Like it or not, artificial intelligence is here, and it’s changing the way the entire world works — including the tree-care industry. To remain competitive, you have to embrace this new technology and learn the cases in which it can help your business grow and the ones that may actually cause problems.
ChatGPT provides a great example, as it’s one of the most familiar AI tools that people have begun using over the last few years. But should you be using ChatGPT to help write the content for your tree service website?
That seems like a simple question, but the answer is remarkably nuanced. We’ll explain everything you need to know below.
How AI Writing Tools Like ChatGPT Work
Before we tackle some of the pros and cons of using ChatGPT to create content for your website and marketing materials, we need to explain how these kinds of tools work. Don’t worry — we’ll keep things as simple as possible.
Fundamentally, ChatGPT and similar tools are a type of artificial intelligence known as large language models. This means that they don’t actually “think” like humans do. Instead, they’ve been created by analyzing billions of written text samples and identifying the underlying patterns.
Because it’s trained on such a massive range of material, ChatGPT can generate smooth, human-sounding copy on almost any topic, from oak tree pruning tips to marketing advice. But it isn’t pulling facts from a hidden database or rigorously double-checking sources. It’s making educated guesses based on patterns it has seen before.
In other words, the model may note that the word “marriage” is followed by the word “vows” 87% of the time (these are fabricated numbers, just to provide an example).
This predictive nature is what makes the tool both powerful and limited.
The Benefits of Using ChatGPT for Tree-Service Content
There are undoubtedly a number of ways that large language models like ChatGPT can be helpful for producing tree-service content. A few good examples include:
- Brainstorming: ChatGPT is very helpful when you need to get your creative juices flowing. Say, for example, that you’re trying to come up with a blog idea, but you can’t think of a topic you haven’t already covered. You could feed an AI tool a list of services you offer and get a quick set of ideas to cover in return.
- Creating Rough Drafts: ChatGPT can create a clear, well-structured starting point for pages describing anything from stump grinding to plant-health care. You can even train it to mimic your own voice, if you share some writing samples with it. But you’ll have to fact-check and polish the piece before publishing it.
- Generating Short, Snappy Copy: It can be time consuming to create things like meta descriptions, meta titles, and Google Ads headlines — especially when you’re constrained by tight word or character counts. But AI tools like ChatGPT can provide you with dozens of variations you can test in mere seconds.
- Outline Generation: Few (if any) AI tools can produce accurate and effective long-form content with a keystroke. However, most of these tools can generate an outline for in-depth content pieces, which you can use to form the structure of the article, book, or report.
- Proofreading and Grammar Checks: While you need to proofread everything an AI tool creates for things like voice and factual accuracy, AI tools can be very effective for checking your content for typos or SPAG (spelling, punctuation, and grammar) errors. These tools can even help you rephrase clunky sections.
- Emails: If you struggle to figure out the best way to respond to customer inquiries in a manner that is both warm and professional, you may want to consider training a large language model to create email responses for you. You’ll still want to review each response before hitting the “send” key, but this can save some people time.
Where AI Falls Short for Arborist Websites
While ChatGPT and similar AI tools are clearly impressive, they aren’t (and likely never will be) a viable substitute for an experienced arborist or a professional marketer. A few examples of potential problems include:
- Inaccuracies: Because these kinds of AI models predict text based on patterns in existing writing, they often produce statements that are inaccurate or outdated — and they’ll often do so with remarkable confidence. For example, they might list tree species that don’t grow in your climate or describe improper pruning practices.
- Generic Content: A tree-service website needs a local voice that demonstrates your familiarity with the community to potential clients. This includes things like references to neighborhood landmarks and municipal permitting rules, as well as the nuances of seasonal care in your service area.
- Missed Regulatory Nuances: AI can’t keep up with constantly changing local ordinances or permitting requirements — that’s simply not something large language models are designed to do. And if you publish a post that overlooks a city’s protected‐tree list or misstates removal guidelines, you could face liability issues.
- Inconsistent Terminology: As you know, tree service work requires precise language. “Crown reduction” is very different from “tree topping.” But AI tools sometimes mix these terms up or use them incorrectly, which can confuse customers and reflect poorly on your professionalism.
- Poor Search Visibility: Search engines are getting better at spotting thin, automatically generated pages. And because Google’s guidelines emphasize “experience” and “expertise,” unedited AI text can hurt your rankings or credibility.
Given these problems, it’s important that you always have a human — preferably an ISA-certified arborist or a marketing pro who understands both SEO and tree care — review the content to ensure the information is accurate, trustworthy, and tailored to your audience.
Best Practices for Tree Services Using AI Tools to Create Content
At this point, you can probably understand the reason we initially characterized the answer to our central question (“Should you use ChatGPT to write your tree-service content?”) as nuanced.
Generative AI writing tools are unquestionably valuable, and it makes good sense to use every modern technology at your disposal. Your competitors certainly are.
But you can’t just type in a prompt and then paste the output into a blog article, either. That’s a sure-fire recipe for ruining your credibility, harming your search engine rankings, and potentially alienating customers.
So, you should definitely experiment with ChatGPT and other tools. But do so while keeping the following things in mind:
- Treat AI output as a draft, not a final product. Verify every detail in the content you use AI tools to create to avoid factual errors that could damage your credibility. This includes everything from species names and pruning guidelines to local ordinances and permit requirements.
- Edit the content to match your brand’s voice and geographic location. You can use ChatGPT to provide you with a draft but always rewrite important sections, so they sound like your company. Add things like city names, regional tree-care tips, and your unique selling points to keep the copy authentic.
- Use AI as a productivity booster, not as a quick-fix replacement for strategy. While AI tools can help you with things like idea generation, outlines, and meta descriptions, you’ll want to keep keyword strategy, content planning, and final approvals in human hands.
- Maintain a professional review process. Have a marketing expert or ISA-certified arborist on your staff (and preferably, both) review the final draft before you publish it. This will help ensure accuracy, verify that the content is easy to read, and avoid problems that could harm your search-engine performance.
Let ORB Tree Service Marketing Create the Content You Need
Ultimately, some tree service companies will decide to use ChatGPT (or similar tools) to create content, while others will rely on an old-school approach and write their content from scratch. And still others will outsource their content-generation needs to an outside agency.
Any of these options can work, but be sure that you never post raw AI content.
You need to ensure that content aligns with your marketing goals, resonates with your potential customers, and embraces the SEO practices necessary to achieve the search-engine visibility your organization needs.
In practice, neither the average tree care company owner nor the finest AI writing tool is capable of accomplishing all these things — at least without the guidance of marketing industry professionals.
And that’s where ORB Tree Service Marketing comes in.
We certainly leverage the power of AI tools, but everything we do, from content strategy development to copywriting to SEO services is guided by humans. In fact, all of our tree care content is either written or reviewed by an ISA-certified arborist to ensure that it doesn’t include incorrect information, which can damage your authority and reputation.
Contact us today — we’d love to discuss your needs and share some of the ways we create content that converts.
Sources and References
- OpenAI – “How ChatGPT Works”
Plain-language overview of large language models and their limitations, explaining how they generate text by predicting word patterns.
https://openai.com/research/overview - HubSpot – “How to Use AI for Content Creation Without Hurting SEO”
Guidance on integrating AI-generated drafts into a content strategy while preserving search performance and human oversight.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/ai-content-creation - Search Engine Journal – “Google’s Guidance on AI-Generated Content”
Details Google’s stance on AI-written material and the importance of experience, expertise, and trust for SEO.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-ai-generated-content - Google Search Central – “Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content”
Official documentation on writing content that meets Google’s quality standards and avoids penalties for thin, auto-generated text.
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-content-update
