Two Readers, One Page
SEO copywriting used to mean writing for a search engine and a human at the same time. There's a third reader now, and it wants something the other two don't.
Google's crawler wants to understand what a page is about. A person wants to be persuaded. An AI extractor wants a single block of text it can lift out, attribute, and present as an answer without any of the surrounding page.
That third requirement changes how you build a paragraph. Not how you build a sentence, not the tone, not the structure of the argument. The paragraph.
Here's the test. Take any paragraph on your page, delete everything around it, and read it cold. Does it still say something true and useful? If not, it won't get cited, no matter how good the article is.
Most business writing fails that test, because most business writing builds toward its point.
The Shape That Gets Extracted
Three rules cover most of it.
The sentence after the heading is the answer. The heading asks, the next sentence answers. Elaboration comes after. Someone reading only your H2 and the line beneath it should have what they came for.
Forty to sixty words. That's roughly the block length Google lifts into an AI Overview or a featured snippet. Much shorter and there isn't enough substance; much longer and it gets cut somewhere clumsy.
Stop hedging. Compare these:
There are a number of factors that can influence how long SEO takes to produce results, and outcomes vary considerably depending on your market and competition.
SEO typically takes three to six months to produce measurable ranking change for a Melbourne service business, longer in competitive categories like legal and cosmetic.
The first is defensible and useless. The second commits to something, which is the only way a passage becomes quotable. Hedged writing feels safer to publish and it's invisible to every one of your three readers.
Format Follows the Question
Google presents answers differently depending on what's being asked, and matching the shape measurably improves your odds.
"How do I" questions produce ordered lists. Write numbered steps, one action each.
"What is" questions produce paragraphs. Open with "[Term] is…" and nothing before it.
"X versus Y" questions produce tables. Build the table.
"How much" questions produce ranges with conditions. Give real numbers and say what moves them.
We've seen pages pick up citations after nothing more than converting a prose section into numbered steps, because the query was procedural and the content wasn't. It's a thirty-minute edit on existing work.
Keywords, Honestly
The keyword rules that still matter are fewer than most guides suggest.
Primary keyword in the title tag, the H1, somewhere in the first hundred words, and in two or three H2s. Roughly 2% density across the body, arrived at naturally rather than counted.
What doesn't matter any more: exact-match repetition, keyword density calculators, stuffing the alt text, bolding the keyword, writing "SEO services Melbourne" where "we" would read better. Google's handled synonyms and related entities for years.
What does matter and gets missed: covering the related concepts a thorough answer would include. An article about Google Ads costs that never mentions cost per lead, conversion rate or quality score is thin regardless of how often it says "Google Ads costs". Breadth of relevant entities beats repetition of one phrase, for conventional ranking and for AI citation both.
Front-Load Everything
The first screen is the most valuable space on the page and most business writing wastes it on throat-clearing.
"In the fast-moving world of digital marketing, businesses face increasing challenges when it comes to…" — delete. Every time. The reader knows what world they're in.
Open with the answer, the verdict, or the most interesting specific thing you know. Then earn the rest. A comparison article should state which one to choose in the first two sentences, then spend 1,500 words justifying it. A how-to should give the short version before the steps.
This is also what reduces bounce. Someone who gets value in the first eight seconds reads on. Someone who hits a preamble leaves, and Google notices.
The Part That Can't Be Faked
Here's the problem with everything above: it's mechanical, and anyone can apply it, including a language model.
Which means structure alone now gets you parity, not advantage. The differentiator is whether the page contains something that couldn't have been generated.
Four kinds of material qualify:
Your own numbers. Not industry averages. What a lead costs you, what your close rate is, what happened when you changed something.
A specific client situation. Named where you can, described where you can't. "A Perth flooring business we built a site for got two leads worth $10,000 combined in its first week" beats any amount of general claim-making.
A position someone could disagree with. "Most small businesses should publish less content and fix their service pages first" is a claim. "Content marketing is important" isn't.
The unflattering thing. Where your service doesn't help. Where a competitor's approach is reasonable. Where results take longer than the reader hopes. Every competing article is uniformly positive and readers discount all of it accordingly.
Our rough rule: at least 30% of an article should contain material no general-purpose model could produce. Below that you're writing something that already exists.
Internal Links, Used Properly
Three to five internal links per thousand words, with anchor text that describes the destination.
Not "click here". Not "read more". The anchor is a signal about what the linked page covers, so waste it and you've wasted the link.
Two patterns worth being deliberate about. Link from your informational articles to the service page that matches the intent — an article about Melbourne ad costs should link to the Google Ads page. And link related articles to each other around a hub, so the cluster reads as a body of work rather than scattered posts.
We got this wrong on our own site for a month. Five articles in our AI search cluster didn't link back to the hub piece. Nothing broke visibly. The cluster just didn't compound the way it should have.
What We'd Cut From Most Pages
Section summaries that restate what you just read. The reader was there.
The conclusion that begins "In conclusion". Stop when you've finished.
Rule-of-three groupings everywhere — three benefits, three reasons, three steps. Real analysis rarely lands on three. Use two or four and the writing immediately sounds less generated.
Synonym cycling. If the word is "page", say "page" four times. Rotating through "page", "asset", "resource", "piece of content" reads like someone avoiding repetition rather than someone with something to say.
For the surrounding strategy, our content marketing page covers how we approach it, and what AI SEO actually is covers where the extraction work sits in the wider picture.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SEO copywriting?
SEO copywriting is writing that satisfies three readers at once: Google's crawler, which needs to understand the topic; a person, who needs to be persuaded; and an AI extractor, which needs a self-contained passage it can lift and attribute. The third reader is the newer constraint and it mostly changes how you build paragraphs.
How long should an SEO article be?
Match the depth of what currently ranks rather than targeting a number. If the top results run 1,200 words, a 3,000-word article usually means padding. If they run 2,500 and cover eight subtopics, a 900-word piece won't compete. Length follows intent and competition — never a word-count target.
What keyword density should I aim for?
Around 2% of the body, arrived at naturally rather than counted. More useful than density is coverage: an article should include the related concepts a thorough answer would contain. A piece about ad costs that never mentions cost per lead or conversion rate is thin regardless of how often the main phrase appears.
How do I write content that gets cited by AI?
Put a direct answer in the first sentence under each heading, keep it to 40 to 60 words, and remove hedging language. Then test it: delete everything around that paragraph and read it cold. If it still says something true and useful on its own, it can be extracted. If it depends on the preceding four paragraphs, it can't.
Should I write for humans or search engines?
The question is outdated, because the same things now serve both. Clear structure, direct answers and genuine substance satisfy readers and extractors alike. What's changed is that structure alone no longer differentiates you, since anyone can apply it. The material that can't be generated. Your numbers, your clients, your positions, is what separates pages now.
How many internal links should an article have?
Three to five per thousand words, with descriptive anchor text. The anchor is a signal about the destination page's topic, so "click here" wastes it. Link informational articles to the service page matching their intent, and link related articles to each other around a hub so the cluster compounds rather than sitting as scattered posts.
What makes content rank in AI Overviews specifically?
The page needs to already rank reasonably, since AI Overviews draws mostly from the top 10 to 20 results. Beyond that, it needs an extractable passage of the right length and a format matching the query type, ordered lists for "how" questions, paragraphs for "what is", tables for comparisons, ranges with conditions for cost questions.
How do I avoid content that sounds AI-generated?
Cut rule-of-three groupings, stop cycling synonyms for the same thing, delete section summaries and anything beginning "in conclusion", and vary sentence length deliberately. Then add what a model can't: your own figures, specific client situations, a position someone could argue with, and at least one thing that doesn't flatter your own service.
How often should I publish SEO content?
Consistency matters more than frequency. One well-researched article a month, properly linked into your existing content, outperforms a burst of twelve that nobody updates. For most Australian small businesses the honest answer is that fixing existing service pages returns more than publishing new articles, at least for the first few months.
Does AI-written content hurt SEO?
Google's position is that it judges content quality, not how it was produced. In practice, the problem with AI-written content is that it tends to be generic, the same structure and claims as everything else on the topic, with nothing specific in it. That's what underperforms, and it would underperform written by hand too.