How Google Bard Can Supercharge Your SEO

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, but it’s not the only generative AI tool out there. Google’s Bard chatbot is also worth consideration. For web designers and content marketers, it may even prove more helpful.

Google unveiled Bard in early 2023, a few months behind ChatGPT’s meteoric rise to fame. After a few hiccups early in its release, the AI platform is now available for public use. If you use it correctly, it can also be a game-changing tool for search engine optimization (SEO).

Google Bard vs. ChatGPT

Before diving into how to supercharge your SEO with Google Bard, it’s important to understand what makes it different. More specifically, why is it better than its main competitor, ChatGPT?

ChatGPT and Bard both use large language models (LLMs) to understand and respond to users in conversational language. You can ask these bots a question in plain English — or another language — and they’ll respond with all the speed and information you’d expect from AI. However, Bard has access to real-time data, whereas ChatGPT’s resources are a couple of years old.

As a Google product, Bard also gains insights directly from Google. That gives it a crucial edge for SEO applications. ChatGPT may have much information on Google, but it doesn’t come from the source and may not be up-to-date.

Google Bard is also less consumer-focused than ChatGPT. As a result, it’s less conversational but a better fit for in-depth research and highly technical review.

How to Use Google Bard to Improve SEO

Given these advantages, Google Bard should be SEO marketers’ chatbot of choice. Here’s how to use it to that end after opting for it over ChatGPT.

Streamline Content Creation

One of the best ways to improve SEO with Bard is to outline and research when creating content. By assisting creators in these early stages, Bard can amplify their productivity and produce more effective pieces.

Most writers take more than two hours to write a blog post, with many taking more than four. Researching and planning take up much of this time, but Bard can compile resources and suggest multiple outlines in mere seconds. Writers can then spend more time doing what they do best — writing.

On top of being faster, this AI-assisted research can also make more impactful content. Bard could propose ideas writers wouldn’t have considered otherwise or suggest multiple differing takes. This diversity of ideas helps writers avoid falling into a rut of similar-sounding pieces and makes it easier to choose the best way forward. The resulting content will likely perform better as a result.

Get Insight into Customers and Competitors

SEO marketers can also use Google Bard in web strategy. This is where Bard begins to truly outshine its competitors, thanks to its real-time information.

The internet moves quickly, so identifying customer trends is essential to creating relevant content. Marketers can ask Bard to find trending searches and list high-ranking pages for each keyword under these searches. Audiences’ preferences become clearer as a result. Other chatbots may fail to produce reliable results here because they aren’t current, but Bard has direct access to Google data.

After identifying these target areas, marketers can use Bard to gain insight into their competitors. Asking the chatbot to list top-performing content reveals which brands are the main competition. Marketers can then ask Bard to analyze these websites’ content, including what they do well and any content gaps, making it easier to see how to outperform them.

Highlight Areas for Improvement

Bard is also a useful tool for analyzing your own content. Updated old content is 74% more likely to drive results, yet many sites overlook the importance of refreshers. Reviewing existing pieces also helps identify gaps to inform future strategies, and Bard can optimize that review process.

Unlike ChatGPT, Bard can review websites if you give it the URL. Because Bard is a Google tool, it’s also the ideal source to ask for tips on optimizing a given page for better SEO. Keep in mind that more direct questions will yield better results than asking for a general assessment. 

Ask Bard to look at keyword usage, title tags, meta descriptions, page load speed and similar specifics. Emphasize that these analyses should aim to boost the site’s SEO. Bard likely won’t offer all the answers you need, but its fast, informative reviews provide an excellent starting point.

Target Bard-Powered Searches

As Bard grows, it will open new channels and strategies to target, too. Google hopes to implement Bard in more searches to distill complex topics into conversational answers, making Google searches more convenient for users. That presents a new opportunity for SEO marketers.

Bard-powered search results will compile information across multiple pages, citing sources for further reading below its answers. Those links could become the new position zero — an easily accessible, highlighted spot that Google has already enticed users to view.

Businesses can target these positions by emphasizing user intent and conversational language. Posts should offer more comprehensive breakdowns of popular topics, covering many “people also ask” questions. It’s also important to organize this information neatly into distinct, scannable sections to make it easier for Bard to pick out specific highlights and direct a wider audience to the page.

How Not to Use Google Bard

While Bard excels in these areas, it’s not the best tool in others. If marketers want to use AI effectively, they need to know where not to apply it. Here are some things to avoid when using Google Bard for SEO. 

Automating the Writing Process

Replacing human content creators with AI is one of the most common missteps with generative AI. Tools like Bard can generate content with minimal input, but that doesn’t mean you should use them this way.

AI is better at double-checking language than writing its own content. While Bard sounds more human than many of its predecessors, its content can still sound repetitive. AI also lacks logic, so even if it produces grammatically correct sentences, they may contain factual errors or make poor arguments.

Human-written content tends to perform better on search results, too. Google doesn’t outright penalize AI-generated content, but the same standards of originality and helpfulness apply to everything. Because Bard and similar tools recycle ideas instead of synthesizing new ones, they’re more likely to plagiarize or sound too similar to other pages, limiting their content’s SEO.

As a Sole Research Tool

Similarly, marketers should avoid taking Bard’s insights at face value. It’s one of the most helpful research tools available today, but it shouldn’t be your only one.

Even though Bard is accurate as far as generative AI goes, all AI models are prone to hallucination. Bard infamously shared a false claim in its opening demo. Remember, AI can’t tell the truth from untruth. It can only infer things from patterns in data, and this process can get things wrong.

These errors don’t render Bard unreliable per se but warrant fact-checking. Human employees should always review AI-generated suggestions and insights before acting on them to prevent embarrassing mistakes.

Google Bard Could Unlock a New Era in SEO

ChatGPT may have started the wave of generative AI disruption, but Google Bard may have a bigger impact on SEO. Marketers and web developers must prepare for this disruption ahead of time.

Knowing where Bard is best and where it isn’t is the first step to making the most of this tool. If businesses can do that, they can push their SEO success further.