Rage against the big, manly SEO machine
Through their attachment to SEO keywords and strict style rules, content companies make it too difficult for produce writing that humans want to read
What’s the essence of great writing?
In English1, the answer is simple: syntax, i.e., the way words are arranged within sentences, and how those sentences relate to one another. Skilled writers know how to craft syntax that shows both an ear for the sounds of “natural” conversation and a knack for more “synthetic” constructions—such as self-conscious alliteration, allusions to other authors’ words, or even metered phrases a la poetry—that no human would ever utter aloud (unless reading said constructions aloud, like in a play), but which provide emotional and or/informational sustenance.2
This skill set is akin to musicians adept at both playing live (“natural”) and creating studio recordings that couldn’t be replicated in a live environment (“synthetic”).
The brilliant mixed syntax of “Henry VIII”
William Shakespeare and his late-career collaborator John Fletcher3 were syntactical virtuosos in this mold. In their jointly authored “Henry VIII,” they blend pitch-perfect imitation of the particular speech patterns of the titular monarch and the members of his court with metered poetry-commentary on the actions of these characters.
Here’s Fletcher peppering some dialogue with a well-known documented speech tic of King Henry VIII, his “Ha!” to express impatience and frustration:
King Henry: Who’s there? Ha?
Norfolk: Pray God he be not angry.
King Henry: Who’s there, I say? How dare you thrust yourselves into my private meditations! Who am I? Ha?
Norfolk: A gracious king that pardons offenses, malice ne’er meant. Our breach of duty this way is business of estate, in which we come to know your royal pleasure.
King Henry: Ye are too bold. Go to, I’ll make ye know your times of business. Is this an hour for temporal affairs? Ha?
We also get the legalese-esque “in which we come” and the more poetic “an hour for temporal affairs.” And then later in that same scene, Henry says these exquisite lines, in seemingly another voice entirely, as he decides to leave Catherine of Aragon:
King Henry: O, my lord,
Would it not grieve an able man to leave
So sweet a bedfellow? But, conscience, conscience—
O, ‘tis a tender place, and I must leave her.
Shakespeare riffs on the “Ha!” in the next act, giving Suffolk a memorable metaphor and some plain old conversational English in one breezy, funny set of lines:
Suffolk: No, no—
There be more wasps that buzz about his nose
Will make this sting the sooner. Cardinal Campeius
Is stolen away to Rome; hath taken no leave;
Has left the cause o’th’King unhandled, and
Is posted as the agent of our Cardinal
To second all his plot. I do assure you
The King cried “Ha!” at this.
These straightforward lines amazingly live in the same scene with Cardinal Wolsey’s lament at the loss of his favor with Henry:
Cardinal Wolsey: Today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth, my high-blown pride
At length broke under me, and now has left me
Weary, and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream that must for ever hide me.
This passage could juice an entire college paper from me—the hyperliterate concision of “tomorrow blossoms,” the repetition of “frost” that you can almost hear someone pausing as they qualify their remark, and the “unnatural” sound of “This many summers in a sea of glory” (something you’d never say extemporaneously, unlike the earlier “Ha!”) all contribute to the masterful syntax.
There’s even what we would now deem a grammatical error in the usage of “that” instead of “who” to refer to “boys,” which only underscore how great writing isn’t about following the rules. The most skilled writers don’t write by the book so much as through the book. They learn through two main, highly personal avenues that involve a lot of stops, starts, and deviations from any one-size-fits-all advice on How To Write Well:
Reading the writing of others: This writing doesn’t have to be in any specific genre, it only needs to show how words can simultaneously convey meaning and stick in your stylistic memory. I’ve long read a politics blog called Eschaton4 that engrained in me the phrase “celestial hall monitors” to refer to the imagined “impartial” arbiters that liberals expect to resolve their partisan disputes for them. Inspiration can come from anywhere, but you’re more likely to find it if you read a bit of everything—novels, plays, news, blogs, social media, and even media reviews5. There’s no singular “great books” list, nor any one advice book, that can give someone an edge.
Trying things out: Gustav Flaubert labored for years over the words in “Madame Bovary,” and his experience is typical. Writing is in some sense rewriting. Well-crafted prose and poetry has almost always been revised multiple times by the author before it ever reaches another reader. Sections that you thought might go in the intro instead end up fitting in the body (and vice-versa), entire paragraphs get ditched (but saved somewhere, just in case), sentences get fiddled with endlessly. Sometimes your entire premise dissolves and the piece ends up being about something else.
Stanley Kubrick’s advice to aspiring filmmakers echoes this vital “do it, try it!” ethos:
Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.
A friend of mine mined similar territory when they recounted how a colleague of theirs always wanted to sit down and read a comprehensive guide to an application such as the issue management suite Jira, to master it before even using it. That’s impossible—you can’t understand software or writing from first principles, you have to tinker with them. Rare is the writing that comes out perfectly with no revision, whether by you (the most important reviser of all) or someone else.
You can no more master Jira by preemptively reading a guide to it, than you can become a great writer by reading a style guide
But what the content industry presupposes is—maybe you can??
What makes “content” unique as writing
Content production is a high-volume, low-margin business, with no time to afford to the trial-and-error process that’s integral to refined writing. Even editing is minimalistic. Instead, you write content as if you were preparing it from a recipe book, with two main “ingredients”—search engine optimization (SEO) keywords and style rules. Everything is known in advance.
SEO keywords
Keywords are words that people enter into search engines. Think of how you construct your own search queries: Maybe you enter “restaurants nearby,” ask “how do RCA cables work?,” or, as a business decision-maker, attempt to narrow things down with “(best) enterprise software (?).” Those are keyword-driven searches.
Specialized software helps content companies research the keywords most relevant to the subjects they’re covering—that’s the easy part. The difficult part falls to writers, who then have to structure their writing a certain way on-page while shoehorning as many of these keywords as possible into it, creating an obvious mechanical armature beneath their syntax.
And even skillful inclusion of keywords doesn’t guarantee any reward. As a practice, SEO keeps some grim bedfellows such as clickbait, and it’s sometime seen as pseudoscientific. It can be defeated by something as simple as an algorithm changing or someone paying for an ad that appears above the “organic” SEO result.
Here’s a top organic result for my earlier query “enterprise software,” for Datapine:
Enterprise software is a computer application that aims to assist big companies with several needs such as data analysis, sales and marketing management, customer service, and many others. Typically, these tools are designed to serve a large number of users with high scalability and integration capabilities.
The notable parts:
“Enterprise software is a computer application” is stiff as hell, but it checks the boxes of getting the keyword right at the beginning of the piece and following it with an “is” definition. This type of definition is crucial for ranking highly for queries such as “what is (the best) enterprise software?”
Secondary keywords follow. “Data analysis,” “marketing management,” and “customer service” are all semantically related to “enterprise software.”
Jargon fills out these rest. “Scalability” and “integration” are staples of enterprise software-speak, and then help match the non-human feel of the writing.
Remember, content writing is primarily for a machine audience, namely, search engine algorithms—human readers are secondary, and even their most important actions (for example, how long did they “dwell” on the page) are filtered through machine-generated analytics. So it’s natural that this SEO writing syntax, too, is what I labeled “synthetic” above, with no resemblance to conversation, and even more than that, unpleasant to read.
It works within specific limits, not entirely unlike the synthetic parts of “Henry VIII,” which play by the rules of iambic pentameter. In contexts such as playwriting such limits can benefit creativity by liberating creators from having to make numerous decisions. But metered verse was designed for human ears and values, while SEO keyword stuffing wasn’t. SEO writing simply has to “work” by getting a machine to give it a good grade and put it at the top of a search results list.
Content writers with experience in other types of writing, such as traditional journalism or anything creative, can chafe at this weird dimension of the content mill machine. Expertise as a writer certainly doesn’t guarantee success as a content writer, because content mills aren’t looking for writers per se—they’re really looking for recipe preparers, to reuse our earlier metaphor. Such preparation is a skill but it isn’t the writing process many writers are used to. The process of writing an SEO piece like the “enterprise software” one is usually:
Plug in your keyword inputs, especially early on. Getting the intro right is the most important part of any SEO asset, because if doesn’t “engage” the search algorithm and filter through various analytics, then the writing may as well be invisible.
Intro-centric writing is bad for clarity and memorability. The most enduring thing I learned in an English class I took in 2005, more so even than the insights I got into “Paradise Lost,” was to write your intro last, because when you try to write it first, you’re trying to summarize something that doesn’t exist yet. The body of the piece will take you in different directions.
Craft syntax that can incorporate those keywords without sacrificing “quality,” whatever that means to the search engine in question, on the particular day you're publishing.
Basically, add thousands of words to sort of tell a story around it that a machine can still understand when scanning the page it lives on.
Include various metadata about the article that makes it easier to index.
Reach a suggested word count based on what SEO software “thinks” is an ideal length, regardless of whether the topic merits it.
Apply style rules—do we use the Oxford comma? title case or sentence case for headings? and so on—to give a veneer of consistency and professionalism, ad ultimately to help capture this overarching “make this easy for me!” sentiment of the search engine.
Get specific outputs, namely visibility in Google search
???
Profit!!6
It’s best to think of Google and the entire ecosystem of SEO software adjacent to it—the lodestars of content milldom—as the impatient King Henry VIII crying “Ha!” while looking for compelling, SEO-optimized content to put in front of searchers, run ads against, and get some “engagement” (of a different sort) from. That’s a high-pressure—and highly masculine scenario (more on this below)—even if content creators aren’t in actual danger of being executed like one of Henry’s wives.
Can SEO content be great writing, though? Of course. Consider this passage from a Microsoft page that ranks very highly for the hyper competitive keyword “cloud computing”:
Speed
Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning.
Like our earlier example, some concessions have been made to how Google scans for keywords:
The inevitable inclusion of “cloud computing services,” a high-traffic keyword entirely distinct from “cloud computing.”
The lack of hyphenation in “self service” and “on demand,” perhaps for easier scanning and a higher word.
“Computing resources” and “capacity planning,” lesser but still important keywords.
The grouping of this passage under the label “Speed,” itself under a heading called “Top benefits of cloud computing”—a vital keyword given more visibility as a heading.
The stiff, third-person “businesses,” clashing with the usage of the more direct, second-person “you” elsewhere on the page, for the likely purpose of getting some keyword traffic related to “business cloud.”
But it sounds like a person wrote it. The casual “a lot of flexibility” phrase and the double-fire dependent clauses starting with “typically” and “giving” are key, because their fleeting looseness recalls conversation and contrasts with the mechanical SEO whole. SEO writing, which is basically leaving instructions for a machine, is inherently machinelike, but there’s room for creativity. In this case, the author knows how to vary their syntax from having engaged with texts and conversations.
The relevant Microsoft style guide prescription—“talk like a person”—advises just that. However, it’s useless for people who aren’t already skilled writers. Without a base of writing skills, “talk like a person” can lead someone down the path of writing sloppily and being afraid to use “big words” or complex/synthetic constructions.
Like a lot of style guide advice, the rule seems OK on the surface, but it can’t make anyone into a good or even better writer. In fact, it and its enforcement might make a content writer’s work worse and force them to give up early and often.
Style rules
If SEO is the (pseudo)science of content, then style is the “art,” but it, too, is managed to seem like a science, with absolute rules designed to look like the ones from the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
Anyone writing for a content mill not only gets day-one training on basic style rules, but also gets reminded of them constantly, to a much greater degree than anything about the actual meaning and syntax of their words. A lot of feedback is about these low-stakes style rules, a situation that can be both relieving (at least someone isn’t calling me a know-nothing non-technical idiot) and infuriating (are arbitrary rules all anyone cares about?).
Style rules come from style guides. The major players here are the AP, various professional organizations such as the MLA and the APA, universities such as the University of Chicago, and some corporations that maintain their own in-house rules. Here’s an example of a typical style rule from the AP Stylebook:
This rule may not seem to make or break the quality of writing. However, content industry professionals defend the importance of it and other such edicts to the hilt, and needing to devote mental bandwidth to remembering it is detrimental to the craft of writing.
I once wrote a 3,000-word guide to cloud computing, and had to sit in a meeting in which at least five minutes—I can never remember if I’m supposed to spell out or numeralize numbers in sentences—were devoted to the use of “their” as a third-person singular, a usage that the AP Stylebook had recently approved.
Masculine notions of style
Critiques of this kind also typically dwell on nebulous notions of how “crisp,” “sharp,” and “muscular” the writing needs to be, needling any content that doesn’t meet their standards, and which of course has style rule deviations, as “fluffy” (I got this from a client who told me my writing was also “beautiful”—showing how style enforcement isn’t really about quality) and “flowery.” In this conception, good content is masculine and bad content feminine. Strict, all-consuming style rule enforcement quickly unlocks the path to a writing of patronizing patriarchy.
Although it’s not the main style guide for content mills in particular, The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White is the Bible of such advice, the most influential document ever on how to generate content Write Like A Man, and one whose silly and often useless prescriptions (“omit needless words,” “do not overwrite”) still prop up a lot of earnest notions about what great writing looks and sounds like. Those prescriptions are hypermasculine, suited to an ongoing era in which everything is being “run like a business,” standardized, digitized, and put through whatever other manly apparatus—Silicon Valley’s search engines very much included—to make it even manlier, as Mark Dery has impeccably explained:
Usage absolutists are the Scalia-esque Originalists of the language-maven set. Their emphasis on “timeless” grammatical truths, in opposition to most linguists’ view of language as a living, changing thing, is at heart conservative; their fulminations about the grammatical violations perpetrated by the masses mask deeper anxieties about moral relativism and social turbulence … The implication is obvious: if a lean, mean Modernist prose of “plainness, simplicity, orderliness, [and] sincerity” is manly, then a style that rejoices in ornament and complexity and sharpens its wit with the knowing insincerity of irony or camp is unmanly—feminine or, worse yet, sissified.
Indeed, dealing with style rules in the content world is often an aggressive, gendered slog, one with two explanations I can think of—one benign and the other sinister.
The untrained writer explanation
Not everyone arrives at a content mill as a subject matter expert or even a talented writer. Many are from relatively marginalized backgrounds, arriving out of desperation, and held hostage by their lowly-regarded humanities degrees. And even if they’re great writers, they’re probably not content experts, versed in all the mechanistic rules of the field. As I noted earlier, being a great writer in general doesn’t always translate to being a great content writer in particular.
So, having such clearly defined, math-like style rules—people will tell you that “prompt the question” is right and “beg the question” is wrong with the certainty of someone expressing the same sentiments about “2+2=4” and “2+2=5,” respectively (not remotely comparable; like money, grammar is whatever people use in the real world)—creates guardrails to keep writers from veering off into controversy (e.g., be careful with the use of “allegedly,” don’t write about certain celebrities, and so on), incoherence (break up longer sentences, use active voice), or even problems with formatting in certain contexts such as printed pages (this is why AP Style doesn’t like the Oxford comma).
Style rules impose some helpful limits while trying to churn out unimaginable amounts of SEO copy. They help maintain consistent voice for the content mill and its clients, too, and likewise they’re good for helping someone begin moving from writing in their own voice to generating content in someone else’s. After all, content is all about containerization—your writing is going into someone else’s monetized container.
However, given the immense demands of content mill production paired with how writers frequently find themselves needing to A) get creative to disguise lack of knowledge of something technical and B) spice up inherently dull subject matter, strict style adherence alone can’t save you. You still need writerly syntax to survive. But the difficulty of acquiring and applying it is self-evident in the enormous turnover rates at content mills—over 80% of more at some outfits since the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most people burn out before the question of whether they’re a “good writer” is answered.
The STEMification of writing explanation
As helpful as style rules can be at first for inexperienced or poorly read writers, the people enforcing the rules usually have ulterior different motives that can make even a well-intentioned style rule, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, an impetus to quit. These rules grind content writers down.
Editors and client-side contacts like my “‘their’ is wrong!’” obsessive, or people who think anything beyond the dumbest simple sentence ever written is “wordy” either:
Don’t recognize that great writing comes from engaging with other writing (not from following style rules) or
Do recognize it, but wish that the expertise-gaining process were more linear, more AI-like, and generally more representative of STEM sectors.
By centering absolute style rules, they are trying to turn writing into more of a STEM-like field, wherein certain outputs always and in every case come from a common set of inputs, which isn’t a recipe for good writing. Writing expertise is acquired non-linearly; for example, what a professional writer reads while “off the clock,” or writes and discards but remembers later in a totally different context, is way more important to their skills than any coaching they get on the job or any formal stylebook.
For example, John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s collaborator on “Henry VIII,” likely learned a lot more from his bishop father’s “prolonged and rhetorical style” of praying at Mary Queen of Scots’ execution, circumstances impossible for anyone else to reproduce, than he did from rotely memorizing “action verbs” or someone telling him to write in active voice. The idea that writing needs to always be so “active” isn’t natural—otherwise, it wouldn’t need so many rules sharks to vigorously snark on its behalf.
If there were simply a formula for great writing, then actual writing would be simpler, not to mention more appealing to the many STEM degree holders who now populate the content writing industry. More cynically, consistently great formulaic writing, captured through very obvious inputs rather than through each author’s unique experience as a reader and a tinkerer, would be a jackpot for the will-o-the-wisp-esque7 “AI” industry. This sector is always “close” to a breakthrough in writing like a person does. Good luck! Especially if the AI is being trained on common style guides and the content they inform.
Making writing more STEM-like, by bounding it within a style guide and transforming it into “content” that satisfies an algorithm, would also make it more practical and respected in the currently very patriarchal, very humanities-skeptical American society.
Fields such as English, art history, and gender studies, all of which produce exquisite writers, are coded as impractical and feminine, and are always the first targets for defunding by authoritarian regimes such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. 8 STEM superiority for employment is a myth9, but a powerful one that comports with American notions of strong, masculine “leaders” who shape reality—great men of history10. The STEM fields also overrepresent men.
Why these fields are so male-dominated? One of my own theories is that the opportunity to repeatedly enforce the types of black-and-white rules that don’t really exist in the humanities—“this is RIGHT, that is WRONG, and ever has it been thus”—is appealing to tradition-minded conservatives, who like patriarchal domination and who are predominantly men. The same sensation comes from telling someone to knock it off with the “fluffy” marketing content with all the hysterical “flowery” language and just write like a Real Man. And content is still a very female (and very queer) industry, so there are always opportunities to tell the less manly that they’re slacking on the rules.
Great content vs. great writing
Great content isn’t necessarily great writing, and vice-versa.
The content industry makes it exceedingly difficult to produce strong writing that appeals to other humans, through the twin forces of mechanical SEO keywords and patriarchal style rules. Content millers are writing for machines predominantly created and maintained by men in the very masculine-coded domain of computer science. Their content inevitably has a distinctive ideological character:
Mechanical, being produced through a machine-like process for consumption by a literal machine.
Commercial, being built primarily for business consumption, to sell products and ads first and to inform second, if at all.
Masculine, being written in a “no-nonsense” style, with no obvious sentimentality or literary aspirations.
Practical, or compelling, being capable of “working,” whether that’s in actually converting a reader or in satisfying some arbitrary marketing metric.
Writers with attachments to literary fiction or anything else non-SEO will struggle in the content machine. So if you’re considering a move into the content field, know that the industry may as well be a branch of computer science, with all the drawbacks that that entails.
In Latin and Greek, syntax is less important due to the inflections that give words their meanings.
This Ethan Hawke talk is really moving on how creative work provides emotional sustenance.
An accomplished playwright and the successor to Shakespeare within the King’s Men troupe.
A David Foster Wallace reference; eschaton is the made-up tennis-like sport in “Infinite Jest.”
I owe a huge stylistic debt to the music reviews of the defunct Stylus Magazine and, yes, even to Pitchfork.
Will-o’-the-wisps are seen but never actually caught because they’re illusions.
Check out great man theory.