The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Google processes more than 8.5 billion searches[1] every day. That’s more than 100,000 searches per second, thousands of which could lead a user to a purchase.
It’s no wonder, then, that 60% of marketers list SEO as their number one inbound marketing priority[2].
But generating organic traffic comes with challenges. Google has hundreds of billions of webpages in its index[3], competing for the top spots on search result pages. Not to mention, when you’re writing for search engines, you technically have two audiences: bots and humans.
Let’s look at how these audiences compare and see who you should be writing for.
Writing content for SEO: who to write for
Bots and humans are the chicken and the egg of search engine optimization. You need humans to make a sale, but you can’t get the humans without the help of bots.
The question is, which one comes first on your priority list? To answer that, let’s define each of these audiences.
Writing for humans
Human readers are the ones that can eventually make a purchase and become a customer. When making purchase decisions, humans need product details and pricing, but that type of information usually isn’t enough.
If you want to create content that resonates with a human audience, your content needs empathy, storytelling[4], and emotional reasoning. Studies show that storytelling, in particular, releases oxytocin[5] in the brain, a hormone associated with positive feelings such as happiness and trust.
Storytelling also helps you structure your writing in a way that’s easy for human readers to follow and understand.