SEO wants structure. Your reader wants a soul.

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Hey - It's Tim.

Dear Humans: This Content Is Not For The Robots (Please Don’t Tell Them)

Let me tell you a secret.
You can write for both.

You can rank and resonate.
You can sneak personality into a blog post like a teenager sneaking vodka into a water bottle.

Here’s how:

1. Start With a Human Hook

Let’s be honest - robots don’t need a warm-up.

They don’t feel tension. They don’t need context.
They just crawl, parse, index, bounce.

But humans?

We like a little seduction.
A little drama.
A little: “wait… what?”
A little foreplay…

So when your intro starts with:

Congratulations - you just blue-balled the reader.

They don’t care what the article will explore.
They want to know if you’ve ever sent an email that made your hands sweat.
They want a story that yanks them into the middle, not a table of contents wearing a trench coat.

Try this instead:

That’s a hook.
Not because it’s dramatic.
But because it’s human.
And it hints at something worth sticking around for.

2. Scenarios > Stats (Every. Single. Time.)

Stats are fine.
They validate. They impress clients.
But they don’t stick.

People don’t remember numbers.
They remember moments.

Stats whisper.
Scenarios punch.

Use data if it earns its keep - but wrap it in real life.
In context. In consequences.
Make me feel the stat.

Because if it doesn’t live in a human experience, it dies in a spreadsheet.

3. Write Like You Talk - But Cooler

This isn’t a novel.
You’re not Hemingway.
You’re not auditioning for Harvard Business Review.

You’re a smart person trying to say smart things to other smart people without sounding like an enterprise FAQ page.

So if your writing sounds like this:

Just know that somewhere, a kitten dies.

Here’s the fix:

• Break a sentence.

• Start with “so.”

• Use a metaphor your boss wouldn’t understand.

That’s voice.
That’s jazz.
That’s what makes people stay.

Because nobody quotes bullet points.
They quote the line that made them smirk.

4. Google Doesn’t Want Your Keyword Soup. It Wants a Story With Seasoning.

There was a time - back when BuzzFeed ruled the earth and "pivot to video" was a thing -
when you could win by writing like a robot for other robots.

Congrats. You just wrote an article that smells like printer ink and tastes like cardboard.

That’s not content. That’s compliance.

Here’s the fix:
Write like a human who accidentally knows a lot about the topic.

Let the keywords slip in the way a drunk friend slips into your weekend plans.
Uninvited, but still on brand.

You want to talk about CRMs?
Tell me about the time you tried one that broke your onboarding flow and made your intern cry.
Tell me about the one that saved your pipeline during a Wi-Fi outage in rural Portugal.
That’s SEO in 2025

Google reads it.
Thinks: “Yep, this guy knows his shit.”
Ranks you.
Done.

The best SEO content?
It doesn’t sound like SEO content.
It sounds like a conversation you’d want to eavesdrop on.

5. Leave Something Just for the Humans

Here’s the truth:

Most content is made to not lose.
Not to win. Not to be remembered.
Just to tick the boxes.

But great content?
It winks at you.

It throws in that one line that doesn’t need to be there - but had to be there.
The one that made the writer chuckle while they typed it.
The one a robot would delete in a heartbeat.

That line?
Doesn’t help you rank.
Doesn’t impress the algorithm.
Doesn’t fit the content brief.

And that’s exactly why you should keep it.

Because your reader’s going to remember it.
Because it proves a human was here.

Google might get you the click.
But soul gets you the share.

TL;DR: Serve the robots the structure. Serve the humans the story.

Google will find your post.
A person will fall in love with it.
That’s how you win.

✌️ Tim "I Wrote This For People But The Bots Keep Reading It" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. Not gonna lie, this is probably one of my favourite newsletters I’ve written. I love this one. With the direction SEO is going, we’re losing the human more and more every day. So, this one is for my writers. Enjoy.

P.P.S
Yeah, I get the irony.
I co-founded an AI writing tool — and here I am, writing love letters to the human voice.

But that’s the point.
We’re not building Penfriend to write for you.
We’re building it to write with you.

To keep the weird metaphors. The voice cracks. The one-line rants you sneak in for the real ones.
To help you publish faster without losing the thing that makes people actually want to read you.

This kind of writing?
It’s not going extinct.
We’re making damn sure of it.
Because if AI’s gonna help us write, it damn well better learn to respect the craft.

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