There's a special kind of writing that exists only for algorithms. You've read it. Probably today.
"Looking for the best coffee maker? Here are 10 best coffee makers for making the best coffee. The best coffee makers come in many styles. When choosing the best coffee maker, consider what makes a coffee maker best for you."
It's not writing. It's keyword soup. And while it might rank on page one, nobody's reading past paragraph one.
The irony is that Google's algorithm has spent the last decade getting better at detecting exactly this kind of manipulation. They're trying to surface content written for humans. But we're still writing for them.
Brands torture themselves to get SEO right. Every blog post becomes an exercise in keyword density, meta descriptions, alt tags. The writing suffers. The thinking suffers. And for what? A slightly better position on page one for a term nobody's actually searching?
Here's what's strange: the content that ranks best long-term is almost never the content optimized for ranking. It's the content that's actually useful, genuinely interesting, worth sharing. Google's algorithm is increasingly good at recognizing quality because quality has signals that can't be gamed — time on page, return visits, genuine links from real sites.
Look at Wait But Why. Tim Urban writes 5,000-word essays about consciousness, technology, and procrastination. Zero SEO optimization. Ranks anyway. Because people actually read it, share it, reference it.
Or consider Patagonia. Their blog doesn't read like a blog trying to rank for "best outdoor jackets." It reads like a publication about environmental activism that happens to be written by a company that makes outdoor jackets. Result? They rank anyway. And people actually care.
The brands winning at content aren't the ones writing for Google. They're the ones Google has to pay attention to because actual humans pay attention to them.
So here's the test: remove all the keywords. Strip out the SEO formatting. What's left? If the answer is nothing, you never had content in the first place. You had algorithmic bait. And while that might get you traffic, traffic without attention is just numbers on a dashboard.
Write for humans. Let Google figure out the rest. Because the algorithm is trying to find what people want. Give people what they want, and the algorithm will find you.