All the visitors in the world are worthless if your website doesn’t engage them. Ultimately we need humans to take action. This is why Search engines and AI put humans first, measuring a website’s value and rank based on the utility and appeal it has for real humans.

The world is changing fast and it’s easy to be afraid that you’re going to fall behind or miss out. Many people haven’t even caught up with the requirements for SEO (search engine optimization) and now they realize they also need to start optimizing their website for AI. Some are even wondering if a website is even still necessary at all! So if you aren’t sure, definitely read my recent article Are Websites Still Relevant in the Age of AI? where I explain why a website is more critically important than ever in the age of AI. And as you’ll see below, human optimization is still the most important factor in determining how you rank in SEO and how AI will represent you to the world.

Increasing Traffic vs. Increasing Conversions

The first thing to understand is that converting new customers is a long pipeline. If any part of that pipe is broken, all the invested time, energy, resources and money is wasted. You may think you can just brute force more visitor traffic to your website through SEO, Social Media, and now AI. But what happens when actual human beings read that AI summary comparison of your company vs. your competitor, will it be accurate and compelling? What happens when actual human beings finally arrive at your website? Will you capture their attention in the first 5 seconds? And then if they give you 60 seconds for your elevator pitch, will your website earn their trust, explain your primary value proposition, and call them to a specific action (before they get interrupted or distracted)?

Traffic alone is meaningless. Human optimization is the critical last mile of your marketing and sales pipeline. An entire website, or a custom landing page for specific audiences or marketing campaigns, must be optimized through business strategy, engaging writing and compelling design. For humans.

But do the robots care about design?

As we’ve established, your website and landing pages must be human optimized so that they actually convert real humans who arrive from search engines, social media, ads, business cards and word of mouth. But you need to understand that yes, even for Google bots, design is actually one of the important metrics considered for SEO ranking and evaluation of authority.

In the early naive days of the internet, Google trusted web developers to thoughtfully add meta keywords as a signal of what was on the page. But that was far too easy to abuse, so Google started ignoring meta data completely and focusing only on the actual visible content on the page. The best practice for many years was “write useful content for humans”, so people started writing long, keyword-rich articles on topics interesting to their audience. This captured SEO traffic and established your authority on a subject. But that too was abused, and the internet began filling up with so many bloated articles on the same topic that now Google often won’t even bother indexing your beautifully written article because it has thousands of others already in their database.

Remember, Google’s entire business model is built on a promise to humans: we will give you the best website that matches your intent. At each evolution, Google has been focusing on more advanced ways to base rankings on human usefulness. For the past 5 years Google has been absolutely clear that it uses Design (UX - User Experience) in its ranking algorithm, which include page load times, mobile friendliness, layout shift, readability, and many other core vitals.

But things are going to the next level now, as Google is finally able to use AI to simulate real-world human experience. That means they rank websites that are emotionally engaging, concisely written, beautifully designed with content that is useful to humans. So good design is more critical today than ever before!

But will AI send people to my website?

AI is revolutionizing how humans search for information. Instead of getting a list of 10 websites that you have to manually visit, speed read and compare, AI will summarize all human knowledge for you. So in general, AI is not directly sending traffic to your website for the first response. But your website is still critical because it is the primary authoritative source of information about your business! So a great website will be a training course to ensure AI becomes a powerful sales agent for your business (see my last article for details).

To really benefit from AI, you need to go beyond just a pretty digital billboard. Your website should contain all the knowledge necessary to train an AI sales agent so they can explain your business in detail. AI needs to be able to explain your primary value propositions. AI needs to be able to compare you with your competitors, show why you are unique, show which niche customers will benefit from different features, suggest the best product for their specific needs, answer questions, overcome objections, appeal to emotion.

Doing the Math on Conversion Rates

If your website has successfully trained an AI sales agent, or it’s earned great ranking with SEO, or you have an active social media strategy, or you are shortcutting it all with paid ads, at the end of the day there is a real cost to acquire new visitors. And at the end of that funnel a human has to take action. So a human optimized website is fundamental for every business strategy. 

The costs of those various channels will vary, but as a simple proxy for all of them you can estimate the price of that effort based on paid ad Cost Per Click (CPC). Consider a typical ad campaign that targets an audience and sends them to a landing page on your website (to hopefully take action). 

• Cost Per Click (CPC): $2

• Conversion Rate: 0.1% (one sale per 1,000 visitors)

• Visitors from $1000 in ads: 500

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): $2,000

• Lifetime Value of Customer (LVC): $2,000

• ROI: Zero.

In this scenario you spent $1 to make $1, and you haven’t even counted overhead yet. Maybe you benefited from some market awareness.

But if you could somehow increase your conversion rate to just 0.2%, you will double your marketing budget and/or double your sales. Now your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is $1,000, you spend $1 and earn $2. That’s a deal any business would take!

So how do you do that? You create a human optimized landing page, strategic content, engaging writing, great design, and clear calls to action. And the good news is that is not just good for humans, it’s also great for SEO and AI, who will not be better sales agents than your own website trains them to be.

What Is Human Optimization

The good news is that if you create a beautiful, engaging website that is useful to humans, you will also ensure it has authority and ranking for SEO and is a powerful sales training course for AI. So how exactly is a website or landing page optimized for humans?

Behavioral Economist Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational definitively proves that people do not make rational decisions. They glance. They scroll. They feel. And then they take action. Good marketing is psychology, enacted through strategic writing and great design. If your content isn’t strategic, precise, engaging, or doesn’t resonate emotionally and tap into a real fear or hope or problems—you lose them. They close the tab and move on.

So your job is not just to inform. Your job is to engage. That requires a film director’s attention to detail for every pixel on the page:

• Cut all filler because every second counts.

• Concepts must be broken into compelling, snackable ideas.

• Titles must be short and provocative.

• Sections are ordered to pull visitors through a compelling story.

• Icons, images, and whitespace are used as punctuation and breathing room to reflect.

• Include social proof (testimonials, recognitions).

• Calls to action are presented as unique solutions in response to each new idea.

Don’t tell them to passively “Browse Products”. Tell them to “Start Sleeping Better Tonight”. That’s personal motivation.

Test and Iterate for Maximum Profit

Your website should be a critical part of your business strategy. Not a liability but an asset, a machine that actually earns money. But like any machine, its performance depends on design and calibration.

Serious companies do A/B testing on everything: headlines, button colors, image placement, order of content. Sometimes a 3-word change can double your revenue.

That’s time intensive and expensive, but if you are going to spend thousands of dollars on marketing, SEO, Ads, Social Media, etc. the small cost of optimization that increases conversion rates, will more than pay for themselves. 

Conclusion

So remember, every visitor has a value that represents a cost you incurred at some point in your sales pipeline. Minimize waste and reduce the number of visitors who bounce. 

Design for humans. Write for humans. Optimize for humans. The robots will follow.

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And you don't have to do this on your own, schedule a call if you need help organizing your content strategy and creating landing pages that convert.