I got to no 1 in Google using ChatGPT

Hey there, AI fans

Today, I am going extremely practical!  

I have been hesitating to share this with the world, but after months of consideration, I have decided to give my secrets away for free to you. 

Following my process, you can create quality content that Google will love with ChatGPT. 

Are you ready? 

Let’s go! 

Do you want more AI news? 

As you know, my newsletter is a gigantic deep-dive into one topic per issue. Therefore I want to tell you about a very different AI newsletter to mine called Bot Eat Brain. I subscribe myself and I highly recommend you check it out!

Bot Eat Brain was created by Anthony Castrio and launched about the same time as Practical AI. Every edition has,

• The most important AI stories and updates

• Some memes to get you through the day

• A tech definition so you can sound smart

It is a fun read, well written, and a great supplement to Practical AI. 

If you want to give it a try, you can sign up for free right here 👇

How I got to number 1 in Google using ChatGPT

Alright, first, let’s set the rules and a few caveats. 

• I used ChatGPT to create the content ranking in the first position.

• Even though ChatGPT generates this, it still takes a fair amount of time to create. This is not a “one prompt” content creation. It will save you time, but it still takes both time and effort on your part!

• I am a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) specialist, and I have been doing SEO since AltaVista was a thing (yeah, that’s the search engine before Google). There is a strategy behind these rankings. I did not get the site to the top of Google with the content alone! 

• I will not share any information about the client, keywords, niches, screenshots, etc. You simply have to trust me that it is true. 

What I will share with you is my content creation process, my ChatGPT prompts, and a few words about my SEO strategy. 

What you will learn today will not guarantee you any rankings in Google! 

However, you will be able to create content that Google loves, that reads well, and that is useful for your (potential) customers. 

You still need to SEO your articles and your website (always good advice!)

And no, Google does not hate AI-generated content! 

Google hate shitty content and shitty websites. 

I use ChatGPT/GPT-4 for my work, but I am sure you could create similar content using Claude2 and Bard. 

With that out of the way, let’s dive in. 

Fun fact: The gif/meme above is from Oslo, Norway. I’m Norwegian and been at this pool many times myself when I lived in Oslo 👍

How to create amazing content with ChatGPT

If you do not want to read through everything below, I made it super easy for you and I am giving you the link to my whole process/session with ChatGPT: 

https://chat.openai.com/share/6039b442-38fc-4453-aee1-48b2188c70a0 

You need to have ChatGPT to view this, but I will make a bold assumption that everyone reading this newsletter have ChatGPT… 

As you get down to the introduction part of the creating process, you can see how I had to “argue” with ChatGPT to get the desired output. This is not uncommon! Sometimes you need to push the AI towards where you want the creative process to go. I had to “fight it” a bit this time, and I am happy that happened! This way, you can see that even with my process and experience, it still requires some finessing. 

I did not promise you that it would be easy, did I? 

But once you get a few reps in, this gets easier, and you will work faster and faster. 

Besides, there might be other adjustments you need to make to get things your way. Just tell it, in natural language, what you are after, and often ChatGPT will say stuff like, “Okay, let’s create more narrative-driven content.” 

Take note of the words the AI uses to explain what you asked and keep them in a separate file for later. This is how you learn! 

I am not a (professional) writer nor a native English speaker. Over the last 11 months since ChatGPT was released, I have discovered words and concepts I can use to get ChatGPT to do what I want it to do (I did not know “narrative-driven” before I used ChatGPT). 

Again, here is the link so you can see for yourself that I do exactly what I say below: https://chat.openai.com/share/6039b442-38fc-4453-aee1-48b2188c70a0 

Here is my (typical) process broken down to the basics:  

First, I “train the AI” (or the “chat session”) with the concepts I want to talk about in the article. This involves me asking general questions like “Tell me what you know about CRMs” or similar. 

Then, I “train the AI” with specific information about my client (or my own business). I give ChatGPT a link to a page with the necessary information (or a Word document, etc.). I want the AI to understand my data and add that to the article I will create.

Next, I feed ChatGPT my “power prompt” (see below). A few very important elements here are:

1. I want you to act like a copywriter. The AI knows what a copywriter is and what the role entails. 

2. Specify tone of voice. 

3. Write in a way not typical for a LLM (an AI).

4. Important concepts: perplexity, burstiness, concise, brevity, and detail.  

Lastly, I ask the AI to create an outline. If I like the outline, I move on with creating each section of the outline, one-by-one. I have found it better to do paragraph by paragraph, then to ask it to write the whole thing in one go. As you can see from my ChatGPT session (linked above), I had to battle a bit with the AI to get an output I was happy with. My advice is go bit by bit, and not try to generate it all in one go. 

Find my power prompt below 👇️ 

I said that I would not share any information about my client, their niche or any keywords, screenshots, or anything. 

However, I did create a piece of content in a different industry from my client to illustrate what I do and how. You can find it further down 👇️ 

I randomly selected “CRM” as an example. I don’t know why. It was the first thing that came to mind. I randomly found an article on Hubspot about 10 CRM for small businesses, and that’s how I found the CRM company I used in this test (Flowlu). I have no affiliation with them, and I don’t know anyone there - heck, I did not even know they existed one day ago… 

What CRM and Flowlu have in common with the client I got to number one in Google, is that they both have products/services/technologies I know nothing about. Sure, I have a background in IT, but I have not done any programming or product development in 20 years. 🙂

In other words, you can do this too!

After the next section, I will share the links to the documents I created with ChatGPT. 

How to quality check your content

Once I have an article created, it is time to play with another super duper tool with its own powerful AI under the hood: Grammarly!

If you don’t know Grammarly, you are missing out! 

Anyone doing any kind of writing should get Grammarly! It is basically a “spell checker on steroids.” 

Only writing emails, you say? 

Grammarly will help you! 

Grammarly will take your writing from 4 to 8 in terms of quality. It corrects your mistakes, helps you reformat your sentences and more. I would be lost without it! 

Anyway, enough free advertising for Grammarly. 

Once my article is created, I go to Grammarly online. 

Not the Grammarly I have installed on my computer and inside Google Docs or Word! 

You need to use the online version of Grammarly to get access to the most powerful features. 

That’s what I do. 

I open up Grammarly and copy/paste the article into their tool. 

Then, I define my settings (pops up automatically). 

And this is how it looks inside of Grammarly

I will follow most of the recommendations by Grammarly (not all, be alert, sometimes the suggestions breaks the logic in your text).

Using Grammarly ensures the text from ChatGPT gets cleaned up and adjusted and updated in the best possible way. The suggestions it will give you depends on the settings you defined (previous screenshot). 

You can also mark a section that you don’t like, then press the AI button, and Grammarly’s AI will suggest a rewritten version of the market text (I seldom use this function). 

And lastly, I will check if the content is plagiarised. Yes, Grammarly has a function for that as well. In this case, my article is 3% plagiarised (I guess OpenAI used these articles in their training). 

This is the biggest percentage I have ever gotten doing this. Usually, it is 1% or less. But even so, 3% is acceptable in my opinion. 

Sometimes I manually edit the articles as well. 

It depends really… 

But there you have it. This is how I use ChatGPT to create content of high quality that ranks well on Google. 

Maybe you disagree with the quality of the content or think my process is wrong. If so, feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts with me! 

Here are the files

Before Grammarly:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rw925hx14-wxtCrEs1TX2U4_1mXtKdA3c4SRx6YklCY/edit?usp=sharing 

After Grammarly: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fuMI-NoIIWxy6pH8yD9opFuiPSusU3QENZ0mXFE7x38/edit#heading=h.s3g13erxbqs9 

If Flowlu happens to read this and like the content, feel free to take it and use it. No permission needed! 👍️ 

A few thoughts on SEO

This will not be a lesson in SEO, so I will make this brief. 

SEO is not an exact science. Nobody really knows anything for sure. We understand a bit, but nobody but Google knows it all. 

Our knowledge or understanding of Google/SEO is mostly because a bunch of really smart people are testing and figuring out what works and what does not. 

Therefore, there are many ways to do SEO.

SEOs always argue about the best way, the right way, the wrong way, what works, and what doesn’t. 

That’s politics. 

I take a pretty simple approach to SEO: I create “topical clusters” and try to build “topical authority.” The topical cluster (a content cluster around a topic/product/service) forms a virtual silo with strategic links between them. 

In simple terms:

• Do keyword research to find all the talking points within a topic.

• Organize that data into topic clusters.

• Produce content that meets the search intent of those topic keywords.

• Build relevant internal and external links to your content.

In step-by-step terms: Make a landing page for the main product (CRM), create a lot of supporting content around that product (“From Spreadsheets to Success: The Evolution of Small Business Management”), and link one time from the supporting content to the landing page with the correct anchor text (f.ex. “CRM for small business”), and 3-4 links to other content pieces within that cluster/silo (with good anchor texts). No other outgoing links from any of the content. 

Why? 

It is complex, but it has to do with “crawl budgets” and “making it easy for Google to understand there is a connection between the articles and their topic.” 

That’s all I have to say about SEO in this newsletter. 

What NOT to do

There are many discussions about whether AI content is good or bad. Google has made it clear that they do not punish AI content specifically.

They will however punish poor content, spammy content, content that is not useful or helpful, or content that is made for manipulating Google (basically content created for the algorithm vs for people). 

With the Wild West of cheap or free AI tools available today, many take advantage of AI tools that can spin up articles in seconds. 

I know many people who have experimented with these “one click content generators” and basically created full websites with 100s or event 1000s of pages in a few hours. 

Some of these are experiments, others are just pure spam. 

My advice: Don’t use “one-click” AI content-creating tools for your business. 

At a bare minimum, if you want something “one click”, use Surfer.

Use the power of AI, but use it wisely! Use it how I have shown you in this newsletter. Or use my process as a starting point and develop your own. 

Spend some time creating the correct content for your cluster, created for humans to be helpful and useful. Then link them appropriately, and get yourself some backlinks as well. 

Don’t spam your website and business with poor-quality content from a $2 AI spinner! 

That’s all I had for you today!

I hope you found this useful! 

If you have any questions, please feel free to reply to this email and I will try my best to answer. 

AI’ll be back!

- Thomas