✋ Happy Friday SuperMarketers!

Today we’re going to learn how to create the best outline for long form content.

With generative AI, creating content isn’t the hard part.

But we’ve all been there, deleting huge blocks of text that an AI has written….because it can be fluffy 💩, frankly.

A detailed outline is the missing ingredient you need guide the writing process, optimizing flow and organization.

On top of that, creating the outline with a focus on SEO ensures that you cover the necessary topics, include the relevant keywords, and other elements you need to have your SEO ducks in a row.

Let’s get into it!

💡 Strategy: Create Your Outline with SEO in Mind from the Start

Consider SEO from before you begin writing.

The outline is like building a solid foundation before constructing a house - you want that SEO base in place to support the rest.

Here are some key reasons why it's important to incorporate SEO elements into your outline when creating long-form content:

• Optimize headers with target keywords (H1, H2, H3 tags) helps search engines understand the topic and what the content covers. This improves discoverability and ranking potential.

• Include LSI Keywords (latent semantic indexing) throughout the outline helps search engines make connections between related concepts and identify relevancy. Using synonyms and related terms expands keyword reach.

• Plan for FAQs in the outline allows you to directly answer questions searchers have on the topic. FAQs help satisfy user intent with highly relevant content.

SEO should be woven throughout your outline, not an afterthought.

This ensures your long-form post will be discoverable, satisfy searcher intent, and drive traffic from day one.

🔍 Use Case: The Foundation To Write Long Form Blog Content

Measure twice, build once.

Getting the outline nailed down has two purposes:

1. Ensures you are prepared for evergreen organic traffic

2. Makes your AI-generated content that much better

✍️ Prompt: Create An SEO Optimized Outline

OK, so there’s a bit of work upfront before we get to the prompt. But this is very cool…

We’re going to look at the top ranking posts, and dissect them: why are they ranking at the top of Google for a particular search term, and how can you do better?

Method #1: Use ChatGPT + Webpilot Plugin

You’ll need ChatGPT Plus for this method, because it requires a plug in that is a feature of the paid plans (definitely worth the $20/mo though).

After you install Webpilot (or any ChatGPT plug in that you enables web browsing), you can automatically pull the SEO elements of those top pages: the header tags, the relevant keywords, and an understanding of why the page is ranking well in organic search.

Let’s say for example, I’m writing a blog post on “SaaS churn”.

I’d get the URLs of the top pages, and include it with a simple prompt:

In seconds, ChatGPT comes back with all of the headings, related keywords, FAQ, and even an analysis of the page:

Repeat this for a several of the top ranking pages, and you now have a detailed overview of how and why these pages are ranking well.

Method #2: Use Harpa.ai

Harpa.ai is a free chrome extension, incredibly powerful and helpful. Crazy that it’s free. I’m going to cover it in a future post.

One helpful feature is to do an SEO analysis of a page, similar to the ChatGPT output above.

Use the “SEO Audit” feature when you are on the page that you want to analyze.

I got this output, while on a top-ranking post for SaaS Churn:

You can get an entire strategy for your target keyword:

Combine all of this research into a doc—repeat for 3-5 posts for your target keyword.

Then drop in your prompt into ChatGPT:

And in seconds, the ChatGPT output:

I didn’t include the whole outline above, it was just too long!

But you now have a deeply researched outline to outrank your competitors.

You can proceed to write out the post, section by section with generative AI like ChatGPT or Claude.

There are also detailed additional elements to ensure that all bases are covered:

Oh, and here is the prompt to create the outline, once you’ve done an SEO audit of the top pages:

Prompt to Create SEO Optimized Outline:

• “You are an SEO and content marketing expert. Your task is to use the insights above and create a detailed outline to targeting the keyword "saas churn". this will be the basis for a long form blog post, so include details and short descriptions on what should be included in each section. focus on using H1, H2, H3 appropriately to maximize SEO opportunities. include all LSI keywords, a table of contents, Frequently Asked Questions, and ideas for tables, charts, graphs, or statistics that would make this the top ranking post for the keyword. “

🔬Experiment: With Harpa

There is a ton that you can do to improve this, just with the free Harpa.AI extension.

Here are just some of the SEO related features, but you can get summaries, write social media posts, get Midjourney prompts, and 100+ more uses:

📖 Resources:

I’m hosting a webinar, calling it “The Marketer’s Guide to AI: How to Implement AI in Your Content Creation”

It’s going to cover stuff like this, but it will be a live over-the-shoulder view.

And a lot more.

Hosting with Shanif Dhanani, founder of Locusive–10 years of AI experience and a wealth of knowledge.

Register for free, if you’re looking for ways to use AI in creating content, it will be good!

Stay Super, Marketers 🤘 

Gen