I’ve rewritten this article several times over the past 20 years, and I’ve never stopped advising clients with the same advice. Stop writing for search engines!
My reputation as an SEO consultant precedes me, although to be honest, I’ve never been fond of that label. The truth is, my philosophy has never been about gaming search engines—it’s been about connecting human beings with the knowledge they’re seeking.
Search engines, and now AI-powered search assistants, are merely translation mediums. They interpret your query, match it against trillions of documents, and return what they believe is the most helpful response. The better the algorithms and machine learning, the more effectively they can understand and deliver for people.
In the early days of SEO, it really was critical to write in a way that search engines could digest. You had to consider keyword placement, density, and technical structures that allowed crawlers to read your site correctly. But today, that’s the baseline. Modern algorithms are far more sophisticated… measuring human signals of satisfaction. If people don’t engage with or share your content, it doesn’t matter how optimized it is.
The human response wins.
From Search Engine Rules to Human Signals
When I started, SEO was a checklist. Include your target keyword in the title, repeat it in the first sentence, sprinkle it across the page, bold it a few times, and make sure your meta tags match. That kind of formulaic writing often worked. But it also made the web feel robotic. Posts sounded forced, headlines were awkward, and content became repetitive.
Fast forward, and that approach is a losing game. Search engines like Google and Bing, as well as the AI assistants built on top of them, are designed to reward human-centered content. They examine how long people stay on your page, whether they scroll, if they click on other links, and if they return. They look at whether your content is cited or shared. These are real-world signals that reflect human trust and interest. No algorithm can be tricked into thinking something is valuable if people don’t respond to it.
Keywords Still Matter, But Not How You Think
This doesn’t mean keywords are irrelevant—they’re still the bridge between what people type (or say) and the answers they’re hoping to find. But keywords should never dictate your writing style. They should inform your understanding of the audience’s language. If you’re writing an article about financial planning, you should know if your readers search for retirement calculator more than pension planner. That insight ensures you’re speaking their language. But once you know it, you write naturally.
Keyword stuffing is a relic. Today, the goal is semantic relevance—covering a topic thoroughly, using variations of terms naturally, and addressing the fundamental questions people ask. AI models and search engines understand context. You don’t need to force anything. Write for humans, and the machines will understand.
Headings, Bold Text, and Internal Linking: Tools for Readers
Many SEO guides still recommend tactics such as use your keyword in subheadings or bold your target phrase. What they miss is that these practices are valuable for people first. A heading helps a reader skim and decide if a section is worth their attention. Bold text draws the reader’s attention to key points. Internal links are shortcuts that allow someone to dive deeper into a related subject without leaving your site.
When you treat these elements as human experience strategies instead of algorithmic tricks, the effect is noticeable: readers spend more time with your content, they click further into your site, and they’re more likely to share your work. Those human signals are precisely what search engines measure. Writing for humans and writing for algorithms are no longer separate—they’re the same thing, with humans always coming first.
Why Writing for Search Engines Fails
I can always spot an article that’s been written for search engines. The opening lines repeat the headline verbatim. Every other sentence awkwardly wedges in a keyword. The tone feels off, as if a robot dictated it. And you know what happens when I encounter those posts? I skip them. Often, I unsubscribe.
Search engine–driven content may bring in a temporary surge of visitors, but it rarely builds an audience. You’ll see random one-off commenters instead of a community. You’ll have traffic spikes but no loyalty. Worse, you’ll constantly be chasing rankings with tweaks and updates because nothing you’ve created resonates enough to stand on its own. It’s a hamster wheel, and it burns creators out.
Human Engagement Is the Only Sustainable Strategy
Contrast that with writing for people. When you focus on clarity, insight, and usefulness, readers come back. They share your content with colleagues. They link to it naturally. Over time, you build trust and authority… not because you optimized for it, but because you earned it.
That’s why I’ve always valued recurring readers and long-term relationships over raw traffic numbers. It’s far easier to keep an existing reader than to earn a new one. Every piece of content you publish should be designed to serve that principle: give people a reason to return. Search engines notice that too, and they’ll reward you.
Search Engines Are Getting More Human
The rise of AI-driven search assistants, such as Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT-powered browsing, only reinforces this shift. These tools aren’t just indexing words; they’re interpreting intent and synthesizing knowledge into natural answers. They’re built to serve humans first. If your content doesn’t satisfy people, it won’t elicit those responses.
Think of search engines and AIO as translators. Their job is to connect human questions with human answers. If your writing doesn’t resonate with people, it won’t be chosen. If it does, no amount of algorithmic complexity will hide it.
Structured Data Ensures Contextual Accuracy
Another reason you don’t need to force your writing into awkward search-engine patterns is that the web itself has become more structured. Schema markup and other structured data formats provide search engines with explicit context about your content. If you run an auto dealership, for example, schema tagging can identify your business type, your inventory, your service hours, and even individual vehicles. That structured information ensures that search engines (and AI systems drawing from them) interpret your content correctly without you having to keyword-stuff car dealer near {location} into every sentence.
Structured data encompasses a wide range of information, including articles, products, events, reviews, organizations, and individuals. By implementing schema, open graph tags, and other metadata standards, you’re telling machines exactly what your content means in a way that supplements—not replaces—your natural writing. When you combine accurate structured data with human-centered content, you create the best of both worlds: information that machines can classify with confidence and people can enjoy without friction.
Practical Advice for Writing Today
So, what does it mean to write for humans today?
- Use headings to make your content easy to scan, not to jam in keywords.
- Bold key phrases when they help a reader catch your main point at a glance.
- Write introductions that hook the reader, not ones that repeat your title.
- Link internally when it benefits the reader, not when it helps you rank.
- Use keywords as a guide to audience vocabulary, not as shackles.
- Tell stories, use examples, and bring your perspective. Those are the elements no machine can fake.
When you apply these practices, you not only enhance the human experience, but you also meet every box that search engines care about. Writing for humans first is, paradoxically, the most effective SEO strategy you can adopt.
The Long View
Over the past 20 years, I’ve watched SEO evolve from a technical arms race into a human-first discipline. The irony is that the best SEO today is what I’ve been advising all along: stop writing for search engines. Write for your readers. Write so they’ll finish your article, share it with a colleague, and remember your name when they need help again. Search engines will always catch up to that. They have to, because their survival depends on it.
If you chase algorithms, you’ll always be behind. If you focus on people, you’ll always be ahead.
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