Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Technical audits are essential for maintaining SEO performance. Google and other search engine bots crawl websites to index and rank content. Issues with sites such as redirects (301), deleted pages (404) or duplicated content can slow down or block website crawlers and cause your site’s rankings to drop. Especially on large sites, technical audits can be lengthy pieces of work and fixing these issues is not a one-size-fits-all approach, as all websites are built differently depending on what CMS, Plug-ins, page builder and code are used. In this article, we discuss how ChatGPT can help users to understand, automate and fix issues on their technical SEO audits, leading to a smoother experience for both end users and search engine crawlers.
Automate Tasks
AI can be used to help automate tasks that would normally be time-consuming and exhaustive. For example, most SEO audit tools (Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, SEMRush, SERanking) track web page content such as titles and descriptions. Titles and descriptions may be too long, too short or missing altogether and need optimising for best practices on Google. Writing hundreds of missing descriptions at once can be time-consuming, and descriptions aren’t a ranking signal on Google, but are more of a best practice to entice users onto your site. AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, can be used to craft engaging descriptions in bulk to speed up the process and save time for other tasks. Some other tasks ChatGPT can help automate include:
- Generate unique, keyword-optimised title tags and meta descriptions for a list of URLs.
- Suggest better H1S and subheadings based on target keywords.
- Draft alternative text for missing or poor-quality image alt tags.
Problem Solving
Every website is built differently using different content management systems, plug-ins and page builders. This can sometimes make fixing problems highlighted on technical audits tricky because while you know there is an issue on the site, finding it can sometimes be easier said than done. For example, a link may be redirecting users to a broken page (404). However, updating the link may not be as simple as finding it on the page and changing it. As the link may be embedded in a template, the code of the site or a custom field, depending on how your developer has created your site.
This is where ChatGPT can be useful, scanning page content or code, it can quickly detect problems such as broken links and where they live, and suggest fixes based on the CMS you are using.
Decision Making
As mentioned before, while ChatGPT helps understand the problems on your site, it can also help you make decisions on how to best approach fixing these problems. For example, many sites use plug-ins, which are add-ons to websites that allow for increased functionality. Plug-ins have also been created to automate SEO tasks such as adding alt-text to images. However, there are a large number of plug-ins available and choosing the best one can be tricky. ChatGPT can help you weigh up which plug-in is best for your needs and list the different features which may apply to your needs the most.
