The public discourse around AI has reached a fever pitch, but marketing writers have been considering the robot for a while now. Since the rise of search engines (and, subsequently, search engine optimization, or SEO), we’ve become servants of two masters: the humans who read websites and the SEO robots that rank them.

Marketing writing seeks to educate, inform, compel, and convince human consumers. But what humans read on a website is first judged by robots working for the search engines.

Allow us to anthropomorphize these robots for a moment

Each search engine has an army of robots (not literal R2D2-style robots, but a computer program) that work to read, understand, and categorize every web page on the internet.

These robots scan a page–a process called crawling–to glean what it’s all about. They can read the on-page content and metadata to get an idea. Then they create a library of every page they’ve crawled, with internal notes about their understanding of each page’s purpose and usefulness. This is known as indexing.

When a human types a query into the search engine, the robots peruse their vast repository for the pages most relevant to the search term. They round up their top choices and present them to the human in search results. If the robots decide your page is low-quality or irrelevant to a particular search term, they won’t include it in their suggestions.

So the SEO robots hold your fate in their hands, but the humans are ultimately the ones with the buying power. Who do you cater to?

A tale of two extremes

To answer that question, let’s imagine a hypothetical scenario.

You’ve just hired a new CMO for your brand. On their first day, they call an all-hands meeting and announce some big changes. “From now on,” they proclaim, “SEO is a dirty word. We’re going back to the old days, when all a brand needed was a great creative idea to get by!” Cue the Mad Men theme song.

This imagined CMO revamps your brand’s website, and it’s gorgeous–strong concepts, smart copy, beautiful images. But they’ve ignored SEO. Your site begins to drop in search rankings, which means your audience isn’t even seeing your CMO’s magnum opus of a site.

Sadly, the decline in your brand’s online visibility begins hurting your sales. You and the CMO part ways.

The next leader you tap is all about results, results, results. On their first day, they declare that “Dashboards are king.” They want one for every possible metric, and they always want to see the numbers trending upward.

To get those kinds of juiced-up results, though, you have to game the system. So your marketing team redoes the website (again), this time with fanatical attention to SEO. The site essentially becomes a giant ball of keywords with no discernable narrative or impactful pitch for your audience.

After seeing an initial lift in rankings and clickthrough rate, things start to go south on your new CMO’s beloved dashboards. You’ve now experienced the downside of the other extreme. It’s great to rank highly in search, but if users can’t figure out what you offer once they get to your site, they’ll leave.

Regardless of where, when, and how your site ranks, it should always have on-page content that is persuasive and articulates your brand’s solutions in a way both humans and robots can appreciate and understand.

It starts and ends with humans

At the end of the day (at least for now), our world is still run by humans, not robots. The robots serve a critical role as intermediaries, but your work is not ultimately about pleasing them. It’s about helping the robots connect humans with the most relevant results to their queries.

Instead of thinking of the robots as the opposition to or the target of your work, why not think of them as your partners? You’re collaborating to help your human audience find what they seek.

Sometimes, the right solution won’t be on your website, and that’s okay. There’s no need to try to game the system to appear in these results; that searcher isn’t looking for what you offer, anyway.

Other times, your brand’s a perfect match for someone’s query. In those instances, you want to ensure your SEO is optimized so the robots can lead that human to you.

Regardless of where, when, and how your site ranks, it should always have on-page content that is persuasive and articulates your brand’s solutions in a way both humans and robots can appreciate and understand.

I’ll admit that I skew more toward the ideology of that first CMO–I tend to romanticize the creative process. But it doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game. Strong technical SEO and conceptual copywriting can absolutely go hand in hand. And in the best digital marketing, they do.

Want to talk with an agency that packs the one-two punch of technical expertise and creative prowess? You’ve come to the right place.