I vividly recall attending a conference early in my SEO career where the speaker asked if anyone owned an Alexa. Only a few hands in the audience went up. He predicted that, within a few years, voice assistants like Alexa or Siri would become deeply ingrained in our daily lives, and – as we now all know – he wasn’t far off. Although I originally thought people would routinely buy products through Alexa, it turns out voice assistants now divert searches for tasks like music, productivity, and fact-checking away from traditional channels.
Not every prediction at that conference was accurate (they also said 3D printing was forecast to be universal within three years!), so it’s natural to be sceptical sometimes about the impact all emerging technology will have on our daily lives. However, I personally believe AI truly is different.
Unless you’ve been living under an actual rock, you’ll know that AI has already become pretty commonplace in our daily lives, particularly professionally. Adoption rates are soaring, trust is growing, and even leading tech companies, including Apple, see its transformative potential.
As business owners, we can’t afford to ignore the advancements in artificial intelligence.
Rather than fearing AI as a threat to our jobs, we should recognise its potential to transform our businesses positively. Used strategically, AI can significantly enhance efficiency, accessibility, and overall productivity.
The Phases of AI Adoption
Changes to the Fabric of Search
Users will adopt multimodal search and more conversational queries. Results must be personalised, contextually relevant, and include additional factors like timing and budget. Businesses must adapt their strategies to ensure AI understands their unique characteristics.
Consider search terms such as “Wedding Venues Durham” and “What are some wedding venues in Durham that can accommodate 100 people and allow outdoor ceremonies?”
This spin will likely be due to voice-based search, as people naturally engage in more conversation when using speech, especially when they are dealing with an agent who is effective at gathering more information.
The results, therefore, need to be hyper-personalised and relevant, have contextual details and have additional important factors like timing, budget and specifics – something traditional search can cater for but isn’t specialised enough in.
How can a business owner future-proof for this?
Think about it this way: how will AI understand the characteristics of your business if you don’t tell it?
As part of the Scurry phase, I foresee that there will be a big era of diversification and bulking of service content – ensuring key characteristics are present on the site. I think we’ll also see additional data points for AI, which cover areas like review and ratings, popularity and engagement, relevance to the query on website content, location and proximity in a great way, social proofing, trust signals and AI-driven behavioural insights to name a few – all needing a revised strategy to be effective in the era of AI, in my opinion.
Interactive, Follow-Up Queries
AI will need to understand the progressive needs of users. Businesses must consider semantic binding and analyse data from operations, customer service, sales, and eCommerce to provide AI with maximum details about their products or services.
Let me give an example:
– “Italian restaurant near me”
– “Exclude restaurants that have no availability on Saturday”
– “Do they serve gluten-free pizza, and what’s the feedback on their lasagne?”
To be effective in this realm, we need to consider semantic-binding, a fancy term for trying to understand the progressive need of the user – the thought behind the journey.
To achieve this, we really need to look at operations, customer services, sales and eCommerce in your business – the consumer will give signs at each stage of what barriers, problems or enquiries they have – ensuring you are presenting AI with the maximum possible details around your products or services look at things like spec sheets, reviews and feedback and present it back.
Emphasis on Visual and Video Content
This is a growing consumer preference that allows AI to capture more data and, in a rudimentary sense, allows the user to process 60,000 faster than text in the human brain.
As a key part of the Scurry process for AI, video is likely going to be a key area of opportunity, too. Businesses that invest and use high-quality media will likely win here – especially when the core topic aligns with user intent.
AI is going to be on the agenda for a lot of businesses in 2025; beyond that, it’ll be completely normalised, in my opinion. What we’re working hard on as an agency is how we maximise AI to meet it, where we think it’ll be in 3, 6, 12+ months ahead, and – crucially – the opportunities for our clients.
There is a very real opportunity for businesses to be the first and best in an era where everyone competes for the same things; this unique first-there angle can be extremely lucrative. As the founder of an agency solely designed to increase our clients’ prosperity, I believe this is something we’ll be leaning heavily into over the coming year and beyond.
I’ll be sharing more here on the blog – and over on my personal LinkedIn profile – around the use of AI in SEO and how we’re making leaps within Climb & Conquer to better adopt artificial intelligence within the business for the benefit of our team and clients alike. Do keep an eye out if AI’s your thing.
