ChatGPT Prompts for SEO: Creating Optimized Content that Ranks

Have you ever seen that one GIF where the guy is trying to carry everything at once and then completely crashes and drops everything?

This one.

That’s probably how you feel sometimes if you’re the head of an in-house marketing team, a small business, or a startup  company.

You’re responsible for overseeing all (or most) aspects of marketing strategies across all channels, and managing an in-house marketing team or dealing with contractors or agencies, and supervising budget and resource allocation, and monitoring customer behavior and marketing strategy performance.

And then, if you have some “extra” time during your 60-hour work week, you have to stay up to date on new technologies, trends, and best practices in digital marketing.

That’s exhausting.

The good news is I’m here to help you out and make your life a lot easier.

Or at least help decrease some of the burden and stress of your ever-growing task list in Asana or ClickUp.

And I’ll do that by showing you how to put your search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing strategy on autopilot with Chat GPT, an AI chatbot.

I’m sure you’ve heard of ChatGPT, and probably even played around with it a little by now. Or maybe you’ve tested it out on a blog post or two.

But to really get the most out of this incredible AI tool and use it to streamline your output and generate real results, you have to use it the right way.

Because anyone can go to ChatGPT and give it a basic prompt (although maybe not for long since a paid version will be rolling out soon). But if you want it to actually give you good information and good AI generated content, you have to give it good prompts.

And that’s what this blog is all about — how to use AI for content marketing.

Literally everything in this blog you can take and implement today.

Hit the bookmark button on your browser so you can keep this guide a click away and revisit it when you’re ready to take action with AI technology.

Let’s get started.

Using ChatGPT Prompts for SEO 

No matter how big or small your blog is right now, let’s pretend you’re at ground zero and start fresh.

We’re going to get a big list of blog post ideas that are related to your product or service.

So go to ChatGPT and enter in this prompt:
(*Note: I’ll be going through this with you, using a virtual interior design SaaS as an example.)

Share [X] topics related to [service/industry/niche]

The AI Algorithm will give you a long list of article ideas.

Our next step is to find a relevant keyword that aligns with each of these content ideas.

To do this, you’ll need the help of an SEO expert or SEO tool for keyword research like Ahrefs or SEMrush so you can see the estimated monthly search volume of keywords and how easy or hard they’ll be to rank for (this is referred to as “keyword difficulty”).

There are two ways we can go about getting our target keyword (and relevant keywords) for a specific topic.

First, you can ask ChatGPT to give you some keyword ideas. Here is an easy keyword research prompt. (If your specific industry is quite niche, be sure to test both broad and granular prompts.)

Give me [X] keyword ideas for the topic [paste topic]

Or you can go to Google, copy and paste your topic, and find a page that ranks in the top 10 that’s similar to your company or what you’d write. Often, you will also find topic ideas for a related post as well.

Then, copy & paste the URL of the page you like into your keyword tool and see what keywords are driving the most traffic to that page.

From ChatGPT, let’s take the “coastal home decor” keyword, and from our competitor analysis, let’s use “coastal interior design”.

Next we’ll put each into our keyword tool and view the search volume and keyword difficulty.

This step is important because you don’t usually want to target a keyword with a super high difficulty score, because you’ll likely never be able to rank for it. At least not in the top 5 or top 3, which is where the majority of clicks are.

Ideally, you’re looking for a keyword that has high search volume and a low keyword difficulty.

But, that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t go after keywords with low search volume either. Keywords with lower search volume often convert better because they’re typically long-tail keywords with specific intent.

(This is where an SEO consulting firm can really help. They’ll be able to guide you through your keyword options and make sure you’re not spending a ton of time and effort on a keyword or page that won’t ever rank).

In this scenario, I’d probably go with “coastal home decor” since the volume between the two keywords is pretty similar, but “coastal interior design” has a much higher KD.

Repeat this step for each blog topic until you have a solid list of blog topics and their assigned target keywords.

You can do these all at once or one at a time — the main goal is to come away with a blog topic and its one target keyword.

Once you have those, you’re ready to move on to the next step, which is creating the content brief and page outline.

Creating the Content Brief and Detailed Outline

You have a topic you like and a keyword to go with it. Now you need a brief and an outline to help you expedite the writing process.

Go back to ChatGPT and enter in this prompt:

Write a content brief by a [type of company & service they provide] that is writing a blog on the topic “[paste topic]”, with the target keyword “[paste target keyword]” for the target audience “[paste target audience]”.

But we’re gonna take it a step further.

It gets easier.

Next, enter this prompt (directly after it’s given you the content brief):

Write a page outline for this blog

But we’re still not done using the AI chatbot.

Right after the ChatGPT AI program gives you this full page outline for your blog, enter in this prompt:

Add sub-bullets to the main bullet points

And after a whopping ~3 minutes of “hard work” with an AI program, you now have yourself a:

But before it’s ready to go to your writer, you’ll need to make sure that you create content that matches the search intent of your target keyword.

To do this, enter your target keyword in Google and look at the top results. Are they “What is” or “How to”-type posts? If yes, then you’ll want to be sure your outline and content are more informational.

If they’re “buy ___” or “best ____”, the search intent is more transactional, and you’ll need to create content that fits that type of search.

Once you understand the search intent of your target keyword and ensure your content brief aligns with that, then it’s ready to go for your writer.

Which brings us to the next section on chatGPT SEO prompts.

Writing Your chatGPT SEO Content

This is where it gets a little tricky because there are some people who are all about AI-written content, and there are others who want to stay away so they don’t get penalized by Google.

I think a better way of thinking is this:

Are readers actually getting any value out of it? Because that’s what Google’s really looking for.

If you’re on the fence about using AI to write your content, or want some insight into Google’s stance on it, check out this article.

TLDR: it echoes exactly what I’ve said above, which is it’s the quality of content that matters, not necessarily how the content is produced.

How you decide to write your content is ultimately up to you. I won’t try to sway you one way or the other.

I have clients right now that do both. Some use a human writer, and others use AI.

However, for those that do choose to use AI-generated content, I strongly recommend a human editor and advise against publishing ChatGPT content without any editing or human review.

There are a couple of reasons for this, with one of the biggest being that AI-generated content isn’t always factually correct.

And the last thing you want to do is publish something that’s just not true. That’s an easy way to lose trust and lose rankings.

There are more reasons, but I’ll let ChatGPT tell you itself why you shouldn’t take its work straight to publishing.

So if you’re using ChatGPT or other AI technology to write your content for you, great. Have a human get eyeballs on it before it goes live.

If you’re using a human writer, awesome.

The point is that by using artificial intelligence with the prompts and process above, you can have a topic, a keyword, a content brief, and a detailed page outline ready to go within a couple of minutes — eliminating the hours of research and writing it’d take to do it yourself.

And because of how thorough and detailed the brief and page outline are, the writer (whether it be human or AI) should be able to work through it pretty efficiently.

Using ChatGPT to Write Your Content

A common mistake I see people make when they try to get ChatGPT to write high quality content for them is that they give it one generic prompt and expect it to produce 1,000+ words and for it to be done.

Wrong.

Sure, it’s an AI solution that can produce a full-length article in under a minute, but the quality is not what it could be.

Funny enough, if you have a little patience (even though the goal is to produce content at an accelerated rate), you can get it to write an article that’s 1000x better if you break it up into smaller prompts.

Back to the example I’m using, I could give ChatGPT a prompt like this:

write a 1,500+ word blog on “virtual interior design for coastal homes” with the target keyword “coastal home decor”

And it’d write a pretty good blog post.

But sometimes it’ll time out and won’t finish writing. Or you’ll notice the quality of the content gets watered down as you read further into it.

This is why breaking it down into smaller chunks is a better option. Plus, you’ll be able to give it clearer instructions and a better feedback loop.

So what’s the easiest way to break down these prompts?

By following the page outline you made!

Literally, go down your outline line by line.

Now, you’ll probably have to make a few tweaks here and adjustments there, but once you get in a rhythm your article will be done in no time and ready to be edited.

Here’s a look at my “virtual interior design for coastal homes” example:

Content brief:

ChatGPT prompt & output:

Now, I’d probably break up those paragraphs into smaller, 1-2 sentence paragraphs to improve the readability, but overall the initial output is great.

Remember, at least some degree of editing on your end is required — ChatGPT for SEO isn’t perfect.

But following this process will help you finish with a high-quality article in a short amount of time.

And the more high-quality content you produce, the more search engine rankings and organic traffic you’re likely to get.

And more organic traffic means more leads, which means more money.

But there’s another step you’ll need to take if you want to best optimize your articles to rank in Google.

Optimizing Your Content for SEO with ChatGPT

This step can be done for both articles that are in progress and existing articles on your site.

So if you already have a good amount of blogs on your site, you can still take some actionable insights from this article.

Title Tag & Meta Description

The first prompt is for the title tag and meta description — two of the most important factors when it comes to SEO.

Use this prompt to generate your title tag options:

generate 3 unique title tags (maximum of 60 characters) for the keyword phrase “[paste keyword]” (make sure you include the exact keyword phrase in order)

You may need to tweak the ChatGPT suggestions slightly to find a title tag that fits, but you get instant ideas and inspiration with this method and can find a title tag you like within minutes.

Next, use this prompt to generate a meta description:

Generate 3 unique meta descriptions (maximum of 150 characters) for the title tag “[paste title tag]” and keyword phrase “[paste keyword]” (make sure you include the exact keyword phrase)

Again, you’ll likely have to make some small changes here and there. But you just got three great options that all include your target keyword and are optimized for SEO.

Related Keywords

I could get much more granular about NLP keywords, LSI terms, and all that nerdy SEO stuff — but I won’t waste your time. Just know that adding keywords that are related to your target keyword can help you rank higher.

And to get a list of what related keywords you should be including in your blog, enter this prompt:

Share a list of NLP keywords to include for an article targeting the keyword “[paste keyword]“

Now you have a list of 20 relevant keywords to add into your article.

One extra piece of advice for related keywords — don’t force them in. Insert them where they fit naturally, because that way it will read much better than it would if you were to keyword stuff.

If you’re handing off a content brief or page outline to your writer, you should generate this list of related keywords and provide that list to them before they start writing.

This will make it a lot easier for them to incorporate the related keywords naturally.

Related Subtopics

And it will give Google a better understanding of the overall context of your content, which can help it perform better with search engines.

Here’s the prompt to enter into ChatGPT:

what are some semantically related topics to include in a blog about “[paste keyword]“

This prompt will be especially helpful if you’re refreshing existing content that’s already been published, because it can provide subtopic ideas you hadn’t thought of that would help enhance the content as a whole and give more value to the reader.

Like the related keywords, I’d suggest matching this list up with the content brief and page outline you created and adding in new subtopics where necessary, before you send it over to your writer.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you’ve done the work above, you should have a really strong piece of content that’s equipped to rank well in the search results.

But to add a finishing touch and one more on-page optimization SEO strategy, you can utilize ChatGPT to produce a list of common questions your audience may have about the topic you’re writing about.

And after running this prompt a handful of times already, I can say that getting your FAQ ideas from ChatGPT is arguably better than getting them from Google’s “People Also Ask” — which is a popular method among SEOs.

Here’s the prompt to use to generate a list of frequently asked questions for your blog article:

Provide the 10 nearest semantically associated questions to “[paste topic or keyword]“

Pick your favorites and add them in at the bottom of your article.

And as a bonus little UX tip, build your FAQs in expandable accordions so there aren’t a bunch of paragraphs showing at the end. That way, if a user wants to see the answer to a question, they can expand it manually and don’t have to see a wall of text that includes the answers to all your other FAQs.

And as a double bonus, you can add FAQ Schema to your article with these questions, which can help your page take up more space in the search results.

Here’s an example of a page that has FAQ schema:

Adding schema is a strategy that’s underutilized by so many sites today, in my opinion. And the sites that do add schema to their pages are seeing great results.

Unfortunately (and maybe one of the reasons not as many sites use it), schema isn’t the easiest to add. It involves creating and placing code and all that jazz.

Mess up one character of the code and it won’t work properly.

That’s why a lot of sites have an SEO agency like Amplifyed add schema for them. So if you’re interested or need help with adding schema, let us know.

Conclusion

Alright, that was kinda a lot — hence why you should bookmark this page and come back to it when you’re ready to try out an AI platform.

But if you read all the way to this point (which most of you probably didn’t — don’t lie to me), or at least skimmed through, you’re now waaaaay ahead of your competitors when it comes to using AI applications like ChatGPT for SEO and content.

You have an exact process to follow and a handful of ChatGPT prompts to use to quickly produce high-quality, SEO-optimized content that will drive more organic traffic, and in the long run, produce more leads.

I’ve spent a lot of time writing this blog for you (probably too much), hoping you’d get at least some value from it.

Because I don’t want you to feel like this guy.

I want you to feel like this guy:

So that’s it. That’s my ChatGPT prompts for SEO blog for ya.

If you have questions, want to know more about how to use AI for marketing, or have implemented any of the strategies I’ve outlined above and want to tell me about your crazy good results, let us know.