Are the robots taking over? Well, if you’d believe a study of 900,000 web pages by Ahrefs, they already have! 7 in 10 English-language web pages include content generated by AI.
While you might already be using AI to write your emails, troubleshoot your car or tell you how to use the air fryer, using ChatGPT for your website content can be more of a grey area.
That’s why we’ve been experimenting. In this guide, we’ll share our favourite prompts to date to help you use ChatGPT to grow your website, without tanking your content.
And here’s a hint: to be great at using AI, you’re going to need to ask some really good questions…
Why Use ChatGPT for Your Website?
First up, some of you may be sitting on the fence with AI and asking, surely a website made with ChatGPT isn’t a good website?
At Lumen SEO, we take a middle approach to AI. It’s a brilliant tool that we’re going to make use of, but we aren’t going to use AI to replace everything.
Back in May, we made headlines with our 32-hour working week. But we aren’t going to stop there. For our founder Aled, AI is a way for our business (and likely yours) to get the 32-hour week down even further, using AI to ‘do more with less’.
So if AI is great for automating processes, covering rote tasks and chomping through large amounts of information, we’ll bring the work that’s creative and human.
Imagine if, 80% of the time, you could put all your creativity into your business, and AI could do the rest? That’s what we’re aiming for.
What’s Google’s Policy on AI Content?
While you might think Google would penalise mass-produced AI content on websites, it doesn’t directly. Getting your pages to rank in search is still about creating high-quality content written for people, not search engines.
To boost your website SEO, you’ll need to focus on creating content that’s original and shows the expertise, experience, authorativeness and trustworthiness known as E-E-A-T in SEO.
Curious about how your website performs on search? Sign up for a free SEO audit to get our team’s feedback and advice on how to grow your organic search traffic and reach your customers online.
Why Copy-Pasting AI is Bad for Your Website
Let’s stop a minute and think about AI. Is copy-pasting ChatGPT going to get your pages ranking as the best articles on your subject on the internet? No.
Every day, 252,000 new websites appear across the internet. Have respect for your users and customers, and make yours worth reading.
As Welsh entrepreneur David Hieatt says, most people are going to let ChatGPT write their website content for them. Yes, it’ll be easier, but it’ll lower the quality of websites overall.
This is your opportunity. Use AI to make you a better writer.
Our Favourite ChatGPT Prompts for Website Content
A few weeks ago, the Lumen SEO team gathered to share our favourite ChatGPT prompts we use to grow websites for our clients. Here are some of our best:
Writing Code
Our tech queen Holly uses ChatGPT to write and debug code. All you need for this is a basic understanding of how code works, and an eye on the ‘undo’ button just in case!
For example, when Soothe and Settle needed help choosing the right hush muff for their pooch, Holly created a basic size calculator using Javascript written by Chat GPT.
To use ChatGPT for writing code, especially as a non-technical person, it helps to describe what code you need and how you want it to function in the context of the web page.
Understanding How to Use Your Website
Can’t afford an IT support team yet? Well, if turning it on and off again doesn’t work (and, in websites, it rarely does!) ChatGPT can help.
In our day-to-day, we work on a variety of different websites from WordPress and Shopify to custom CMSs. If we don’t understand how to edit a particular part of a website, we’ll ask ChatGPT.
Want to share your screen? A game-changer for us has been sharing a screenshot of the back-end view you’re seeing with ChatGPT, and it can tell you what you’re seeing and describe the button you need to press to make the change.
Internal and External Linking
When you’re writing website content, you’ll want to add lots of internal and external links. This is where we find ChatGPT really shines.
Before writing a blog, we’ll ask ChatGPT:
This gives us a range of statistics and external links we can use for the blog. Importantly, it’s worth always clicking into the link to make sure your statistic is reliable and to remove ‘utm_source=chatgpt.com’ from the end of the URL.
For internal links, you can share a web page URL from your website with ChatGPT, and ask it to suggest links from your website that could be added.
This last tip can save you lots of time, but is still hit-and-miss using ChatGPT at the moment. It’s worth double-checking any internal links suggested as the AI may not always be able to read content from your URL and sometimes makes things up, a phenomenon known as AI hallucination.
Writing SEO Blogs
First up with SEO blogs, remember we aren’t going to copy-paste ChatGPT. Your website is too good for that.
Instead, if you’re ever stuck for ideas on what your next blog topic should be, you can give ChatGPT a link to your blog and ask it to come up with ideas.
We also love ChatGPT 4.5 for getting rid of writer’s block. One way we’re experimenting with using it is in writing a sample blog for us:
A prompt might look like:
Here is my website: [Insert URL]
This is my title: [Insert Blog Title]
Here are my subheadings: [Insert Subheadings]
Write me a blog that’s at least 750 words in the editor.
We’ll add ‘in the editor’ because ChatGPT blogs are often better here than in the main discussion view. The blog written here won’t look much like the final version, but can be a starting point for your own writing – make sure to add your own statistics too.
One area of blog writing that AI isn’t much good for? ChatGPT still isn’t great on emotional or subjective topics like ‘Why volunteer?’ In these cases, it’ll likely give you cliches, so you’re better off writing from scratch.
Using ChatGPT as a Tool, Not as a Replacement for You
In writing this guide on how to use ChatGPT for your website content creation, we’ve shared our favourite discoveries to date. We can’t write a blog on ChatGPT, however, without acknowledging how quickly AI is developing.
If you want to keep on top of the latest AI used for your website content, the best approach is to keep experimenting yourself. We’d love to hear what you find – drop us a comment below to share your tips.
Remember, using AI is a tool within your wider SEO strategy. If you want to grow on organic search, we can help. Sign up for a free website audit, and we’ll give you easy-to-understand and actionable tips to improve the quantity and quality of your search traffic.
