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 strategy
Before 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:
- ChatGPT is trained on a large data set and finished training in early 2022, meaning not all of the information is up to date and – as you likely know as a user of the internet – not everything it’s trained on will be correct.
- ChatGPT does not crawl the web! It has access to information about the web from when it was trained, but it will not go to a page and crawl it (but often, it’s responses will lead you to believe it did or does!)
- There are a variety of things ChatGPT can get flatly wrong: facts, math problems, code.
- While it has access to a lot of data and can organize that data in interesting ways, it’s unlikely to have an expert-level of “taste” or knowledge about any individual subject (yet, anyway).
- ChatGPT wasn’t designed to be an SEO tool, so while you can create prompts for things like keyword research, clustering, link building, etc. keep in mind that it’s responses and suggestions frequently won’t be using the same types of data sets (driven by search popularity and competition) as your favorite SEO tools.
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:
- Be as clear and thorough with your prompt as possible.
- Make sure ChatGPT is capable of