Writing for SEO

aNMost writing these days ends up on the web. That means writing for good SEO (search engine optimization) is an important consideration. If it’s worth writing, it’s worth getting found by targeted readers.

The procedure itself is rather direct. Identify appropriate keywords and then put them in the right places in the document, such as title, headlines, first paragraph, etc., and with the right frequencies. Semantic search and AI search now require updating the traditional approach.

The challenge comes in when you also want the writing to look good and work well with human readers, including prospects, customers, and human reviewers at Google and other search engines. And according to Google and SEO experts, writing effectively for human readers is the most critical consideration. The days of just writing keyword-stuffed bad copy are over.

Much of the SEO writing being done is outsourced internationally, where non-native speakers of English are paid very low fees to string words together crammed with keywords.

If they don’t overdo it and get penalized by Google, this can result in a page with a good search-engine ranking. But human readers will be turned off by this kind of writing and find the page barely readable. Frequently the English is barbaric and many sentences are meaningless or hopelessly obscure. This hurts the company’s brand and presents a low-scale image to the public.

To see what I mean, just Google the name of any pharmaceutical and read several of the pages you find. Many will be very similar, the same thing repeated in slightly different words strung together in a slightly different order (spinning). Or it could have been done by poorly used AI.

Some of the English will be so poor, with basic rules of syntax fractured so bad as to make the “sentences” unreadable. Often it looks like it was written by a not-too-smart computer. Unlike spinning, usually the AI gets the English right.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Writing can be done so it’s polished and effective, without compromising SEO effectiveness. We judge our work by language quality, marketing effectiveness, and SEO results. When it’s done right, it builds trust and it builds the brand. More people read it, share it, and are motivated by it.

The techniques described above with keywords put in the right places and with the right frequencies and densities are called ‘on-page factors’ and are crucial for successful SEO. But there are also off-page factors that boost search-engine rankings, and they can be as important and sometimes even more important than the on-page factors.

The main off-page technique is link-building, in which you seek to attract as many inbound links as possible from relevant, highly ranked sites. The best way to do this is with strong, useful, well-written content, copy that engages readers. Which webmaster or site owner would want to link to the barbarically written pages I referred to above? But if you have a great page, people will want to link to it and boost your SEO in the process. A page that shows quality and builds trust will be much more likely to pick up links from other sites.

The New Exciting Era of AI

Every day more searchers get their results from Google AI Overviews and other AI LLMs. The objective for clients is the same, namely high rankings on search results pages, but the methods are different.

Previously you just wanted to get a high rank so you can get more clicks. Now you’ll need to be the source AI uses and cites.

So you need to clearly answer questions searchers have. You need to present that content in a comprehensive, well-structured, and fact-based manner. Mere sales puffery is a waste.

You’ll also need to show topical authority for the issue via content on the site and links from respected sites in your field. And everything has to be in a format that is accessible to readers and AI, which will need to parse and summarize it.

The transition will be frustrating for many, but offers big opportunities to the prepared.