Whatever your small business sells, you need your website to be found quickly and easily. If you sell directly from your site, you need lots of traffic to your product pages. If your site is primarily a validation tool, the traffic needs to find the site, in particular the evidence and knowledge pages.
It used to be a “simple” case of ranking with the search engines. Now you must be concerned about the large language models (LLM) as well, as more people are simply typing a question into ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude.
So how do you get your business appearing when your target audience starts searching? Here’s some recommendations….
Don’t block their bots
AI search engines use bots in a similar way to the traditional search engines, so you need to ensure you are not blocking them. Here’s some guidance on how to ensure you’re not blocking OpenAI and here’s some for Claude too.
What are the questions your target audience will ask?
When your SEO focused on keywords, many people produced content aimed at the most popular search terms, often stuffing pages and articles with these keywords to drive up their rankings (it was a little more complicated). AI works differently because people using it work differently. People ask questions rather than typing in a few keywords, so answer the questions.
This may seem like something that could be anything, but there are people in your business that will know the answers. Your sales team and other client-facing staff should be able to tell you the questions they regularly get asked.
Make a list and produce content that answers those questions. Your website almost certainly answers some of them, so check so you aren’t duplicating work.
You can then produce content around the questions that aren’t already covered.
Demonstrate your experience
Whether you’ve been running your small business for 6 months or 20 years, you have experience that will help people choose you.
If you’ve got a new business, its almost certainly based on your previous experience working for someone else. You still have the experience that your customers are looking for, so talk about it. If your business is 20 years old, you will have huge amounts of experience, so make use of it. Talk about:
- The issues you see frequently and how you’ve resolved them
- The results you’ve achieved for your customers
- What you’ve learnt over the years.
Everything in this area is about helping people believe you can help them, so use your experience to prove you can.
Keep it simple
Something we regularly see when small businesses are targeting big businesses is that they use lots of big words and make what hey are saying complicated. There is a belief that decision-makers in big businesses have somehow developed a different language to the rest of the world. Nope!
Keep the language simple. Technical terminology is fine, but big words won’t impress anyone.
- Your blog is a blog, not a thought-provoking exploration
- A training programme is not a leadership capability framework
- An IT security audit is definitely a better phrase than technology assurance framework review!
Don’t forget to write for humans. Too many people used to write content for the search engines, and how they are writing what they think the AI tools will consume. Remember who you really want to see your content.
Succinct is good
Why use 5 words when 27 will do? Often attributed to Mark Twain (but apparently it was Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher) who said “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”
People searching topics such as “ideal blog length” see results that range from 800 – 3000 words, so they often err on the long side. Again, nope! With the short attention spans people have today, the sooner you get to the point, the better!
Website structure
Structured data as well as the basics of SEO will help the AI tools use your content. This article from Google will help with this. Make sure the information you provide is clear.
Meta descriptions, header tags and alt tags all serve their purpose with the search engines and the AI tools too, so don’t ignore them.
Combine with your other marketing
AI hasn’t wiped out the need to get your marketing right (thank the stars!). If anything it has made it more important, as the LLMs will be looking at where else your small business is represented. What are you saying on social media? Are you appearing on other sites, in news articles or podcasts? Are your reviews any good, whether on Google, your website or other places such as Feefo or TrustPilot?
A broad digital footprint is a good thing, so the more you can establish credibility outside your website, the better.
We hope this helps, and if you need some help, please get in touch.
