What is an Article Actually Supposed to Do?

An article’s goal is not to supply information only. The reader comes to the article for a reason. Otherwise, who has time to read words in this time and age? That’s why each article you write should help the reader do one of these: a) do something, b) understand something, c) decide something, or d) feel more confident about something. A 2000-word pile of facts isn’t really helping anybody as an article.

Real help comes from an article that begins on the right note. The right note is understanding the reader’s actual need. Why did they search for this topic? What were they hoping to find? What question are they really asking? Sometimes the title and the reader’s actual intent aren’t quite the same. And in many cases, you’d be able to find the answer to some of these questions.

Remember—good writing addresses the need behind the search.

Different Articles Have Different Jobs

This is the first thing to understand. Now, there might be more of these, but I believe roughly, articles can be bunched up in five types of jobs:

1. Explain Something: Make a confusing subject understandable. Remove unnecessary technical language. That sort of stuff. Give a PC power user a reason to read your article to troubleshoot BIOS issues and save them the time it takes to over official documentation and long-outdated forum threads.
2. Help Someone Make a Decision: Compare options. Explain trade-offs. Tell the reader what actually matters. Think of product reviews. An excellent product review isn’t one that covers all specs. It’s one that gives the most practical knowledge.
3. Teach Someone How to Do Something: Give your reader a process to follow without burying them in background information that they’re likely to know.
4. Change Someone’s Mind: This is rarer but many articles do need to present an argument, anticipate objections, and give the reader a reason to reconsider what they believed. At no point should these articles patronize the reader.
5. Keep Someone Interested: Stories, opinion pieces, personal experiences, and entertaining articles have a different job. Sometimes the reader isn’t looking for a solution. They just want a good read, even though there are many books in the world.

And as the writer of an article, you also have a job. It’s to leave the reader somewhere different. This is pretty much what Google has been trying to enforce for years. To some extent, Google has succeeded. Or had succeeded before all the AI stuff took over. Basically, fulfilling a search intent leaves the reader somewhere different, which means the reader doesn’t need to search again (or search the same thing again). Google noticed factors like bounce rate (pressing back instantly, for example) to understand whether something really did this or not.

So, try to ensure that your article does at least one of these:

• The reader knows something they didn’t before
• They understand something they previously misunderstood
• They now have enough information to make a decision or act in some way

The change doesn’t have to be dramatic. More often than not, it will be a slight change. But that makes all the difference. Sometimes, the goal might be to have the reader enjoy spending five minutes reading your piece. 

And never confuse length with value. More sections don’t automatically make an article better. Adding another 500 words because the brief says “2,000 words” can make the piece objectively worse. Some topics need depth. Some can be explained properly in 700 words. Good writers know when they’ve said enough.

Making Decisions as a Writer

Part of your job is to make certain decisions before/as you write an article. What information belongs in the article? What can be left out? What needs explaining? What can be assumed? Which example makes the idea easiest to understand? What should the reader remember after finishing?

Unfortunately, not all writers will be able to answer these for their current assignment. Each aspect is unique and requires plenty of experience. For example, new writers often assume everything must be explained without realizing that the majority of surface-level stuff they’re adding to their articles is pointless. This leads to higher bounce rates as the reader realizes someone is teaching them the basics all over again before ever getting to the point.

And SEO complicates this further. Keywords, headings, search intent, and optimization all matter for clients. There’s no tiptoeing around that. But an article shouldn’t exist merely to satisfy a search engine. That’s your job as an article writer. A page that ranks but frustrates every human who reads it hasn’t done its job very well. The best SEO article still feels like it was written for a person.

All that being said, you shouldn’t overuse personal creativity and liberty a lot in certain cases.

• A commercial article may need to generate leads.
• A product article may need to help someone choose what to buy.
• A brand article may need to establish credibility.
• A blog may need to bring people back to the site.

The writer needs to understand the business purpose without turning every paragraph into a sales pitch. How much the client’s goals matter differs from assignment to assignment. A good litmus test is this: ask yourself what the article actually did for the reader. Can it be answered in a single sentence? You’ve found the point. If not, the article might just be a collection of information arranged into neat paragraphs.