This blog was not written by AI.
But this one was.
And it is absolutely possible to write quality blogs that sound human, have SEO value, and offer unique insight to your readers. You just have to do it the right way.
(Update March 25, 2014: That blog now ranks in the top spot on Google for "marketing law".)
AI as a Content Generation Tool
You can skip this section if you already know about AI and ChatGPT.
This is the obligatory introductory section to ensure readers have the background information needed to understand the conversation. It helps with SEO too. But we know readers skim for headlines and the first few words of paragraphs, so most won’t have reached this portion of the sentence. But here’s the quick review before we get into this step-by-step guide of how to use AI in content creation.
AI stands for artificial intelligence, which is machine intelligence rather than human intelligence. Computers and software are now (well, since the 1950s, but rapidly accelerating in the last decade) able to learn and develop intelligence, rather than just follow instructions.
OpenAI is an American organization involved in AI research. They developed a tool called ChatGPT—a text-based artificial intelligence that responds to your queries. You can use it for free, or pay a small monthly fee to access the more advanced model (ChatGPT-4)
Many businesses and content creators are using ChatGPT for blogging and social media content as the easiest first opportunities to make use of this technology.
If you ask it to write you a blog about how to stain a deck, it will do so. But the quality will be low, and it won’t be optimized to help your website rank on search engines. Your audience is also likely to identify that it doesn’t feel very human or expert-written, and move on to someone else’s blog.
But you can use ChatGPT to produce your blogs. You just have to spend more time coaxing the content out of the AI.
Ignore all claims of “AI can write your blog in seconds” and realize that this process will still take some time, but eliminates the heavy lifting.
Step-by-Step ChatGPT Blog Writing Guide
To do this successfully, you need to see ChatGPT as a tool to write the blog with you, rather than write the blog for you.
A human component is still needed for evaluating responses and steering it in the right direction. The technology is not yet in a place where we can copy-paste the output without expert review.
This is your guide to using AI in blogging. Throughout, I’ll be explaining how I used ChatGPT to create this blog that explains Canadian marketing laws and how to be compliant.
1: Find a Great Topic
If you don’t already have a topic in mind, ChatGPT can generate some ideas.
For our example, I used this prompt:
Help me come up with a topic for a blog. It's for my marketing agency's website. We work with Canadian small businesses and are a full-service marketing company with a team of specialists in all areas of marketing. What would be a powerful blog topic to help with our website’s SEO that is a highly searched topic by prospective clients without being too competitive?
And ChatGPT responded:
Coming up with a unique, SEO-optimized blog topic can be a challenge, but it's crucial to attract and engage your audience. Here are some topic suggestions for your marketing agency's blog that are relevant to Canadian small businesses and are likely to be searched for, while not being too competitive:
And then listed eight recommendations that each included a possible title and short description of what it would be about.
And also ended with:
Remember to use relevant keywords in your blog posts that align with these topics to help boost your SEO ranking. Each blog post should be in-depth, informative, and helpful to your readers. This will not only improve your visibility on search engines but also establish your agency as an authority in the field.
Out of the recommendations, a suggestion about digital marketing laws in Canada really stood out as a topic that isn’t talked about enough, but is of interest to a lot of small businesses.
ChatGPT’s other suggestions like “how small businesses can benefit from social media marketing” and “utilizing influencer marketing in Canada” and “leveraging the power of local SEO for small businesses” seemed overdone and less appealing. They could be good topics for the future, but the digital marketing regulation topic stood out as being more likely to be uniquely valuable.
2: Research Your Target Keywords
With the topic chosen, you want to know what keywords you will be targeting. These are short search phrases that you may want to include in your blog content and headings and title, and they are the queries you hope the blog could rank for in search engines.
So I asked ChatGPT:
I like the topic of digital marketing laws in Canada for small businesses. What keywords should we target with this blog to ensure we are able to rank for relevant searches?
And ChatGPT responded with a list of short-tail keywords, long-tail keywords, localized long-tail keywords, and related keyword phrases. As well as this reminder:
Remember to include these keywords naturally in your content, in headers where possible, and also in meta tags and descriptions. Overuse of keywords, also known as ‘keyword stuffing,’ can have a negative effect on your SEO, as search engines may perceive it as spam. The intent is to make the content informative, relevant, and helpful for readers while also being optimized for search engines.
I copied this list of keywords into a document for future reference as the blog came together.
3: Create Your Blog Outline
An important step in writing with ChatGPT is to provide a good structure and outline to follow so all your points are covered and the topic has a logical flow. But ChatGPT can create that outline for itself to follow! Just ask for it.
So I asked:
Please write me a detailed outline for the blog about Canadian digital marketing laws applicable to small businesses that would create a strong ability to rank in search engines, considering the keywords you provided.
And it provided me with an outline for the blog. I got a headline and overview of content for each section. For example, this is the description for one of the content sections:
Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)
- Brief explanation of PIPEDA.
- How PIPEDA affects data collection, storage, and use.
- The importance of consent under PIPEDA.
- Implications for marketing practices.
I took the entire outline and copy-pasted it into my working document as well. Now I had the structure for a blog. And our planning stage is complete!
4: Write the Content, Section by Section
You can now get into the AI blog writing. You’ll get much better results if you write section by section so ChatGPT can go into enough detail on each specific topic, rather than it all getting muddled into one prompt.
Skip over writing the introduction section for now, which is likely to be the first item in your outline, and have it write the main content first.
Going to your pasted outline in your working doc, take the first body section and use the same description it provided to ask something like:
Please write the blog section about the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), providing a brief explanation of PIPEDA, detail how PIPEDA affects data collection, storage, and use, highlight the importance of consent under PIPEDA, and give insight into the implications for marketing practices.
You’ll get a number of paragraphs that follow that outline, including headings and subheadings. Copy and paste this into your working doc.
Then create the prompt for the next section, repeating the process until the whole blog is written.
This is where you go back and have it write an introduction, now that it has worked through what all the body content is. Write a simple prompt asking for an introduction for the blog it just wrote.
5: Shape the Tone
The first draft sitting in your working document is going to sound a little dry and clinical. Maybe this is already how you want the blog to sound, but it usually needs some finessing.
I asked:
I want this blog rewritten to sound more like my style of writing, which is slightly casual, accessible, and friendly with a grade 7 reading level, but also still professional and authoritative, like a friendly professor. Here's a sample of my writing:
And then pasted in a couple paragraphs of one of my other blogs that I thought best exemplified my writing style. And I pasted in the entirety of the blog that ChatGPT had written.
ChatGPT rewrote the entire blog with a better tone, and I copy-pasted that into my working doc for preservation. If it’s still off, you can keep working with further guiding prompts to get closer to the voice you’re hoping for.
6: Utilize Keywords
Remember the list of keywords ChatGPT provided that you pasted into your working document? Weed out any that you don’t think are relevant, and paste it back into ChatGPT, asking it:
Can you rewrite the most recent version of this blog to make appropriate use of these keywords. Remember to include these keywords naturally in the content, in headers where possible. Remember, overusing them (keyword stuffing) can have a negative effect on SEO, as search engines may perceive it as spam. So only use them where natural and applicable.
With more of your target keywords implemented, copy and paste this latest version back to your working document.
7: Edit the Blog
This step is not to be skipped!
ChatGPT needs to be fact-checked.
Go through the entire blog and check every statement of fact. Find sources that back up what is being claimed. It is not uncommon to find inaccuracies.
And you’ll likely want to reword a few things here and there that sound too cliché or robotic. ChatGPT loves finishing sections with paragraphs that start with phrases like “in conclusion,” which sounds like a high school essay.
8: Write Title and Meta Description
Your title is very important to clearly identify your topic, but also to allure the reader into giving the blog their attention. This will also appear as the title in search results, with the meta description below.
I asked ChatGPT:
Write a compelling title for this blog.
And I got:
Digital Marketing Laws in Canada: What Every Small Business Needs to Know
I was happy with that, so then I asked:
Write a meta description for this blog that's no longer than 155 characters.
And ChatGPT responded:
Learn key Canadian digital marketing laws, their implications for small businesses, and practical tips for compliance. Ensure your strategy is legally sound.
If you want help with the URL slug for the blog as well, you can ask:
What should I use as a URL slug for a blog titled Digital Marketing Laws in Canada: What Every Small Business Needs to Know so that the URL is optimized for search engine ranking?
And ChatGPT will provide you with some options, because you don’t want to let your website platform set the slug to default, or it’ll likely be “/digital-marketing-laws-in-canada-what-every-small-business-needs-to-know/”, which isn’t ideal.
9: Find Link Opportunities
For strong SEO, you will want to have some outbound links (links headed to other pages on the internet) and some internal links (links to other pages on your own website). This will help the page become recognized by Google and help build credibility and ranking.
Since ChatGPT (at this moment) cannot crawl the current contents of the internet (it was trained on a snapshot of the internet from September 2021), you will need to do this manually. Find phrases and keywords that would be natural to link to other pages and websites, and hyperlink them.
10: Publish!
You’re all set. Publish your blog!
SEO Content Generation With ChatGPT
While I was going through this process, there was a piece of advice ChatGPT provided that is worded better than I could write it myself.
So here’s the one piece of this blog written by ChatGPT, which I’ll end on as a closing comment:
While AI can assist in generating a bulk of the content, it's important that the final post is reviewed and fine-tuned by a human. This ensures that the content is high-quality, accurate, and meets the needs and interests of your audience.
In essence, using AI should be viewed as a tool to assist with the process and not completely replace the human element in content creation.
