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Unlocking the power of prompts is key to supercharging your SEO content strategy.
Well-crafted prompts helped yield remarkable results for SEO expert Shelly Fagin, with website traffic experiencing an impressive increase of up to 30%. This is why perfecting prompts is essential for ensuring generative AI tools like ChatGPT deliver the best output, she said.
But where should you start? And what qualities make a prompt perfect – or at least good?
Here’s a recap of Fagin’s top tips from SMX Advanced, as well as some prompts she has used for maximum performance.
Crafting effective prompts is crucial for generating unique outputs. Always assume your competition is also using ChatGPT and that it learns from the prompts you provide.
To stand out, be concise, provide detailed instructions, and avoid overly complex questions that can lead to confusion and deviation from your intended point. As Fagin explained:
Use this eight-step prompt strategy for producing unique, high-quality editorial briefs using ChatGPT:
Breaking prompts down into eight steps significantly improved output quality, Fagin said, adding that additional steps could be added to the process.
While it might seem time-consuming, she stressed it’s still more efficient than creating briefs manually without ChatGPT’s assistance.
Due to limited resources, Fagin wanted to automate content generation as much as possible, so she and her team explored different tools. Three valuable tools for making this all work were:
“How could you not start any creative or optimization brief without understanding the search intent?” Fagin said. She uses the following prompt for ChatGPT when she’s trying to understand what people are expecting when searching for different keywords:
Fagin said she uses the instructions below in the same prompt:
ChatGPT then “inserts all of the scraped page titles that came from that first step that actually runs in the background.”
ChatGPT understands intent categorizations – similar to tools like Semrush or Ahrefs, and so its analysis can include an intent categorization section where the intent is divided into four parts:
You want ChatGPT to produce its answers this format:
Audience analysis helps you to understand what kind of reader you should be targeting, Fagin said.
To get ChatGPT to assist you with this when writing blog posts, she advised using the following prompt:
Combine your knowledge of keywords with the insights you’ve gained from your search intent analysis, Fagin said. This analysis should encompass the ultimate search intent and specific audience information.
You can then prompt AI to analyze based on these findings.
You can use your own article as input. Alternatively, you can enter the URL of the article that currently ranks number one for your target keyword.
The goal is to outperform them, so you want to request a well-organized summary that covers all the essential topics, with a length between 500 and 1,000 words.
To do this, Fagin advised using the following content summary prompt:
This aims to improve the title and meta description for your blog. Use elements from your existing title or the title itself.
The aim is to create better content that targets the keyword and outperforms the current one.
Fagin recommended using this exact prompt:
Fagin stressed the importance of giving AI clear instructions and urged using one of the following prompts below for improved titles and descriptions:
Or:
Fagin added that you can change and tailor these prompts as you see fit, depending on what makes sense for your brand and company.
Fagin then explained how to tell ChatGPT to format the results using this prompt:
Do this for each of the elements, title and the description, she said.
You can also instruct ChatGPT to include additional information and what approach it should take for writing the copy, which Fagin said “really elevated our output”, using this prompt:
The prompt below tells AI to act as an SEO strategist with the goal of enhancing an existing article structure by including the topics previously identified in the outline:
Fagin explained there are even more instructions that can be used to improve content further still, which she said could be “really helpful” for editors:
Fagin went on to share some useful advice to make your prompts more effective:
While AI can boost your SEO strategy, there are still some concerns, Fagin said:
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Fagin concluded her presentation by outlining the key benefits after implementing this prompt process:
Below is the complete video of Fagin’s SMX Advanced presentation.
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