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Last month a client on Lygon Street sent me a blog post drafted by a previous agency. Nine hundred words, and the phrase commercial cleaning services Melbourne appeared seventeen times. Not once did it explain what actually happens during a first clean, how long it takes, or what to do if you’re not happy with it. That’s the opposite of people-first content, and it’s still shockingly common in 2024.
Google’s own John Mueller has said for years that writing for search engines instead of readers eventually shows up in your metrics, whatever your keyword density looks like on paper. People bounce. They don’t scroll. They don’t come back. And Google notices all of that whether or not you noticed it first.
What people-first content actually means
It doesn’t mean ignoring keywords. That’s the myth I want to knock on the head early, because I’ve had clients swing too far the other way and strip every ounce of SEO structure out of a page because someone told them Google hates optimisation now. Google doesn’t hate optimisation. It hates content that was clearly written for a crawler and only incidentally for a human.
People-first content means you start with the question a real person is typing into Google, you answer it properly, and the keyword sits naturally inside that answer because it was always going to be there anyway. If someone searches best physio for a torn calf Melbourne, they want to know if they should ice it, how long recovery takes, and whether they need a referral. The keyword is a side effect of answering well, not the goal you’re writing towards.
The content gap test I run before writing a word
Before I write anything for a client, I do what I call a gap read. I put the target keyword into Google, open the top five results, and read them properly, not skim them. I’m looking for what all five have in common and, more usefully, what none of them cover.
Usually there’s a gap. Maybe every result explains what a service involves but nobody mentions pricing ranges. Maybe nobody addresses the objection that’s actually stopping someone from booking. For a dental client we worked with, every competitor page explained what a root canal was, but none of them addressed the fear question directly: does it actually hurt anymore. We wrote a section answering that head-on and it became the highest time-on-page section on the whole site within six weeks.
That gap is where you win. Not by writing something technically superior about the same three points everyone else made. If you want a longer look at how we structure that kind of research before drafting, our guide to creating a well referenced blog walks through the process in more detail.
Before and after, real phrasing swaps
This is the bit people find most useful, so I’ll be specific rather than theoretical.
Before: Our team provides comprehensive plumbing solutions across the greater Melbourne area for all your residential and commercial needs.
After: If your hot water system dies on a Sunday in Brunswick, we can usually get someone out same day. We cover residential and small commercial jobs across the inner north.
Before: We leverage industry-leading strategies to deliver exceptional results for our clients.
After: We check rankings weekly and send a plain-English report every month, so you always know what changed and why.
Before: Choosing the right accountant is an important decision that can impact your financial future.
After: Most clients switch accountants because their last one only called them in June. We check in quarterly, not once a year.
Notice the pattern. The after versions are shorter, more specific, and they contain a detail a competitor’s copywriter couldn’t have guessed without actually knowing the business. That’s the tell of people-first writing. It couldn’t have been written about literally any business in the category.
Where keyword stuffing still turns up
Nobody stuffs the visible body copy anymore, mostly. Where I still see it: alt text, meta descriptions, and headings that read like they were built for a bot. I’ve seen H2s that literally say Best SEO Company Melbourne Melbourne SEO Services Digital Marketing Melbourne, stacked as one heading. It reads like nonsense to a person and, in my experience, it doesn’t help rankings the way people think it does either.
The on-site SEO dos and don’ts we’ve written about before cover this in more depth, but the short version is: one clear keyword per heading, phrased the way a person would actually say it out loud.
The EEAT obsession is a bit overhyped
I’ll say something a lot of agencies won’t. Everyone’s talking about EEAT (experience, expertise, authority, trust) like it’s a checklist you tick and rankings appear. Adding an author bio box and a credentials paragraph is not going to fix a page that doesn’t actually answer the question well. I’ve seen sites add elaborate author schema and About pages and see zero ranking movement because the actual content underneath was still generic.
EEAT signals matter as supporting evidence for content that’s already good. They’re not a substitute for it. If your blog post about tax deductions for tradies doesn’t mention the actual ATO thresholds relevant this financial year, no amount of author credentialing fixes that. Search Engine Land and Google’s own helpful content documentation both make roughly the same point, just with more corporate phrasing.
Structure still matters, and this is the one bit that’s not negotiable
Writing for people doesn’t mean abandoning scannable structure. Most people reading a service page on their phone at a red light are not reading every word. They’re scanning headings, bolded points, and the first line of each paragraph to decide if this business is worth calling. Our homepage optimisation tips cover this from a conversion angle, but it applies to blog content too. Short paragraphs. Headings that tell you what’s coming, not clever ones that require reading the paragraph to understand.
One thing to action today
Open your best-performing service page right now. Find the first sentence under the main heading. If it could be copy-pasted onto a competitor’s site in another suburb without anyone noticing, rewrite it with one detail that’s actually true only of your business: a suburb you specifically service, a timeframe you actually offer, a specific thing you do differently. That single sentence swap, done properly, usually lifts time-on-page more than a week of technical tinkering. I’ve watched it happen on client after client, most recently with a Brunswick-based trades client whose enquiry rate on that page nearly doubled within a month of the rewrite.
If you want a second opinion on whether your on-page content is actually doing its job or just filling space, that’s the kind of audit we run as part of our SEO packages, and it’s worth checking against what local competitors like the businesses we’ve worked with in Brunswick are actually doing on their own pages.
Write for the person standing in front of the page, not the crawler behind it. The ranking tends to follow the reader, not the other way around.
— Sarah, Content & On-Page Lead at SEO Empire
Written by SEO Empire
