The new rules of web copy and writing for the third audience

Lia Bartley

In today’s digital landscape, writing web copy isn’t just about crafting words that sound good. It’s about ensuring that your content is understood by three key audiences: search engines, artificial intelligence, or “AI”, and humans.

These three audiences have different needs, which makes writing web copy a balancing act. However, by structuring your content carefully, you can cater to all three and increase your chances of online visibility.

Writing for search engines

Search engines, like Google, are the gatekeepers of online visibility. In the past, businesses would focus heavily on using the right keywords to attract search engine traffic. While keywords still matter, search engines now take a more sophisticated approach. They look beyond individual keywords and assess the context and intent behind a user’s search query.

For example, if someone searches for “how to improve website conversions,” a search engine doesn’t just look for that exact phrase. It will also scan for content that addresses related topics like user experience (UX) design, load speed or even call-to-action buttons.

To cater to search engines, your content should be structured well, with logical headings and clear sections that show how ideas connect. The goal is to help search engines easily understand what your content is about, so it can rank your page for relevant queries.

Writing for humans

While search engines and AI need content to be structured in specific ways, humans care about readability, engagement and relevance. Good web copy should offer value to the reader, answering their questions clearly and effectively. It should be engaging and easy to follow, offering insights or solutions that directly speak to the reader’s needs.

When writing for humans, your focus should be on clarity, compelling stories and strong calls to action. A reader who feels like they’re receiving clear, relevant and helpful information is more likely to take the desired action – whether that’s making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter or getting in touch with your business.

Writing for AI and answer engines

The rise of AI and answer engines like voice search and chatbots has added a new dimension to content creation. These systems don’t just pull results from pages; they summarise and synthesise information to present the best possible answers. This means that your content must be easily understandable by AI to ensure it gets featured in voice search results, snippets or AI summaries.

AI systems rely on semantic clarity to interpret your content. This means that the meaning of each sentence and paragraph needs to be clear and unambiguous. Using structured data, like schema markup, can help machines better understand your content.

Schema markup is a type of structured data that helps search engines understand the content of your web pages more effectively. By adding specific tags to your HTML, schema markup provides context to search engines, making it easier for them to interpret and categorise your content.

For example, if you have a recipe on your website, schema markup can help search engines identify the ingredients, cooking time and nutritional information. This additional information allows search engines to display rich snippets (such as star ratings, cooking time and ingredients) directly in the search results, which can improve your visibility and click-through rates.

The goal of using structured data like this is for your content to be easily extracted and presented as concise answers to user queries.

Balancing all three

The key to succeeding in this new content landscape is balancing the needs of all three audiences. By focusing on clear, structured and concept-led content, businesses can ensure their web copy performs well for search engines, engages humans and is easily understood by AI systems.

At Engage Web, we specialise in optimising content for all three audiences. If you’re looking to boost your online visibility and ensure your content is working across all channels, get in touch today.

About
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Lia Bartley

Content Editor at Engage Web

With years of experience in the financial sector, Lia has swapped the world of mis-sold PPI in exchange for life as an eagle-eyed editor at Engage Web, ensuring our wonderful clients have equally wonderful content on their websites.