How to write content for humans
A few months ago I was asked to join a conference to speak about how to write content that actually gets read. I will admit, I still don’t think anyone personally seeks out my content, but I do often try to make an attempt to make what I am writing somewhat interesting.
In a world where there’s content flying at us from EVERY SINGLE ANGLE (I bet you just stopped for yet another notification, right?) — it’s very difficult to retain people’s attention.
“Writing content for humans” isn’t just about writing content that will be hopefully glanced at amongst a series of other distractions — it is about building an audience.
So how do you actually achieve this?
TLDR:
Writing for SEO isn’t a thing.
Optimize your content with internal and external links.
Write with empathy, not for robots!
Do your research and get to know your audience.
Talk about your personal experiences — people want to connect.
Appreciate your copywriters, this shit is hard.
First things first.. SEO
Before we get to how to write content that will get read, it’s still worth discussing SEO a little bit.
There’s an obsession with SEO that I’ve seen grow throughout the years, but this obsession has lead to creating content that is high-ranking but frankly full of nonsense. (Remember that one time when Kanban Roadmap became a thing?)
This strategy may rank certain sites higher for those keywords, but perpetuates terrible information in circles. This isn’t content for humans — this is content for vanity.
Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write with keywords in mind. No matter what, you’ll always have to research your target keywords, then structure the page around those keywords. This is called SEO optimization.
SEO Optimization
SEO Optimization is when you optimize your content to be as SEO friendly as possible. Keywords are just the first step to achieving that.
Another way of optimizing your content is with internal and external linking (that is, linking within your own domain as well as external domains.)
Google displays web pages in their search results based on the authority and relevance of the page to enhance the user experience using two methods:
By determining the relevance of your page by analyzing its content based on several factors, including where and how often you use certain words in that piece of content.
By measuring the authority by the number of links pointing to that page and how trustworthy those links are, which is why link building is important.
The problem unfolds when writers try to hit as many keywords as humanly possible, turning the content into a collection of buzzwords.
Stop writing for SEO — start writing for people.
Copywriting — whether for a blog post, article, ebook or a website — has to have a level of storytelling involved. It’s an art and a science, and you have to have a balance of both SEO and human appeal in order to create a community around the content that you’re writing.
Here’s how we do that 👇
Know your audience
Ok sounds obvious, and yet I see this mistake being repeated over and over again.
Take the time to research and understand who it is you are writing for. The most frustrating thing personally is when I read an article about product management, but it reads as though the person has no idea what they’re even talking about. (Let me reiterate, Kanban roadmaps are NOT a thing.)
Use your audience’s language and common terminology, and don’t be afraid if it might sound a bit too niche — if anything niche is what you want.
The reader has gone out of their way to try and find an article related to the topic they’re looking for, so treating them as if they didn’t know what they’re researching is if anything counter intuitive.
They’re there to learn from you, but they’re also there because the topic is within the realm of things they’re familiar with, so try to not be so generalist about things. Your audience is smart, so treat them like that are.
Write with empathy
For me, writing with empathy includes two things:
Don’t pretend you’re smarter than your audience, because you might not be. I know I just said it’s ok to have a niche — and it is! But there is a balance that can be found between informative and condescending. You are there to both share and educate, but you are certainly not there to be the smartest person in the room.
Be inclusive with language. That means using “you” or “I” as opposed to “he or she” where possible, unless of course you personally know the person you are referring to or quoting.
Talk about experiences
The best content I’ve read are the ones where people share their personal experiences, and not just the good ones.
If you’ve had a negative experience with something, share it with the world, talk about what you’ve learned, what led you to that place, and how you might do things differently next time.
Influencers love to share the good stuff but rarely ever share the bad stuff. Remember that content at the end of the day is there to educate.
Not everybody wants to read about how wonderful things are, often people are seeking to understand if others are struggling with the topic they’re researching and how to do things better or how to move past a certain struggle — so write about that. And definitely do not be afraid to look stupid. You are not stupid. We all make mistakes, and we’re all looking to relate to each other.
Understand the problem
Copy-pasta is a term you have to familiarize yourself with. It’s when someone writes entirely bullshit content that ranks high, causing the next person looking to rank just as high to copy the entire content, perpetuating a cycle of shitposts across the internet.
Yes, I went there.
If you don’t thoroughly understand what you are writing about, don’t be afraid to talk to your audience about it first.
Treat it like a product. Research the what and why, see if it’s a problem others need to learn about, gather some feedback, and iterate.
Appreciate your copywriters
If at this point you’re thinking wow that looks like a lot of work…it’s because it is.
Writing content is not easy.
It takes a lot of time and effort to get to know your audience, understand the topic, do the research, understand positioning and come up with a story.
I once had someone tell me to “not to be bothered with copy” because anyone could write it.
It felt like a stab in the heart.
It clearly showed that this person did not appreciate my work, but also didn’t understand how hard it actually is to write content.
So if you’re writing the content yourself or you’re looking to hire a content writer, be kind! Writing content takes a lot of mental effort.
Personally, I can only write between the hours of 6am-11am, after that, I lose all ability to form sentences 🤣
Human writing vs Keywords
So let’s get to the juicy stuff… how do we actually find balance.
The truth here is there isn’t an exact formula I can give you that will guarantee that all of your content will always be great.
If such an algorithm existed, an AI could write the content for us and we wouldn’t need to go through everything I just described. Then again, don’t they do that already?
However, there are a few tips I can give you for how to structure documents with keywords and ensure your stories are ranking higher.
H1 Header
Limit the use of H1’s to just one, Google doesn’t like it. For everything else, there’s about 6 different header sizes you can use.
Make your URL SEO-friendly
Use 3–5 words to describe content in your URL, with the keyword if possible. (eg, https://www.yourdomain.com/content/super-awesome-content-writing)
Use the keyword in the first paragraph
Most people don’t know that they can and should use the targeted keyword in the first paragraph. It’s even better if you can use it in the first two sentences.
Images
Include a minimum of 2 images, include keywords in alt tag. This helps your content rank higher.
Make use of backlinks
Use internal link on first paragraph, link to domains with high authority as “Follow” / “No Follow” for low auth URLs.
Use the right tools
There’s plenty of tools out there to help you research the right keywords, but also help outline how well your content might perform. These include:
Read more books
If you take one tip away from today, I hope it’s this one: read more books.
This will give you an idea of how authors structure sentences, create flow and stories, tie and weave these stories together in unique ways.
I like to read as much as I can on all subjects, whether it’s novels, self-help books, comedies, fiction, non-fiction — whatever it is, there’s a uniqueness in all of them that can only help you improve how you write and help you find your own voice.
Thanks for reading! 😬