A Beginners Guide to Using ChatGPT to Generate Website Copy
Need to write content for your site but don’t know where to start? Well now with ChatGPT and a few simple prompts you can produce quality copy fast and more easily than ever before!
We’ve released the first video in our new Generative AI series covering basic use cases that can help even total beginners start taking advantage of these rapidly advancing tools. We’ll be providing these blogs as a resource to collect any prompts we discuss and to help explain how to use them.
First, some important notes about the format of our prompts:
Anything in [square brackets] is meant to be a placeholder for you to replace based on your own context. For example if the prompt said “[your company]” I would replace it with “Third Eye Technologies.” Notice I didn’t keep the square brackets in my replaced version; in this instance the brackets are just there to make it clear what you’re replacing.
Anything with <angle brackets> is meant to be copied as-is, keeping the brackets. In this instance we are borrowing some structure from coding by essentially creating variables to help keep ChatGPT on the same page as us. Although ChatGPT is very good at understanding human language, it is still a machine and must translate our instructions into its own language before it can act. The angle brackets aren't required, but by having this unique format for these pieces of our prompt we make it especially clear that the words inside the angle brackets are something specific, letting ChatGPT know exactly what we mean when referring to that thing.
With that out of the way, let's get to our first prompt!
Please write [tone] copy for the [desired page] of my website that speaks to [target audience] about [your product/ website topic] and encourages them to [call to action]. The copy should be optimized for <SEO keywords> that I will provide. I will also provide <additional info> about my product/business for you to work with.
<SEO keywords>:
[List of your SEO keywords, one per line or separated by commas]
</SEO keywords>
<additional info>:
[any additional info you want chatGPT to pull from: slogans, product descriptions, mission statements, reviews, etc]
</additional info>
The first prompt has a couple of pieces that you’re going to have to replace based on your own specifics. To make this process easier we’ll define those pieces here and give some examples.
Tone: the voice and identity of the writing. If you’re just making a site to share pictures of your dog then you may want a tone that’s “lighthearted and silly, whereas if you’re making a site for your law firm you probably want a tone that's more “clean and professional”.
Desired page: the specific page you would like to be produced like your home page, contact page, about page, or services page. Narrowing the scope of the prompt here is going to help ChatGPT properly focus on the specific needs of each page.
Target Audience: who would you like to be viewing your site. If you’re promoting your business you’ll want to think about and research the types of people who might be interested in what you have to offer. For us, as a business that provides services like web development and IT consulting, our target audience would be other business both small and large.
Your product/ website topic: very simply, the purpose of your website. A website is a way to direct attention towards something and you topic is the thing you want attention directed to: your product, your portfolio, or even your dog
Call to action: The thing you want your target audience to do. If your site is for selling a product, you want to call on your audience to view your shop and buy something. If you provide services you want to call on your audience to contact you about things that they want your help with.
SEO keywords: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is everything having to do with how easy it is to find your site on Google and other search engines. SEO keywords refer to the words and phrases that someone could search to find a site. Defining your own SEO keywords is then about what words and phrases you would want someone to be able to search and then find your site. For us that would be things like “web developers” or “IT consulting”, but this is an area where it's well worth doing some research on your own specific situation to find out which keywords are most worth emphasizing.
Additional info: this refers to any extra context or examples you’d like to share with ChatGPT. The more info you give here the more specific the answer will be to you and your situation. If you’ve already created any material for your site such as a slogan or introduction that you like, make sure to include that. Including as many specifics as you can about your product, service, or topic will save you a lot of time fixing incorrect aspects of ChatGPTs response later.
This prompt may appear to have a lot of moving parts at first, but if you take it one step at a time you’ll find that it's all fairly self-explanatory, and you can remove pieces that you don’t feel are relevant to your use case! Note that in the second half of the prompt we have a space where we define our angle-bracketed variables, with instructions inside of the square brackets meant to be replaced by lists of relevant info.
When creating lists it's important to separate the items on your list in a way that ChatGPT understands. The best way to do this is with either commas or by starting a new line for each item. For more complicated lists like we have in <additional info>, a new line will work best as you will likely be listing longer items that have punctuation (like commas) already. Remember to create a new line with shift-enter so you don’t accidentally submit your prompt before it’s ready by hitting enter by itself.
Now for our second Prompt:
Please generate copy for the [desired page] of the same website we’ve been working on.
This is a perfect example of how good groundwork in your prompts can pay dividends. In both our first two prompts we only ask ChatGPT to produce one page at a time because keeping the scope of tasks you give to ChatGPT narrow and finite is a good way to make sure that it doesn't get confused or produce something you don't need. Luckily ChatGPT will remember information that you give it earlier in a conversation so, with only a sentence, we can get the same quality of response as our first prompt by taking advantage of this continuity. Remember this strategy depends on you providing good information in your first prompt! It’s also important to provide ChaGPT feedback as it remembers what you do/don’t like not only within your conversation, but across all the conversations you have with it.
Finally, our last Prompt:
Playing the role of an experienced website copywriter and SEO specialist, critique and improve the <website copy> that I provide. Respond with a list of the changes you would make and explain why you would make those changes.
<website copy>:
[copy and paste any copy you would like to improve/fine tune]
</website copy>
This last prompt takes advantage of a couple slightly more advanced prompting techniques. First, we define a persona for ChatGPT. By asking it to “play the role of an experienced copywriter and SEO specialist” it signifies to ChatGPT that it should pull reference material that is either created by or targeted towards people in those professions, ensuring that it's using information that’s relevant to our needs. Second, we define the format of response we’d like ChatGPT to give. Here we ask it to answer in a list to make it easier for us to read and then we ask it to explain itself as it may otherwise just give us a list of changes with no context. All of these prompts ultimately follow the same core principle: the more specific you make your request, the more specific the response will be!
As you probably already know, generative AI is infamous for hallucinating / confabulating. Make sure to do a final review of all your copy before posting it, as the AI may have communicated something you don’t want to actually say to your website visitors. From there you can fix it yourself, or continue to push it back to ChatGPT for improvements.
We hope you found our video and accompanying blog useful! For any questions or feedback feel free to reach out to us.
