Your Website Isn't Just Talking to Customers Anymore
For years, we built websites with two audiences in mind: the people visiting them and the search engines trying to understand them.
Now there's another audience in the mix.
AI-powered search tools are reading websites, gathering information and using what they find to help answer questions.
That means your website isn't only trying to convince a potential customer that you're the right business to call. It also needs to clearly communicate what your business does to the technology helping that customer find an answer in the first place.
Fortunately, those two goals have a lot in common.
Clear Beats Clever
We've always been fans of personality in website content. Nobody wants to read a website that sounds like it was written by a corporate committee in 2006.
But personality can't come at the expense of clarity.
If you offer commercial cleaning in Kelowna, your website needs to make that clear. If you specialize in a particular type of legal service, explain exactly what it is. If you only serve certain areas, say where you work.
A clever headline might get someone's attention, but somewhere on that page there still needs to be enough specific information for a person, Google or an AI system to understand exactly what you're offering.
Your Website Design Needs Structure, Not Just Words
How information is organized matters too.
A single Services page with two sentences about each of the twelve things you offer doesn't provide much depth about any of them. Dedicated service pages give you room to explain what each service is, who it's for, how it works and answer the questions people commonly have about it.
Good headings help organize that information. Internal links show how related pages and subjects connect. FAQs can answer specific questions in plain language. Location information provides important context about where the business operates.
None of this is particularly flashy, but it makes a website design considerably easier to understand.
Specific Information Builds a Better Picture
Generic marketing language has always been a problem and AI makes the weakness even more obvious.
“Quality service you can trust.”
“Solutions tailored to your unique needs.”
“Committed to exceeding expectations.”
Those statements could describe a roofer, an accountant, a massage therapist or someone selling Premium Doohickeys.
They don't actually tell us anything.
Useful website content is specific. It explains what you do, how you do it, who you help, where you work and what someone should know before choosing you. It answers the questions customers actually ask and includes the details that come from knowing your business and industry.
That's useful to a potential customer because it helps them make a decision. It's useful to search engines and AI because it provides context they can actually work with.
Don't Start Writing for Robots
This doesn't mean your website should suddenly sound like it was written for a machine.
People are still the ones buying your products, booking appointments and hiring your company. Your website needs personality, good writing and a clear understanding of the person on the other side of the screen.
The goal isn't to stuff pages with awkward keywords or write robotic explanations because an algorithm might read them. It's to create genuinely useful content that makes your business easy to understand.
That's been good website strategy for a long time. AI just gave us another very good reason to keep doing it.
