paid SEO tool could give you the same information, as well as provide more details.

But ensure you don’t count the search volume and keyword difficulty, as ChatGPT doesn’t provide real-time data.

Using ChatGPT to Brainstorm Content

Now that we have done our keyword research, let’s see how ChatGPT can help us come up with some content ideas.

Generate a Content Outline

Creating an outline for SEO-friendly content, especially when unfamiliar with the topic, can be challenging.

You need to spend hours researching, finding content appropriate as a reference, and then writing it down clearly and concisely.

But you can use ChatGPT to make the process easier and faster.

Prompt: “Can you generate a content outline for “How to Make Money Online”?”

You can further tweak this prompt by adding a few more parameters.

Prompt: “Can you generate an SEO-friendly content outline for “How to Make Money Online”? Include the H2, H3, and H4 headings wherever necessary. And mention my seed keyword “make money online” 4 times in the H2 and H3 headings.”

I have a few issues with this. First, I asked ChatGPT to mention the keyword “make money online” in the <h3> and <h4> headings. Initially, it didn’t work; so I had to break the sentences.

Then I asked it to mention the keyword four times, but it came out seven times. Not bad at all!

Generate Blog Topic Ideas

If you are stuck with ideas, you can use ChatGPT for inspiration.

Prompt: “Can you generate a few topic ideas about your keyword?”

The result looks impressive and makes sense to me.

To take your prompt to the next level, consider combining it with other elements, such as meta description, search intent, etc.

Prompt: “Create a table with these columns: Blog Title, Meta Description, and Search Intent. The Blog Title column contains the title of the blog. Suggest a meta description for the meta description column. The Search Intent column contains the human intent when searching for the blog. Limit your output to 10 blog titles only.”

Generate Text Prompts for AI Generated Images

Another use of ChatGPT is to assist in providing detailed and context-rich text instructions to AI image generators, guiding them to produce desired visual outputs.

Whether generating AI-generated art, AI-generated images, 3D images, or illustrations, or paintings, ChatGPT can help to create prompts for AI image generators to produce accurate and relevant results.

This is a prompt you can use for example to help you create the perfect image and scenery:

Prompt: “Generate a 1-short paragraph text prompt description to create a 3D image of a modern building in Tokyo with a zen garden.”

As you can see, ChatGPT generated a paragraph of text that describes a modern building in Tokyo with a Zen garden.

But does the description work? To test this, we used a popular AI-generated image generator called Fotor.

Here is what it looked like:

This is a pretty good image. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than what we could have done without the help of ChatGPT.

Get the most out of ChatGPT for keyword research.

ChatGPT isn’t just for keyword research. You can use it to complete many day-to-day tasks, such as email writing, image generation, code writing, etc.

To make the most of your keyword research, remember these steps.

Write Detailed Prompts

While paid search tools can perform searches using a single keyword, ChatGPT requires you to craft detailed prompts before running your search.

For example, entering the keyword “dog training” into any SEO tool will give you plenty of keyword ideas.

But ChatGPT works differently; you need to provide a detailed prompt like this:

“Can you generate a few keywords related to dog training”

Use a Keyword Research Tool for More Effective Results

As mentioned, ChatGPT doesn’t provide real-time data as an SEO tool does.

So, if you solely depend on ChatGPT to generate keywords, you’ll have less-effective results.

That’s why you should use a keyword research tool as well. A tool like SEMrush will give you many keyword ideas, search volume, CPC, and competition data.

ChatGPT for Keyword Research: FAQs