For weeks, marketers have been hearing about ChatGPT and its applications for content and SEO. Prompt engineer is even now a job: I won’t pretend to know which SEO and digital marketing functions ChatGPT and AI software will and won’t replace. But becoming an expert at creating prompts for these tools can already be a valuable skill (and will likely increase in value over time as the tools improve). This article will discuss what to keep in mind when creating ChatGPT prompts for SEO and share an extensive list of SEO-focused prompts to use in your day-to-day work. ChatGPT prompt engineering strategyBefore getting into specifics, it is helpful to have a general approach to ChatGPT prompts (and AI chat / writing prompts) so that you can create prompts for your specific applications and be aware of great SEO prompts other folks have come up with. First, it’s vital to understand ChatGPT’s limitations:
So if you ask ChatGPT for a list, don’t expect it to be curated at an elite level. If you ask it to write code, don’t just assume it will work. If you ask it to write an article, don’t assume everything it generates will be accurate or well-written (particularly on topics that would require up-to-date information). QA is your friend! I like to think of prompts kind of like I think of tasks like creating a content brief, or using a search operator, or creating an SOW. Based on that approach, here are specific tips for crafting a good prompt:
The best (and worst) ChatGPT SEO promptsAs with most topics, many people are sharing great information about ChatGPT prompts you can use for SEO. And then there are some sharing prompts which are somewhere between mediocre and downright harmful. Below, I listed examples of what I think are largely “good” (or helpful, to steal a term from Google) prompts and what I think are “bad” (unhelpful to harmful) prompts. These examples offer specific ideas for prompts that can help make you more efficient, and also some prompts that can get you into trouble (or waste your time). The goodWe’ll start with some useful prompts. Again, I can’t emphasize this enough: QA the output of everything you get from ChatGPT! Information can be (dangerously) wrong or misleading and code can break in the worst ways (more on that later in the article). While Google has stated AI-generated content isn’t explicitly in violation of their search guidelines, it’s certainly possible to get your site into trouble with it. Keyword and topic brainstorms Due to the possible downside above, I like to think of ChatGPT as a helpful brainstorming tool for various tasks, including keyword research. It is particularly useful as an early starting point for getting ideas for keywords and topics. Let’s assume I’m creating a site aimed at delivering information about coaching for youth basketball coaches: As someone who is frequently looking for specific youth basketball drills I can tell you that this is a pretty good starting point. Adding the note about popular websites and not just asking for ideas got me an extra layer of both topics and some examples of suitable sites in the niche. (Again, remember, these are from early 2022 or before!) Let’s dig a little deeper into keywords: OK, interesting. I wonder how ChatGPT is determining that these are “popular and low competition.” Wow, ChatGPT uses Ahrefs, Moz and Keyword Planner to generate keyword ideas? It only took a few seconds too! I felt like my LinkedIn and Twitter timelines would have been flooded with information about this, so I decided to ask a follow up: So this is not what I asked. I’m getting a “Did you eat these cookies ChatGPT? Well you know the thing about cookies is…” vibe here, but let’s clarify: Ah! (Much quicker to apologize than my kids, anyway). Let’s take a quick look at whether these terms are actually low competition according to Ahrefs, one of the tools ChatGPT initially claimed to have used (tough break for Semrush and other tools here, incidentally): Yeesh. Well, not much search volume here, but let’s check competition, particularly against this initial claim:
This isn’t an impossible term competition-wise, though it is likely not feasible for my brand new site any time soon. I can see with the volume for other terms these pages are ranking for that there’s likely search volume in this area generally. A popular prompt framework is to get ChatGPT to answer a prompt “as an X” with X being a person with a specific job, level of experience or expertise, etc. Let’s see how that impacts things here: These seem pretty good again! Let’s dig deeper – the combination of volume and competition maybe tripped the tool up. I’ll ask for terms with volume this time: And let’s see the data on that round via Ahrefs: Not much better! Keep in mind here that ChatGPT takes my “prompt history” into account for a specific chat, so if I’d opened a new chat and focused more on volume, I may have done a bit better. Generally, it’s often the case that if you feel like you’re down a rabbit hole with ChatGPT and aren’t getting the data or responses you want, you may want to consider starting fresh and better orienting the tool to what you want. These prompts and responses are a perfect encapsulation of ChatGPT for a lot of functions:
If I were looking for general topic ideas here, this might have been a useful exercise. If I had just started writing (or paying writers) to create content to target these phrases without checking ChatGPT’s suggestions, I might have wasted a ton of time and resources. Title ideas You should probably have your own ideas about creating titles and title tags for blog posts, but again ChatGPT can be a good place to generate some ideas: List ideas Similarly list types like X examples, tips, quotes, etc. require some digging to come up with ideas – while you want to curate your own list you can quickly get ideas from ChatGPT: FAQ ideas To quickly get FAQ ideas for an article the tool can be useful as well – again layering in specific instructions and a persona can help: Content outlines This is also true for content outlines. Again, keep in mind that tools like Clearscope, Content Harmony, Market Muse, Frase and Surfer SEO are creating briefs and outlines based specifically on what’s ranking in search results, while ChatGPT isn’t. Here is the prompt I used:
And here is the output: Again, not perfect, but a pretty decent framework! Keyword clustering Standard caveats: Clustering is not going to be search-specific like tools like Keyword Insights or similar. It won’t necessarily be driven off of volume and competition, but you can create clusters either semantically or by things like levels of intent: And/or just add things like search intent as an additional column. Summarizing Be careful with how you use these summaries (as they may get “flagged” as anything from low quality to AI over time). But if you have something like a study or a lengthy article that you want to feature in your own content, (and also let folks know you’ve featured in outreach) in something like a tips list, you can get help there: You can also ask for an outline of an article if you want to understand it quickly. Technical SEO: Code snippets (schema, hreflang, etc.), robots, .htacess and more Among the most dangerous ChatGPT prompts of all: code snippets! These can be great time-savers, but again: give as much detail as possible and QA, QA, QA! A simple prompt along the lines of “Wrap FAQ schema around these questions and answers” will get you the code to copy: Same for different types of schema like organization schema: I have had various schema come back from ChatGPT that didn’t work when rendered on a live page, so again, be sure to check everything. You can also have a robots file created: And create rewrite rules. Be careful, though! (More on this later) Meta descriptions A lot of SEOs or people responsible for maintaining lots of pages hate creating meta descriptions. This is really a perfect function for ChatGPT: Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console and Looker Studio You can get troubleshooting ideas for these platforms: Get instructions for building specific reports: Or even get code to use to interface with their APIs: Translation You can translate text to create country-specific pages: Formatting As an SEO, many quick and simple formatting tasks come up where ChatGPT can be very helpful. Things like converting a page to (or from) HTML: Extract links from a page: (It missed the distinction between internal and external links here, obviously.) You can also take a list of URLs and extract just the domains from them or convert a list of sites into HTML links (or vice versa). Additionally, you can perform some functions you might typically perform in spreadsheets (which may or may not be more helpful than just performing them in spreadsheets, depending on your proficiency with spreadsheets and workflow). Instead of concatenate or having to find a list of cities / copy and pasting a list of states: In place of VLOOKUP / IF types of functions, you can create a prompt like:
Code for simple tools and widgets As I walked through in this article, you can use ChatGPT to help you build simple tools like calculators that can enhance content, give you a chance to rank for specific terms (like {subject} calculator), and give you something to promote via outreach. Rewrite content If you give ChatGPT specific instructions on things like tone and what to include, it can help you rewrite or flesh out content: Outreach assistant While ChatGPT can’t find contact information for you (at least for now), there are some specific outreach tasks it can perform. Like getting a list of ideas of places to guest post: Or drafting a template for an outreach email. This is potentially particularly valuable if English isn’t your first language: Infuse your prompts here with your own tone and content preferences to make sure the template you get is closer to being consistent with your typical outreach emails. You can even craft an entire auto-responder sequence: Or you could create different types of outreach lists: And as you work through the outreach process, you can likely find even more opportunities to leverage ChatGPT. The badIn my experience, most of the trouble you'll run into with ChatGPT will be:
Publications have already been accused of publishing AI-generated content with errors and plagiarized content. If we'd unleashed ChatGPT to do all of our keyword research for us, we likely wouldn't have gotten a lot of traction. When you try to assign it tasks like strategy, you'll often get the same kind of boilerplate advice you'd get from a beginner-level X tips article on Google: And without a lot of human input (specific prompts, editing, and likely a mix of human and AI content weaved together), you'll likely get warmed-over content. Depending on your purpose (and your risk threshold), that may be fine. You may not need your meta descriptions, FAQs or certain articles or pages to be "10x". But make sure you understand what you're getting. The uglyOf course, some areas, like health-related content or critical tasks, on your site can go sideways: Be particularly mindful of ChatGPT's limitationsWhen it comes to ChatGPT prompts and SEO, you want to proceed with caution. Get good at creating your own prompts and sourcing inspiration (or productivity enhancements) from prompts other people share. Here are a few great articles with additional SEO prompts for ChatGPT:
The post An SEO’s guide to ChatGPT prompts appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://searchengineland.com/chatgpt-prompts-seo-393523
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