ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and the world of productivity immediately lost its mind. Realizing the potential of generative AI for automating remedial tasks, entrepreneurs and business executives found novel new ways to incorporate AI in their existing workflows.
While many people immediately started shouting the benefits of generative AI from the rooftops, we should also clarify that AI is still in its early stage. ChatGPT makes mistakes. A lot of mistakes. Mistakes so profound they’ve been deemed hallucinations.
Of course, there’s no replacement of marketers and content creators. But the professionals who have managed to integrate AI into their existing workflows have seen a huge increase in productivity.
And I should know. Because that’s exactly what I did!
In this post I’ll share the process I used to optimize my content creation and SEO workflow.
Content Research
Explore your competitor’s content. Which competitors do you focus on? That’s easy. With a focus on SEO content, which sites rank for your target keywords? Usually these competitors have already invested into the SEO process.
So why reinvent the wheel when you can take inspiration from your top-ranking competitors?
Competitor Blog Posts
Once I have a list of organic competitors, I like to go through their blog posts, which is usually easy to find with crawling software like Screaming Frog.
Otherwise, you can simply install the free ScrapeSimilar Chrome extension. Then go onto your competition’s blog page (that lists all the blog posts), right click on one of the clickable titles and you should see the option to “Scrape similar…” This will return all the blog posts on that page, so just copy these titles into a document.
Make sure to do this on all their blog pages, so you get access to all their blog posts. Because it’ll be super useful in the next step.
Categories, Insights & Inspiration
Once you have a list of competitor blog posts, you’re going to want to share that directly with ChatGPT. Here’s the prompt structure I tend to follow at this step:
I’m looking at my competitor’s blog posts for content inspiration to write blog posts on my site about my {niche} services. Please categorize the blog titles below, give me some insights into the types of posts they write in each category and brainstorm some examples how I can apply their SEO content strategy to my own blog:
[List your competitor blog post titles]
At this stage, ChatGPT will probably come back with some incredible insights for your content strategy. This all comes back to the AI concept of “Garbage in, Garbage out”. On the other hand, when you spoon-feed ChatGPT’s generative AI Gold, you’re bound to get Gold-level output in return.
Using the method above, you can get a sense of what your competitors’ content focus is. If you complete this process for each of your top competitors, you’ll understand how each competitor positions itself with its content. As a result, you’ll identify endless actionable insights for your content strategy, as well as any potential gaps in the market.
By the end of this process, you should have a clear list of content ideas that are relevant for your business, industry and target audience.
Tone of Voice & Writing Style
The final piece of research we need is around the tone of voice and writing style. We’ll use this in our writing prompts later to make sure it sounds less like generic AI. For this step, you’ll first need an example content piece.
This can be either a competitor’s content piece that you really liked or one of your own that you’re particularly proud of. We’re going to ask the GPT to analyze it. And this analysis will be used a guideline in our writing process.
This is hands-down my favorite method for getting a clear tone of voice and writing style:
I’d like you to analyze the tone of voice and writing style of the three competitors. We’ll use this to start writing later, but please only analyze the competitor content for now. We’re not writing anything yet. [Insert Content Piece]
Once you have the tone of voice and writing style analysis, hold onto it. We’ll be using it later. And if you enjoy this tutorial, you might just benefit from it as long as you create content in this niche!
Content Outline
Now that we have a virtually endless list of valuable content ideas, it’s time to get started on our first one! Of course, we don’t just ask GPT to start writing. After all, you don’t know what it’ll end up writing. That’s why we first need a clear content outline.
A content outline makes sure that you and the AI are on the same side. It’s a content checklist of sorts. It’s a guide, making sure the AI covers all the bases without repeating itself or missing valuable information.
Creating a content outline can be difficult, but lucky for us we have GPT to help us. And virtually all we need to include in the prompt at this step is the title of the blog post we’re writing and mention that we need an outline. GPT then takes it away and comes up with an outline, which is usually quite impressive.
Though sometimes, we may need to make a few changes. Again human expertise is no match for pre-trained AI models. Only humans can write for human audiences, so we need to be aware at each stage of the AI-optimized work flow that human intervention is always valuable and incredibly simple. If you want to make a small change to the outline, just let the GPT know with a follow-up prompt to replace this or remove that.
Once we’re happy with the content outline, then we can start writing.
Content Writing
There are a few things I do before it’s time to start writing. First of all, I want to clarify to the AI that we’re going to write the content in a few instalments. I usually split the content into 3-4 chunks to ensure GPT is able to output an in-depth amount of content under each bullet point from the output. Otherwise, it ends up skipping over the details. Also it’s helpful to make sure it’s on the right track.
That’s why I start my writing prompt with something along the following:
Now you’re going to help me write the content. We’ll split the writing into 4 phases:
- Sections 1 – 3
- Sections 4 – 6
- Sections 7 – 9
- Sections 10 – 11
Your first output will be the first phase of the content writing. You will ask me to proof-read and offer any guidance before you continue to write the content in phase 2, and so on.
But don’t send that prompt yet, because the GPT still doesn’t know how we want it to write. That’s where the next part of the prompt comes in…
Tone of Voice & Writing Style
As part of the content research phase, you got a clear understanding of the tone of voice and writing style of your competitors. Here’s where we use the analysis to complete our prompt from the previous section:
You will also follow the tone of voice and writing style guidelines below: [Insert Tone of Voice & Writing style guidelines]
With this added guideline, we’re much more likely to get a quality content output.
Content Proof-reading
Now we’ve used AI to create our first draft. And how long did it take? Maybe 10 minutes max…? Maybe a bit longer if this is your first rodeo. But still it’s probably 10x faster than any other blog content piece you’ve created in your life.
Of course, now we need to kick up the human intervention a notch. We have the content structure and all the content we need. But to make it more human-friendly, we need to make human changes. I like to tackle this step of the process the old fashioned way.
I go through each line of the content in my doc, remove any parts that feel misplaced and reword sections to sound more engaging. Of course, I’ll also use AI at this stage of the process. In two very different ways.
1. Phrase synonyms
As an experienced SEO copywriter, it’s often quickest to make the changes I think of right away. But sometimes I know something sounds off, I just don’t know how to phrase it. So I ask GPT something like:
I want to replace [word] in this paragraph with something focused more on [another word]. Give me 10 options for this change: [Insert content to edit]
I’m not aware of any other applications that give you synonyms for entire phrases, and GPT gives you as many as you want. I lean on this feature almost every time I proof-read content.
2. “Rate my content”
Here’s a feature people don’t usually understand when I tell them. But I ask the AI to rate my content. It’ll give me an idea of areas for improvement. Then I can make more changes based on its recommendations and ask it to rate itself again later.
Here’s the simple prompt I’ll use:
Rate my content for writing standards like spelling, grammar, copywriting, SEO, etc. as well as factual errors: [Insert content here]
This step in the process makes sure your content is high-quality and even fact-checks your content. Again, ChatGPT is known to hallucinate, so don’t just take its word. This is just an extra line of defense for your content accuracy.
Create Your AI Database
Of course, all this AI work has streamlined your process significantly from the very first time you used these prompts. But if you’re as lazy at following unnecessary steps as I am, you’ll realize there’s a simpler way. If you create content for the same brand repeatedly, there are many steps in this document you don’t need to do more than once.
Why follow unnecessary steps when you already know your desired tone of voice, writing style, content topic, etc.? If you build a database, you only need to do most of this “work” once. And for this, I recommend Notion.
ChatGPT is such a useful tool that it even formats your text for headings and links. Now, I’m a Google Docs guy through-and-through, but I had the issue when I first started working with this workflow that I couldn’t copy the formatting from GPT without ruining my Google Doc formatting.
This is where Notion shines. Copy from ChatGPT, paste it directly into a Notion page, and it’ll format beautifully. Once it’s in Notion, you can easily paste it into a Word or Google Doc with no issues.
So what does my Notion content database include?
- Brand Tone of Voice & Writing Style Guideline
- Content Plan with all upcoming blog posts
- Past blog posts (this can come in handy sometimes)
AI Content Creation in a Nutshell
AI is a game-changer for your content creation and SEO process. As we’ve explored in this guide, AI tools like ChatGPT can significantly streamline the content research, outline, writing and proofreading processes. But don’t forget that AI can only enhance human creativity, not replace it.
The real power lies in the synergy between AI efficiency and human expertise. After all, ChatGPT does not understand nuance, context or emotional appeal like you do.
By integrating AI into your workflow, as illustrated in this guide, you can stay ahead of the curve. The future of SEO content is a blend of AI-driven efficiency and human ingenuity. And those who recognize this will lead the way in crafting compelling and impactful SEO content.
Adopt the mindset where innovation, experimentation, and continuous learning are at the forefront. That’s how AI can help you leverage your content expertise more effectively ever before.
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