Writing For The Search Engines VS Writing For Your Readers

Over the last few years, there have been some big algorithm updates, especially noticeable with Google, that have changed the way websites need to have their content written and published. Writing for the search engines and writing for your readers are two vastly different things now, which can make or break your business if you're doing it all wrong. If you are still writing all of your own content, you'll want to make sure you're doing enough research prior to posting so you know if Google, Yahoo! and Bing will love what you're writing, and especially how you're writing it.

The grammar of your content can be perfect, but if you're not writing for your visitors, you will likely be seen in a bad light by the search engines. A lot of people think they're doing everything right, but what they are doing wrong is over-optimizing their articles as well as making them unreadable. You need a good structure for your writing, your content needs to show engagement and you need need to be seen as a real person and not a bot when the search engines come to crawl your content. Yeah, a bot can evaluate you to determine if your content seems like a bot wrote it or not lol. 

In this discussion, I'll be going over what you should and shouldn't be doing when it comes to writing for the search engines VS writing for your readers.



Writing for the search engines
When someone is writing for the search engines, they usually have some understanding of SEO and how to rank pages on a website in order to hit the top page within the search results on Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Writing for the search engines will usually backfire on you since it's something that they don't want you to do. The search engines want you to be writing for your readers, not them, so the reader has a better experience when on your website.


Writing for the readers
If you're writing for your readers, you aren't caring too much about what happens after you publish your content. You want them to read something they love, and you don't worry about getting top rankings for a specific keyword. You likely aren't over optimizing your content because you aren't worried about your keyword density, your headers, your titles or your descriptions. You just want to get some high-quality content in front of your readers in order for them to learn and hopefully engage with you. Sure, you want to be big and popular within your niche, but you're not writing for the search engines and hoping they show you a ton of love due to your over optimization.


Why writing for the search engines isn't the best idea
Writing specifically for the search engines isn't the best idea in the world because you won't always get the best benefits from it. Writing for the search engines usually consists of someone trying to optimize their pages to a point where they think that Google, Yahoo! and Bing will increase their rankings to #1 for their desired keywords, sending them thousands of visitors each month because of their top rankings. In reality, if you're writing for the search engines, you won't always see top rankings because the search engines will catch on and not put you at the top because you're actually trying too hard.


Why writing for your readers is a great idea
When you write for your readers, and you don't worry too much about getting that top spot within the search engine results pages, you will likely be rewarded and given higher rankings. It's kind of backward when you think about it, you write for the search engines and you don't get any love but when you write for the people, the search engines reward you lol. Another backward thing is if you write for your people, you're actually writing to increase your rankings within the search engines. So if you write for your readers, you're essentially writing for the search engines....


Engaging with your readers
When it comes to getting to the top of the search engine results pages, you need to show some sort of engagement on your posts and pages. If you are posting quality content, you won't always beat out your competition who might be writing on similar topics and getting the engagement. The search engines may boost your rankings simply based on your content, but it doesn't always happen that way  If the search engines come to your pages and see some sort of engagement within the page, with your visitors, they will likely boost you more than if you didn't have any engagement. They want to see people already liking, commenting and sharing your content so they know it's already showing some sort of popularity within the community. They want to promote better websites within their rankings, so by getting some engagement on each of your posts is a great way to help boost your rankings 




In Conclusion
Writing for the search engines isn't a great thing to do because they will usually keep you on page 2 or higher on pages 3, 4, or even 5+. They see you as a website that has potential, but they just don't think you're ready for the first page. On the other hand, if you're writing for your readers, you're going to be noticing some higher rankings even though you're not trying to do it as much as some other people. You'll need to start getting some sort of engagement on your posts in order to overtake your competition. You can definitely get to page 1 without engagement, so don't try to call me out on this one lol. It's not as easy to get top rankings without engagement though  So get out there, write up some great content and try not to worry too much of how the search engines are going to view you. If you act cool, like you don't care what others think about you, you'll likely be rewarded with higher rankings.



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