A recent Gartner report stated that 61% of modern B2B buyers prefer to buy without human contact. That means more and more business owners are negotiating complicated, nuanced business interactions without talking to a person.
Imagine you have a landscaping company and you are buying a new fleet of trucks. You can go online and research all of the features and specs. You can see what other field service owners are using and read reviews. You can make a decision: these are the trucks I need.
Are you going to call the company to place an order? The trends say probably not. Any business with a sales line has seen call volume drop to a trickle compared to what it was 10 years ago. When you call a salesperson, it will take time, and they will try to upsell you or sell you the warranty. Why spend all that time when all you want to do is type in your credit card number and finish the transaction, because you’ve already made your decision.
As a business owner, your customers send a message when they’re not picking up the phone. They’re finding what they can on your website and making a decision based on that. How can you make sure that those customers are finding what they need? That’s a new twist on what we know about SEO.
It’s called answer engine optimization, using optimization that AI can understand.
Answer engine optimization augments SEO; it optimizes your website for those snippets that come up when you search using AI tools. You need to structure and describe your information in a way that an AI can broadly understand, making sure that your content and marketing materials on your website define the things that you’re selling instead of relying on keywords and metadata. Try asking ChatGPT to take a look at your website and summarize what your business does. You might be surprised at the results.
Want to learn more? Check out our podcast: Episode #4: Is AI Coming for your Job?
(art by Becka Rahn)
