Writing for search engines or for people?

Teutra/blog ” SEO ” Writing for search engines or for people?

From an SEO perspective, is it better to write for search engines or for people?

Generating traffic from search engines, is a challenge.

Every day you compete with other sites in your niche.

You try to gain positions, your competitors try to maintain or improve them.

Every day in your niche, new sites, new competitors enter the competition.

How to cope with the situation?

Optimizing a site according to the rules dictated by Google is a very good idea.

Surely you have read that one of the keys to optimizing pages is to write quality content.

But this content, should it be targeted to search engine robots or to the people who read it?

It’s a bit like a cat biting its own tail: you need readers, and potential customers, to read your content, but at the same time, you also need robots to show your content in search results.

So who to prioritize.

Obviously: both.

Related articles: Understanding search engine robots to understand how the web works.

Writing for people

Readers of your content are the ones who can become customers and buy your services and products.

But how do you turn a reader into a customer?

With time and involvement and empathy toward you and what you do.

In short, with trust toward you and your brand.

No one ever said it would be easy.

Writing for search engines

Search engine robots, or spiders, do not buy your products.

But spiders do influence the composition of the search results page, the SERP, so they play an important role in the success of your content.

If no one reads them, it’s as if they don’t exist.

But how can I get search engine robots to take a good look at my pages?

By optimizing them according to Google’s rules.

If you don’t do that, if you think SEO is a waste of time and money, I’m sorry to tell you, but you will never gain positions over your competitors who are ahead of you in search results.

How to write for humans and robots?

Writing content that is digested by humans that and robots is a kind of balancing act.

Content structure

Structuring your content with headings and subheadings makes your post easier for people to read, and that is a good thing.

Adding a table of contents at the beginning of the article helps people find topics relevant to their search.

Section headings also, if written wisely, can be an opportunity to capture the reader’s attention.

For example, “5 ways to get attention” is more specific and intriguing than a generic “attention-grabbing tips.

As for search engine algorithms, they tend to reward on the results page, a well-structured page, divided into paragraphs and sub-paragraphs and focused on a specific topic.

Writing effective titles

You should write your content titles with both Google’s robots and people in mind.

For search engines, you should include the keyword, topic, and post topic in both the title and description to help crawlers index your page correctly.

For humans, same thing but with an added emotional component to stimulate the click.

You can find an in-depth discussion in this article of mine on how to write effective headlines.

Correct use of the Italian language: grammar and spelling

Grammar and spelling errors do not have a direct impact on the search engine unless they prevent proper scanning of the page.

As far as humans are concerned, on the other hand, correct use of Italian grammar and spelling tends to build confidence in those who are reading you.

Have you ever happened upon a page with ungrammatical Italian or gross errors in grammar and spelling?

What was your reaction?

A loss of trust and credibility with the site you were reading and hitting the browser’s “go back” button.

Word choice and language

Priorities for robots:

• Identify context.
• Simple, unarticulated text to read.

Priorities for humans

• Specificity: use phrases like “50% of Italians have a Facebook profile” rather than “a great many Italians have a Facebook profile.”
• Avoid terms like “evidently,” your reader is not stupid.

Use of complex or overly technical text

People on search engines are looking for answers, not for detailed or technical explanations of topics they probably know little about.

Simply answers.

You don’t have to talk to your readers like a college professor talks to his or her students, but rather like a friend to whom you are giving advice.

Simply speak in terms that everyone can understand.

If you speak to your users in simple terms, they are likely to have less incentive to click the ‘back’ button on the browser and your bounce rate may significantly decrease.