G’day, Craig from SEO Empire here. Settle in — this one’s a long one but its worth it.
Listen, I’ll be straight with you. When ChatGPT first dropped a few years back, I was just as confused as everyone else. I’d type in something like “write me a blog about marketing” and get back something so generic it could’ve been written by a robot. Which, fair enough, it was.
But after a few years of mucking around with prompts every single day at SEO Empire, I reckon I’ve finally figured out the patterns. And the thing is, this stuff isn’t just for the tech nerds anymore. If you’re running a small business in Melbourne — whether thats a café, a tradie, a dental practice, an accountant, anything in between — knowing how to talk to AI properly is gonna save you hours. Maybe whole days, depending on how much writing you do.
So here’s the rookies guide. Not the fancy “prompt engineering” version that makes it sound harder than it actually is. Just the bits that genuinely work, written by someone who’s stuffed it up plenty of times so you don’t have to.
Why Most People’s Prompts Are Rubbish
When I look at how most people write prompts, they treat the AI like Google. Three or four words, hit enter, expect magic. The AI does its best, but you end up with something so bland and generic that you have to rewrite half of it anyway. Which kinda defeats the point.
Here’s the bit nobody tells you up front: AI is brilliant at being specific. Its terrible at guessing what you actually want.
Think of it like a new staff member on their first day. If you said “write me a blog post” without any other context, they’d stand there blinking, waiting for more. But if you said “write me an 800-word blog post about why local search matters for dentists, in a friendly tone, with three practical tips at the end, and a clear call to action” — now you’ve given them something to work with.
The AI works exactly the same way. The more context you feed it, the better the output. Every single time. No exceptions.
The Five Things Every Good Prompt Needs
Over the past couple of years our team’s been writing prompts for everything — content briefs, technical SEO audits, even helping draft Google Business Profile descriptions for our clients. We’ve landed on a simple structure that pretty much always works. Five bits:
1. The Role. Tell the AI who it’s meant to be. “You are a Melbourne dentist with 20 years experience” gets a wildly different answer than “You are a marketing student”. Neither is wrong, but you’ve gotta pick the right one for what your trying to do.
2. The Task. What do you actually want it to make? A blog post. An email. A social caption. A FAQ answer. Be specific about the format and the length. Don’t just say “write something” — that’s where the genericness creeps in.
3. The Audience. Who’s reading this? Tradies looking for new clients? Mums booking swimming lessons? Office workers ordering lunch? The same content needs to sound completely different depending on who its for, and AI will absolutely nail it if you tell it.
4. The Tone. This one matters more than people realise. “Friendly and casual” vs “professional and authoritative” vs “fun and a bit cheeky” will produce three completely different drafts. Be honest about how your business actually talks to its customers — not how you think it should.
5. The Constraints. What can’t the AI do? “Don’t use jargon” or “no exclamation marks” or “stay under 500 words” — these limits are where the magic actually happens, because they force the AI to be more useful instead of more wordy.
A Real Example — Before And After
Here’s a prompt I see people write all the time:
“Write a blog about why SEO is important.”
And here’s what you’d actually want to write:
“You are a senior SEO consultant who has worked with small businesses for over 14 years. Write a 600-word blog post explaining why local SEO matters for a [dental practice / café / tradie / accountant — pick one] based in [Melbourne suburb]. The audience is busy business owners who don’t know much about SEO and don’t have time to learn the technical side. Use a friendly, plain-English tone — no jargon. Include three practical things they can do today, and finish with one clear next step. Format with H2 subheadings and short paragraphs so it’s easy to skim.”
That second prompt takes maybe 90 seconds to write. The output is night and day better. We use a variation of that exact structure for content briefs across all the suburbs we work in — whether were helping a tech company in Port Melbourne or a dental practice in Brighton — and AI saves us hours every single week because of it.
The Iteration Trick (This Is The Big One)
Here’s the bit that took me embarassingly long to figure out: you don’t have to nail the prompt on the first go.
The best prompts are conversations. You write the first version, the AI gives you something, and then you say “make it shorter”, “more conversational”, “now write three more from different angles”, “actually, change the audience to first-home buyers”, and so on.
This back-and-forth is where AI genuinely shines. People who treat it like a vending machine — one prompt, one answer, done — miss about 90% of the value. People who treat it like a junior colleague they’re bouncing ideas off get stuff they couldn’t have written on their own.
For our blog work, we’ll often write a single starting prompt and then iterate eight or nine times before we’ve got something we’re actually happy with. That’s not failure — that’s the actual workflow. Don’t beat yourself up if your first version is rubbish. Everybody’s first version is rubbish.
Things AI Is Genuinely Good At
After two years of daily use, here’s where I find AI legit useful for small business stuff:
- First drafts. Anything blank-page. Emails, blog posts, social captions, Google Business Profile descriptions, FAQ answers, About Us pages — all of it.
- Reformatting. Got a wall of text and need it as bullet points? Done in two seconds. Got bullet points and need them as flowing prose? Same deal.
- Brainstorming. Need 30 blog topic ideas for a creative agency in Cremorne? AI will give you 30 in under a minute. Most will be average — but three or four will spark something genuinely useful, and that’s where the value sits.
- Explaining things to clients. AI is brilliant at translating technical stuff into plain English. We use it constantly to write client-friendly summaries of audit findings, so the recommendations don’t read like a manual.
- Customer research. Paste in 20 reviews of your competitor, ask AI to identify the recurring complaints and the recurring praise — instant, free market research. This one alone is worth the price of admission.
Things AI Is Genuinely Bad At
Equally important, and most rookies dont realise this until they get burnt:
- Facts. AI makes things up. Constantly. If it gives you a statistic, assume it’s wrong until you’ve checked. Same with dates, addresses, phone numbers, anything specific. We’ve caught it inventing fake court cases, fake research papers, fake people. Always verify.
- Local knowledge. AI doesn’t know that Bay Street in Port Melbourne is a totally different vibe to Bay Street in Brighton, or what the parking’s like at the South Melbourne Market on a Saturday morning. Anything genuinely local needs your human input on top.
- Your business voice. AI tends towards a flat, agreeable, vaguely American voice unless you fight it. Feeding it samples of your real writing helps, but you’ve gotta train it actively — its not going to figure your tone out on its own.
- Original thinking. It can remix what’s already out there, but it can’t have a genuinely new opinion. That part’s still on you.
A Quick Word On Tools
There’s about a million AI tools now and the honest truth is, for 95% of small business stuff, the free version of ChatGPT or Claude is more than enough. You can read OpenAI’s own prompting guide if you want to go deeper — its surprisingly readable for a developer doc. The Wikipedia entry on prompt engineering is also a solid starting point if you like the academic angle.
Don’t get sucked into paying for fancy tools you don’t need yet. Get good at the basics with the free version, then upgrade when you’re genuinely hitting limits, not before.
The One Mistake I Really Want You To Avoid
This is the bit I care about most, because I keep seeing small businesses get burnt by it.
Don’t publish AI content straight to your website without reading every word.
Not because AI content is bad — it can be brilliant when used properly. But because Google’s getting smarter at spotting low-effort AI output, and more importantly, your customers can tell. The businesses winning with AI right now are the ones using it as a starting point and then putting their own voice, their own examples, and their own local knowledge over the top.
If you’re publishing blog posts that read like every other AI-written blog post on the internet, you’re not gonna rank, and even if you do, customers will bounce. The whole point of AI for a small business should be to save you time on the boring parts so you can spend more time on the good parts — the parts that make your business different from the 50 others doing the same thing in your suburb.
Final Thoughts From Me
Look, I genuinely want every small business reading this to do well. Marketing’s hard, AI is changing weekly, and most of you don’t have a marketing team or a big budget to lean on. The fact that you’ve read this far means you actually care about getting better at this, and that puts you ahead of most.
Start small. Pick one task you do every week — writing emails, answering FAQs, posting on Instagram — and get good at prompting that one task first. Build from there. Once you’ve got a handful of prompts that work well for you, save them somewhere you can grab them quickly. Future-you will say thanks.
And if you ever want a hand making sense of any of this, you know where to find us. We’ve been doing this digital marketing caper for over 14 years now and we genuinely love helping Melbourne businesses figure it out. Even if you never become a client, my door’s always open for a chat.
Go well out there.
— Craig Winder, SEO Empire
