What SEO Week taught me about writing for real people and the machines that rank them

Insights from SEO Week 2025 on how emotional intent, cultural relevance, and AI are changing the rules of content.

May 30, 2025 · Last updated on June 11, 2025

hiiimeg

SEO isn’t merely about search engines anymore. Emotional intent matters more than ever as AI reshapes how people find and interact with content. Understanding how people, think, feel, and behave online (and creating content that meets them there) is more important than ever.

That shift became crystal clear for me during SEO Week 2025 (hosted by iPullRank). Between the animated walls filled with projections that moved with the theme of each presentation, the playful energy between the speakers and hosts, and in-between-session meditation breaks, Day 2 of SEO Week (themed “The Psychology”) felt less like a conference and more like a full-sensory brain spa for content nerds.

But, most importantly, it was an exploration of the messy, brilliant, deeply human reasons behind search behavior (not just keyword density or schema markup). And as a freelance SEO writer with a background in mental health, focusing on the human element of search spoke to me.

Here's what I'm still unpacking days later and what I want to share with the Fiverr community.

Rethink What You Measure

A special kind of spiral happens at 2 a.m. when you're staring at your traffic dashboard and see that pageviews climbed (yay!). Then dipped (oh no…). Then tanked (cue internal screams of panic).

Thankfully, Bianca Anderson, Organic Growth Manager at hims & hers, gave that experience a name (and a way out). In her space-themed presentation that had the whole room laughing, she said what many of us needed to hear: traffic is a vanity metric if it doesn't lead to something real.

Her "Heavy Hitter" model reframed what counts as SEO success. She defined a Heavy Hitter as "the top-performing 10-20% of any given content library, identified through a formula that evaluates both traffic and conversions, with a much larger emphasis on conversions."

Here's the formula, step by step:

Normalize and scale each URL's traffic and conversion data equally. Formula: (Traffic of URL / Max Traffic) * 100. Follow the same for submits.

Use a scoring system that factors in normalized data but gives extra weight to conversions since they carry more significance. Formula: (Normalized Traffic * 0.3) + (Normalized Submits * 0.7).

Determine the percentiles of your weighted scores. Higher percentiles equal greater business impact.

Group URLs into tiers, then identify the top 10–20% as the Heavy Hitters in your content library. Tier 0 is your Heavy Hitters (80th-100th percentile; top 20%), Tier 1 is your strong performers (60th-80th percentile; next 20%), Tier 2 is mid-level performers (30th-60th percentile; middle 30%), and Tier 3 is the low performers (0-30th percentile; bottom 30%).

When you generate what Anderson calls a "Heavy Hitter Report," you can understand how your most important pages are doing and recognize patterns across the URLs you analyzed and broader site trends. Plus, she says the report enables you to answer confidently when your client asks, "how bad is it?"

Accept that Authenticity Is Not Optional

Later in the day, Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive came on the stage like a bullhorn of energy (the kind that makes you put your dang phone down, sit up, listen, and mutter "damn" under your breath). "You can't tell me you're authentic, I'm looking for your authenticity," he said, and the room collectively tightened.

Because here's the uncomfortable truth: many of us are experts at "faking the funk" (a Wil Reynolds term I will happily use from now on). We tend to write to the algorithm. We squeeze soul out of sentences in favor of keywords. And we tell ourselves that's just what a good strategy looks like. And Wil called B.S. on that.

He reminded us that audiences don't want polish. They want presence. They want truth. And they want some dang answers that will actually help them. "Authentic people connecting with authentic people is where I want to win," he said. And honestly? Same. Can we give ourselves permission to stop contorting lackadaisical writing into what we think will rank and start trusting that honest, real writing can win too? Humans are the ones doing the search, after all, so why aren't we putting more emphasis on connecting with them, human-to- human? Just a little something to think about when you write your next blog post.

During his talk, he shared this resource that covers everything he spoke about, plus bonus insights, tools, and people to follow if you're trying to level up your SEO and AI knowledge.

Use Off-Site Signals to Drive On-Point Strategy

When it comes to back-link strategy, Carrie Rose, CEO & Founder of Rise at Seven, had a sharp yet straightforward message: if you want to show up wherever people search, you need people talking about your brand off your site.

Instead of shoving brand messages down people's throats, Rose demonstrated how she aligns content with what people were already interested in. Imagine that. She laid out how media placements, PR, cultural alignment, and even UGC help train people and machines to associate your brand with the right categories.

Her "category signals" framework reframed backlinking as a game of cultural relevance. You've got to show up where the conversation is already happening. Access her framework and slides if you want to dig in.

Be Human-Relevant and Machine-Readable

If there's one hard-to-admit but true theme from SEO Week that's still echoing in my very human-centered, emotionally driven brain, it's this: we're not just writing for humans anymore.

We're also writing for the robots that filter what humans see. ChatGPT. Perplexity. Gemini. Claude. We know these tools are reshaping how information is found and delivered. And they're hungry for structured, credible, citation-worthy content.

So, we now need to ask more than "How do I rank on Google?" A better question might be, "How do I become a credible source for the machines shaping answers to human questions?"

Our job is now twofold:

Be emotionally resonant for real people

Be semantically clear for the machines that gatekeep access to those people

We need to build trust, structure facts, and reduce the gap between our content and what the AI thinks it knows. Say something worth remembering, then make it easy for people and machines to remember it.

Lean Into the Human Side of Search Psychology

Day 2 of SEO Week 2025 was a masterclass in emotional intent. People don't search because they're bored. They search because they're uncertain. Curious. Anxious. Looking for proof they're not alone, or at least not totally screwing something up.

Ross Hudgens, CEO of Siege Media, touched on this when discussing emotional resonance. Talia Wolf, founder of Getuplift, reminded us that logic drives decisions, but emotion starts the engine. People don't click because your H1 was well-optimized. They click because they feel something.

It's easy to default to content templates and traffic goals. But the best content (the kind that earns trust, loyalty, and conversions) leads with empathy. That means asking: What's my audience feeling when they land on this page? And how can I meet them there?

Here’s What to Do Next

As freelance SEO writers, we need to start thinking bigger than rankings and broader than page views. Here’s what I’m doing differently post-SEO Week:

I’m focusing less on traffic spikes and more on meaningful engagement (and using Anderson’s formula to measure this performance).

I’m helping clients redefine success and exploring how they can show up in places that actually drive influence (cue Carrie Rose’s insights about backlinking for cultural relevance).

I’m checking in with myself every time I write, asking myself, "Am I chasing visibility or creating real value?"

And I’m validating what I’ve always thought: Write like a human for humans, with just enough structure and authority to keep the machines happy.

And here’s what I hope others take away:

For clients: Work with freelancers who challenge you to think beyond traffic volume and rankings. Ask them to help you build genuine connection with your audience and measure what counts.

For freelancers: Use your lived experience to connect and understand your audience’s emotional drivers. Be authentic and be choosy about the data you’re using to determine the success of your content. Lean into search intent and put your strategy brain to work.

Final thoughts

SEO Week 2025 reminded me that great content lives in the quiet space between a question and a need. Between a person and their search. We write for curiosity. For confusion. For late-night spirals, and for early-morning clarity.

And when we're up against machines that feel like they're taking over every aspect of our lives, our edge is something they can't replicate: our human ability to understand why people search and how to meet them with something genuine.

So, write something genuine, credible, and well-structured, and the machines will be more likely to cite it. And that’s a win-win, don’t you think?

This article was written by Megan M., a seasoned freelance writer and editor. Explore her portfolio and services on Fiverr here.

Comments (11)

Popular