How insurance agencies can optimize SEO using AI and Custom GPTs

InsuranceNewsNet reporter Rayne Morgan conducts a video interview with John Dietrich, Principal SEO Consultant,  Stella Rising, to discuss how insurance agencies can use AI tools, especially Custom GPTs, to optimize their websites to draw more organic search traffic. Dietrich provides practical advice on how to use these tools to improve site content. Below is the video transcript.

Rayne Morgan:
I am Morgan with Insurance News Net, and today I'm speaking with Dietrich, the principal SEO consultant with Stella Rising. Thanks for joining me today, John. Okay, so basically today we'll be talking about using AI to improve your website's SEO, more directed towards insurance agencies.

John Dietrich:

Great. So when you're approaching, let's say content creation that's specific to the insurance niche, you're going to want to provide context to whichever tool you use. So there are some dedicated content development tools that leverage AI. So when I'm using ChatGPT, there's a feature called a custom GPT. So, I highly recommend leveraging that feature to help you generate content for your niche. And the reason I'm recommending that feature is because you can give it context so that every prompt you write it has context that it can draw from. It's very easy to do. If you don't know how to do it, there are lots of guides online, or you can even use the AI tool and say, "Hey, how do I create a custom GPT?" It's very straightforward. You basically just give it a name and you upload documents, and these documents are that context. So you would upload, again, your own preferred pieces of writing content, so in your own writing style.

If you're doing this for a client, you would just ask them, "Hey, what are some posts that you are particularly proud of? Let me have those as examples." You might upload five of those. Then you'd also upload some thought leadership pieces that kind of give a lot of context about your industry. So all of the details that a professional would know, current trends, anything like that that you would want to provide any writer context to write well within your niche. You give those documents to the tool. And then you might give it some instructions. So, these instructions would be anytime you give it a prompt, it would reference these instructions. So you might say, "Don't use these words," or, "Use this type of language," or, "Reference these experts, but don't reference these experts." You give it some specific guidance.

You could even upload your brand guidelines if you have them. You could upload your editorial guidelines if you or your client has them. Any information like that, you would kind of put it into the prompt and you would say something like, "I'm going to provide you input and I want this type of output." So you might say, "I want a comprehensive article. Every time I ask you for an article, it needs to follow the guidelines that I give you." So, generally, what the prompt will be is an editorial brief, and I would use AI to create this editorial brief. So the one thing I wouldn't use AI for yet is the keyword research piece, just because there are SEO tools out there that do such a good job there, and they have the monthly search volume for these terms. And that's something that the AI tools don't have directly. Although I will say if you use ChatGPT's deep research feature, it will go out and it will find you publicly available keyword research tools and it will give you a rundown.

So if you wanted to do the keyword research and didn't have an SEO tool like Semrush or Ahrefs, then I would use the deep research feature within ChatGPT and say, "Here's my topic. I need you to do keyword research for me," and then let it do the keyword research. And then I would take that keyword research, I would feed that back into an AI prompt and say, "Okay, I need an editorial guide for this article, so create that for me using this keyword research." And then it would pick a main target term, some supporting terms. It would tell you the length the article should be based on competitive analysis. It would give maybe some brand guidelines in that. Just again, anytime you would give a brief to a writer, that's what you'd want to give to this tool.

So you might even create a custom GPT to create briefs for you. So again, you could use the general tool to create a brief, but if you wanted to give some very specific examples of what briefs you liked or what you want in a brief, then you would create a custom GPT to create your briefs. And then what I would do is you get your brief, then you'd go to your custom GPT that's good at writing articles, and you give it the brief and say, "Write an article based on this brief," and there you go. It will write an article that you'd be surprised how good it can be. It's come a long way in the two-ish years that this technology has been around. Definitely will still need a human expert to review it, both from a subject matter expert standpoint, also from an editorial standpoint.

But again, with enough context, with the guides, with good input, you're going to get a pretty well-polished piece on the other side. So that's how I would leverage these tools to create content within the insurance niche. So yeah. And I would also talk about developing FAQs for your website. So you'll notice in many Google search results, there's going to be a people also ask feature, which is like an accordion that you can drill into any query that you put into the search engine. You'll find these almost always; you'll find these people also ask questions. So it's often good to include FAQs in the articles you write.

You might have a whole section on your site, whether that's a blog section or a resource section or a news section with FAQs specific to the various topics that you're covering. And there, again, I would leverage that same writing tool to write the answers to the questions that you've found that people are most frequently asking. And so that's a great way to, again, either enhance existing content, or create new content. Those are the two main things to do there. Again, in general, the process I just went through for creating new content is an excellent process for updating existing content.

Because you'll find, and this is an excellent thing to do outside of AI just for SEO in general, audit your content, what's outdated, what's not getting traffic, what may be just factually wrong that obviously your industry, like every industry changes over time, you've got a piece of content that was written five or 10 years ago, it's very likely to have just factual errors in it right now. So again, audit your content, look for what's not getting traffic, and look for what may be so old that it needs just some factual updates. So yeah, leverage this tool and this process for both creating new and updating old and outdated content.

Morgan:
Okay. That's very helpful. I do have a spin-off question.

Dietrich:
Yeah.

Morgan:
So is there any part of the content process that you would say AI shouldn't be used for? I know you mentioned keyword research is kind of one that agents might want to use something a little bit more hands-on, like Ahrefs or Semrush, but are there any other parts of it that you would say shouldn't be done with AI?

Dietrich:
Yeah. I wouldn't just copy and paste from the AI output onto your website. I would definitely have, like I said, have a subject matter expert, either you or your client, or someone who knows what they're talking about, read that article and update it because it won't always be correct. It may be missing key information. So yeah, it needs an editorial review and a subject matter expert review by humans, that can be the same human or a team of humans, but those are critical components for finalizing the copy, finalizing content. Yeah.

Morgan:

That makes sense. So basically, it sounds like where AI is really helpful in improving SEO is mostly in the content aspect of it. It couldn't, for instance, look at someone's website and say, "Oh, you don't have any pictures on here," or, "You don't have any internal links." It can't really help with that kind of aspect of it.

Dietrich:

No, I would say that was step one. I mean, if for content creation, it's great at that. Another thing is what you might call a competitive analysis. So I use these tools quite a bit to do competitive analysis. So I'll take screenshots of my page, screenshots of the competitor's pages and say things like, "What do you notice between these two? What is making this page rank over that page? Is it some UX element? Is it copy on the page? Is it the title tag? Is it the heading tag?" You can go on and on and on.

Morgan:

Awesome. Sounds good. Thanks so much, John.

Dietrich:
Sure, absolutely. Good to see you, Rayne.

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Rayne Morgan is a journalist, copywriter, and editor with over 10 years' combined experience in digital content and print media. You can reach her at [email protected].