Learn prompt engineering and AI to improve your SEO workflow

Si says: “Start embracing AI and learn how to do prompt engineering. That’s going to be critical for the next couple of years, particularly for seasoned SEO veterans. After that, who knows where AI can take us?

For example, if you’re an SEO strategist or an SEO manager and you want to build a piece of interactive content, you might need internal dev resources and a team to support you. However, if you learn how to use prompt engineering and ChatGPT effectively, you can start to build programs that will allow you to create interactive content yourself.

On top of that, it’s very difficult to get the resources you need these days, especially at a junior level. AI can help you do a lot of the heavy lifting, which allows you to focus on the strategy side of your SEO campaign.”

What key AI software and skills do SEOs need to know?

“Start with prompt engineering and ChatGPT.

First, understand your processes. Take a step back and think about the main things that an SEO does. A lot of it is keyword research. We all know how to use Majestic, Semrush, Ahrefs etc. Learn how to clean up your data, then learn what you need from your data and how to use it, and then start to put that into prompts.

Once you’ve done that, half the job is done. You need a process for your day-to-day activities or tasks. Get those written down and then you can scale them up.”

When you’re cleaning up your data, are you primarily talking about the keywords you’re going to target?

“Yes. Let’s say you’re doing competitor analysis. Any third-party SEO tool can give you a list of keywords that your competitors are ranking for that you’re not ranking for. Then, you can use OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool, upload that list of keywords onto the platform, and ask it to filter out any keywords that aren’t going to be relevant for your campaign. That would be the first step in cleaning up that information and data.

I also create classifications. You can ask it to group keywords by semantic relevance. That allows you to understand the different types of content entities you need to create for your landing pages. If you’re doing something around holidays, when you group your keywords by semantic relevance, you can see things like the best time to visit a specific place or things to do.

Your keywords can be grouped in those semantic buckets, and AI can help you do that at scale. If you’re looking at thousands of keywords, you can do that within a minute. Without AI, it would have taken you a week or more.”

Can you trust how ChatGPT groups those keywords?

“When you create a prompt, the first thing that you need to do is ask it to give you an example. It will give you a sample of how the output should look and then it’s up to you to refine that. You’ve got to think about it as if you are training someone who has some experience in SEO but not as much as somebody who’s had years of SEO practice.

AI will give you an example. It’s up to you to make minor adjustments and refinements before you print out the output in a CSV file – particularly with the new GPT-4 upgrade that gives you a CSV file.”

Do you use AI for content creation as well?

“People are using AI to create content but, if you are going to do that, you need to learn how to make sure it has the right tone. You need to give it a specific tone in terms of how it should write content. You can ask the AI to take on a persona, and tell it what that persona should be like and the tone of voice that it should use.

It’s also a good idea to give it an example of how you write as a human. Then it would use your example to learn how to write as you, effectively cloning yourself – if you are a content writer. However, as they always say, never get an SEO to write your content for you; get a copywriter or a content writer.

Utilising AI can allow you to make a start on the content you want to create. You should then have a skilled writer going through that content and making sure there aren’t any errors in it and it reads the way you need it to read. I wouldn’t fully embrace creating all your copy using AI. It could help you to create about 60% of it.

One of the things it can create might be meta descriptions. They are important from a CTR perspective but they’re not important from a ranking perspective. You could test that and see what the output is. Then you could start to look at description copy or landing page copy, if you are an e-commerce website.

It does depend on your use case. If you write a full 4,000-word article using AI, from my experience, it doesn’t come out the way that you’d like it to. You need to do a lot of manual tweaking and it does create a bit of work.”

Will you be using AI to replace some of the work that’s traditionally done by junior SEOs?

“If you’re coming into the profession, this should help you to shorten the learning curve. That’s a positive way to look at it. If you are doing keyword research, AI can help you perform that keyword research task or that semantic clustering task.

If you can learn to work with a large language model and use it to your advantage, then it could shorten that learning curve. That’s probably the best use case if you’re coming into the space. Embrace it, because it gives you a competitive advantage over your peers.”

Is SEO leading the way AI is used in marketing or are other channels using AI in ways that SEO can learn from?

“Within the businesses that I’ve worked with, it’s helping with ad copy, creating ideas, and visuals. It’s not just ChatGPT; DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and other tools have come into the fold, and they allow you to create graphic content using prompts. It’s enabled certain creative people to bring in new ideas by seeing their visions played out in visual formats. Other marketing and advertising channels outside of SEO are utilising it quite well.

For SEO, the most important thing is understanding your processes and slotting AI into those processes effectively. You might have a way that you want to carry out a technical audit or content audit: encode that and break it up into sections where you can use prompts and have AI fill in the gaps for things that would have taken a substantial amount of time to complete.

For instance, you could utilise AI to analyse a large list of alt tags and see which ones should have different titles based on the landing page content and the context of that page. It’s often about analysing and structuring data. A lot of the work that I do, as an SEO, is with large sets of data and it helps me speed up that process and then think about the strategy and direction of the campaign.”

Are there any ChatGPT plugins that you would recommend?

“There are a lot. What I would say is, if you’re going to use ChatGPT, get the paid version if you can. GPT-4 gives you advanced data settings and it enables you to upload CSV files. You can do a lot more with it than you could with standard GPT-3.

The difference with GPT-3.5 is that plugins are enabled. If you’re using GPT-3.5, you can use plugins but, if you use GPT-4, you can’t.

With GPT-4, you can ask it to download the output in a CSV file and you can start to analyse that and bring it into your own workspace. However, there are tools like Noteable, which is a plugin for GPT-3.5 that allows you to do a lot of data extrapolation and cleansing, and use diagrams for visualisations within the ChatGPT interface.

It does depend on your use case. If you want to bring everything into Noteable, you can use GPT-3.5. However, if you want to bring everything into a CSV that you’re running in your own workspace, then you should use GPT-4.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop doing everything manually and learn how to write prompts. Whatever you’re doing right now, write a process for it. What are the steps that you take to get to where you need to go? Think about that and break it down into subsections.

You might be doing keyword research, and the first thing that you do when you’re doing keyword research could be understanding the business. Write that down. It could be that you start with a few head terms. Write that down. When you’ve got that information and data, try it out with AI.

Create a prompt and ask it to think like an SEO practitioner. Once you’ve done that, you can give those methods for starting keyword research to the AI and see what the output is. Keep doing that continuously across all your activities, tasks, and processes – turn those into prompts. Once you’ve done that, you’ve basically automated half your work.

Then you need to think about how this fits into the bigger picture and why it matters for the business. Does this activity generate sales? Does it generate revenue? If you’ve automated a lot of your steps, you can analyse a lot more data and tailor your content to specific users.

When we were creating content before, it was quite generalised. Now you can create lots of variations of content for different users and demographics. You can ask your AI to think like a specific persona and create copy that is written for those users.

AI is going to open up a lot more possibilities, even just in terms of the personalisation of what we see on the internet and how websites are structured. It will help us better organise our content and our information. It won’t be something that allows you to sit on the beach and enjoy the fruits of your labour, but it’s something that’s going to add a ton of opportunities for people.

As SEOs, we want to create new campaigns and run new pieces of content marketing. Imagine what you can do with good prompt engineering. You can ask Stable Diffusion to create different graphics and then bring those graphics into a Jupyter notebook to create an interactive infographic. You might not be working with a professional graphic designer or engineer from the get-go, but you will involve them. It means you can get to that stage a lot quicker, which will create a much richer experience for your users.

You will be able to create new ideas and new experiences for users, and I think that is going to open up a renaissance of unique content experiences online. Before, what was holding the majority of practitioners back was that they had constraints in resources and skills. Now, AI allows you to unlock those skills and resources where they didn’t exist before, and that’s going to create a lot more opportunities.”

Si Shangase is an SEO Partner at KuduHQ, and you can find him over at KuduHQ.com.