Generate Meta Descriptions in Bulk using Open AI’s GPT-3

Meta Descriptions are an essential aspect of On-Page SEO. Around 43% of people click on a given result based solely on the meta description for that page.

But honestly, creating meta descriptions in bulk can be very time-consuming. Let’s say you recently onboarded a new e-commerce client and have to optimise their website for better search rankings. Wouldn’t it be great if you could generate meta descriptions for all their product pages in bulk in just a few minutes?

It would give you way more time to focus on other important technical aspects that cannot be automated, for e.g, code optimisation etc.

In this post, I’ll show you how you can generate meta descriptions in bulk using just Google Sheets. The tool is using Open AI’s GPT-3.

❗️ Please don’t rely solely on the Meta Descriptions generated by this tool! Use these as a starting point or inspiration and come up with your own versions of Meta Descriptions.

Before we move on to the instructions, let’s see the Google Sheets tool in action:

Generating Meta Description in Bulk – Google Sheet Set-up

Let’s move on now and see how to set up the Google Sheets so you can start generating meta descriptions for your website.

1. Make a copy of the Google Sheets:

Make a copy of the Bulk Generate Meta Descriptions Sheet.

Once you click on the link, you’ll see the following – just click on Make a copy.

2. Obtain your API key from Open AI

Since the Google Sheets Script uses Open AI’s GPT-3, you’ll need to obtain an API key from their website. It’s extremely simple to do so.

Just go to: https://openai.com/api/ and click on Sign Up to create a new account.

Once you’ve created your account, visit the API Keys Page by going to https://beta.openai.com/account/api-keys.

Click on Create new secret key button.

Copy the API key and paste it in the API Key Section in the Setup sheet.

3. Start Generating Meta Descriptions in Bulk

You’re almost done.

Now you just have to define four things in a few words:

1. Keyword/Product: What keyword, product or service do you want the meta description to be about
2. USP/Offer: What’s the unique selling proposition of your product or service? Is there any offer going on that you want to include in the Meta Description?
3. Brand: Mention your Brand Name.
4. Intent/Emotion: What should be the emotion/tone of the Meta Description?

I’ve included a few examples in the Google Sheets for you to try.

Once you’ve provided the tool with your inputs, just go to 🤘🏻 Get Inspiration in the Google Sheets menu and click on Generate Meta Descriptions (Refer to the screen recording below).

The first time you try to run the script, you might be asked to give authorisation and run the script again if needed.

Things to Note:

💡 The Google App Script checks if the Meta Description column has empty values. The script won’t run if all Meta Descriptions have already been generated. So if you want to regenerate meta descriptions for a few rows, just delete the old description in the cell and run the script.

💡 Google App Script has a 6 min execution limit and times out after that. So if you have a lot of Meta Descriptions to generate, just run the script again in case of timeout and it’ll continue from where it left off.

💡 You get $18 credit with Open AI to use the API. It costs $0.02 to generate 1000 tokens (approximately 750 words or 4000 characters). So let’s say you are generating meta descriptions of around 160 characters each – with the free $18 credits, you’ll be able to generate approximately 2,250 meta descriptions.

If you like this tool, please let me know in the comments below.