Writing Content for People, Search Engines, and AI 

When you’re considering how to write content for a website, it’s easy to focus on writing for your readers and neglecting to optimize your content for search. And while you should definitely prioritize your audience, utilizing SEO best practices is important for getting eyes on your content in both traditional and AI search results. Writing solely for one or the other will result in lower search performance, so striking a balance of writing content for people, search engines, and AI is the best way to make sure your content is relevant and also optimized for search.

Traditional search engines primarily rank pages. AI search engines generate answers by synthesizing information from multiple sources, making comprehensive, well-structured, trustworthy content even more valuable. 

There’s a lot of overlap with writing content for people, search engines, and AI search. As a generative engine optimization agency with content marketing services in house, here are our top tips on creating high-quality content that appeals to your audience and gets ranked by search engines.

The Prioritization of Helpful Content

When you’re writing content for your audience, one of your goals should be to provide valuable, helpful content. You’ll want your audience to view you as a reliable, educational source of information.

And Google’s latest guidance continues to emphasize creating helpful, people-first content. Those same principles are also proving effective for AI-powered search experiences, where systems prioritize content that is useful, trustworthy, and easy to understand. 

One of the biggest opportunities today is providing unique perspectives and firsthand experience that can’t easily be found elsewhere. This is effective for both human search and for crawlers – no matter the search medium, the goal remains the same: make the answer or recommendation as relevant to the user as possible.

So what does that mean for you?

One of the biggest SEO best practices is creating quality content that appeals to the reader first. Google and other search engines serve humans, so putting humans first in your content will go far in getting your content indexed and ranked, or being surfaced in AI-generated answers. 

But of course, it’s not that simple. There are other SEO best practices that you shouldn’t neglect.

E-E-A-T: What it is and how to optimize for it

Google uses E-E-A-T as part of its framework for evaluating high-quality content. Those same qualities also help content perform well in AI-powered search experiences.

Here’s what those four signals mean:

Experience

Share firsthand knowledge, real examples, and lessons you’ve learned through actually doing the work. 

Expertise

Demonstrate subject matter knowledge with accurate information, thoughtful explanations, and practical guidance.

Authority

Build authority by earning mentions, publishing original research, and creating content that others reference. 

Trust

Keep your content accurate and current, cite reputable sources, and be transparent about who created the content. 

The strongest content typically demonstrates all four of these qualities, helping build confidence with both readers and search systems. 

How to Write SEO Friendly Content: 6 Tips

There are many on-page SEO factors that you should consider when creating a new piece of content. The good news is that all of these components not only influence your visibility but also make the user experience better – a win-win!

If you’re wondering how to write good SEO content, these are some of the most important on-page elements to optimize. 

1. Keywords

Research and identify the keywords that you’re trying to rank for and use them throughout your piece of content. The keywords you choose should align with the problems you’re trying to solve and the questions your audience is asking. For example, if you’re writing a blog post about how software updates can help defend against viruses, keywords you’ll use might include “software update benefits”, “how often to update software”, and “how to update software”. It’s likely your audience is searching for these terms, so including them in your content will increase its visibility.

Make sure you aren’t forcing keywords into the copy – instead, find ways to organically incorporate them in headers and throughout the copy and try to use a keyword in the first 100 words of your copy.

For AI visibility specifically, think about broader questions and topics your audience is trying to understand. Stepping outside of the realm of keywords is important for covering your bases with how people are now searching. To account for natural language searches, your content should answer broader questions and address topics your audience is trying to understand. 

2. Page Hierarchy

Your page needs structure. Having big blocks of text severely impacts readability and user experience, so you’ll want to make sure you’re using headers and sub headers to break up sections of copy along with bulleted lists, call-out quotes and any other elements that help break up the page and give your content structure. Be concise with your writing, too. Keep paragraphs short and to the point.

To use headers on your webpages, make sure you’re formatting copy into H1 and H2 headers. H1 headers should be the big ideas while H2 headers should be smaller points within those big ideas. The style of the headings should reflect their hierarchy on the page, so an H1 font should appear larger than an H2. You can break copy down even further by using H3s and H4s if it makes sense for your page’s structure.

Clear structure and logical organization are of course better for readers, but they’re also necessary for ensuring AI systems can understand your content. Make it as easy as possible for the AI to parse the content on your site. One way to make your content easier for AI systems to understand is by providing a Markdown version of your content, though it’s not a requirement. Following strong SEO best practices—including clear headings, logical hierarchy, and semantic HTML—will also help AI better interpret your pages. If you’re interested in Markdown, we’ve put together a guide on when and how to use it. 

3. Images

Pictures and videos are a great way to make your content more interesting and to break up text. Supplementing text with images keeps readers engaged. Just remember to compress images so that they don’t slow down your page speed.

Make sure to include alternative tags for all images. Alt tags provide a description of the image or video that is important for a number of reasons. For one thing, if the image doesn’t show up on the page, a description will still be there to give viewers an idea of what the image was about. Alt tags are also important because they give search engines a better understanding of what your content is about. Lastly, alt tags are necessary for accessibility purposes. Screen readers read alt tags, giving anyone with a visual impairment context for what the image is depicting.

Beyond alt tags, images can strengthen your visibility in AI-generated search results when they provide meaningful context to a query.

To get your images to show up in AI search results, use original, high-quality visuals that illustrate your expertise, write descriptive alt text, and include surrounding text that explains why the image is relevant. AI-powered search experiences incorporate images that provide useful context and help explain an answer.

4. Title Tags

Title tags are the titles of your webpages that appear as links in search results. You’ll want your title to be short enough to not get cut off in the results but long enough to give your readers an understanding of what the content is about. Stick to 50-60 characters and try to squeeze in a keyword.

By writing title tags, you’re giving search engines what they need to describe your content to readers. But even though you’ve written a great title tag, it’s important to note that there’s no guarantee Google will use that specified tag.

5. Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are the descriptions of your page that appears below the title tag in search results. These can be between 150-160 characters and should tell readers (and the search engine) what your content is about while including keywords. They should also be catchy or interesting, making your readers want to click your content.

6. Internal Links

Including internal links on your pages is important for making it as easy as possible to navigate your website. You can link to related content, service or product pages, blog posts, case studies, etc. You’ll want to structure your website by pillar pages and then link related content to those pages. For instance, your pillar page might be your services page and supporting pages would be a blog post and a case study related to the service.

Using internal links helps people move through your site seamlessly, but it also helps search engines understand how your site is structured as well as which pages to surface for specific queries.

Make sure you’re linking any relevant, preexisting pages to any new pages you publish. New pages that don’t have internal links directing traffic to them won’t perform well in search, so be sure to consider linking opportunities when posting new content.

Internal links also help search engines and AI systems understand how topics relate across your website, reinforcing your topical expertise. Over time, a strong internal linking strategy helps establish topical depth, making it easier for both search engines and AI systems to understand what your website is an authority on. 

How to write content for AI search

As AI-powered search continues to grow, many of the same principles that improve SEO also improve AI visibility. As mentioned above, AI-powered search experiences favor content that is well-organized, accurate, comprehensive, and supported by credible sources.

Here are a few other ways you can increase your odds of having your content surfaced in AI answers:

• Answer questions directly before expanding on them
• Demonstrate real experience and expertise
• Support claims with reputable sources, original research, or firsthand examples
• Keep content current through regular updates

Optimizing for AI is just an extension of your SEO strategy – SEO and GEO work together to get your website showing up wherever your audience is looking for you. Creating genuinely helpful, trustworthy content remains the strongest foundation for success across both traditional and AI-powered search.

Partner with a digital agency for your content marketing needs

Effective SEO website content writing goes beyond keywords. It requires a thoughtful strategy that balances user experience, technical SEO, and increasingly, AI visibility. 

Bringing in external SEO assistance is always a great option, too. If you’re looking for someone with expertise in this area or want to dive deeper with a holistic, custom-built SEO strategy for your website, consider hiring a digital marketing agency like Perrill. We’ll evaluate your specific needs and partner with you to create a strategy that fits your goals.

SEO is an ongoing process, so having a dedicated team who is evaluating your website for search engine optimization and recommending improvements over time can really help you boost your rankings and stay ahead of competition.

Elevate your content with Perrill

Now more than ever, creating quality content is the key to standing out from the crowd. The digital landscape is overwhelmed with content, but writing content for people and search engines will help you reach your audience.

If you’re ready to build a high-performing website content strategy that increases traffic, reach out! We’re happy to partner with you to build out a unified digital strategy to grow your online presence and better connect you with your audience.