Fast becoming a mainstream technology, artificial intelligence (AI) is shaking up the way businesses are run. Website development and online user experience is one area in which AI can have a transformative effect. Here’s how.
To many people, artificial intelligence (AI) has seemed like a distant, futuristic technology that doesn’t have any application to everyday life. This has all massively changed in the last year or two, with AI technology being rolled out and integrated into many aspects of both life and business.
AI is an area of computer science that enables machines to perform tasks that would previously have required human intelligence to complete. AI is developed using large data sets and algorithms, using sub-branches of AI such as machine learning and deep learning to train machines how to think. As the algorithms become better trained and more advanced, machines can pick up on an increasing number of nuances and react in a way that humans would.
AI is already all around us. It’s in our homes in the form of tech such as Alexa, and it’s on our phones in the form of Siri, as well as being integrated into innumerable apps. Our email clients use AI to direct some of our messages to spam folders. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Business are beginning to invest heavily in AI because it is bringing them compelling results. According to research by Accenture, businesses who have successfully integrated AI are experiencing time savings of up to 70%. In addition, companies that successfully scale AI see a three-fold return on their AI investments.
When it comes to creating a great website for your business, AI can bring brilliant rewards. A website is your shop window to the world, and more individuals want to complete transactions in an entirely digital manner every day. This makes AI in websites a potentially critical investment.
Here’s how AI can help your business website.
Improve Accessibility
Making websites accessible is a legal requirement, set out in country-specific laws as well as the international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium. This means that people with certain disabilities and needs must be able to adequately access your website. Accessible website elements include alt text on images, descriptive titles and headings, sufficient color contrast for the visually impaired and being screen reader accessible. It’s possible to implement these things manually, but AI technology can ensure you keep on top of your website’s accessibility compliance. Every time you edit a page on your website, or create a new web page, you run the risk of doing something that compromises your site’s overall accessibility.
Not only is website accessibility important for you to be able to reach your customers, it’s good for positive brand-building too. If this forms part of your broader website visibility strategy – for which some people buy backlinks too – your website should start to see some next level performance.
Chatbots
A key way that many websites incorporate AI now is through chatbots. This is all about improving customer experience by making customer service available 24/7. Chatbots can be trained to help customers with some of the more common questions or problems they have. This also frees up customer service personnel to deal with a smaller percentage of problems that require a human to deal with. Overall, chatbots help to make business operations more efficient.
Search
Incorporating AI technology into a website’s search function can help to deliver better results and improve customer retention. This is called semantic search, when the search functionality can understand the customer’s intention by searching for specific terms. It has the potential for customers to find relevant content much more quickly. In turn, this improves the length of time a customer remains on a website, and means they are more likely to convert into an actual customer. It also means the customer has a positive interaction with your brand as a whole, which is excellent for customer loyalty and building long term relationships.
AI doesn’t just apply to a website’s internal search either – it can also be applied to search engine optimization (SEO). This is an area of work that optimizes websites so that search engines such as Google find them and ranks them highly. There are AI-powered tools that can identify any SEO issues a website might be having, and help you rectify them. Applying AI tools and tactics to improve both you internal and external search performance is a powerful combination.
Tailored Recommendations
Something that makes businesses such as Amazon so successful is the personalized recommendations they offer customers. Showing customers products that other customers with similar buying habits bought is a highly effective business strategy – and it’s powered by AI. For Amazon, this functionality alone is believed to bring in at least a third of its sales – and probably more.
Of course, Amazon has extremely high numbers of data to work with to train its AI technology, but this kind of technology is open to anyone with a website. Personalized recommendations go beyond products too. Even if you sell experiences, such as vacations, AI can learn what kind of vacation criteria users have and offer high quality options as a result. It can go into granular detail too, such as whether a customer is looking for hotels specifically with kids clubs.
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