AI-Ready Website Foundation. The 5 signals that build trust + win clicks

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Patrice Valentine: Hello, and welcome!

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Patrice Valentine: I feel like I say this at the start of every webinar, but we're just a minute early here, so I'm gonna give.

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Patrice Valentine: Folks, chance to jump on the call, and then we will dive right in.

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Patrice Valentine: Happy Wednesday!

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Patrice Valentine: This is being recorded.

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Patrice Valentine: So, we'll have it for playback, and I do think I'll be able to stick to the 30-minute, uh, actual time frame this time around, which would be great.

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Patrice Valentine: I tend to get a little verbose. I'll do my best not to do that this time. Uh, so let's go ahead and jump in here.

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Patrice Valentine: Okay, boom, it looks like my screen is being shared.

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Patrice Valentine: And…

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Patrice Valentine: Looks like my audio is working, so boom, we're good to go. Okay, uh, thank you for joining us today. Today is our 30-minute.

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Patrice Valentine: Weekly Wednesday webinar, and uh… my name is Patrice Valentine, I am the owner of ProFusion Web Solutions. Today, we're going to be talking about AI-ready website foundation.

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Patrice Valentine: The 5 signals that build trust and win clicks through to your website.

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Patrice Valentine: This is gonna be yet another, what we consider a practical session.

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Patrice Valentine: Uh, our goal is that you're going to leave with an understanding of the five signals that users and AI alike are going to use to evaluate your website and ultimately your business. So if your website is one of the first things that people see.

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Patrice Valentine: we want to make sure that we're making a really good impression, and that goes for AI as well.

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Patrice Valentine: Our kind of roadmap for the day is we're going to look at why the trust signals matter to begin with, and then we're going to take a look through the five different signals, and at the end.

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Patrice Valentine: I've got a downloadable, uh, checklist that should take…

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Patrice Valentine: 5 or 10-ish minutes, depending on how much work needs to be done on your website, so we'll have that available at the end.

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Patrice Valentine: Let's take a look first at what people are even doing when they come to your website. People tend to make decisions pretty quickly. I've seen stats showing that people make their first impression in less than one second.

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Patrice Valentine: But really what they're looking for, if they do give you, let's say, 10 seconds or so of time, is they're going to your website, they're looking in the upper left-hand corner, they're kind of validating who is this website, what business is this?

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Patrice Valentine: So they're looking for who you are, what you do, all of that directly in that first 10 seconds.

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Patrice Valentine: what really users are looking for is, can they identify themselves in your website? When they go to your website, do they see, this company clearly understands who I am.

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Patrice Valentine: what my problem is, and do they have a solution to my problem? If you can make a user, a site visitor, feel that from the initial load of your website.

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Patrice Valentine: then you're likely to get them to stay a little bit longer to then start looking for proof that you've done what you say you can do, that you have experience in this industry, and they're looking then to take the next step, so that call to action. Ultimately, the user is going to either stay on your website, they're going to click through to some other pages.

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Patrice Valentine: or they're going to bounce off of the website. Ultimately, we want them to stay on the site.

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Patrice Valentine: You have some control over what people are doing on your website.

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Patrice Valentine: If we look at the first one, Clarity. This is going to be a big theme throughout today's presentation, is talking about clarity.

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Patrice Valentine: But that is who you do, who you help, where you do it, so what your actual geographic location is.

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Patrice Valentine: You have some control over how your website presents a trustworthiness factor. That could be in the form of claims that you're making, in the form of evidence proof type case studies, so you have some level of ability.

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Patrice Valentine: Obviously, you can't just tell people, hey, trust me, we're the best at what we do. I mean, you can say that, but without evidence, it just sounds as, you know, kind of a falsehood, so people want to see that real evidence there.

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Patrice Valentine: You can control what level of information you're providing to people, which gives them some level of transparency into your company. Transparency can be looking at your process.

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Patrice Valentine: being able to set the expectations, and having that all available on your website. And then, what is that next step? So, allowing someone to actually take the next step.

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Patrice Valentine: When all of these things are strong, when that what you can control list is strong on your website, people are going to understand what you want them to do, they're going to understand a little bit faster, which leaves.

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Patrice Valentine: room for less doubt. So, the faster they can do it, the more action is actually going to take place on your website. So again, your job is to remove any doubt.

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Patrice Valentine: And your job is to do that pretty quickly.

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Patrice Valentine: Now, everything that I just said sounds like something that humans want, right? I even used the words visitors and users when I was talking, so if you're thinking, that sounds great for humans, but this webinar.

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Patrice Valentine: the title is AI Ready Website Foundation. Uh, it's not too dissimilar. More and more, what we're seeing is that if it's good for the human user, it is also good for AI.

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Patrice Valentine: In fact, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a technical definition here, but in the Google AI overviews, they use a customized Gemini, which is their AI model, they use a customized Gemini model that works with Google's existing ranking quality system.

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Patrice Valentine: and the knowledge graph. And they're built to kind of scrape that information from the Google's existing systems and pull that into.

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Patrice Valentine: the AI model. So Google's AI features are built on the same foundation of their search.

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Patrice Valentine: Now, if you sat in on last week's webinar, you know that there's some things that you can do that make your website a bit more attractive and easier to use for the AI models.

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Patrice Valentine: You might want to revisit last week's webinar if you need to know, kind of, some of the differences between.

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Patrice Valentine: the, uh, SEO, search engine optimization, AEO, answer engine optimization, and GEO, which is generative engine optimization. So.

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Patrice Valentine: feel free to go back and take a look at that, that is up on our website, but the SEO and what we're looking at for here for AEO, they are very similar, so what's good for the user.

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Patrice Valentine: is good for the AI models as well. If your website is AI ready, that means it's easy to understand.

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Patrice Valentine: easy to corroborate, and with that proof, which means it's safe to cite when AI is pulling information. So, AI ready is also really good for the humans. So, you'll kind of hear me today talking about both things.

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Patrice Valentine: Somewhat, uh, interchangeably.

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Patrice Valentine: So let's go jumping into the five signals.

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Patrice Valentine: These are the five signals that show up on highly converting websites over and over again. We're going to go through each one and have, at the end, like I said, that simple kind of to-do list on some checklist items that you can be able to go through.

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Patrice Valentine: take a look at your website, or if you're one of our partners, you can take a look at your clients' websites and say, okay, using this checklist, how do we rank? What changes could be made?

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Patrice Valentine: The signals are clarity, proof.

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Patrice Valentine: Humans, transparency, and ease of use. I know all of those need a little bit of definition, so we'll jump into each one. But ultimately, what I want to tell you, and kind of have you understand, is you don't necessarily need to go rebuild your website. Your clients don't need to run out and rebuild their website right now.

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Patrice Valentine: most of the time, just making some small tweaks, and some of them might, but most of the time, making some small tweaks are going to allow these signals to kind of, you know, increase and do better for their business overall, so…

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Patrice Valentine: Let's go ahead and jump into signal number one, which is clarity.

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Patrice Valentine: Clarity is… we've said this since we first got into this business, that clear beats clever every single time. There was a push for a little while in menu navigation, so when you go to a website and you look at somebody's menu, that they were… people were naming their pages clever things. Like, instead of about us, it was…

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Patrice Valentine: you know, something cutesy, like… I don't even know, but they were naming things that weren't always clear, and the last thing you want to do is confuse your website user. So, while it might be a little bit more boring.

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Patrice Valentine: Clear beats clever every single time. Clear is kind. So make sure that you are being clear on your website. And then one of the first things people are going to be able to see when they come to your website is your headline.

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Patrice Valentine: Your headline really has one job. It's there to tell the user, and AI again.

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Patrice Valentine: What you do, who you help, where you do it, and it needs to be done quickly and succinctly.

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Patrice Valentine: So it could be something like payroll services for small businesses in Whatcom County. That's where we're located.

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Patrice Valentine: So something very clear and simple, again, so that the user, when they visit your website, they're able to recognize.

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Patrice Valentine: I am a small business in Whatcom County, and I do need payroll services. So, again, making your headline just very clear.

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Patrice Valentine: then perform what we call the 5-second test. If someone were to open your website, in the first 5 seconds, would they be able to see who this is for.

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Patrice Valentine: What it is, where you are.

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Patrice Valentine: and what you want them to do next. I'll say that again. Who it is, like, so who you actually are.

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Patrice Valentine: What is it? What is the service or product that you provide? Where are you? And what should I do next?

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Patrice Valentine: if any of that is fuzzy, this is the first thing that you need to fix on your website. So that's the first thing you want to go through, that's on the checklist to make sure that all of that is very clear.

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Patrice Valentine: When someone comes to your website.

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Patrice Valentine: Again, for AI, Clarity helps AI classify what your business is.

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Patrice Valentine: So when someone is looking for a recommendation, or when someone is looking for the, you know, best.

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Patrice Valentine: payroll specialist in Whatcom County, for example, that they are able to use your website and use your business as the answer in the answer engine optimization. So that's… that's where AI comes in. That's why you, of course, want to be clear for your users.

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Patrice Valentine: But having that level of clarity also assists with the AI classification of your website.

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Patrice Valentine: Signal number 2…

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Patrice Valentine: is proof.

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Patrice Valentine: Proof should live near.

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Patrice Valentine: the claim. So, if you say that you are, you know, you offer payroll services in Whatcom County.

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Patrice Valentine: have some level of proof that is near that claim that you've just made. If you say that you are a trusted or top-rated, or, you know, the best person in Whatcom County.

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Patrice Valentine: Have the proof right there in the headline, or near the headline.

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Patrice Valentine: For the proof, you can use specifics. This can be a review snippet, so if you've received a Google review.

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Patrice Valentine: or a Facebook review, or even if someone has just sent you a really nice email, use that review on your website.

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Patrice Valentine: a Google review is great because it's third-party verifiable. If I wanted to go take a look at your business, I could go look and see that that Google review.

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Patrice Valentine: exists on your website, but also exists in Google, so I know that it's a real and valid.

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Patrice Valentine: Uh, review right there.

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Patrice Valentine: You want to use specifics in terms of how long you've been in business, so actually including the, you know, since.

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Patrice Valentine: we've been in business since 2004, so including that, you know, somewhere on your website. It could also be neighborhoods served, number of projects launched, number of clients served, things like that. Specific show.

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Patrice Valentine: Exactly what you do and who you do it for.

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Patrice Valentine: We always prefer to include some level of example, so if it's not clear on what you do, a case study makes it really clear. So it shows, you know, who you worked for, what you did, and what the outcome was. That's a very clear indicator to not only the user, but also to AI.

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Patrice Valentine: on what you offer and what services you provide. People and AI are looking for evidence that you are real, experienced, and safe to choose as a company.

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Patrice Valentine: Proof will help AI feel safe in citing you. Again, this is going to be in that AI answers in the overview section there, but if someone is just doing a search for.

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Patrice Valentine: you know, give me a list of the best web developers in Whatcom County. Again, that's where we're located.

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Patrice Valentine: It might provide 3 or 4 different web developers, and you want to make sure that your company is being found in those overviews.

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Patrice Valentine: This level of proof that you're putting on your website is going to help AI feel safe in citing you and in referring you when they're pulling up the answers.

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Patrice Valentine: Proof works even better when you can see the people behind the claims. So if we're offering up that we are the best web developer.

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Patrice Valentine: we now want to show the human element to that, because people trust people, especially right now. I think there is…

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Patrice Valentine: Um, while AI is amazing, and it provides, you know, great resources for us to be able to, um, you know, gain efficiencies in some of our everyday tasks.

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Patrice Valentine: I do still believe people really like to do business with other people, and when you're making a claim about the products and services you provide, it's nice to know that it's backed up by real humans.

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Patrice Valentine: To show that as evidence on your website, to be able to have that kind of human touch on your website.

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Patrice Valentine: It's important to use real photos, if possible, so if you have a client, um…

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Patrice Valentine: Over… a client case study, you know, include pictures of yourself with a client, or the product that you produced for that client.

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Patrice Valentine: Um, include those photos of yourself. Uh, we work with a lot of business owners who.

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Patrice Valentine: they don't want to be perceived as being too small. They might be a, you know, one, two, three person operation, and so they hesitate to put up their own biographies on their website, or their own, you know, photos on the website, but people want to do business with people, so including information about who you are.

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Patrice Valentine: including your names and the roles, potentially even a Meet the Teams section on your website that shows, you know, the key players on your site. All of that helps people become comfortable with you as an organization.

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Patrice Valentine: And it helps AI realize that you are a real person, that there is a real person behind this company.

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Patrice Valentine: And now, well, AI is not technically using, uh, what Google calls EAT, EEAT, which stands for Experience, Expertise.

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Patrice Valentine: authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

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Patrice Valentine: Each is not technically a ranking signal in SEO, however, Google says it's not a ranking signal anyway. However, it is incredibly important when people come to your website that they are able to see those different elements. Again, that's experience.

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Patrice Valentine: expertise, authoritativeness, so you are kind of the authority on the topic in which you speak, and trustworthiness. That all comes from proof, trustworthiness comes from proof, experience that shows case studies.

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Patrice Valentine: expertise, you know, putting in some level of, if you've got certifications, any of that, having all of that on your website, again, just allows you to be.

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Patrice Valentine: recognizable as the expert in your industry, which helps, then, AI want to cite your website, or cite whatever information that you put on your website.

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Patrice Valentine: I have the bullet point here of Write Your Why as well, and that's kind of a callback to Simon Sinek, so if you know the book Know Your Why, it's been around for quite a while when he did his TED talk on that.

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Patrice Valentine: Um, if you're not familiar with that, go take 10 minutes and watch a TED Talk on YouTube, because it talks a lot about people don't buy what you sell, they buy why you sell it, why you're in this business.

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Patrice Valentine: And if you haven't connected your website to why you're doing this, something as simple as, you know, for us, we wanted to help.

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Patrice Valentine: uh, small businesses compete with larger businesses online. So that was our… that's our why. We… we really love small businesses, and we want to help them grow and be able to compete online.

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Patrice Valentine: And that's why we do what we do. So putting up your why, again, just ties the human element to you and shows that.

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Patrice Valentine: here's who we are, here's why we do it, and that allows Google to realize, or AI to realize, that this is written by a human, who is an authority on this subject, who has a passion for this subject.

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Patrice Valentine: And allows them to, again, just cite you as the authority in this industry that you're in.

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Patrice Valentine: So having that human touch on your website is incredibly important, not only, again, for human users, so for your customers and prospects, but also for AI.

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Patrice Valentine: Now, if we look at transparency, we've kind of touched on transparency this whole… oops, this whole kind of presentation, because they all kind of go hand in hand. Clarity and transparency to me are pretty similar, but.

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Patrice Valentine: What we want to do with Transparency is reduce the unknowns. If there's an unknown, or if there's a question, or something doesn't feel right, that's going to stop people from reaching out to you.

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Patrice Valentine: when we look across the websites that are pretty successful with conversions, there are two things that stand out, two blocks of content that stand out. The first is the what to expect section.

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Patrice Valentine: And that really can be a simple one-two-three process. It can be a, uh, something if you're having someone complete a form on your website that requests more information, or is a PDF download, or is a…

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Patrice Valentine: you know, request a quote, something like that, that on the form, you allow them to complete the process of requesting it, that you then give them a confirmation that you've received their information.

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Patrice Valentine: Again, just setting that expectation, and then delivering on what you said you were going to deliver. So if it's a PDF that's being sent to their inbox, make sure that that gets delivered. If it's an estimate, make sure that gets delivered.

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Patrice Valentine: So, that section, the what to expect section, and then the pricing section.

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Patrice Valentine: Are both really, uh, key indicators for, uh, highly converting websites.

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Patrice Valentine: What I mean by a pricing section, because I know a lot of people don't want to have pricing shown on their website.

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Patrice Valentine: But, again, as we kind of looked at on our… on the webinar last week.

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Patrice Valentine: If you don't show pricing on your website.

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Patrice Valentine: and someone searches for… I'll just use my company as an example. If someone does a search for.

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Patrice Valentine: How much does ProFusion cost to create a website? What does it cost?

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Patrice Valentine: AI, if they can't find it on our website, the AI overview and the answers there, it will make up information.

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Patrice Valentine: on its best guess, or its best guess. So it will, you know, scrape our website to try and find pricing information if we provide it, but if not, it will say, here's, you know, some typical pricing.

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Patrice Valentine: and that will be tied to our company name. In last week's presentation, I showed a screenshot of what the pricing was based on Google's AI.

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Patrice Valentine: when it pulled in our pricing, and it was as low as, like, $25 an hour, which I don't think we've ever had pricing.

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Patrice Valentine: like that, it's just, it's not feasible. So… but that is what AI had scraped somewhere and determined that this would be our pricing. So even if you don't want to.

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Patrice Valentine: Expressly put in the pricing, showing exact cost of what you're selling, what your items are.

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Patrice Valentine: Something as starting at, or our price range is, or including things that here's what affects the price of the solution that we're providing.

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Patrice Valentine: or showing what is included in the price, so you're starting to at least talk about pricing, but not actually give, you know, firm numbers, um, that is one way to do it. So if you're hesitant to put out pricing.

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Patrice Valentine: I encourage you to just go do a quick Google search and take a look and see what Google says your pricing is. So if you sell promotional products, go take a look and say in the Google search, and you can do it in AI mode or not.

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Patrice Valentine: And just say, what is an average promotional product from… insert your company name here, what does it cost? And just see what that solution… what that AI overview actually shows for your business, because you'd be surprised that they might have answers that you did not provide.

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Patrice Valentine: Another part of transparency is going to be making sure that your service area, your hours.

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Patrice Valentine: and what your typical response time is on your website. So have all of that information available. And again, this just feeds all of the, what we would call, answerable content for the AI summaries.

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Patrice Valentine: So if someone is looking for pricing, or if they're looking for how long should a website take to develop, if you have that content on your website, that's going to get pulled into those AI summaries, or the AI answers.

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Patrice Valentine: and it's going to be able to reference your company as a citable source. So the point is to help people.

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Patrice Valentine: self-qualify, so people on your website can go through and find this information and say, okay, yes, this is what I'm looking for, but also AI is going to be able to find that information and use it in the AI summaries as well.

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Patrice Valentine: The side benefit of this, it is work to go through and add this additional content to your website and add this additional information.

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Patrice Valentine: However, what we have found is that when you do add these things to your website.

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Patrice Valentine: A lot of times the bonus here is that when people do contact you, they're likely somewhat further along in the buying cycle than they could have been before they reached out to you, because they have more information.

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Patrice Valentine: So they've already researched, you know, your hosting solution, or whatever it is, and they've kind of self-qualified to make sure that, yes.

00:21:47.000 --> 00:21:58.000
Patrice Valentine: they agree with what you're saying, they somewhat know your pricing, they're somewhat in… you're in their budget, and they want to talk to you now about the solution. So, we've seen that the buying cycle is potentially reduced.

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Patrice Valentine: Uh, for the time to sale for people who are adding more content like this, to create that transparency on their website.

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Patrice Valentine: And again, if you don't have the information, it's interesting to see what AI will hallucinate about your company and the products and services that you provide.

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Patrice Valentine: Alright, the last signal that we want to talk about is just making it easy.

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Patrice Valentine: if the next step, if the call to action, if completing that is hard, people won't do it. So this is, this is probably the most, um, human.

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Patrice Valentine: you know, element on the signals. Everything else really does have a… have a, um, AI.

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Patrice Valentine: impact, this is more really for your human users. Obviously, it's important that AI is able to see, you know, kind of what your call to action is as well, but for your… for your users, for your customers.

00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:53.000
Patrice Valentine: if there are… if there's any level of friction in completing your form, so if your request and estimate form has.

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Patrice Valentine: 30 fields that are all required, and it's hard for people to fill out, or it just is too much information for people to fill out, they're likely not going to complete that section.

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Patrice Valentine: Um, so have a short form that only asks for the required fields. If your website is terrible on a mobile device, and people can't fill out the form on a mobile device.

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Patrice Valentine: that needs to get fixed. So making it really easy for people to be able to.

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Patrice Valentine: uh, you know, complete that next step, to actually reach out and call you, or to complete that purchase if you were doing e-commerce, making it easy for them to finish. And again, check this on mobile. I think this is a section that people get really.

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Patrice Valentine: used to making website edits on their desktop, and they kind of assume that everything is going to work well on mobile, but we always, always want to encourage you to also check your site on mobile.

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Patrice Valentine: It is so important to make sure that everything, um, works well and is consistent from desktop to tablet to a mobile device.

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Patrice Valentine: All right, so if we're taking a quick look at this, again, I promised a checklist, so those are the five pillars that I just went through pretty quickly, but those are the five pillars that create that AI-ready website foundation.

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Patrice Valentine: We do have a checklist here, so if you want to download it, there's that link right on the site. I will send it out to everyone who's on the call right now, but if you wanted to check our website, this is just under.

00:24:10.000 --> 00:24:22.000
Patrice Valentine: Uh, under Services, and then it's under webinars and Education. Click on that tab, and you'll get to the AI Ready Website Foundation. This checklist, again, is something that's very simple to go through.

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Patrice Valentine: And it gives you the bucket, so if you're looking at clarity, it's gonna give you items that you should be checking for for clarity, as well as a brief description on why clarity is important on your website. So, go through again, make sure all of your contact information is available, make sure the.

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Patrice Valentine: The who you are, what you do, where you do it, who you do it for is all very clear on your website.

00:24:43.000 --> 00:24:48.000
Patrice Valentine: Include that proof, the testimonials, the case studies, the before and after pictures.

00:24:48.000 --> 00:25:00.000
Patrice Valentine: make sure that you actually show up on your website. If you are part of your business, if you are, you know, involved in sales, or you're the one that answers the phones, you need to also be on your website.

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Patrice Valentine: we work with a lot of people that are involved in a franchise, and a lot of times the franchise information shows up on the website, the headquarter information, but the actual person who owns that franchise is nowhere on the website. Their personality doesn't exist there.

00:25:16.000 --> 00:25:22.000
Patrice Valentine: They don't show up anywhere, and again, people want to do business with people, so make sure that you are showing up on your website.

00:25:22.000 --> 00:25:33.000
Patrice Valentine: add that level of transparency. So what does your process look like? What can the user expect? Laying that all out for them to be able to see that, again, just allows them to answer questions, answer their own questions, and to.

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Patrice Valentine: To get as much information as they can before they actually pick up the phone and call you.

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Patrice Valentine: And then make sure that that call to action, that next step, is frictionless. We want to make that as easy as possible.

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Patrice Valentine: Okay, at this time, I want to see if there are any questions that I can answer. I know I went through that pretty quickly, but it's all… this information is fairly…

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Patrice Valentine: uh… I think when people are looking at AI and making my website AI ready, there's a lot of different people saying, you know, you have to add all of this different stuff, and we're gonna… we're gonna talk about some of it, so next week, when we look at what's coming up, it's.

00:26:06.000 --> 00:26:16.000
Patrice Valentine: Uh, a whole webinar about Schema and what that means, and that might be one of the more technical webinars that we do, but also a very important thing to understand.

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Patrice Valentine: Um, so we're gonna take a look at Schema.

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Patrice Valentine: Uh, but the stuff that we've covered today, not very technical. It's really just talking about your users and making sure that.

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Patrice Valentine: If they come to your website, they get their questions answered, and they're able to do that next step.

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Patrice Valentine: And again, if it's good for your user, it's going to be good for AI. The more information you can empower your user with, the more information AI is going to be able to pull and feel empowered to pull your information into those AI overviews as well.

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Patrice Valentine: I don't see any questions coming in.

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Patrice Valentine: Let me take a look here.

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Patrice Valentine: No questions yet.

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Patrice Valentine: So that's it for today. Again, we will have our next weekly Wednesday webinar on the 11th, and that one's going to be, again, Schema without the headache.

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Patrice Valentine: It's gonna be… it'll be… it'll be a fun one. If you don't know anything about Schema, it'll be a good one to drop in on. Again, I will do a quick session just like this, where we talk through what Schema even is.

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Patrice Valentine: why it's important, how you can check and see if it's on your website, and if it's done correctly. So, join us next week. If you have any questions, if you want to go download the PDF from today's presentation.

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Patrice Valentine: Again, I'll put that back up on the screen here.

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Patrice Valentine: it's ProFusionWebsolutions.com slash AI ready Website Foundation.

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Patrice Valentine: Thanks so much for being here, and I look forward to seeing you next week.