Let AI help you produce more helpful content

Bill says: “Concentrate on content, and producing the best helpful content for users.

At the same time, you can use AI to find out what that best and most helpful content is, to help you create it. You don’t have to just make things up as you go along. You can use AI to help you find what the most helpful content will be.”

Is this only relevant to certain types of businesses?

“I would say that it’s appropriate for any type of business.

Think of a home inspector who is hired right before you buy a house. That’s a small business. It could be a one-man operation that produces content on his site that is helpful to people. It shows that he knows what he’s doing and that you should eventually hire him.

To have the right helpful content on the site, as an SEO, it’s a combination of starting with keyword research and then having that lead you into writing the appropriate content.”

Is your own website the best place to publish, or is there an argument for local businesses to focus on Google Local, social media, or somewhere else?

“There is an argument for that.

My particular process for a small business would be to do the research and come up with the ideas, and use AI to help you come up with ideas. Then, once you’re posting on your site, you’re going to social media and following up – perhaps with shorter versions.

It could be a blog post on the main site, then you go to LinkedIn and have a version of that, and you follow up with social media posts and so forth. Even with Google Business Profile, you can have a theme, whether it’s daily, weekly or monthly.

A theme could be that the weather is very hot right now, so ‘How do you cool off your house in summer?’ could be an example. That would translate to a longer article on the website, and then also all the social media content with photos, videos, or whatever’s appropriate for each platform, to actually bring back the links on that particular theme and topic, referencing the business.”

What AI tools should SEOs be using to assist with their content production?

“There is a lot out there. There are a couple that I use daily.

Just before we started speaking, I was using ChatGPT. There’s a new website that needs a lot of title tags, meta description tags, etc. I was just asking ChatGPT to write a basic meta description tag for a page about X, with Y title tag. Over and over again, it can write good, unique title tags for a site. An e-commerce business, for example, will need a lot of those.

Unfortunately, you cannot really automate it in this particular case. You have to actually ask an AI, then copy and paste the results. There are tools that integrate into certain CMSs, that will write meta description tags, etc. for thousands of products. In this particular case, that would be a prime example.

When you’re looking at building a new site, or building out a section of a website, you could start with an AI such as ChatGPT. Ask it something like, ‘I’m writing a web page about this particular subject. What are the typical topics and subtopics that I would expect to see if I’m on this particular website, about this topic?’ It will suggest pages that you would expect to see when you go to that website.

The next step is asking, if you’re writing a page about concert tickets, what topics, subtopics, and sections would you expect to see for a page about ‘cheap concert tickets’, for example?

You start broad and ask an AI questions, then you can dig in a little bit more, get more granular, and then get even more specific. Something like ChatGPT can help you from the high-level site structure down to the very specifics about each page.”

How do you prompt ChatGPT to ensure that the answer is as accurate as possible?

“You have to try different prompts. There are some lists out there that other SEOs have created, where they’ve written really good prompts.

For meta description tags, I was simply asking something like, ‘Write a meta description tag for a webpage about this subject and include the company name in the meta description tag.’ You can start basic and then look at what comes back. Today, it came back with the code and I told it, ‘I don’t need the code. I just need the sentences.’

You’re not relying on the AI. You’re using your thoughts and brain to determine when you have something good, what particular format you need, what you don’t like, etc. and when you need to tell it to do something else. There is work to do. Part of it is trial and error, and seeing what it comes back with.”

Do you have to manually check everything to make sure it’s something you can use on your website?

“When it comes down to whether it’s good or not, some of that just comes with experience and knowing the difference between a good title tag versus a good meta description tag, etc. Some of that comes with knowing how to write a meta description tag and the formatting.

If you’re going to have 100 pages, you obviously don’t want the same formula. You want it to change up a little bit. You may need to use other prompts to get it to write something different.

Today, I was writing meta description tags for a particular football team’s tickets. The AI was helpful because it knew the stadium where the team plays, so it incorporated the team name, ‘football tickets’, and the name of the stadium into the meta description tag. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of the stadium where they play. That helped make that particular meta description tag unique.

We’re talking meta description tags, but it could also be using part of that as a few sentences of content on the page, which can make a difference.”

What content production tasks wouldn’t you use AI for at the moment?

“I’m not 100% comfortable with getting AI to write an article and just copying and pasting it without actually reading it and doing some editing manually. That may come from my background as a writer and a technical writer, in my college days, and knowing that there’s part of that content that I would not literally copy and paste. You’re better off using it for something like a meta description tag.

When it comes to more long-form content, you need more structure, strategy, and planning to work in the right entities, and the proper topics, subtopics, etc. All the content that I’m doing for clients is a combination of AI content, with my own editing, as well as manually putting photos, videos, etc. into that content as well, so it’s not just a page of text.”

Can you use AI to come up with all of your relevant entities or is it likely to miss out on a lot of opportunities?

“If I’m a home inspector writing about home inspection, the entities that I would expect to see in that content would be ‘real estate’, ‘home’, ‘house’, ‘inspection’, etc. It could also be ‘air conditioning’, ‘heating’, and various things that a home Inspector would look at. Those would all be entities.

You can think about entities as being a person, place, or thing – essentially something that could appear on Wikipedia. Google does have an entity API that you can run. I occasionally use InLinks to identify the entities that are appearing in the top 10 results for a particular keyword.

If you’re starting fresh with content, you can do a search for a keyword, take the top 10-20 results, and see what entities there are, and how many Google-approved entities are showing in that content. If most of the top 10 results are showing 8-10 of those entities, you need to mention at least 8-10 of those entities in your own content to be helpful enough to rank in the search results.”

Can you incorporate those entities within the prompt you’d provide to ChatGPT?

“Yes. You can also pair different prompts that you’ve asked ChatGPT to find out what entities, subtopics, and subjects you should cover.

It’s a manual process to combine those, and maybe even come up with another prompt. If you’re willing enough (and taking enough risk) to have AI write the content versus personally writing the content yourself, then you would ask ChatGPT to write that content based on this particular list of entities.”

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 2025?

“Do some ranking analysis and traffic analysis, and concentrate on the pages that you know are bringing in traffic, sales, and leads. Look at those particular pages and do some entity analysis to see if there are any topics, subtopics, or sub-subtopics that you haven’t mentioned.

Maybe some other pages that are ranking well do mention this subtopic, like ‘finance’ or ‘mortgage’ when writing about getting a home inspection, that you haven’t mentioned. You might find that you need to beef up that content a little bit.

If you are limited on time, look at the content that is performing better right now and see how you can make that content better. Even if you’re ranking well for that content, there’s still a way to potentially expand it. If you’re ranking number 1 (the ideal situation), you can still expand that content out and maybe bring in even more traffic.”

Bill Hartzer is CEO at Hartzer Consulting, and you can find him over at Hartzer.com.