Why Content for Humans?
What’s with our name, anyway? 🤔
We’re glad you asked!
Our name reflects our passion for the type of content that the world needs more of, and it speaks to our approach to solving content needs for our clients. We believe businesses succeed online when they reach their customers and prospects with content that is eminently human: warm, engaging, empathetic, and persuasive.
In other words, we believe you need content that sounds like actual human people (that’s us! 🙋) wrote it with the intent of moving the hearts and minds of other actual human people (that’s your audience).
We hope our brand resonates with you immediately and makes you think, “That’s what I’ve been looking for!” But it’s impossible to communicate everything about our brand ethos in just a few paragraphs. So, whether you’re already on board or you’re wondering what on earth “Content for Humans” even means, this post should give you a clearer sense of what we mean when we talk about writing Content for Humans.
The World Needs Content That Is Deeply, Truly Human
If you have a website, you know the importance of search engine optimization, or SEO. It’s the difference between coming up first when a customer Googles a problem and not showing up at all.
And that matters. A lot.
So companies go to great lengths to rank on Google— as they should. They formulate complex digital marketing and SEO strategies and they chase those front-page rankings above all else.
There’s just one problem: they forget who’s at the other end. The endpoint of every single SEO equation that matters isn’t a Google robot or an algorithm. It’s a human person. Usually one with a problem they need help with.
And that human person you’re trying so desperately to reach? Guess what kind of content they respond well to.
It isn’t hyper-optimized, soulless content that moves hearts (and opens wallets). It’s the content that’s deeply, truly human: empathetic, persuasive, personal, and real.
We believe that businesses succeed when they produce and publish content for actual human people, content that speaks to people where they are and in the ways they want to be spoken to. People want content that solves problems, entertains, delights, and empathizes.
In other words? They want Content for Humans.
The Problems With Pleasing Robots
We get why businesses invest so heavily in pleasing the Google robots 🤖. It doesn’t matter how engaging or human your content is if no one can find it! But businesses can quickly get themselves into trouble when they focus on pleasing the search engine overlords at the expense of other concerns.
No, not that robot— but he sure is adorable.
When you focus too much on making the robots happy, it’s easy to lose track of who’s actually at the other end of any content interaction. (Hint: it isn’t a robot.)
It’s entirely possible to rank #1 on Google (or Bing, or DuckDuckGo) with content that makes the search engines happy—but that doesn’t truly resonate with your readers or achieve your goals. It might be good content, but it isn’t human.
And this matters, because content that doesn’t resonate doesn’t convert. It doesn’t win hearts and minds, either.
The other problem with a robot-centric strategy is that search engines are constantly changing their metrics and algorithms. If you’re working the system instead of generating real value, what will you do when the system changes?
Remember What Google Actually Wants
At this point, you might be thinking, “These folks are anti-SEO! That's never going to work for us!”
We aren’t anti-SEO at all. But we aren’t slaves to SEO, either-and we believe your human readers matter most.
Even if that explanation doesn’t thrill you, think about this: what does Google actually want? What’s the whole SEO game about?
Google’s mission isn’t a secret: the company says it’s "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Google wants to make information useful. It’s not a stretch to say they want to supply every searcher with the best answer to their search. The methodology they use to determine this is incredibly complex. But the objective is simple.
So here’s the Eureka moment: If what Google wants is to deliver the best right answer to every search—and humans are the ones who ultimately indicate which answer is the best one—then writing for Google is still writing for humans!
Making your human readers AND search engines happy? Genius!
So it doesn’t have to be an either/or decision where you either write for Google or you write for people. The businesses that are winning at this—consistently ranking at a high level and engaging and converting readers—are doing both. And on the content front, doing both starts with writing for humans.
Too Much Digital Content Is Soulless, Mechanical, and Fluffy
We’ve written content for a wide range of clients in B2B tech, software, SaaS, and similar spaces. And what we’ve found is that so much of the written content in these spaces is soulless and robotic. Apologies to the engineers out there, but most tech content sounds like an engineer reading a spec sheet or the back of a shampoo bottle.
If you’ve ever had to slog through this kind of stiff, robotic content as a reader, you know what we’re getting at. It isn’t fun, and it doesn’t quickly solve the problem you’re trying to solve.
Especially in the tech world, businesses need to reach consumers (on the B2C front) or busy leaders and executives (on the B2B side). These people don’t want to get bowled over with deeply technical content. They want to know how your product or service can solve their problem.
That’s a human problem to solve. It takes an empathetic, understanding human voice. And that’s what we do here.
Death to the Fluff
Fluffy cat? Adorable. Fluffy content? Not so much.
In many industries and spaces, written content is unnecessarily fluffy, too. Marketing departments hear that recent iterations of Google’s algorithm are favoring longer content (that’s sort of true, but only part of the puzzle), so then it’s like an arms race to see how long of a piece they can put together.
The truth is, Google is favoring both length and quality. Its main goal is to deliver the best answer to every searcher, and it’s getting better and better at rewarding real quality and punishing fluff.
Length isn’t a bad thing. In fact, for certain content types, it’s almost always good—but only when your long-form content is also quality content.
Content for Humans Is Ready to Serve You
So now you know: Content for Humans is all about creating powerful written content that speaks to your human readers. We serve clients in a range of industries, with a particular focus on these:
content for B2B tech, services, and SaaS
content for music organizations (private studios, instrument stores, arts organizations, and more)
content for education and edtech
content for nonprofits
We also specialize in partnering with digital marketing agencies and SEO firms, providing that crucial component of top-tier written content called for in their marketing plans and SEO strategies. You provide the strategy; we provide content that delights your clients—and their readers.
Ready to get started? Mash the button below and tell us what you need.