Is Writing Doomed to Die Under the Weight of SEO?

If you, like me, receive the “This Week in Writing” newsletter, then you will have read Justin’s theory about root-bound writers. Also like me, you would have received it more than two years ago, on February 21st of 2023.

In the newsletter, he discusses a type of writing characterized by short sentences and broken-up paragraphs. I think one could go even farther and say the overuse of images, line breaks, emojis as punctuation or emphasis, lists, and quotes that only serve to create a sense of length without adding substance to the thing being written.

As Justin says, “This is a terrible, uninteresting form of writing.” He’s 100% right. Both two years ago as he is today, where the problem has only grown, especially as AI (in its infancy when this newsletter was first written) copies that style.

However, in many ways, I think it’s an inevitable form of writing that’s been maturing for years. I don’t think we, as writers, are just root-bound (by what we find to be the most palatable form of articles) but we are SEO-bound — we do what ever we can to be found on search engines.

A few years ago I sat down to make a website dedicated to traveling in Italy. Guides, tips, advice, how-to, all the good stuff, all about Italy. And let me tell you, I hit publish, and the website sank without a trace into the murky depths of Google.

This didn’t stop me, though. I kept writing to it, kept publishing new articles, kept adding.

And nothing.

Finally, after a few years of shouting into the void, I decided to get serious about it. Early this year, 2025, I went back through the articles and started to “SEO-ize” them. I didn’t re-write anything, I just tried to figure out what questions these articles could answer and go from there.

I went from something like 9 visits per month to 200 a month later.

And this is when I was reminded of the newsletter from two years previously. I was really just writing for myself. The titles were informative but not particularly grabbing.