Writing for SEO – How Our SEO Experiment Changed How We Write
Why We Tested SEO‑Driven Writing
We get innumerable e-mails from companies promising to help us get our notes on to Google’s (GOOG) first few search pages or mentioned in Search Summaries. Most (Some offer guarantees that automatically lead us to believe they are scams) offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization) software or services that either reformat your content to conform with certain SEO ‘Standards’ or make suggestions that the content producer makes to their content before posting. These products make or ask the provider to perform changes that make the content more attractive to bots, particularly Google Search bots that are responsible for building and maintaining Google’s massive site and content index on which the company’s algorithms rely when answering a query.
Our thought was to not only see how effective SEO was toward adding traffic but also to see how much of an influence it had on our content creation. As we post weekly notes to our site (www.scmr-llc.com) once each week, the experiment seemed a logical way to evaluate the effectiveness of SEO on site traffic and content, although the effects can take months to propagate.
Rather than sign up for one of the vast number of SEO fee-based services, we took a simpler approach, we asked Gemini to help us. Initially we wrote our content in the same way as has been the case for years and presented the finished (we thought) note to Gemini with the following prompt: “Here is a note on XYZ. Can you make suggestions in order to optimize it for both SEO and GEO?” at which point GEMINI generated a series of very specific suggestions and the rationale behind each.
Typically the first suggestion referenced the note title. Our titles tend to be simple and imagination capturing (In our opinion)
Examples:
It seems that the Google bots want what they call “a high quality heading that provides a descriptive and helpful summary of the content.” Informal titling fails this test. Bottom line, the bots want it spelled out, without the creativity that humans might find colorful or distinctive. In fact, we asked what a proper SEO title might be for Lewis Carroll’s follow-up to “Alice in Wonderland” might be, resulting in the following suggestions (Both headings and bullet points were suggested by GEMINI for “Through the Looking Glass”:
Best All Around
How Google’s Crawlers Allocate Crawl Budget
For each site that Google bots visit an algorithm decides which pages to fetch and how often to crawl specific pages (Hourly to not at all) based on metrics like update frequency, estimation of importance. They decide how deeply to dig into the site, and how much of the crawl budget[1]it is to use for the specific site and its contents. The decided on site data is then parsed and entered into the Google index.
How Query Intent Changes Rankings
When a query is issued, Google retrieves candidate data from the index and scores each using a large number of relevance and quality signals, and decides what types of additional data to supply (images, news, snippets, etc.) based on the query intent and content type. The page rank depends on the query itself, with the same page receiving a high rank for one query and a lower one for another. Our note titled “Panel Pricing Analysis & Forecast: November 2025”
Aside from technical considerations (spam violations, crawlability, odd site structure) Google Search says it looks for “people first content”, essentially content created primarily to help users rather than to game rankings, and discourages tactics like mass produced, low-value articles and content that is stuffed with keywords, yet every time we asked GEMINI to make SEO optimization suggestions, it suggested making sure keywords were prominent in each paragraph, especially in paragraph headers (sub-titles). Google has prioritized EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) as their search mantra, although Gemini almost always suggesting moving data out of paragraphs and into bulleted lists or tables to make it easier for the bots to read, regardless of their necessity.
How SEO Suggestions Affected Our Writing Style and Creativity
Initially we saw the suggested changes as quite bothersome. Aside from the obsession with titles and headers, the text changes that were suggested oversimplified details and eliminated nuance in favor of emphasizing adjectives that overstated the point. The example might be a suggestion to change “an unusual 7.3% drop in sales” to “a disastrous 7.3% drop in sales”, essentially adding market ‘zip’ that changed the tenor of the point.
The most salient change however, was stripping out ‘conversational text to make the content ‘more direct’. To us, this removed creativity and personality, something a digital entity like a bot or AI does not understand, and we consider that a strong reason to advocate for giving bots and Google Search algorithms the ability to understand how ranking content on its readability from a digital perspective lessens the creative nature of the content, which we believe lessens its value to humans.
One More
Over the few weeks we continued to use GEMINI on each note, we noticed another issue, a human one rather than a digital one. As GEMINI made phrasing and detail suggestions for SEO for each paragraph, after a few weeks we asked GEMINI to write a better conclusion on a particularly difficult note, rather than stare at the note until a revelation occurred. In that case, GEMINI wrote a particularly well-versed conclusion that included all of the points we were missing. We made a few changes and used the GEMINI/SCMR-LLC version, which took less than 5 minutes against what would have likely been a 15 minute break and another 10 minutes of writing.
The next time we ran into a sticky phrasing issue, rather than get some fresh air and a better perspective, human nature took over, and we asked GEMINI to write the paragraph, which we used. After another similar situation we realized that it was becoming progressively easier to ‘allow’ GEMINI to ‘fill in the blanks’ rather than work toward doing it ourselves. At that point we stopped asking GEMINI to do our work and hammered out the issues ourselves once again.
Conclusion – Hack Through the Jungle
It is human nature to try to take the clear path rather than hack your way through a thick jungle, but just as social media algorithms take advantage of human nature orienting oneself to SEO, AI, and ‘digital thinking’ does the same. When it comes to repetitive tasks, there is nothing better than letting AI do it, but when it comes to anything creative, especially writing, taking the easy path leaves us without the creativity that makes use human, and gives us the ability to write “Alice in Wonderland” and other ‘human’ classics. We have become much more conscious of how to use what GEMINI suggests for SEO and how to avoid becoming dependent on saving time over creativity since we began the experiment.
[1] Crawl budget is the practical limit on how many URLs Googlebot can and wants to crawl on a given site within a certain time period, combining server capacity and demand for a site’s content.
We get innumerable e-mails from companies promising to help us get our notes on to Google’s (GOOG) first few search pages or mentioned in Search Summaries. Most (Some offer guarantees that automatically lead us to believe they are scams) offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization) software or services that either reformat your content to conform with certain SEO ‘Standards’ or make suggestions that the content producer makes to their content before posting. These products make or ask the provider to perform changes that make the content more attractive to bots, particularly Google Search bots that are responsible for building and maintaining Google’s massive site and content index on which the company’s algorithms rely when answering a query.
Our thought was to not only see how effective SEO was toward adding traffic but also to see how much of an influence it had on our content creation. As we post weekly notes to our site (www.scmr-llc.com) once each week, the experiment seemed a logical way to evaluate the effectiveness of SEO on site traffic and content, although the effects can take months to propagate.
Rather than sign up for one of the vast number of SEO fee-based services, we took a simpler approach, we asked Gemini to help us. Initially we wrote our content in the same way as has been the case for years and presented the finished (we thought) note to Gemini with the following prompt: “Here is a note on XYZ. Can you make suggestions in order to optimize it for both SEO and GEO?” at which point GEMINI generated a series of very specific suggestions and the rationale behind each.
Typically the first suggestion referenced the note title. Our titles tend to be simple and imagination capturing (In our opinion)
Examples:
- “Tracking Taylor” – Progress on Semiconductor fabs
- “Panel Price Perturbation” – Tariffs and July display panel pricing issues
- “Beam Me Up Scotty” – 3D Communication system
It seems that the Google bots want what they call “a high quality heading that provides a descriptive and helpful summary of the content.” Informal titling fails this test. Bottom line, the bots want it spelled out, without the creativity that humans might find colorful or distinctive. In fact, we asked what a proper SEO title might be for Lewis Carroll’s follow-up to “Alice in Wonderland” might be, resulting in the following suggestions (Both headings and bullet points were suggested by GEMINI for “Through the Looking Glass”:
Best All Around
- Through the Looking-Glass Analysis: Chess Symbolism and Themes by Lewis Carroll
- Through the Looking-Glass Summary & Review: Lewis Carroll's Sequel to Alice in Wonderland
- The Best Quotes from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll (Read the Full Text)
How Google’s Crawlers Allocate Crawl Budget
For each site that Google bots visit an algorithm decides which pages to fetch and how often to crawl specific pages (Hourly to not at all) based on metrics like update frequency, estimation of importance. They decide how deeply to dig into the site, and how much of the crawl budget[1]it is to use for the specific site and its contents. The decided on site data is then parsed and entered into the Google index.
How Query Intent Changes Rankings
When a query is issued, Google retrieves candidate data from the index and scores each using a large number of relevance and quality signals, and decides what types of additional data to supply (images, news, snippets, etc.) based on the query intent and content type. The page rank depends on the query itself, with the same page receiving a high rank for one query and a lower one for another. Our note titled “Panel Pricing Analysis & Forecast: November 2025”
- Query - Panel Pricing Analysis & Forecast: November 2025
- Our note with that specific title ranked #1 on Google Search
- Query - Panel Pricing Analysis & Forecast
- Still ranked first
- Query - Panel Pricing
- Here’s where things go awry. Since ‘panel’ pricing has lots of meanings (wall paneling, solar panels, electrical panels, etc.) our note fades into oblivion and “Home Depot – Wall Paneling” ranks first
Aside from technical considerations (spam violations, crawlability, odd site structure) Google Search says it looks for “people first content”, essentially content created primarily to help users rather than to game rankings, and discourages tactics like mass produced, low-value articles and content that is stuffed with keywords, yet every time we asked GEMINI to make SEO optimization suggestions, it suggested making sure keywords were prominent in each paragraph, especially in paragraph headers (sub-titles). Google has prioritized EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) as their search mantra, although Gemini almost always suggesting moving data out of paragraphs and into bulleted lists or tables to make it easier for the bots to read, regardless of their necessity.
How SEO Suggestions Affected Our Writing Style and Creativity
Initially we saw the suggested changes as quite bothersome. Aside from the obsession with titles and headers, the text changes that were suggested oversimplified details and eliminated nuance in favor of emphasizing adjectives that overstated the point. The example might be a suggestion to change “an unusual 7.3% drop in sales” to “a disastrous 7.3% drop in sales”, essentially adding market ‘zip’ that changed the tenor of the point.
The most salient change however, was stripping out ‘conversational text to make the content ‘more direct’. To us, this removed creativity and personality, something a digital entity like a bot or AI does not understand, and we consider that a strong reason to advocate for giving bots and Google Search algorithms the ability to understand how ranking content on its readability from a digital perspective lessens the creative nature of the content, which we believe lessens its value to humans.
One More
Over the few weeks we continued to use GEMINI on each note, we noticed another issue, a human one rather than a digital one. As GEMINI made phrasing and detail suggestions for SEO for each paragraph, after a few weeks we asked GEMINI to write a better conclusion on a particularly difficult note, rather than stare at the note until a revelation occurred. In that case, GEMINI wrote a particularly well-versed conclusion that included all of the points we were missing. We made a few changes and used the GEMINI/SCMR-LLC version, which took less than 5 minutes against what would have likely been a 15 minute break and another 10 minutes of writing.
The next time we ran into a sticky phrasing issue, rather than get some fresh air and a better perspective, human nature took over, and we asked GEMINI to write the paragraph, which we used. After another similar situation we realized that it was becoming progressively easier to ‘allow’ GEMINI to ‘fill in the blanks’ rather than work toward doing it ourselves. At that point we stopped asking GEMINI to do our work and hammered out the issues ourselves once again.
Conclusion – Hack Through the Jungle
It is human nature to try to take the clear path rather than hack your way through a thick jungle, but just as social media algorithms take advantage of human nature orienting oneself to SEO, AI, and ‘digital thinking’ does the same. When it comes to repetitive tasks, there is nothing better than letting AI do it, but when it comes to anything creative, especially writing, taking the easy path leaves us without the creativity that makes use human, and gives us the ability to write “Alice in Wonderland” and other ‘human’ classics. We have become much more conscious of how to use what GEMINI suggests for SEO and how to avoid becoming dependent on saving time over creativity since we began the experiment.
[1] Crawl budget is the practical limit on how many URLs Googlebot can and wants to crawl on a given site within a certain time period, combining server capacity and demand for a site’s content.
Postscript – Aside from SEO suggestions for this note, we were surprised to see GEMINI make the following comment:
“Google’s current guidance actually leaves quite a bit of room for what you’re trying to do: keep the human voice and creativity but remove unnecessary friction and ambiguity for both humans and bots. In other words, you don’t have to “write for bots”; you have to make the surface bot-legible while keeping the core human‑centric.”
“Google’s current guidance actually leaves quite a bit of room for what you’re trying to do: keep the human voice and creativity but remove unnecessary friction and ambiguity for both humans and bots. In other words, you don’t have to “write for bots”; you have to make the surface bot-legible while keeping the core human‑centric.”
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