4 Ways to Futureproof Your Website & How a Chatbot Could Boost Traffic and Sales

AI-driven search and digital marketing is just around the corner. So too are newer devices, such as folding phones, and faster-than-ever connections via 5G.

As a webmaster or internet marketer, your work is never finished when it comes to maintaining your website and ensuring it works as it should. In this post, we’ll look at four things you can do right now to futureproof your website and to protect it against future change.

Responsive Design

Of course, your website should already have a responsive design. But if you want to make your site as futureproof as it possibly can be, then it should be really responsive. Folding phones are just around the corner, and these will be used by countless people to view web pages. Don’t think they will catch on? No one thought big smartphones would either!

Your website needs to not only look great on a huge range of different devices, but also to be able to change size in real time. If your theme essentially switches between two versions for large and small sites… that’s not good enough!

Smarter Images

Google looks at images a little right now, paying most attention to the alt-tags and the file-names. In the not-too-distant future though, it will also be able to look at the actual content of the images. This will be possible thanks to machine learning which will give us advanced computer vision.

We can already see this in products like Google Lens, which can tell us things about objects we point our cameras at. Imagine that functionality baked into Google, and you have an even more powerful form of search!

Wiser Wording

Google is getting smarter and smarter all the time. Not only does that mean it’s getting better at discerning high quality and low quality content, but it also means that it’s getting better at understanding context and meaning. Google doesn’t just look for content matches any more, but actually understands what users are looking for, and can find answers within your text.

Google wants more people to search using voice through Assistant, which means we need to write using natural language and semantic markups to help it find the important parts of our content.

Media Rich Design

While you might not want to make any changes like this just yet, it will make sense in the next few years to start adding richer media to websites. As more and more people start using 5G, loading times will get faster the world over. That in turn means that a video or large image will have less negative impact on page load speeds.

There’s no requirement to add large animated backgrounds, or crisp HD images, but seeing as your competition might… it certainly can’t hurt either!

Don’t do this yet, but have a think about how you could upgrade your site for faster connections and then you’ll be ready to embrace this new technology.

Do all this, and your website will survive the coming years with no problem!

How a Chatbot Could Boost Traffic and Sales

If you’re looking for a way to bring your website into the 21st century, to potentially increase your sales, and to improve customer satisfaction, then you should consider getting a chatbot.

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a little AI assistant that lives right on your website, or that users can contact through social chat apps such as Facebook Messenger. The idea is that your chatbot will be there to answer questions, give advice, and even suggest recommendations – all without you or your business having to raise a finger.

Users can speak to a chatbot through a chat window, as though it were a real person located in a call center. They can then ask questions using natural language, and the chatbot will respond.

Chatbots are often considered primarily for customer service. The idea here, is that a chatbot can help people with FAQs, or direct them to the page they need. A chatbot can provide advice on what to do if a product is damaged, and on how to contact the company.

All this can improve customer satisfaction, without requiring you to spend large amounts of money. Because while most companies would love to be able to answer every question, that would require a huge support team of staff, which might well be outside of the budget of many smaller companies. But with an automated chatbot, they can filter down the vast majority of issues so that only a few that can’t be answered from a flow chart need to be seen to in person.

Chatbots for Marketing

But where things get really interesting, is when you use chatbots for marketing.

How might this work? One example would be to try and increase conversion rates when a visitor lands on a website. Normally, you might use some sales text, and rely on users following the right links and buttons on your page in order to find the product listing for them. Often this would result in confusion and frustration, and many visitors would leave before having a look around.

Bounce rates are high across the internet.

But with a chatbot, this could be very different. Imagine if the very moment someone landed on your website, a chatbot asked them what they were looking for. When they answered, that chatbot could take them straight to the relevant page ready for them to buy. No searching through the site, no complication.

What’s also great about this, is that even if a visitor doesn’t buy anything, they will have shared their ‘intent’ simply by telling the chatbot what they were looking for. This kind of data can be hugely beneficial for marketers.

More Types of Chatbot

Chatbots can also take many other forms. For example, it is increasingly common for chatbots to be used over Facebook messenger. Several restaurants and fast food joints now allow customers to order their food simply by messaging the resident chatbot this way!

Moreover, Facebook chatbots can actually reach out to potential customers and buyers to offer them special deals!