They say numbers don’t lie. I would like to rephrase it as “Numbers don’t lie, but sometimes they can be deceitful.”
In 2024, I published three articles on Hackernoon. Today, I was going through my profile to see how the content performed. Here is what I noticed- the content that got me the kind of result I wanted was not the one with the highest number of views.
My article on “AI writing revolution” got just 1.5K views, which is definitely not something great, but it got people to subscribe to my newsletter. I tried to figure out what I did differently, and what I found out was that I was more human while writing the content. I can’t remember doing any SEO gimmick for that article. I was just writing about what I had an interest in.
For other articles, I was more focused on the accuracy of my facts, educating my audience and ensuring search optimization. I guess that made me a little robotic, and my content didn’t really resonate with the audience, although it got more views.
Every writer wants to boast of how their work ranks on the first page of Google. Clients love it, and it looks nice having such results in our portfolio; I brag about my content that ranks, but the truth is, if you want to help your clients get the result they want, it goes beyond getting that number one spot on Google search. Find the balance between writing optimised content and being human.
SEO helps you reach your audience but when your audience can connect with what you are writing about, then you have truly won.
