You need to update your website. What’s that? You don’t have time? You don’t know how? No one on your staff has the skills? You can’t afford to hire a contractor to overhaul your copy?

No more excuses: Find $20 per month, and hire ChatGPT or one of the many other Large Language Model (LLM) tools built on OpenAI’s GPT technology to be your new marketing assistant.

Modernizing your website is one of the most valuable things an AV solutions provider can do. You’re selling something that’s both valuable and expensive: it’s the kind of investment both businesses and individuals tend to research primarily via search engine. That means it’s essential to optimize your site to rank highly on search engine pages, and to make it appealing and engaging for first-time visitors.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is great at Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You should have a list of keywords — search terms where you want to rank highly in the results. An AI tool like ChatGPT, Jasper, WriteSonic or Copy.AI can help you generate a list of relevant keywords for your business, review your current copy and make suggestions for how you can revise it to perform better on your target keywords. It can also produce totally new content specifically designed to boost your rankings on certain keywords: pieces like blog posts, wiki articles and training materials. This content can help you build your site out into a rich resource for your customers — somewhere they’ll want to spend time learning about your offerings and your products. In the meantime, you’ll also make the site much more appealing to Google’s algorithm.

AI is terrific for improving the top of your funnel — that is, getting people to come to your website in the first place. Once they click on your link in the search results, you need additional, more sophisticated tactics to make them stay and ultimately, convince them to engage your services. For example, adding a 3D product model to virtual showroom to your homepage is an incredibly powerful tactic. These features have been shown to dramatically increase session duration (i.e. how long people spend on your site) and even to have a direct positive impact on purchase intent.

They also amplify the SEO work your AI assistant is doing. Google gives websites using 3D models a page-ranking bonus, because the company know that users are more likely to find those pages useful. Interactive models take the value even further; they encourage visitors to click through, exploring your site, lowering your bounce rate (the percentage of people who click through to your site, don’t see anything interesting, and immediately leave) and improving your rankings even more.

I encourage every small business owner to start experimenting with AI to make improvements to their website. This modest monthly cost can help you make some simple, quick changes that will deliver enormous value. Hopefully, this will send you down a path towards a truly modern website that will capture your customers and dominate the competition. By the time they’ve incorporated ChatGPT into their marketing strategies, you’ll already be pitching customers in the metaverse.

Editor’s Note: This blog is part of a series for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Appreciation Day, which is held annually on July 16. Click here to read more AI Day stories from rAVe [PUBS] and click here to read more AI Day stories from LAVNCH [CODE].

About the Author: Dave Chace is president of Cogent360, a CI-focused design firm specializing in interactive media, based outside Philadelphia, PA. Chace founded the company in 2007 after many years as a training director and classroom instructor for a nationwide AV and custom integration specialty retailer, with a goal of revolutionizing how organizations educate their sales channels and consumers. Cogent360 is on the leading edge of immersive media and breaking new ground in the realm of virtual technologies and advanced instructional design. They work with many of the most prestigious companies in the industry including Lutron, Harman, URC, LG, and many others. As a facilitator, Chace has presented at numerous conferences and events on topics including virtual reality (VR) implementation, instructional design principles, sales and product training methodologies and more.