If you hired a marketing agency or a brand agency to do your website, you may have a website that better resembles a 1960’s-esque print ad than a cutting-edge website.

I don’t mean in looks. I mean in the way it’s written. See, marketing agencies and brand agencies don’t usually have an SEO on their team. What they do have is a copywriter.

And sometimes — NOT ALWAYS, but sometimes — that copywriter is less of a scientist, more of an artiste. They want to make the audience feel something. They want the words to look sharp and pretty. They want compliments. 

Let’s take a look at some of these real homepage headlines I just copied off of a popular “sleek website roundup” website:
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“America’s Deep Tech Frontier.”

“Building the Future with AI and Strategy.”

“We’re Simplifying the Path to the Good Life.”

“In a world saturated with noise, we create moments of meaning.”

“Confidence in construction.”
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Elegant, thoughtful, emotional? Yes. Ranking? Hard nope.

And SEO, by which I mean the methodology some marketers use to help Google and AI find your website and share it with others, gets left behind in the dust. 

Conversion copy and SEO aren't enemies, but it kinda feels like that sometimes.

No, conversion copy and SEO are not allergic to each other. They can exist on the same page. But it’s not always easy. 

Consider these headlines for healthcare:

• SEO-driven headline: “New Jersey’s Top ABA Therapy Provider” — clear, but stiflingly boring and forgettable.
• Conversion-driven headline: “Here to help your child. Here to help you.” — emotionally resonant, but are they personal shoppers? At-home phlebotomists?

Both headlines have a place. The problem is when the second one is your H1, because now Google has no idea what you do, and the parent Googling 'ABA therapy NJ' never finds you.

If a copywriter is not trained like an SEO specialist, they will neglect the SEO. The words might look nice, but the website isn’t ranking, and no one is finding the page.  

If an SEO is just a mathematician and not a marketer, your website will be designed entirely for rankings — not human consumption. Also a problem.

There’s a middle ground, folks.

To be clear, I’m not bashing conversion copywriters. (I am one.)

The problem isn't a focus on conversion; it’s a focus on conversion without SEO.

A web agency can make a website look great, sound great, and be findable. It’s what we do at Motif Studio.

‍The SEO basics we won’t skip (even when nobody asks for them)

These are some of the fundamentals we bake into our website.

• Basic keyword research: What terms are people using to describe our products, our services, our audience etc on the great wide web? We always include keyword research to ensure the client is using terminology that aligns with the way the regular folks talk about our industry.
• Mindful H1s and H2s: “Here to help you” might be the biggest headline in your homepage hero section, but it’s not the H1. The H1 might be small, but it will be boring and packed with our most critical keywords: “Provider of Science of Reading-Aligned Material” or “Best Alcohol Rehab in Maryland”. H2s, as well, are pulled from key search terms and used thoughtfully throughout the homepage, especially the second screenful. Headlines that are purely emotionally resonant are not wrapped in these high-value headline styles.
• URL structure, site migrations and 301s: Crawlers pay attention to the names in URLs, too, so we’ll always recommend straightforward, keyword-rich URLs and structures. P.S. The biggest way to ruin a beautiful website revamp is poor URL migration, resulting in lots of 404s and tanked metrics. When taking a website from, say, Wordpress to HubSpot CMS, or BigCommerce to Shopify, we always talk about the URL migration, either keeping URL structures the same or redirecting old ones to new ones via 301s so search systems can easily crawl through the new pages.
• Metadata that isn't an afterthought: Title tags and page meta descriptions are easy to include on a checklist. Don’t neglect them. 
• Schema markup: With AI answer engines trying to make sense of websites, it’s become more important than ever to keep your code informative. Product, Review, Organization, Breadcrumb — these easy-to-add, easy-to-forget bits of code just tell crawlers “Here’s what you’re looking at.”
• Internal linking: Are your individual web pages islands, not connecting to each other (besides for the upper navigation)? We always ensure key pages are connected to the homepage, and link other important, relevant pages to each other. It’s all telling search systems: “These are topics that are super important to us, and that’s why we repeat them, talk about them a lot, and connect them. It’s not just a one-off thing.” This is especially convincing for search systems. 
• Breadcrumbs: Related to internal linking is breadcrumbs. Any kind of content system — whether you do ecommerce and have a product catalog, or have many blog posts or other resources — necessitates breadcrumbs. These handy-dandy structures at the top of a page tell search systems and people where they are in the overall structure of your website.
• Page structure designed for keyword-rich content: Even if you can’t afford a comprehensive SEO strategy right now, we ensure that we build sections into the site that are built for that naturally — so when you do bring someone on to write up thoughtful content for each collection page, or FAQs for each service page, your website is already set up and structured properly. This can save so much in future dev costs, and costs nothing to create in advance! 
• Page speed: In 2026, this is table stakes. We ensure images are compressed properly and heavy videos aren’t auto-playing at the top of the site so that everything loads quickly. 
• CSS vs Javascript: Sometimes, a paragraph of text might be hidden for usability — the way an FAQ is tucked under a question with an arrow, or an especially long paragraph is hidden behind a “read more”. Those often keyword-rich paragraphs can be hidden with Javascript or CSS. Hidden with CSS, they’re readily available in the HTML, but hidden with Javascript means they need to be retrieved — and are often not crawled by Google! Building correctly from the start prevents lots of headaches later on.
• A site that AI can read: AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity pull from structured, clearly-written pages. Clean headings, direct answers to buyer questions, and schema (see above) are how you stay visible as search shifts away from blue links.

What we don't do (and still work with many amazing SEO partners) 

With alllll of that…

We are not an SEO agency. Our goal is not to get you first-page rankings. (If we do, hurrah!) 

What we do promise is that the foundation is laid so a future SEO partner (or our client’s team) has something really strong to build on. Instead of having a giant mess to fix.

We want to get your website to 75% so you can get to 100%. 

3 practical takeaways for your website

SEO is easier to build in than to bolt on. So what can you do to make sure that your beautiful website doesn’t rank like garbage?

Here are 3 quick takeaways that you can do without a developer:

• Metadata: This is tedious, but it isn’t hard. Have your favorite AI tool (I’m basic, I like Claude) write up meta descriptions, page titles, and schema markup, and tell you where and how to implement it. 
• H1s and H2s: Use trends.google.com for free, basic keyword research, ensuring that you’re hitting some of the most common search terms people use for your services or products. Then check the H1s and H2s on core pages, like homepages, landing pages, and collection pages and add those keywords in or adjust the language if needed, again, using AI to coach you through.
• Page speed: Use pagespeed.web.dev to test your website speed. If your site fails, use tools like tinypng.com to compress existing images and reupload them. Ask AI to audit your page for speed and see if there are any.