Content today is written for machines, not for humans.
There is no bigger turnoff than coming across waves and waves of listicles and "alternatives to" articles that provide no real insight, beyond dumping a bunch of links, adding 1,000 words of nothing, titling it "Ultimate Beginner's Guide to X in 2020" and calling it a day.
Sometimes, to find "actual person" content, I'll add "reddit" to the end of my search query, but that won't be enough, as some enterprising content marketer has decided that they need to rank for those searches too, and created posts like "What reddit thinks about X".
SEO is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is that businesses create this kind of low-quality "linkbait" as "inbound marketing", which is getting eyeballs on a page (by whatever means necessary) and upselling their own services. That's why the content feels so soulless.
There is no bigger turnoff than coming across waves and waves of listicles and "alternatives to" articles that provide no real insight, beyond dumping a bunch of links, adding 1,000 words of nothing, titling it "Ultimate Beginner's Guide to X in 2020" and calling it a day.
Sometimes, to find "actual person" content, I'll add "reddit" to the end of my search query, but that won't be enough, as some enterprising content marketer has decided that they need to rank for those searches too, and created posts like "What reddit thinks about X".
SEO is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is that businesses create this kind of low-quality "linkbait" as "inbound marketing", which is getting eyeballs on a page (by whatever means necessary) and upselling their own services. That's why the content feels so soulless.