Why you need to inject some personality into your content.

Posting bland corporate-speak blogs to your site will not get you found in the search results.

If you’re not offending somebody, you’re boring everybody.

I love that statement; it’s entirely true, so why do so many blogs read like they are written by someone who does not give a sh*t?

Are your blogs boring? Nothing sinks to the bottom of the SERPs quicker than a boring blog post, so get passionate people to write them.

To rank higher and with less off-page SEO, write your site’s content like you’re conversing about something you are passionate about.

Google knows the difference between bland corporate speak and the voice of an expert, so don’t write for the search; write for yourself and engage better with your visitors and search engine bots.

You’ve probably heard of Google’s EEAT guidelines.

EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) guidelines emphasise the importance of high-quality, reliable content demonstrating the author’s expertise and experience.

They also want you to build authority and trust with your audience.

These principles guide writers in producing content that meets users’ needs and aligns with Google’s standards for ranking well in search results.

These guidelines are important to consider when writing content for your blog and one of the main reasons you should not use AI to generate bland content for your site.

When publishing anything on your site, and before you even think about improving your on-page SEO, you need to inject some personality into the content so it’s more obviously written by someone with an opinion rather than a ghostwriter, cheap freelancer, or computer.

You should never publish for the sake of publishing.

If you are throwing anonymous content onto your site to grow its size or because you’ve read that’s what to do: stop.

Search engines want genuine content written by people with expertise in the subject area they are writing about.

You cannot simply hire someone else to create content for your site if they lack the required experience and expertise.

This sort of content is bland and devoid of personality, and the search engine algorithms pick it up and rank it accordingly.

Your content needs to be obviously written by someone with a passion for the subject.

There’s a delicate nuance between generic text and well-written copy.

This is often misunderstood by people who are not copywriters, as copywriters understand these nuances and add elements to their content that others do not.

These differences can help your content rank highly without backlinks, social shares, or other off-page SEO.

Producing content for your website should be treated as the most critical thing you can do, not just something you have to do.

You need to pour some of yourself into the content you write for your site; approach it as you would if you were composing an emotional and personal song or a poem for a loved one.

Consider this example – what most people do when they send someone a birthday card.

The first type of person buys the card with the message inside and adds:

• To Dave
• [generic card message]
• From Name

The other type of person buys a birthday card that’s blank on the inside and writes their own message instead:

• To Dave
• Happy Birthday, Dude. Welcome to the 50 Club—don’t worry—it’s not that bad! I hope you have a great day!
• From Name

Person one has let the pre-printed message do the talking – nothing wrong with this, but it’s pretty generic.

Person two takes the time to write a personal message, hooks into something the recipient might be feeling and connects on an entirely different level.

That’s how you want to be writing content for your blog: going the extra mile and aiming to connect on a deeper level.

Bland, generic content is BORING. If the content on your site is boring, visitors will assume the people behind the content are boring, and eventually, the whole brand will be boring and be avoided (bounces back to the search results).

Make sure your team is free to share their opinions on your website.

Business relationships are between people, not brands, so if you have rules for your website content where writers have to follow some form of company-approved tone of voice and set of rules, throw them all away.

It does not matter which industry you work in; incorporating personality into your content is one of the most important things you can do on your site.

Sure, if you are in certain niches, such as YMYL content, you might need to tread more carefully, there is no one alive (and that might even include the search engine algorithms) that gets fired-up reading boring waffle.

Be in the room.

Write on your blog like you’d talk to friends in the pub about something you’re passionate about.

Your written content does not have you there to show how animated you are about the subject.

Copy does not deliver the physical cues you can deliver when talking in person, so you have to work hard to convey these in words rather than actions.

Humans are pre-programmed to read physical cues when interacting with people. However, your website does not have this ability when using text alone, so you have to give the reader the impression that you sat down and wrote this stuff with purpose and personality.

Imagine you are trying to make the reader understand what it might be like to meet you in person when you are writing – will you be passionate, animated, engaging, or dull?

Your readers will decide about you before they even meet you, and, in the context of this article, so will the search engines.

You cannot accomplish personality by simply adding an author box at the bottom of the article.

Adding an author box with a short bio and a link to the person’s LinkedIn profile is generally advised for on-page SEO, but adding this to dull content emphasises that the author is dull.

Google pays some attention to authorship, but it won’t go much further than an assessment of the on-page author bio—it’s not going to Linked In to discover how interesting (or not) the author may be.

So you’ve got to weave personality into the copy, and do this from the start—don’t publish bland content with a view to improving it later.

Tell the brand police to back off.

Another issue that bigger brands face is that their writers have to follow corporate guidelines, which makes everything sound the same and equally boring.

You can’t write that, Dave; it’s off-brand, and marketing won’t approve it.

The bigger a brand, the more terrified it is of saying the wrong thing or offending one customer due to the online cancel culture we now endure.

I am not saying you should be offensive or shocking just to try to stand out—that’s a lazy approach to branding that only a handful of brands manage to do well, and it’s high-risk.

You have to let your brand breathe if you want your content to rank, and this means you need to get writers passionate about writing content for your website.

Don’t edit to death.

It’s alarmingly easy to kill great copy by overediting someone else’s hard work.

The point here is that you want different voices, tones and opinions on your website because it makes your content more trustworthy and shows a wide range of experiences – if it’s all edited down to the company tone, it’s going to sound like it’s all written by the same person – another no-no for effective SEO.

It’s not just a job; it’s an art.

Many staff writers are just people writing copy for companies that pay the wages – I virtually guarantee you won’t find an employed writer who writes about the same content inside and outside of work.

They write the on-brand content for their pay, and they write the passionate content for themselves.

You need to get them to write passionate content for your brand, and this means letting them get creative, injecting something of themselves into the content, and taking a few risks.

Copywriting is one of the most underrated skills needed for a successful website; the problem is that everyone and their dog thinks they can do it – they can’t, so find people that can write passionately for your website and let them loose.

Is there any science behind all this?

This is an opinion, so I’ve not researched anything to back up what I am saying here – if you need the science before you can write creatively, you are probably missing the point I am making here:

We are in a new world where over 7.5 million pieces of content being published daily, partly thanks to AI.

If you want to cut through the noise, what do you do?

Well, you can try techniques such as skyscraper posts, where you find an article with ‘The 20 best tips for X’ and write an article with ‘The 30 best tips for X’, which is likely to be just as boring but longer.

You can try apeing successful content, but that’s downright plagiarism.

Or, you can try writing something unique, original, and opinionated that demonstrates your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and ability to build trust.

So what next?

Don’t bother rewriting your boring content, but put a simple plan in place for no more boring content.

The next article you publish needs to be written by someone who is passionate about the subject. If you don’t have this in-house, find someone who is and pay them to write it as an author on your site.

Don’t use AI and don’t use twenty-bucks-an-article ghostwriters from Fiverr.

Personally, I have never really understood why people find it so difficult to get some fire in their writing – maybe its because it’s just their job and their passions are elsewhere, maybe they think the brand police will not tolerate it, or maybe they just don’t know how.

But, if you want your website to rank in the new world of AI, you are going to need content that meets the EEAT guidelines and exceeds them, and that means you are going to need to either find or allow someone to write the content your site needs.