A woman in her 30s opens a Knee Replacement Surgery page ranking number 5 on the first page. She needs to know how long it might take for her to climb the steep stairs in her condo.
The next morning, a GP in Dubai opens the same page, “Where do I send her”, he mutters. The page talks about the surgeon, how many surgeries the unit does each year. He leans closely to see whether the numbers are stated outright, he also sees where they dodge those numbers.
The page is written for a reader that does not have a knee, and will never need a knee. The reader it is written for is the Search Engine.
SEO is what I did before I started writing for hospitals. SEO is what brought both those readers to the page. Findability is the real work.
The problem starts when the third reader is all that the page serves.
“Comprehensive orthopaedic solutions using state-of-the-art technology.”
The woman cannot see her stairs in that. The GP cannot find his numbers. They both leave, and the engine watches them leave, and a page nobody stays on slowly stops ranking anyway. Even the third reader ends up unserved.
The patient should be first. Then for the professional. The engine reads last, and it was always meant to read last, because it is the only one of the three that follows people instead of leading them.
A writer’s job is holding that order in rooms where every question is about the third reader.