In today’s episode, Shara asks for good ChatGPT prompts beyond “optimize for SEO.” I explain treating it like an intern – give step-by-step instructions, not vague directives. Share key concepts, outline requirements, provide research sources. Tune in for actionable tips on crafting effective prompts for generative AI.
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
In today’s episode, Shara asks, I often use chat GPT for copy on my website.
Are there any good prompts to use besides optimized content for SEO? Okay.
That is not the best prompt to use for, for using chat GPT to optimize for SEO or anything.
What you want to think about prompting it to do is think about these tools like they’re the world’s smartest intern.
If you had an, a brand new intern day one at the company and you sit them down at your desk and give them the coffee and stuff like that, would you hand them a blog post or a page and say, Hey, optimize this content for SEO.
Would you do that? I sure hope not.
I sure hope not because you’re going to get not great results.
Right.
You’re going to get terrible results because the intern’s going to be like, I don’t know what SEO is, I don’t know what your website’s about.
I can wing it and hope it turns out well.
And it’s not going to turn out well.
Instead, if you had the world’s smartest intern and they sat down day one on the job and you hand them a piece of content and you said, Hey, use this piece of content, I want you to expand on it.
I want you to use the phrase industrial concrete more frequently.
I want you to use a thesaurus and do some research on Wikipedia on what other things co relate with industrial concrete.
I want you to look up maybe five interesting facts about industrial concrete.
I want you to be able to answer the question in the text.
What happens if you’re laying concrete and it rains for several days? Side note.
That’s a good thing.
It helps the concrete cure faster.
And I want you to write in professional tone of voice.
I want it to be 1500 words.
I want you to avoid adverbs.
I want you to avoid passive voice.
Go.
Would that get you a better result from the intern than say, Hey, here’s some content optimizer for SEO.
Of course it would.
You get so much better results from that long set of directions that you gave the intern because they would have more of an idea of what to do.
That is what an artificial intelligence model is.
A generative AI model is a smart intern on day one of the job every day.
Every time you turn it on, every time you hit the new chat button, it is day one on the job and you have to tell that intern how to do their job.
That’s one of the reasons why in all the trainings and keynotes and workshops I give, I tell people keep a, keep a prompt library, keep a journal of prompts so that every time you have to re prompt the intern to tell them who they are and what their job is, you don’t have to rewrite it from scratch.
Every time you can copy and paste the two paragraphs say, Hey, intern, here’s who you are.
Here’s what you’re doing.
Here’s the key concepts and so on and so forth.
That would be my suggestion.
My friend Andy Crestodina has a great gap analysis SEO prompt.
He will say, Hey, based on what you know about industrial concrete and all the keywords that go with it and stuff, here is my content about industrial concrete.
Tell me what I’m missing that would be of interest to my buyer persona.
And he provides the buyer persona as well.
And the tools will do exactly that.
They’ll say, okay, I’ve got your content.
I’ve got your buyer persona.
Let me see based on what I know, what the buyer persona would probably be interested in is that in your content or not.
And that gap analysis is so powerful for making your content more useful because if the tool can identify most pages about industrial concrete talk about curing and yours does not, you probably want to have that on there.
You probably want to have a whole paragraph about how industrial concrete is cured and how it can be ready for service in a certain amount of time and what the structural integrity of it and what that the tensile force load is on it all these things that go into content about concrete you would provide you provide to the intern, you would tell them here’s what to do.
And that gap analysis is incredibly powerful for SEO because it satisfies user intent.
And because semantically it will have more of the words and phrases that a service like Google would expect to see on a page about industrial concrete.
If you had a page on on espresso, what words and phrases would you expect to see on that page? Google’s looking, Google’s looking for lattes and cappuccinos and mochachinos and all that stuff.
And if those words aren’t there then in its computations for how it determines things like trustworthiness or expertise, if those words are missing, there’s a chance that it’s going to say, hey, you know what, you don’t seem to be particularly expert about this because you’re missing a whole bunch of words that should be there.
If you use Andy’s trick for gap analysis, you will at least not make those mistakes.
At least you will at least not have those persistent gaps in your content.
So that is the answer for today.
Thank you for the question.
We’ll talk to you soon.
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