Our client
One of our clients has a large number of products it offers to customers and these are managed through a PIMS (Product Information Management System). Of course, this is true of many businesses – whether they offer a suite of products or a variety of services.
A PIMS holds the ‘super set’ of information about any product or service a company might offer. For instance, a retailer might have a tee-shirt listed online. A potential customer will be able to see the information they need, such as a photo, the colour, the size and the price. But, the PIMS will list everything the retailer needs about that tee-shirt, including stock levels, the supplier and any associated costs.
The challenge
The list of products this particular client offers are updated on a regular basis and it’s key that all of the associated information surrounding each product is listed on the organisation’s website, so clients can find the one that suits them best. While some visitors will hop on the website and look under the relevant section, we know that many will also use Google to search for what they are looking for.
As the web developer, we are required to not only surface all this content but also share the SEO Metadata associated with each product. The clients PIMS system had all of the product data already setup, however the SEO Metadata was not yet curated for all of their products. It’s a time-consuming project for either our client to create this content and they needed a solution to get to market in a reasonable time frame.
Why is SEO Metadata so important?
SEO Metadata is required so each service or product on a website can be easily identified and ranked by Google. Put simply, Metadata is ‘data that provides information about other data’ and, in this case, it needed to be a brief explanation about each of the products our client offers.
SEO Metadata helps search engines understand the content of a webpage and influences how that page appears in search results. It also provides a quick to read description of that page for anyone searching on the Internet.
Here are some other reasons why Metadata is important:
• It improves click-through rates: A well-crafted title tag and meta description can make your page more appealing in search results, encouraging users to click on it.
• It helps search engines understand content: Metadata, such as title tags, meta descriptions and structured data, provides context to search engines, improving indexing and ranking.
• It boosts rankings: While Metadata alone won’t skyrocket your rankings, relevant keywords in title tags and descriptions can positively influence your page’s position in search results.
• It enhances social sharing: When shared on social media, platforms use Metadata to display rich previews and this increases engagement.
• It supports accessibility: Metadata like alt text for images helps visually impaired users understand content through screen readers, improving user experience.
Our solution
As an Umbraco Silver Partner, we at Lake Solutions have been supporting this client with its website for a number of years and we knew we could extend Umbraco to provide a solution utilising AI.
To save vital time, we were able to use AI – integrated with Umbraco – to create SEO Metadata for all the products our client needed to list on its website en masse. This was a much more efficient and faster way of doing this, than creating each piece of Metadata ‘by hand’.
That said, while the Metadata is created almost straightaway as with any interaction with AI, it isn’t perfect – but it is a starting point. After that, over time, our client will finetune the words, to make them more appropriate for each product. But, this is a much easier job to do, than starting from scratch and the Metadata is there doing its job straightaway.
The AI that was utilised is a Large Language Model (LLM), a type of AI that excels at processing, understanding and generating human language, trained on vast amounts of text data using deep learning techniques.
This project has been a real success story for our client and for Lake Solutions – as we have been able to support them in creating Metadata for not only their current products but their back catalogue of product as well (those which have lapsed etc). And this has been achieved so much quicker than doing it manually. We also know that having good Metadata in place quickly has vastly improved the search rankings for our client.
For us at Lake Solutions, this is another example of how we have the technological expertise to make websites work better for our clients and how we work with the tools provided by Umbraco alongside cutting edge technologies to make that happen.
If you want to talk to us about how we can help your website to perform better, contact Lake Solutions today: 0203 397 3222.