Building out the LLM

There are a few things that you have to consider when itcomes to building out your LLM

Patience is a Virtue

You need patience and normally you will have to refine the prompts and words that you have used. From my own personal experience, it seems as if the biggest stumbling block is a lack of patience and a genuine understanding of what prompts use them. How often can you read a piece of copy having to refine it? That’s either never or very rarely.

People are proud of their copy and often unwilling to change or learn. I’m not trying to offend anyone, but you need copy that reflects what are people are looking for. This has been an issue since the late nineties, and we are still seeing the same issues today.

What has changed is we are being bullied into a style that LLMs understand. It’s not just content; it’s code as well. You are expected to write your website copy in a style that LLMs understand. Beyond Google, all screen readers and crawlers have always needed this. Website owners have got off with writing flowery copy as long as they had enough domain authority to push themselves up the search rankings. It’s why the link building industry based on PBNs (private blog networks) have been successful. Over the years we saw Goggles method of bringing in some kind of authority started with showing People Also Ask results in the front page. So many businesses used to rely on that one answer that drove 90% of their website traffic. The growth of EAT and then EEAT was the start of the end for that kind of result.

And so, we are where we are today. A compromise of being forced into a style of writing that is based on answering questions in a conversational style because LLMs are the new bosses and it’s what they want to see. Even worse is the demand from LLMs to ask and answer these questions in the LLM way. It’s not natural, I’m sure it will mature in time, but we are seeing a demand to answer as many questions as possible in the LLM stylee. The sad fact is we see websites with poorer offerings steal that space from those with authority. It may not be a good thing, but it’s a reality. As a result of this we all need to change if you want any visibility in this AI overview space.

Creating your own LLM is a way of generating the bones of website copy. I’m not asking you to play the game, but I am asking to consider using a few different large language models for different parts of your website.

Creating LLM Templates

I found writing home page copy is entirely different to most other pages of the site. I see home pages like album covers, (an album is a piece of vinyl plastic that has music etched into its grooves). The album cover show cases a 1^st impression. It may not necessarily reflect the songs inside the album but it is there to grab attention. Generating copy from an LLM for a home page is often impossible but it’s trying to do the same thing.

What is easier is creating different style of content for each part of the website. You can create templates for lead generation, blog content, service pages, a FAQ section for these types of pages, a CTA on some pages, timeline and evidence pages, local pages. They’ll all need their own JSON schema mark up for them to be understood, but it’s all doable. A blog post will normally be written in a style that is not the same as a service page, an industry page or a page with a transactional action or a page written with a call to action for lead generation. For those that have been writing copy for decades, or those that written a book or two, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. You should have a large enough bank of “words” to start building out your LLM for at least some parts of the website, but rarely all of it.

Template styles are entirely up to you but if you want any kind of visibility in the AI space there a few things to consider. A basic template will need a headline written in H1 and sub headers should be written in H2 with content that reflects the copy of that one section of the page, and sadly the more content you have on the page and the number of entities (or topics) you use make a massive difference in who wins and who loses

Building the LLM. We've got some templates. Now we need some words. The larger the bank of specific types of words you have created in each section of your website, the easier it becomes. If you want to save time (man hours) you need to patient. You need to tweak the content and the relevant prompts time and time again. This is where most people fall over. Pride comes before a fall. If you are not willing to learn and relearn you will be manually writing for the rest of your life and competitors will steal your space.

Too Many Authors Spoils the Broth

There are some caveats. If lots of people have blogged or written on your website, and you build your LLM on it, you will several types of nuances or writing styles in your auto generated copy. If you briefed someone else to do it for you, let them know that you are looking and what to avoid from the start; put it into the brief, if not, you are almost guaranteed a disappointment. The quality of work is heavily based by the prompts you use. If you want the copy to look like AI generated with Chat GPT – (dashes), that’s what you’re going to get. You reap what you sow.