Why SEO Pros Need To Master Prompts: The ChatGPT Revolution
Content generation has grown exponentially in recent years, and prompts have become a must-have tool for SEO professionals.
With these simple instructions, it’s possible to generate articles, images, videos, and more.
For marketers and SEO pros, in particular, mastering the use of prompts is a real asset.
This is because they can teach the AI how to best adhere to SEO recommendations while generating quality content.
AIs have revolutionized content generation by allowing articles to be customized to each user’s writing style, tone of voice, and preferences based on Large Language Models.
Today, SEO experts must master these tools to remain competitive in their field.
In short, mastering prompts, and AIs is crucial for SEO pros concerned with generating quality content and complying with SEO recommendations.
With these tools, they can deliver personalized content that is relevant to their target audience.
Promptology, Or The Art Of Creating Good Prompts
Editor’s note:
What are prompts? These are simply words, phrases, questions, keywords, etc., entered into AI tools to generate results.
What is promptology? The art of creating the most effective prompts to achieve your desired result.
Prompts To Generate Text
After many, many failed attempts at generating quality text, we can say that 2022 is the golden year of text generation.
While generating texts has never been easier, I have identified the main obstacles you will encounter and their solutions.
“My Text Is Too Short”
Often, the solution is to teach the AI to create a document structure with an introduction, sub-headings, one or several paragraphs per sub-heading, and a conclusion.
The release of DaVinci-text-3 revolutionizes the creation of long content because the AI now knows how to create long content with simple instructions.
Here are the prompts that work best with this new AI :
- “Write a comprehensive guide to [topic].”
- “Create an in-depth analysis of [topic].”
- “Explain the benefits of [topic] in detail.”
- “Describe the history of [topic] and its impact on [related field].”
- “The text is long but I don’t like the repetitive writing style.”
In this case, you will have to give the AI examples of your writing style and use the parameters that allow reducing repetitions. The latest generations of AI can give very good results.
“Is The Text Unique?”
This is a very good question, especially for SEO – and once the text is generated, you need to use tools like Google, where you search for phrases put in quotes with the search engine to detect if the phrases generated are present.
It is not necessary to take all but a few phrases randomly, there are also paid services like Copyscape to do this.
“The Text Is Full Of Invented Concepts”
Sometimes AI can invent concepts, and the best solution is to reduce the parameter of creativity.
After that, you can also use business rules to ensure that the concepts mentioned are related to your business area.
“Who Owns The Generated Text?”
This question comes up very often, but text generation tools are very clear on the subject: the text belongs to you.
“My Text Is Not Optimized For SEO”
Indeed, the AI has never learned to do SEO, so we must give it examples and teach it the types of optimization to do, such as:
- Include H1, H2, H3.
- Indicate relevant links.
- Use specific named entities such as places and people.
- Use specific keywords.
It is quite possible to generate unique texts optimized for SEO.
Prompts To Generate Images
Regarding image generation, I wrote a full article on SEJ on how to generate images, but let’s dive into the issues you will encounter.
“The Resolution Is Too Low”
For cost reasons, the generated images are of low resolution.
Many upscale tools will help you increase the resolution of an image generated with AI; I recommend this free tool.
“The Dimensions Are Too Small Or Not Adapted”
Once again, for cost reasons, the images generated are often 512 x 512 px.
There are two main solutions:
You can regenerate the image by specifying your dimensions – here is an example with Dream studio.
Screenshot from DreamStudioLite, December 2022You can also use the technique of outpainting, which allows you to add new image areas to an image.
Screenshot from Dall-E, December 2022“Is The Image Unique?
The best way to check your image’s uniqueness is to use Google Photos to check how similar images are.
“Who Owns The Image Rights”
All of the image generation tools mention in their TOS that you become the image’s rightful owner.
If you ask to copy an artist’s style, the creation being new, the image also belongs to you.
“I Used My Own Photos To Generate Photos”
In this case, the result will be even more original and unique.
The trend at the moment is to send a dozen photos of yourself in close-up, from afar, etc. to generate an infinite quantity of variations finally.
There are paid and free tools, and I recommend you use myheritage.fr if you want to generate an image of yourself in different eras – the result depends mainly on the quality and variety of your uploaded photos.
Now that it is possible to teach a style or a unique concept to an AI to allow designers or artists to stand out, here are examples of styles that have been learned from existing photos:
- Photos of home interiors.
- Fashion illustrations.
- Concert posters.
- Book covers.
How To Master Prompts For SEO
Test And Learn
The simplest technique is to write the prompt, see what is wrong with it, and modify it by adding or removing instructions until you get the best possible result.
The technique is not at all scalable but allows us to get closer to the ideal result.
Often, it is not about succeeding in one generation but, over time, ensuring that the results are always of consistent quality.
You will also want to have different tools that will check:
- Spelling and grammar mistakes.
- Repetitions.
- Forbidden words.
- Generations that are too short.
- Compliance with your SEO guidelines.
In some cases, more than 20 checks will be necessary. Note that this step can be time-consuming. However, once you have fine-tuned it, you will have a template you can reuse to infinity.
Now, I will introduce some methods that avoid the trial-and-error approach.
Use A Prompt Search Engine
The easiest method, and notably free, is to use a prompt search engine. These are available for all types of content.
The best-known prompt engine at the moment is Lexica.art, which allows you to search based on keywords and identify and extract the prompt for an image you like.
You just have to click on the image and get the prompt that was used to generate it. This is a real timesaver.
Here is an example to make this image with LexicaArt. Type in: “https://lexica.art/?q=typewriter.”
Image from LexicaArt, December 2022For text prompts, there are several initiatives, but the databases are pretty empty.
At the moment, the most interesting prompts are often shared on Twitter.
Prompt And Negative Prompt
Let’s take the case of image generation.
The image can contain a lot of bias, or undesirable things, so we might as well eliminate it with a negative prompt that specifies everything you don’t want.
Beware that the AI must understand the concept to be able to eliminate it, so you will have to teach it if necessary.
Negative prompting is to specify everything you don’t want to appear in your text and image.
You have to know that when a student writes an essay, he knows what he has to talk about, but he also knows not to include certain things, as they might negatively impact his grade. The list might include insults, jokes, invented elements, etc.
For humans, it is part of the memory of the experience, but for an AI, it is necessary to provide instructions in that sense.
OpenAi has fixed some biases, for example, that all CEOs were men and all nurses were women.
The prompts allow writing, and the negative prompts are used to avoid bias and offensive content.
The latest version of GPT-3 allows giving a prompt that indicates everything you want to generate and a negative prompt that indicates everything you want to avoid – for example, repetitions, short paragraphs, and competing keywords.
Ask An AI To Write Your Prompts And Perform SEO
ChatGPT is a chatbot based on artificial intelligence from OpenAI.
It is designed to provide a smooth and natural conversation by autonomously answering questions asked by users.
This chatbot can be very useful in content generation as it can help create content by automatically answering questions, generating ideas for blog topics, or suggesting headlines for articles.
It can also be useful for generating content for social networks or for online marketing campaigns.
Using OpenAI’s artificial intelligence, this chatbot can provide accurate and relevant answers, which can be very useful for writers and marketers looking to create quality content.
This ChatGPT can therefore be used to help you find your prompts.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, December 2022
The last question is now to know if this AI can do SEO.
I had already tested it in this SEJ article by having it complete an SEO quiz, and it now does a perfect job! It can even create such a quiz in a few seconds.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, December 2022
Now, ChatGPT can optimize the following content to rank in Google for “electric candle warmer” and explain all you need step by step.
The resulting SEO recommendations are better than last time, but still below an expert level. In any case, the progress made in a few months is awe-inspiring.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, December 2022
Screenshot from ChatGPT, December 2022
Conclusion
Now you have all the keys to write quality prompts to generate image and text content.
You will have to ask yourself if you want to build or buy one of the many tools available on the market and one of the many training courses.
I invite you to discover the most advanced workflows that allow for generating quality content at scale.
More resources:
Featured Image: Besjunior/Shutterstock