After nearly 20 years, the lesson has been hammered into my brain time and again: marriage is about communication and compromise. If you’re not willing to give and take, if you don’t communicate with your spouse, there is no relationship. It’s just two people sharing space and bills.
We’ve talked quite a bit about content and SEO (and AEO) lately, we even hosted a LinkedIn Live covering the two and how they inform one another. And I want to take inspiration from something our outstanding SEO manager Dee Salvador mentioned in that conversation with Bridget Cunningham last month, because I believe this is elemental to understanding not just content optimization, but content itself:
“...[S]tructure is in no way ever going to replace storytelling. The structure is reinforcing the story that you’re trying to convey.”
That’s so, so good.
It’s this axiom that necessarily moves us away from perfunctory, droll content. We don’t publish structure, we structure our ideas. And good, mature structure allows content marketers like me to remain what we always were: writers. Structure clarifies and amplifies ideas and points of view worth structuring and amplifying.
It’s what keeps the spark in the relationship.
Content for Optimization’s Sake
What’s not healthy in any relationship is to go so far to please the other that there is no sense of self left. Any relationship worth maintaining exists in a healthy tension.
This is in essence the dilemma content marketers have been stuck with for years now: How do we structure work in ways that get us noticed by AI? is effectively the same question as, How do we structure things in a way that gets us noticed by search crawlers? Both of those questions miss the point, to Dee’s point above: Structure forms the copy which conveys the idea, the idea informs the structure that allows for effective copy.
An underdeveloped content strategy this way shows its seams in the deliverables: stilted language, obvious keyword plays, generally lifeless copy. It seems perfunctory because it is perfunctory, the goal not being How do we meet our target audience with this piece? but rather, How do we get AI to respond to queries with our stuff?
Google’s core signals for rank include outside discussion and demonstrated shareability. AI platforms have followed suit. Marketers generally haven’t, and we risk losing the plot entirely when we don’t interact with these tools on their own terms. The relationship between us and our technology is not entirely unlike interpersonal relationships: communication leads to understanding, which then fundamentally defines and refines who we are in the process.
This is one reason why HubSpot got into some KPI trouble during their self-professed “traffic apocalypse” – they met subject matter criteria but also grew their content library so broad as to have no defined audience at all. In content as in optimization, context is everything.
Is it appropriate to point to a lack of optimization or deflating metrics over time (content entropy, if you will) as the case for developing (or redeveloping) content? Sometimes! Times, trends and tastes change. Not everything is evergreen; a world full of pine trees is one without biodiversity.
Meanwhile, Reddit routinely gets top rank in both SERPs and is a chief reference for AI platforms because the platform is inherently, for better or worse, structured by subject matter and weighted by the audience. HubSpot did something similar without the clear delineations or the active audience and got penalized for it (sort of).
Optimization for Content’s Sake
Like any relationship, communication and compromise are at the heart of understanding. But understanding touches on something more nebulous and less definable at a deeper, foundational level: Trust. After all, if we don’t believe in the other person in the relationship, what grounds are there for communication or compromise?
We have to believe in our content, and that belief should reflect in the quality of our work as well as in optimization that also reflects and amplifies belief. Just like how marriage should be a reflection of what it means to support and promote one other, our best content consists of strong viewpoints well-structured and articulated, as well as formatted to be seen and amplified by readers and crawlers alike.
Theory and praxis. Subject and object. Strategy and tactics. Love and marriage.
Finding that sweet spot between an idea and SEO? That’s tricky, and it takes compromise. Too many keywords in too many places and the reader can tell. Too few and no one will see it in the first place. Both are forms of miscommunication.
But optimization, too, is a three-dimensional play beyond the work we publish: great website design, appropriate use of technical SEO, excellent user experience and website pathways that are both thought-through on one side and intuitive for the other are all forms of optimization. If we’re just looking at putting the right words in the right places, we’re looking at the wrong thing. Like marrying for money.
The marriage that lasts is the one where the two participants have such a level of understanding between each other that it’s difficult or even impossible to think of the sum as its parts. Genuinely compelling content isn’t picked apart for its SEO value; what gets people to read isn’t in whether or not it has perfect keyword match phrasing. It’s a brand, trusted for what it offers and how often it offers it, and increasingly, that trust is determined not in how many keyword matches a brand makes per piece of content, but in how well the content resonates with the audience via shareability and citations.
The goal? Content that reaches out, but never punches down. Work worthy of people’s time and attention and gives them reasons to keep coming back. Work on a different kind of relationship, the bonds that form between a trusted brand and a buyer, as well as trust signals that give AI and SEO similar reasons to keep coming back.
The story is worth the structure; the structure is worth the story. Community demands communication, and they together will get and keep any content strategy on the right path: because marriage takes work, and anniversaries are worth celebrating because we believed the work we put in over time is worth the effort. Because the other half, the better half, is always worth the effort.
Brent Sirvio
