Stop Optimizing SEO for Robots. Start Designing for Humans.
Every search query is a person trying to finish something. Your website’s job is to help them do it.
SEO has been taught as a matching exercise. Find the phrase. Build the page. Wait for the ranking. “Pet Shop London.” “Dog food near me.” Rinse and repeat.
Honestly though, keywords are exhaust fumes. They’re what gets left behind when a real person, with a real problem, fires up a search engine.
Underneath every query is an activity. A goal someone is trying to reach before their dog starts staring at them. And probably a pain point.
When we optimize for the keyword, we’re optimizing for the symptom. When we optimize for the activity - and for the constraints blocking its completion - we build something that actually helps people. And helping people, it turns out, is excellent SEO.
The missing piece: constraints
People don’t just have activities. They have constrained activities. Time, distance, availability, trust, expertise, convenience. Each one is a content opportunity - not a keyword opportunity, a human opportunity.
When someone searches “pet shop open now,” they’re not interested in pet shops. They’re expressing urgency. That’s the constraint you’re solving.
Map your site around those constraints and something useful happens: the information architecture starts to make sense on its own. Instead of three keyword-stuffed pages chasing the same intent and providing no real value, you get one page per problem, one solution per moment.
That’s not SEO. That’s design.
The resilience argument
Search engines are now answer engines. Add AI summaries, voice assistants, and zero-click results - and a strategy built entirely around “rank for this phrase and get the click” is built on sand.
What survives is a structured digital presence built around real human behavior. Content that answers questions before they’re fully asked. A Google Business or Bing Places profile that does the work before anyone visits your site. Pages that make a person feel like they’ve arrived in the right place.
Don Norman wrote that systems fail when they’re designed around features rather than activities. Most websites are full of features. Very few are designed around activities.
That’s the gap. And it’s also the opportunity.
A practical starting point
You don’t need to rebuild everything. Start here:
- Audit your hygiene content - hours, address, parking info. Unglamorous. Foundational.
- Find the unmet question. What do customers always ask when they walk in? That question is a page that doesn’t exist yet on your site.
- Own your soil. Put your expertise content on your own site first. Social is amplification. Your site is the ground.
Good SEO isn’t about gaming a system. It’s about being the most useful neighbor in the digital village.
Build for humans first. The machines will follow.
Warren Laine-Naida is a digital consultant based in Germany. Full article and further reading at warrenlainenaida.net
