How to write blog posts using ChatGPT: A complete guide

AI content tools are popping up everywhere, and ChatGPT is the one everyone tries first. It’s powerful, famous, and feels a little like magic. For writers and marketers, it looks like the perfect cure for writer's block or just a way to get a first draft down.

But here's the catch: using a general-purpose tool for a specific task like writing SEO-driven blog posts can present some challenges. This guide will show you exactly how to do it, step by step, but we will also explore the entire process, including its limitations. We'll walk you through the whole unfiltered process and also point you toward tools built specifically for this job. Platforms like the eesel AI blog writer are made to streamline this process. It’s the tool we used to achieve our own blog's growth in just three months, so we’ve learned a thing or two about what it takes.

What is ChatGPT? A powerful but generalist tool

At its heart, ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) from OpenAI. You can think of it as a very smart chatbot trained on a huge chunk of the internet. It can write essays, code, poems, and pretty much anything else you ask it to. It's an amazing piece of tech, built on models like GPT-4 and the newer GPT-5.2.

It's important to understand its design: it's a versatile, all-purpose tool, not a dedicated blogging machine. As one Redditor put it perfectly, its value depends completely on the skill of the person using it.

I do not use or recommend using Chat GPT to create articles and then using those blogs as is. I think using it as a framework to structure is fine but it simply isn't good at writing. It's redundant, sometimes inaccurate, and doesn't produce the highest quality content.

Reddit

For bloggers, ChatGPT can help with a few things:

• Brainstorming topics, angles, and headlines.
• Creating a basic outline to structure your post.
• Drafting individual sections of your article.
• Rewriting clunky sentences or editing for clarity.

While it's a helpful assistant, the process requires significant user input, as we'll explore.

The traditional approach: Writing blog posts with ChatGPT step-by-step

When you use a general tool like ChatGPT for a specialized job like blogging, you can follow a manual, multi-step process. It requires a lot of your time, some decent prompt engineering skills, and a few other tools to get a single post ready to go live. Here’s what that workflow typically involves.

Step 1: Research, brainstorming, and outlining

First, you need an idea. You can ask ChatGPT for blog post ideas for your industry, and it will probably give you a reasonable list. From there, you can ask it to generate some headlines and a basic outline for the topic you pick.

One of the first considerations is that ChatGPT does not have built-in SEO functionality. It can't tell you which keywords get a lot of searches, how competitive a topic is, or what people are really looking for. You have to leave ChatGPT, open an SEO tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush, do your keyword research, and then bring that info back.

I think it's a bad idea to use it without being extremely cautious. It seems to me like people are misinterpreting what Google said. As soon as something becomes easy, many people will use it and then the algorithm has to change in order to remove the lower quality stuff.

Reddit

Once you have your keyword and a sense of the search intent, you have to feed that back to ChatGPT to get a better outline. Even then, the outline is often generic unless you spend a good amount of time guiding it with specific prompts to find a unique angle.

Step 2: Generating the draft section by section

Now for the writing. You can't just paste an entire outline into ChatGPT and ask for a a full blog post. This can sometimes lead to hitting character limits or the AI losing context, which may result in repetitive text.

The common workaround is to generate the post one section at a time. You take the first heading from your outline (H2), prompt ChatGPT to write that part, then move to the next heading (H3), prompt it again, and so on. This piecemeal method is slow and often creates an article with an inconsistent tone. The intro might sound formal, while a later section is super casual.

Users should also be mindful of "fluff." ChatGPT is a master at writing sentences that sound smart but don't actually say anything meaningful. It's full of generic phrases and often lacks the specific, actionable advice that readers want.

Step 3: Manual editing, fact-checking, and SEO auditing

This is a crucial and often time-consuming part of the process. A raw draft from ChatGPT should be treated as a first draft that requires significant editing.

Here’s what you absolutely must do:

• Fact-checking: LLMs are known for making things up. These "hallucinations" can be anything from wrong statistics to completely fabricated quotes. Since general models like ChatGPT have knowledge cutoffs and can't browse the live internet, you have to verify every single claim it makes.
• Voice and tone alignment: The raw output will sound like a robot, not your brand. You need to go through it line by line, rewriting sentences to add your unique personality, style, and vocabulary.
• SEO auditing: You’ll have to manually check if your target keyword is used correctly, that your headings are structured in a logical way, and if you can add internal links to other content on your site.

Step 4: Sourcing visuals and adding a human touch

Once the text is polished, you’re still not done. A blog post composed entirely of text can be less engaging for readers. You need to manually find or create all your visual assets, like images, charts, infographics, and videos, to break up the content and make it more engaging.

Finally, you have to add the human element that no AI can fake. This means weaving in personal stories, original insights, and your own strong opinions. This is what makes your content stand out and aligns with what Google looks for with its E-E-A-T guidelines. Without it, your post is just another piece of generic AI content.

Understanding the limitations of using ChatGPT for blog posts

While ChatGPT can be a helpful assistant, relying on it for your entire blogging workflow can present some challenges related to workflow and content quality.

Knowledge cutoffs and the risk of hallucinations

As mentioned, ChatGPT's knowledge has a specific cutoff date, which can be a limitation for topics that evolve quickly. It also rarely cites sources, and when it does, it sometimes just invents them. This means you have to spend extra time hunting down credible sources to back up its claims. If you don't catch these errors, it can seriously damage your brand's credibility. Even OpenAI puts a disclaimer right on the tool: "ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info".

The challenge of creating unique content

AI-generated content can sometimes have a generic quality, feeling formal or lacking a unique voice. One Reddit user nailed it, saying the content can often feel empty and repetitive.

The quality of these articles still has a '$4/hr copywriter from Pakistan' feel and seems like the kind of spam articles that repeat the same fluff or phrases without getting to anything of substance.

Reddit

Lack of built-in SEO or AEO features

ChatGPT is not inherently an SEO tool. To get an SEO-friendly draft, you have to be an SEO expert yourself, feeding it very specific prompts about keyword density, heading structure, meta descriptions, and more. This requires manual effort.

On top of that, it’s not optimized for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). AEO is about structuring your content so it can be easily featured in Google's AI Overviews and other answer engines like Perplexity. ChatGPT’s output isn't formatted for this, which means you're missing out on a huge source of modern search traffic.

Text-only output without rich media

This creates an additional step in the content creation workflow. After all that work on the text, you still have to go find or create every single visual. This means finding stock photos, designing infographics, making charts, and searching for relevant videos. It also can’t do things that add real authenticity, like embedding relevant YouTube tutorials or pulling insightful quotes from social media to back up your points.

An alternative approach: The eesel AI blog writer

If you're serious about scaling your content and getting real organic traffic, you may consider a tool that was built for the job. The eesel AI blog writer is a purpose-built platform that addresses many of the challenges associated with using a generalist tool like ChatGPT.

Generate a complete post from a single keyword

Instead of a multi-step prompting process, with eesel you just enter a keyword and your website URL. In a few minutes, you get a complete, structured, and media-rich article that’s ready for a final polish. This is the workflow we used to grow our own organic traffic from a modest 700 to over 750,000 daily impressions in just three months. It’s a process that gets real results.

Get deep research and a natural tone

The eesel AI blog writer performs context-aware research for every article. If you’re writing a comparison post, it will automatically pull in pricing data. For a product review, it will find the relevant technical specs. This means your content is based on real, verifiable information, not AI guesswork. We’ve also spent over a year refining our language models to produce a natural, human-like tone that people actually want to read, creating a more natural and readable style.

Automatically generate assets and social proof

This is an area where a specialized tool differs. You don't just get text; you get a complete article. Every blog post generated by eesel comes with AI-generated images, custom infographics, and clean tables to present data. It even embeds relevant YouTube videos and finds real, insightful quotes from Reddit forums to add a layer of authenticity and social proof that makes your content far more trustworthy.

Built-in SEO and AEO optimization

The eesel AI blog writer is designed to rank. It automatically handles the SEO basics, like including your target keyword, building a logical H2/H3 structure, and generating optimized meta titles and descriptions. The content is also structured for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), so it's ready to perform well in new search experiences like Google’s AI Overviews and other AI-driven results.

Comparing workflows: ChatGPT vs. the eesel AI blog writer

Choosing the right tool for the job

ChatGPT is an amazing piece of technology and can certainly help with blogging. It’s great for brainstorming or getting past a blank page. However, creating a high-quality, SEO-optimized blog post from start to finish with it is a manual process that requires significant effort and expertise.

For businesses that are serious about using content marketing to drive organic traffic, many find it more efficient to use a tool built for the task. A specialized platform like the eesel AI blog writer automates the tedious parts of content creation, including the research, drafting, formatting, and asset creation. This frees you up to focus on high-level strategy and add your unique human expertise, which is where the real value is.

To see a detailed walkthrough of how an expert combines ChatGPT with SEO principles to create content that ranks, check out the video below. It provides great insights into the manual process and highlights the kind of strategic thinking required.

A video tutorial explaining how to write blog posts using ChatGPT that rank well in search engines.

Create high-quality, SEO-optimized blogs in minutes

Stop the endless cycle of prompting, editing, and fact-checking. Generate your first complete blog post for free with the eesel AI blog writer and see the difference a purpose-built tool can make.