For more than 14 years, I have been running an offline business. It's a leisure activity where people come to spend some good time with their families or friends. The main marketing tool of my business is my website. I have developed several landing pages that are search engine optimized and they attract the people who search through google in the region.
Lately, I have realized that there was a net decline in page visits and I tried to understand the reason for it. It's not a one time thing but rather a continuous progress that in a bit unsettling for me and my business.
I started to research and asked around and of course also asked AI what could be the reasons. My research made me realize that the reason could actually be AI.
How AI changes people's behaviour when researching online
In Switzerland, it's possible to use ChatGpt for free and a lot of people even have a paid subscription. More and more people are using AI when they research something online. The concept that you get one answer or a limited amount of answers for a request seems to be very attractive to most. Therefore more and more people are using ChatGpt or Google AI when they look for things online.
For me as a business owner, the question that came up is how do I manage that my website figures in the results that are rendered by AI? Well, I asked AI what I had to do and I was quite surprised to see how much I had been missing.
Step 1: Make sure that your website is registered with Google and Bing
I had a webmaster account with google but didn't have one with bing. ChatGpt rather uses the information of the later. The good thing is that I could important into Bing my data from Google and this was quite quickly done.
Step 2: Add schema.org tags on each page
That was quite a tricky thing to do. AI expects to find javascript information about your page. I won't go into too much detail but I had to find out what these tags were and how to add them to the website. It took me ages to figure things out and test it. I'm still not sure whether I did everything correctly. I was quite happy to have the help of AI to set this up...
Step 3: Adapt my FAQ to catch demands from AI
On my website there is a FAQ page that answers to many questions around the game. I have added a section called: 'How you ask chatGpt, how we answer'. The idea of this section was to ask questions how people would enter them and where we want to be seen in the AI answers. So it wasn't really about the activity itself but rather about why they should come to us. I also added links to our landing pages on these questions which hopefully will attract direct traffic from AI searches.
Just this one aspect shows how little businesses might struggle with the coming of AI. Things that have worked for a long time, might not work any more. It's very important to understand the challenges and to adapt. I think we can't ignore how AI is changing the world and we need to adapt before it's too late.
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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