Using GPT to update + optimize blogs

AI as editorial intern

Hey friends,

GPT doesn’t write amazing blog content. The marketing community seems to have reached a rare moment of consensus on this issue.?

Still, it's an amazing tool. It's?great at taking a data set and presenting it in novel ways. While that's not enough to write with real insight, it's extremely useful for editorial tasks:

• Structuring an argument
• Condensing paragraphs
• Rewriting sentences

In other words: suggesting variations on the content that a skilled human wrote. GPT was literally made for editorial tasks like that.

We’ve been trying to lean into those strengths. “Evaluative” rather than “generative” AI, as Nick Gaudio recently suggested:

In this newsletter, we’ll look at use cases, prompts, and related tools we’ve been using. The goal is to make GPT an agent of quality control rather than?“scaled content abuse.”

?? How we made GPT our editorial assistant?

The quality of GPT’s output is dependent on the quality of its input. This means that content optimization is a great use case for it.

When you provide GPT with a complete piece of (well written) content to update, you’re providing it with a distinct data set and clear instructions.

?Here are a few tasks we’ve been finding useful:

• Optimizing page titles for target keywords. By presenting the finalized blog text and a target keyword, you're giving GPT all of the original data that it needs. As with all current AI tools of the moment, if you ask it to generate 20 titles, you’ll get a few that you can work with.
• Refining H-tags for structure and user experience. Again, you’re providing it with a closed set of data and some specific requests (eg. “Section should have 1-3 paragraphs and each paragraph should have 2-4 sentences.”)
• Condensing content within a post. Sometimes a given section within a blog post is way too long. Cutting and condensing is a time-intensive practice but GPT is pretty good at doing a quick, effective job.
• Adapting transcripts from video + audio. Webinars, podcasts, video tutorials are great source material for written blog posts. When provided with a brief summary, GPT can shape long transcripts into structured blog post drafts.

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Again, this is all playing to its strengths of data analysis and sequencing. GPT can produce clean, revised copy in this way because we’re providing original data, composed by a human. ?

Marketing head Megan Dorcey suggests using GPT as a research assistant:

??? Example: a prompt for condensing content?

Here’s an optimization task that our little buddy GPT is good at completing all by itself...

Scenario

Let’s say a writer turns in a blog draft that is 3500 words but it really only needs to be ~2000 words. One section in particular – entitled “Product Features” – is way too long. It’s 800 words, featuring subheads within subheads within subheads.

You can drop that text into GPT and give it a command…

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Prompt

I'll provide you with blog copy. Condense the copy into a bullet-pointed list. Each bullet point should identify one product feature and include 2 sentences: the first sentence identifies the feature and the second sentence explains its significance to the broader workflow.

?? Choosing optimization tasks based on page performance data

The optimization tactics you assign to GPT will vary, of course, according to the needs of a given page. Those decisions are determined by various performance metrics

For example...

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Pages with great engagement metrics but subpar search rank and traffic (a.k.a.?wallflowers). You'll likely need to optimize metadata in order to gain traction for a specific search query. This would be a great instance for bringing in GPT. Let it suggest new titles, headings, and meta descriptions.

It could even help you to batch out this work across your blog.?Use Ottimo to find and export a list of every one of these "wallflower" pages on your website. Then bring in GPT to revise them all.

Another example...

Pages with decent search performance but dismal engagement metrics?(a.k.a. "sloths"). These require a more thorough revision. UX is probably one of the elements that can be improved on any such page.

You can use GPT to restructure content in a way that’s more readable, scannable, and comprehensible for your audience (and search engine crawlers).

At the end of the day, no single tool – not even a revolutionary AI tool – can replace a content marketer. The job is too complicated and creative.

So let's use these tools to reach new heights of creativity.

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