AI-Powered SEO: Steps to Improve Customer Experience with AI
How important is it to optimize for Voice-Visual Search and Accessibility for Retention & Conversion?
Optimization of the websites is a continuous process and while we focus on optimizing the web pages for most of the users, we tend to forget a major chunk of audiences (and now increasing manifold) who prefer searching for their products/services using voice or visual search.
One of the major barriers to a great customer experience or conversion in the current scenario could be if the web assets are not optimized for voice search and visual content search. The audience may not be able to search the website on the search engines using voice or visual search. Customer experience, in this case, is shadowed, and conversion, surely a far-fetched dream.
Let’s figure out how AI, through predictive intelligence and natural language processing capabilities, can help create the most memorable customer experiences, while we keep in mind the most essential rules of search engine optimization and accessibility for users of the websites.
Search Engine Optimization and AI
Search engine optimization of the website is undeniably crucial and we can’t deny the importance of conventional SEO. Keeping the traditional SEO as a base and augmenting these strategies with AI can be the most workable solution ever for your websites to rank favorably and for effective customer retention.
Voice Search: Go the Conventional Way: The optimization technique of having conversational content on the websites is downright effective in helping websites rank favorably for voice search. Having long-tail keywords in your content, creating question/answers or FAQs are some of the successful ways of optimizing the content for voice search.
Voice Search: Structured Data Mark-up & AI: Marketers can optimize content for search engines by deploying structured data using tools such as Schema.org, JSON-LD Schema Generator, and Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. These tools can mark up content with tags that help search engines understand what different on-page elements mean. The objective here is to map the optimization of our web pages with the highly structured AI-powered Google Brain — that gives a lot of importance to the structured information about the content.
AI can augment such possibilities further when plugins such as WordLift, “connect to the existing website, reads the entire content, and creates such a fine & detailed representation of it, which search engines best understand.” (Source: WordPress.org)
Consequently, based on the user search query — its intent and relevance, search engines fetch such web pages with schemas as rich snippets on SERPs for better visibility, which in its own way signifies better connect with the audience. Such AI tools can even assist the online creators in producing content that is “compatible with schema.org markup, allowing search engines to best index and display the website.” (Source: WordPress.org)
Visual Content: An Evolving Arena for Greater Customer Experience & Retention: AI has significantly made its mark in image recognition — Imagine yourself clicking an image of your favorite product and seeing similar products on the search engine results. It is certainly the AI doing its job for commendable user experience and customer retention! With visual content search gaining momentum, optimizing for this search has become all the more important. Don’t forget the traditional optimization such as offering multiple images of the products, using high-res images, having the correct metadata — alt texts and keywords.
The eCommerce industry, particularly fashion and home decor retailers, is already using a host of applications and machine learning models to understand the content and context of these images when they reciprocate to the “image or object as query” search with a list of related results.
Pinterest Lens is what comes to mind when one talks about images and discovery search. AI has opened up ample opportunities for marketers to reach out to their audience effectively using strategies such as Lens Your Look and Shop Your Look. Likewise, customers are happily checking out these possibilities to click and upload their dream look and, in turn, are delighted to see it coming true since they see relevant images with the links to shop.
Visual Search: AI is the Master-Mind: As a matter of fact, rapidly growing consumer preference for visual search is a pointer for digital commerce brands to redesign their websites to facilitate the visual search for increased customer satisfaction.
AI is the mastermind here since retailers should be using and deploying it to bring visual search solutions to practice. AWS offers an end-to-end solution with services like Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Elasticsearch, so on and so forth.
These services focus on building, training, and deploying machine learning models which then have the ability and intelligence to recognize the context of the images, and in turn, matches the object with the nearest neighbor out of multiple objects (KNN Search offered by Amazon ES), and produces the similar products in front of the customer, thereby increasing chances of relatability of the search intent.
Along with search, issues like accessibility are also equally important for a great customer experience and AI has a huge role to play in it. Let’s check how?
Accessibility, User Experience, and AI
Accessibility is guided by a revelation that the web should be equally accessible to people with disabilities and in the face of such realization, website optimization for accessibility becomes preeminently important.
AI Assistants for Accessibility Adjustments: With AI assistance, marketers can stay true to their audience with disabilities. Tools such as AccessiBe use contextual understanding and image recognition to scan and analyze the functionality of every element on your website and adjust it for screen reader accessibility. Through predictive understanding of millions of records of past behaviors on the websites, AccessiBe provides the most effective “AI-Powered Screen-Reader and Keyboard Navigation Accessibility Adjustments.” (Source: AccessiBe) From the navigation menu, dropdowns, pop-ups, and images to forms, buttons, and links, AccessiBe manages all.
Many brands have already started leveraging such machine-learning models and the industry is working towards revolutionizing the way websites are made accessible in order to create great user experiences and also to not lose out on a group of audience for conversion.
Somewhat aligned with this is the idea of relevant customer experience. To make a website user-friendly to every group of audience, even the simplest features on a website can play a major role in how they interact with the website and if or not they convert.
The simplest instance here could be a search bar on the website.
User Experience & Search Bar: AI Semantic Search: An effective site search solution can double the conversions by enhancing the customer experience — whether in the form of a seamless purchasing experience or in the form of getting relevant content for engagement. Unlike the conventional lexical search, AI-powered semantic search identifies the intent and contextual meaning of a search query and brings out better and more relevant results. This kind of site search derives its intelligence from natural language processing that takes into account language patterns and relationships between words to identify the actual intent of the user search query.
The recommended results are usually relevant and accurate thereby increasing the chances of personalization, great customer service, and customer conversions.
AI Chatbots: Aligned to this is the significance of having AI chatbots on the websites — one of the major optimization hacks that brands are implementing for a better user experience. Industry statistics point out the fact that 59% of Americans are willing to receive coupons/offers through a chatbot and the average retention with the bots after a month was 40 to 60% higher as compared to apps which was just 20–40%. (Source: neilpatel).
H&M is one such brand that makes use of such AI-powered shopping chatbots. These bots automatically create a user profile, converse with the customers, gather information, segment the audience, and send meaningful messages. Not only do these bots help in streamlined segmentation of the audience, but through deep learning and predictive patterns, these bots also become increasingly better at showing outfits that appeal to the customer, therefore helping in driving brand engagement, customer retention, and conversions! Such optimization efforts backed by AI can be great for increasing conversions and we as digital marketers can certainly leverage such possibilities for keeping our customers engaged with us.
These are some (or many? I believe many!) of the possibilities that AI is creating for us and as marketers, it is our responsibility to map and even rethink our optimization efforts, so that we are able to carve, create and steer our customer journeys and bring them to conversion. However, there is no end to optimization. The digital space will not cease growing, AI will keep on evolving, and so the optimization wheel should keep turning!
A Quick Tip!
On May 18th, 2021, Google introduced the latest algorithm, MUM — Multitask Unified Model. This algorithm is categorized as “a new AI milestone for understanding information” and with this, it is evident that even image search is not the end! (Source: blog.google) MUM is multimodal, so it understands information across text and images and, in the future, can expand to more modalities like video and audio. Get ready to rethink the optimization strategies as per the ever-growing AI technologies and algorithms to give customers a 360° customer experience that they value, remember, and cherish!
