Ep 41: Faster to Build, Harder to Get Right: Industrial Websites in the AI Era

When a company came to us, say, for a website, let's say five years ago, what were they typically asking for?

Yeah, great question.

SEO was definitely top of mind for them, but they tend to first kind of lean more into our website's looking stale.

So it was more of like an aesthetic thing and maybe not taking a closer look at is it more of our content that's stale and not the design? Like, are we really answering questions that our prospective buyer is looking for? Or is it just more fluff that's appealing to that search crawler, that search bot to move up the rankings?

I'm seeing a parallel sort of reaction as we're moving into the AI bots and the AEO demands now that marketing is dealing with and how that impacts a website.

It's really interesting because as we see that sort of the mechanicals changing, there's always that focus on the mechanicals, right? It happened back in early SEO days, keyword stuffing and all kinds of silly things that people would do to manipulate traffic, but not necessarily get marketing results.

And I think there's a tendency to want to do that now too, and rely on technical things without remembering that a buyer is still a person making a decision.

And that is really what's behind all of the machinery.

So by the end of the conversation that we have today, I think that we should expect our listeners to really understand the importance of one, naming every job that every page on their site has to do, and identifying the pages that don't have a job anymore, maybe?

Yeah, and it's okay to cut some of those loose.

Two, I think separating that idea of understanding what is machine traffic? What is human traffic in your reporting? So a traffic decline stops feeling like a mystery and what those different things may mean long-term to your marketing planning.

So let's go back to that old model, right? When a client or when a marketing leader decided say six years ago or so, it's time for a new website.

What drove that decision?

Yeah, a lot of times it was we're on an outdated platform and the person that used to maintain that knew how to maintain the website.

We don't know how to maintain and make continued updates.

It's our overall design and aesthetic looks archaic compared to our competition.

Or our business has changed and is not reflective of what we currently sell and offer to our customers.

Okay.

And do you have an idea of, you know, how long really the shelf life was for a website and what the factors were that impacted that?

Some companies that were a little more progressive, maybe they were on like a three to five year website timeline.

We would deal with some where they hadn't touched it for 10 years and you could very quickly tell.

What did that cycle of, you know, letting a website decay and get stale, what did that really cost companies that they didn't maybe realize in the moment, but that added up for them over time?

There's so much that goes into a website build.

A lot of times companies, they put so much effort into it and they just want it done by the end.

So it used to be very common to spend a year building this site.