How to Use AI on Your Website to Bring in More Business

Unless you've been living under a rock on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific, you know artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage nowadays. As a consumer, AI plays a significant role in your day-to-day life, with or without your knowledge — voice assistants, content recommendations on YouTube or Netflix, and even instant messaging.

Today, AI technology is more accessible than ever before, with many small-to-medium-sized businesses leveraging it on their websites and products. This is one bandwagon you should jump on.

Here are six ways you can use AI on your business website to boost your bottom line:

To provide personalised recommendations

The modern customer not only craves personalized content but expects it too. Imagine how much more effective your website would be if you could offer personalized product recommendations, content, and offers to every potential customer.

Amazon attributes 35% of its revenue to personalized product recommendations, which are regularly updated and optimized to gratify each user.

So, if you're running an eCommerce store or a SaaS website, AI empowers you to serve personalized product recommendations and bespoke content, which can go a long way in boosting conversions.

For conversational marketing

Apart from personalization, AI, with the help of machine learning, also helps build super-effective chatbots — which are almost a necessity today for dangerous business websites, not just a mere nice-to-have feature. Over 53% of customers prefer to use online chat when they need assistance over calling.

Chatbots help your customer service team by being the first responder to visitor's inquiries, which can often be unnecessarily time-consuming for customer support teams. They can help guide visitors to various parts of your website, allowing your team to deal with more significant tasks required to move users further down the sales funnel.

Instead of having visitors fill out a form and await a response from you over email, they can type in their doubts and get on-the-spot answers to commonly asked questions. Such 24/7 availability and the ability of delightful real-time customer service make chatbots a precious AI-based asset.

To incorporate semantic search

A search bar is a helpful feature on any website as it enables visitors to navigate to what they're looking for promptly. These users have a specific purpose in mind, such as finding a piece of content or shopping for a particular product. A successful search experience results in satisfied visitors, which means they are more likely to stick around with your business.

But traditional search, known as lexical search, involves simple character-matching, so the results are limited to literal matches of the search query or, at most, variants of them.

AI crushes this limitation — with semantic search, the search engine can determine the intent and contextual meaning behind the search query, thus enhancing the accuracy of search results, thereby increasing user satisfaction.

To improve site accessibility

One of the most critical elements that constitute a high-performing and trustworthy business website is accessibility. An accessible website accommodates all visitors on all devices regardless of the physical or mental ability of the user.

Now, whether you like it or not, having an accessible website is not optional. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) extends to the digital realm and requires that your website is easily usable by people with disabilities. Your site's visitors, disabled or otherwise, can very well sue you for not having an accessible business website.

But that's beside the point. Accessibility is essential not just to avoid ADA lawsuits but to scale your business and capture new audiences. Nearly one in four adults in the United States live with a disability, and an estimated 26.9 million adult Americans report that they either "have trouble" seeing or unable to see at all.

So, overlooking website accessibility means you are knowingly shunning a big potential audience from doing business with you. While there are many things, you can do yourself to improve your site's accessibility, such as have alt text for visuals, ensure sufficient colour contrast, write descriptive anchor texts, and so on, AI can be a big boon.

For instance, AI can help you provide language translation and captioning for people who are hard-of-hearing. It can also help you automate image recognition and alt text creation for visually-challenged website visitors.

Hence, with a web accessibility tool like accessiBe, business websites can easily make their content accessible to disabled users in minutes and consequently, generate more sales.

For quantitative usability testing

Website usability testing is a process to assess how user-friendly your website is. The tests typically involve real users to determine the ease-of-use of a website.

Usability testing is a crucial step in designing a great user experience. But sometimes the data collected from the test can be insufficient to make the most informed decisions.

Enter AI, which is a powerful asset to have for any testing thanks to its robust data processing capabilities. So, with the help of machine learning algorithms, quantitative usability testing enables you to track and process a vast array of meaningful UX metrics.

This may include information about:

• The device that the visitor is using
• Session time and duration
• Traffic source
• Pages visited
• Categories or products viewed
• Bounce rates
• Total number of website visitors

All these metrics are vital to form a clear understanding of user behaviours and interests, which, in turn, helps bring in more business.

Bonus: For content creation and curation

This information may not be particularly useful for your business (at least for now), but when it comes to content marketing, AI has already made significant advancements. For example, can you believe an algorithm independently wrote the following opening line of a sports story:

"Kenny O'Brien did his best to change the outcome, but the sophomore couldn't will George Washington past Virginia as the Colonials lost 2-0 at Davenport Field on Tuesday."

Publishing giants such as the Associated Press, Fox, and Yahoo have been using AI and machine learning to create content for their websites automatically.

What's more, AI algorithms are also helping in content curation and predictive intelligence — something that gives modern marketers foresight into what kind of content to target and to which customers. And with predictive lead scoring, companies can recognize where users are in their buyer journey and use that data to target specific content formats they are most likely to engage with and encourage a positive response.

Closing thoughts

From enabling instant customer support and providing personalized content to improving accessibility for the disabled, you can use AI in quite a few ways to upgrade your website and land more business.

About the author

Gaurav Belani is a senior SEO and content marketing analyst at The 20 Media, a content marketing agency that specializes in data-driven SEO. He has more than seven years of experience in digital marketing and loves to write about business, AI, ML, data science, and other emerging technologies. In his spare time, he enjoys watching movies and listening to music.

Connect with him on Twitter @belanigaurav.

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Tags: Artificial Intelligence , Guest Post