AI and Copywriting Basics for Your Content and Website

Let us say you have just had an event at your business, and you want to post a simple picture of the event with an amazingly simple “Check us out” style of message on your Facebook page. This is a scenario you will undoubtedly encounter multiple times a month, if not daily. Let us start with a practice picture, something we could easily find somewhere on the internet. It may look blasé, but it will get the job done for our purposes. Here is the picture:

We are at a restaurant or catering service, for the purposes of this exercise let us assume it is a small company that caters in the Cleveland area. It specializes in all-American food and is regularly available for higher-end events. Cool, now that we have the idea in place let us show you a rudimentary Facebook post using this picture:

This might look like something you are just entering in as a draft. It does not have much information, it lacks imagination, and it is hardly utilizing the characters Facebook allows you to use in a post. Next up is ChatGPT’s stab at it. I entered the prompt “Create the copy for a Facebook post as a small catering business in Cleveland Ohio” and this is the result:

This looks a million times better, and of course you will have to fill in any information ChatGPT does not know about your business/brand, but this has so much more personality, so many more words, so much more…. Well, everything. It has too much of everything. Facebook usually shows a paragraph’s worth of text in an ad or even a regular post, but if you had this much in a post it would be cut off after “Cleveland’s culinary scene.” Also, the little emojis all over the post do not help with anything, and really make it seem like someone who was incredibly young wrote a post for their parents. Let us take out the emojis, shorten it up, and create a digestible post with some services and more of a personalized message a catering company might create:

This looks much more presentable, much more concise, and the list of events the company caters to are at least visible before you see the “show more…” button on the post. ChatGPT might introduce a lot of flair, but you must reel it back a bit and present a more formal approach if you are selling something. Clearly a person wrote this, it focuses on the actual event, it lists the services, has relevant hashtags, and looks much less cluttered.

This should be your process. Create a draft with your own text, see what tools like ChatGPT can produce, steal some ideas, and make it formal with a human touch. In the coming years, all businesses will need to be able to seem more human because these AI tools are only going to keep progressing.

This is where people make an entire living. Writing the content for a website is an actual full-time career for thousands of people in the United States, and I can only tell you it might be worth your time to hire a marketing agency to tackle this part of your copywriting to-do list as it can be VERY convoluted. Some businesses or brands might not have the budget or capability to hire out-of-house so this section will help you figure out exactly what processes to follow for your website.

Step 1 – Focusing on Your Keywords

You will need to make sure your homepage for your website has consistency on the goods and services you may offer. A “Header” (also labeled H1, H2, etc.) is like the title to your website. You want the header and content of your webpage to be coordinated for Google and Bing to understand what you are offering.

If you are a construction company that specializes in concrete, make sure to mention it about 5-10% of the time. That is the sweet spot for keywords. If you absolutely flood your text repeatedly with “concrete” search engines will hide your website in search results. This is called, “keyword stuffing” and will absolutely be detrimental to your goal.

Step 2 – Image Alt-text

This is much easier and is considered low hanging fruit in the SEO community. The funny thing is, hardly anyone realizes how effective it is and usually businesses and brands just ignore it completely.

Every image has something called “alt-text” and this is meant to help visually impaired people register what is on their screen. If there is a picture of a basketball going into a hoop, the alt-text should mention a basketball going into a hoop, straightforward, right?

Make sure to go through the images on your website, go into the editor of your web hosting (WordPress, Squarespace, etc.) and add a succinct description to your images. Copywriting comes in handy here because Google and Bing take alt-text very seriously. On this very website we ran an experiment where we let Google decide our Metatag title in their search results and it shocked us. It read “Acclaim LLC – Logo” After some digging, we found out that because we had listed so many of our partners and used their logos, Google had pulled the alt-text information from our 80+ images on our work tab and automatically thought all we did was logos.

So, the finesse you can apply here needs to be gentle and intelligent. You cannot just stuff your keywords here again, but you can nudge the algorithms of search engines. Take this photo for instance:

A proper alt-text description for this photo could be “Many people witting around a table using computers.” That is extremely accurate, but we can add something to for Google and Bing to notice. If we described it this way: “People working in a meeting with computers discussing a new construction project.” That not only describes the picture perfectly, but it also adds the topic for your construction business let us say.

Step 3 – Metatags and Descriptions

This is a search for “Construction Company” on Google. Acclaim is located here in Cleveland, so we get results based on our location. Look at these companies:

Notice how their names might have a catchphrase or a subtitle by their company’s name and how there is a description right below them giving a run down of their website or business. These are called “Metatags and Descriptions.”

Adjusting these will inform people searching for your business, it is that simple. Here are a couple of websites that can help you generate metatags and descriptions for your website:

Yoast

SEMrush

SEOptimer

We do not recommend just copying and pasting the AI generated descriptions, you should use these sites as a starting point to create your own unique web page descriptions. Titles are often just the Website name and then the page (Home, About Us, Contact, etc.)

These three steps will be the biggest things you need to focus on for your website. As an aside, this is for on-page SEO not off-page SEO. If you are using a website builder like Wix.com most things will be done for you automatically like responsive design and page speed increases. If you work with an independent web developer, you may need to reach out to them for off-page SEO or contact someone like Acclaim and get us into your website for optimization.

The last subject we wanted to touch on was crafting blogs and how to use proper copywriting for search engine optimization. This will forever be an uphill battle and requires you to sit down and write out a 10^th-grade level paper once or twice a week. Having said that, it is important to know that creating blogs is effectively the most reliable way to increase your placement on search engines. Let that sink in. Producing articles or blogs (just like this one you are reading now) will increase your position rapidly and effectively, every single time.

Even with the advent of AI, writing a blog takes time and it takes determination. Simply inputting a prompt into ChatGPT will not give you a good result, Google and Bing are now looking to suppress AI generated articles. Artificial Intelligence uses “deductive reasoning” which pulls data from the internet and creates a mosaic out of the information. This means, at a fundamental level, it can be detected after analysis. Just like detecting edits to a photograph, it needs analysis.

Here at Acclaim, we use ChatGPT to construct outlines, which it is superb at doing. Part of utilizing ChatGPT this way requires specific prompts. Let us go back to that catering service in Cleveland. I am going to show you the prompt to use, how complex it can be, and then what ChatGPT gives me to work with so I can go ahead and flush out a blog manually.

Take note of HOW I asked for this response. ChatGPT will give you plenty of room to type out a prompt, it feels like too much room to type. The paid versions of ChatGPT from OpenAI will let you enter thousands of characters into it. As we said, it is ill-advised to just copy and paste directly from an Artificial Intelligence, we recommend having it put together an outline for you that you can then expand, change, and add to later while writing your blog.

Blogs will increase your traffic, increase your placement in search engines, add more pages that can be found in search engines, can reinforce key words when site like Google or Bing rank you, and can offer your audience value that will make them more inclined to call you, click your website, or pay for your business. Using AI the right way can seriously improve your social media copy, so do not look down your nose at this approach as it is rapidly becoming the most effective tactic available.