Ep 143 - Navigating AI in Website Design: The Future of Smarter and More Personalized Sites with Greg Merrilees

Speaker A: Your target audience is a little bit warmer because they've been. They built trust on other platforms. They come to your website. You really just have to give them a pathway that suits them. So it still might mean segmenting based on their intent. Whether that's a different offer, different type of lead magnet might be somewhere down the funnel. Not just a cold. Lead magnet might be more like an interactive tool to build more trust in your brand and then just to book a call. If it's E commerce, to literally buy, you know, it's just changed the way people find your website and I think that's important. But if you're an established business, then you need to understand the principles as to why people would convert. Because if you're getting less traffic on your website, like a lot of people are finding these days, they usually get it a 30% drop because people just search in LLMs. Then when people come to your website, it needs to be designed with the, uh, principles to help it convert better. Welcome to the SEO Leverage podcast where

Speaker B: we talk about search, marketing and conversions. Welcome back to SEO Leverage, here today with my friend Greg Merrilies from Studio One Design. Welcome, Greg.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. Yeah, great to be back. It's been a while since, uh.

Speaker B: It's been a while. It's been a while. I was taking, I think it was episode two when you came to the fish to the podcast for the first time. Great. Daniel. Uh, yeah, there was another one again. And now I'm really happy to have you. Happy to have you back because I just have your new book here, which you kindly sent over. I really appreciate it. It made all the way to Madrid in Spain here, uh, next level website design. So, first of all, congrats on this book. I've spent a few days with it, really getting into it, reading all the case studies, and I think it's not easy to find a book where you get like the theory and then so many different examples actually applying those concepts and those strategies, etc. So I think you have done an amazing job with that.

Speaker A: Thank you. Yeah, I wanted to have some practical examples to. Yeah, because theory is just so boring, you know. So every one of the chapters starts with a story and, you know, the personal connection with that client, how I first met them and then what they went through as well. And then it leads into the lessons that everybody can take from how we helped, you know, improve their results. So, yeah, it's, uh, certainly not smooth sailing for anybody, but there's. And it's all based on the principles in the book. So even with AI obviously taking over the way, you know, websites are created these days, um, if it's not based on the fundamentals that you can get from the book, then you know, it'll never get you great results.

Speaker B: This is an excellent point because it feels like we have everything at our fingertips right now. Right. Everybody's starting out online and they have watched a lot of YouTube videos from woodworkers and handyman starting their own small businesses, etc. And they say, yeah, just use AI to build your landing page and do some vibe coding and do some I don't know what, you don't need anybody. You can do this all on your own. And I've been doing my fair share of website development and programming, et cetera. And kudos to every woodworker who suddenly starts figuring out those kinds of things. How do you advise clients that feel they can do it everything on their own? With you having 25 years of experience, 2000 websites built, as I've read, just impressive on its own. How do you, how do you, what's the conversation like with, with clients like that?

Speaker A: It depends on how uh, like how new their business is. Have they tested everything? Have they tested their offers, their lead magnets, their funnels, how established is their business, how much content do they have on their website? And so if, if it's a brand new business, then use AI, use uh, one of those vibe coding tools like Replit or Cursor and there's a whole ton out there that can just quickly turn your idea into a coded web page. That's fine. And there's a lot of template websites that has been template websites for years right now. And that's fine if you're starting out to test your offers. And what I would say though, if you are an established business and you've already, you know, spent years building content that's getting found in Google and you know, other platforms are now getting found in AI because you do it all that work in for Google search. Obviously there's a lot of nuances that are different for being found in AI, but the point is if you have a thousand page website, don't just replace it with an AI created website because it's not going to get you the results that you've already built up over time. So that's when, if you follow, you know, just some basic principles on which is all about, you know, this book's called Next level Website Design. But it's really about the psychological drivers and the brand positioning which is super important in A world of AI, how to position yourself differently, you know, from your competitors and, and all that. But yeah, that's when it's time to think, right? Apply the principles and hire a, uh, designer or an agency that understands the principles and can get you and maintain the results you're getting, but get you better results because the traffic has also shifted these days. So it used to be that, you know, your website was the first place where people go to check you out. Now it's all these other platforms online, from social media to Reddit to YouTube and they've, this point, when they've come to your website, they're generally a little bit warmer. The only time they won't be is if they do. If your website does get found in an AI LLM search engine, then they still may be cold. However, they trust that AI tool that sent your website to your prospects. So therefore they're generally warmer. So when it comes to your website, you still need to cater to cold traffic. And that's where, you know, we can even talk gerd about blog posts and podcast layouts and things like that. And then the next step in the funnel. But generally speaking, if your target audience is a little bit warmer because they've been, they built trust on, you know, other platforms, they come to your website, you really just have to give them a pathway that suits them. So it still might mean segmenting based on their intent, whether that's a different offer, different type of lead magnet might be, you know, somewhere down the funnel. Not just a cold lead magnet, might be more like an interactive tool, um, to build more trust in your brand and then just to book a call if it's E commerce, to literally buy, you know. So, um, yeah, it's just changed the way people find your website and I think that's important. But yeah, if you're an established business, then you need to understand the principles as to why people would convert. Because if you're getting less traffic on your website, like a lot of people are finding these days, uh, they usually get it a 30% drop because, you know, people just searching LLMs. Then when people come to your website, it needs to be designed with the principles to help it convert better.

Speaker B: Lots of, lots of interesting points here. I think you pretty much laid out the agenda for today's call. Um, so definitely one thing I try to establish because at this Stage, end of October 2025, AI is definitely like the big, big hype. What do we try to do when we talk to E commerce sites especially? Uh, we try to really analyze their current situation. And the current situation very often is just that we are talking about 1, 2% of the overall impact of revenue of traffic. I think 5% is the highest I've seen so far. So we always try to really analyze what kind of audience do we have, how tech savvy are there? Um, I've got clients here in Spain that haven't opened ChatGpt so far. They still work pretty much if nothing had happened. Which is very funny because for me it's pretty much 80% of my work impacted somehow by AI. But there are still those people in the Same way as 20 years after it started we were still explaining remarketing to companies. They're like, we have those different shifts definitely based on industries, age groups, etc. But it is interest all coming down to the intent. Right? So we, we see this with E commerce. One of the safest bets with E commerce was pretty much putting out like ultimate buyers guides or something like that where you would have like top of funnel, somebody is interested in, I don't know which tool or which widget or whatever. And you, you kind of give them all the information they could ever uh, ever wish for and pretty much put up and like an ebook on um, on a huge article. And now we are down to very, very bottom of funnel. This versus that, this brand versus that brand. Where can I buy three for the price of one or whatever. Like all bottom of funnel. The quality is better though. So it's interesting how this obviously shifts. The volumes are not the same. Volume calculation hardly makes any sense. It's all um, coming back to the principle which is why I like the structure of your book so much because it's really having so much more than website design. I mean knowing you and hearing that you published a book, I was expecting like the four from A to Z design kind of thing. And then I find things like copywriting and strategy and positioning and all those funny things. And it's really interesting how the parallel then in my day to day work these days is really that people are more interested in those things again. So they come back to marketing and suddenly it actually pays off to have been in marketing for 20 years because you don't know only SEO, but you also have an idea about positioning and about market research and about messaging and copywriting etc. So this all seems to be coming back. So I think now it's really more important than ever to work with the professional.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more. Obviously it's what we do. So I'm Biased. But even if you um, look, you could do the website yourself with AI helping you and this will give you some pretty good frameworks to think about to prompt AI essentially. Um, and I've also got an uh, interactive uh, author. It's me. Basically the whole book's uploaded to, you know, to this interactive author and it's got some guardrails around it. But it's essentially going to help you, you know, redesign your entire website from the copyright into the paid structures to the funnels to the lead magnet suggestions like it'll give you everything. So that's certainly, if you are thinking about doing it yourself, just go to next levelwebsitedesign.com forward/free and yeah, get the AI interactive author. There's a whole bunch of other tools in there as well. But um, yeah, definitely check out.

Speaker B: What do you think is one of the things that established E commerce sites in particular um, are getting wrong? When you check out E commerce sites and you analyze them for potential redesign, what kind of things do you see where they say hey, this is definitely a no go these days.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I think thinking about their intent once again, um, I would say like if you think about most E commerce websites send paid traffic to, to their website, right. So if, if they do an organic uh, SEO and they get found in organic, that's great. But a lot of people just send paid traffic to. It might be a category or, or you know, an individual product which is great. Um, the problem is people don't know everything else about your brand. Right. So I feel like those short little product pages are ah, just not enough information to give people to, to convert. So obviously there is a pretty standard structure on a E commerce product page where you have you know, some images at the top, uh, or video, et cetera, you have the description for you know, getting found in search, you have some, the five star rating, you have some bullets, you have the pricing, you have you know, maybe payment options and you have the call to action and you know, there might be a subscribe and save type of auction, that type of thing but then under that it kind of falls away generally speaking, but above the fold that's you know, pretty standard best practice. Right. So what I recommend and the problem that I see is that most people don't have anything else below the fold, maybe testimonials and that's great. Right. But underneath that there's no other reason to choose you over your competitors. So that's why you need to have a section, you know, why choose us and what is unique about our offer? And there's so many more things that you could unpack, um, on that page. For people that haven't converted above the fold because we can't, we don't want them to pogo stick over the entire website. Uh, we just want them to convert on that page. And so the other thing is when you do have a big long scrolling, uh, product page, obviously you don't want to have it too long, but you want just enough information for them to choose you. But then you have a sticky call to action in the footer so that when they're scrolling they can still purchase, you know, as soon as they decide they're ready so they don't have to scroll back up. So they're just a few little tips. But yeah, ah, I feel like that's the biggest problem. People don't have enough information on their product pages.

Speaker B: This is really, really something that we also see with AI now where it's all about context. Right. So you can obviously have your name and your, uh, product name and a few images, etc. But really what does a conversation look like where your product should be recommended? So we really try to get a lot of use cases up on product pages these days. We try to have real usage pictures, um, I don't know, testimonials like you said, but the ones that actually give some context about how they actually used it, etc. So it's really fascinating how people really think it's just name plus price equals sale. And it reminds me actually of like the last time I went to an electronic store physically. I asked the sales rep to compare two products for me and he would just go there and read the labels to me and he would say the name and three characteristics and the price and then the other product. And again reading for me the name and the characteristics and the price. And this is how very often product pages are structured.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: It's just a standard template. They just went with it. Don't want to pay too much attention to the individual product. And it's just this crappy sales rep. You have a store, but you have a crappy sales rep. And for me it's always the product page like your sales rep that actually needs to pull off the sale. And now it's your sales rep that also informs AI about why your product is the right solution for a particular use case.

Speaker A: Yeah, and also people will be, you know, comparing, they'll compare you to other brands that they find as well. So why not put a comparison chart on those Product pages, why they should choose your brand over uh, your competitors. For instance, they don't name your competitors, but it might be a competitive type of product or solution. You know, it might be a totally different type of product but it still gets the same result. So just, yeah, let people know why they should choose you. But then also I think you touched on it before ugc. So user generated content. Don't just have testimonials or reviews like show people interacting with your product and put that on the product page as well. Uh, so yeah, there's so many things you can do to give people reasons to buy to choose your solution.

Speaker B: We've been doing a lot of work with Ezra Firestone and always looking at his latest templates he figured out with his A B testing and stuff like that and just saw him in Barcelona on a conference as well, talked a little bit with him and he was like all about the buy box, obviously talking all about the buy box and the buy box needs all those decision factors. But then when you look at his uh, websites obviously, I mean this is a long, it's a huge broad page. So much testimony, so much proof, so much uh, social proof obviously, but also so many use cases and additional information, etc. It's like this. Every product page he's got is like a landing page that could stand on its own.

Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. I just want to say Ezra Firestone is an absolute legend. That's where we, that's where I cut my teeth on, on e, uh commerce. We were his, uh, his white label design team for about five years.

Speaker B: I didn't know that.

Speaker A: Yeah, when he first started, um, yeah, his agency, uh, obviously Smart Marketer, you know, has changed a lot over the years. It's uh, more an education business now. Back in the day he used to white label us to provide E, uh commerce websites to. Cool.

Speaker B: I didn't know that.

Speaker A: I learned so much from Ezra. Uh, like he just doesn't hold back. And yeah, I watch all of his presentations since then as well and he had me speak at his event, uh, you know, in San Diego about six, seven years ago now. But yeah, legend. And yeah, that's where we learn everything from Ezra. So his stuff works.

Speaker B: That's really great. Yeah, we learn a lot as well. We're always tweaking our SOPs based on the latest, latest tests he's been running. And he obviously does this at scale where it really makes sense to draw some conclusions. One thing that I see very often though is that people kind of compare their own store to like the big guys. I mean you have an example about Amazon in your book, for example. I would like you to talk a little bit. I very often. And this also happens with us in SEO. Not only design or layout wise, it happens with us in SEO. They say, look, this is what Amazon does. I want to do the same thing. And I'm always like, the automatic answer is you're not Amazon. Right. So a few things change here. Why wouldn't you design like a normal Shopify site, um, for a mid sized Shopify brand? Like an Amazon sales page?

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, it's because they have an audience that trusts their brand. If you're a challenger brand and you're not known at all, then you can't expect to get, you know, if you put the same type of design, uh, up as Amazon, you can't expect to get the same type of results because you're an unknown brand. And it means you're going to have a thousand different options on there and it's going to dilute your conversions of the thing that you want to sell. All right, so it's just confusing people. But yeah, there's obviously a lot of split testing that I do. But it's because their audience trusts their brand and that's the biggest difference. So if you're a challenger brand, you have to give uh, people reasons to choose you over your competitors and over Amazon as well. That comes back to all the things we said just previously where you need to prove that you are the trusted authority and the expert at what you do and give people reasons to choose you over your competitors.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Uh, makes a lot of sense. I mean, one thing we also mentioned is that Amazon is pretty much a search engine. So people don't see it like that. But Amazon is a search engine. So most of the product searches, people searching to buy something right now, they open up Amazon, they don't even open up. Google tries to get close to it with the layout and their sidebar and the navigation, etc. But people try just go, if you want a video, you go to YouTube, you want a product, you go to Amazon. I think most users of different ages have uh, gotten to this point right now. So we definitely need to make sure we differentiate here. Uh, one thing that's really, uh, interesting for me, for example, what we do in terms of assessing E commerce sites is that we pretty much have a revenue leak calculator. So we say, okay, there is something wrong on this website. Let's actually assess what this means in terms of revenue losses and then assess the revenue leaks and say okay, in which order do we want to approach them? And one of those leaks is definitely in terms of bounce rates, also conversion rate. What kind of, what kind of impact do you see in E commerce for example, with uh, a proper design from a standard template? It might be a Shopify standard template or woocommerce to actually something that's custom where there's more work behind presenting the product in the context, et cetera.

Speaker A: Yeah, even Shopify templates can uh, be very conversion focused initially. But nobody knows how your particular audience is going to use your particular website. Right. So that's why we do the same sort of thing. We have a conversion optimization service. So if somebody new comes to us for E commerce, we're not just going to use best practice, we're going to put heat maps and uh, you know, and user uh, behavior, uh, watch every video of people using their website and then potentially even to survey their audience or have user polls on checkout pages and you know, thank you pages to figure out why they chose you essentially. And so there's a whole lot of data that we need to gather uh, before we do a redesign. And that is a crucial piece. So in other words we don't exactly know there's best practices. Sure. And I think one of the um, best practices that's often overlooked is obviously a lot of um, website traffic goes to mobile, uh, instead of the desktop. So there's a lot you can do on mobile to get it to load fast but also to maintain conversions. But then the missing piece that I always see is the hamburger menu, like the dropdown on mobile. Um, often people just replicate what's on their actual um, desktop. But that's not always how people use the mobile menu. They're just looking for best sellers and you know, things that are uh, you figure out quickly if you put some heat maps on there where people are clicking and where they're getting stuck. But based on that behavior, we'll rearrange that top navigation to suit how people have been using the website. And we put social proof in there as well. Like so it's almost like a mini sales page but in a very condensed uh, mobile menu drop down. So yeah, that's something that I feel like is a massive opportunity where we've seen massive lifts just by making those type of changes.

Speaker B: M. It goes back to intent I guess. Right. Where the intent on the mobile is different than on the desktop when we see this in search as well. So Google is going to act differently on a mobile phone search Results page than on a desktop search results page. And they are going to mix different components in their search results. Results just based on intent that might lie behind the keyword behind it, depending on the user location. Tons of personalization, obviously coming in. There is personalization something in design that's actually something that's coming up.

Speaker A: Yes. So, uh, more so, uh, I mean you could use like we're using Delphi, which is an AI interactive tool where, um, you know, people can figure out whatever they want as far as they can ask me anything, basically on Studio One's website where it'll help, it's trained to help guide them to the right service or lead magnet that's right for them, but it'll also give them help on their actual website and give them advice and things like that. So to me that's very personal. Right. But then apart from that, sure, you can do the same thing on an E commerce website. Have a, like a Delphi or an AI chat bubble, something like that. We've got a whole page dedicated to it. But then, um, realistically, like personalization, sure. Uh, there's different platforms and different plugins that you can use based on if people are a repeat visitor, then you can change the content or you can welcome, if they're a past customer as well, uh, welcome them by their first name and things like that and offer things that are relevant to them. Obviously, uh, Amazon are very, very good at personalizing things. Right. But you do need to be logged in as a past customer for them to really tailor the content to your preferences and what they want you to see. Right. So you buy more. But yes, but if you're a cold visitor, it's really quite difficult. So. Yeah, I mean, even on, um, let's say on, you know, one of our funnels, we have people to book a call that we ask them a series of questions. But the first question is, what is your first name? And then, you know, I get on the next question, um, you know, thanks. And then what's your website? And blah, blah, blah. And so every question from that point is going to address you by your first name and it just feels more personal. So it's little, uh, personalization tricks that you can do like that that really help boost conversions because people feel like, oh, he knows my name, definitely.

Speaker B: That's a great element, obviously that, um, directly addressing people. I mean, one thing that's expected, apparently I've heard this from different ends and I find, I think it can obviously be we're changing user behavior. Right. So the way how we interact with platforms changes. Like you said a website. We might only visit a website when we already know the brand and we have interacted with them, um, on socials maybe or we have heard about them on AI chats, etc. So our entire behavior changes. But it feels like personalization online is just getting to a level where we just expect it. So I go to TikTok and I see my woodworking videos, right. I don't have to ask for them, I don't have to search for them. They know that a certain time of the day I'm more interested in woodworking. And at a certain time of the day I'm more interested in marketing topics, for example. So the question is there a way where you come to a website and uh, the system might just know your preferences or they might just show things in a different way? I mean I remember when I was a web developer, uh, what was this, 15, 20 years ago? We were spending hundreds of hours trying to figure out the personalization and personal recommendations just based on certain characteristics. But this was like I said, 20 years ago. Interestingly, it hasn't come to a point where say there would be tons and tons of plugins or standard extensions right now that people would use. Apparently it wasn't worth it, I guess, or it was not possible to an extent. I just wonder if we are going to expect a completely personalized experience at some point.

Speaker A: Look, I think so. And that's why I sort of led with um, the AI interactive tool. Because sure, if people are a past customer and they, they're logged into your website, then you can do a lot of personalization based on that. But if they're a brand new visitor and they've never been to your website before, then the best way to personalize their experience is to have that AI chat with them to help direct them and then if they come back to your website later, it will remember that conversation with the AI tools. Yeah. So to me that's like the next best thing for people that aren't actual, uh, you know, past customers. Because it's, it's very difficult unless uh, unless you've got their login details and they're logged in to personalize a website for them.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean even social media platforms need to Show People like 20 different reels in order to, or short videos to figure out what they, what they might be interested in. So you need to do the choosing at some point, right?

Speaker A: Yeah. And all those platforms, you're logged in, Netflix, you're logged in like it's all going to be personalized based on the fact that you have an account and a history with.

Speaker B: Yeah, and the history especially. Yeah, the history especially. Uh, that's great. Yeah. Let me, let me, uh, try to wrap things up. So we obviously see AI definitely a good option, uh, for new brands. Testing the waters, testing their offer, making sure they get some initial traction. Uh, if I understand you correctly, at some point, obviously we need to take one more step and start looking at the data. Check your scroll maps to your heat maps, check the user behavior. What do people actually do with your website? Because this then gives you an entry point to actually close some revenue leaks, find some additional potential increased conversion rates. Talked about product pages being more landing page, like more with more context, um, use cases and more details about the product as well. Um, where do you think an established E commerce site should see the roadmap? M where they say, okay, we think we never look too much into design. We get tons of those, those Shopify sites. Right. At some point when we pressed down the template, tweaked it a little bit, are making decent sales, maybe through social ads, etc. Where would they start to take like the next step and say, okay, let's double down on design and see if we can get our conversion rate up?

Speaker A: Yeah. I think it's important to constantly review your marketplace and your competitors because if you find like your sales are, uh, dropping, you might be building as you're building your brand, but then they may plateau or something like that and you may be going for a few years. Generally it takes a few years for an E commerce business to, you know, make some decent traction. And so at that point, review your marketplace and your competitors and figure out what they're doing. And if you can figure out what you think they're doing, well, and this is where I would use AI tools as well to, you know, an LLM to review and figure out what they're doing, uh, well, and then figure out what your point of difference is and just review your own website from the perspective of how is your brand positioned compared to your competitors and do you stand out enough because you really need to be, you know, memorable these days. Not just the look and feel, but the messaging, uh, everything needs to resonate with that target audience in a way that you will be more memorable if you stand out in certain ways. So figure out what's unique about your business is what I'm trying to say, and then put that in lights and put that all over, not just your website, but all of the platforms. That lead people to your website. Um, so, yeah, and then look, I would say generally speaking, if you are, you know, making you gone m from seven figures to eight figures, um, keep. I, uh, would definitely review your website, keep what's working and if you can figure that out from all of your, uh, your data, but then potentially do a redesign. But be careful if you do a redesign because you may alienate existing visitors. So you may want to update the design but not completely reinvent it. So it's unrecognizable.

Speaker B: That's a big, big element. We, we try to recommend. I remember one guy came in and he wanted to kind of completely relaunch the website and it was like a really risky situation. I was like, let's, let's do the header first. And he actually got pretty much his goals. But just the header redesign, it was obviously very, very, uh, cost effective. It was very quick. He had like in two weeks, two weeks later, he had like a completely new look and feel, but was able to preserve for us. It was important to preserve his rankings. Obviously with the redesign you never know how users are going to react. But those iterative changes I think are really something we have been able to prove time and again to be like the uh, recommended path of action where it's just, uh, make small tweaks, see if. Does this do anything? Does this, uh, are things still at least as good as they were before and not dropping. Otherwise we can just undo a small change and just iteratively test your way through this.

Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. Very important with E Commerce. Yeah. Um, awesome. And yeah, just remember your website is never finished. So even if you do a full redesign, look at the user behavior and your analytics and your metrics, your sales, your leads, etc. Um, and then m make tweaks based on the data that you're observing.

Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you so much. Greg Merrillis Next level Website design is your new book. Definitely highly recommended. What's the best way to get in touch with you and your team?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean, go to nextlevelwebsitedesign.comm if you want to check out the book. That'll take you directly to Amazon. Uh, but yeah, if you want to have a chat with me, look, uh, @studioundesign.com uh, have a look at our folio, uh, our services, and then you can reach out to me, GregTudioInDesign.com if you have any questions.

Speaker B: Awesome. Uh, m. Thank you. As usual, this podcast is going to be over@seoleverage.com podcast where we're going to link to these sources and obviously the book. Thank you so much for taking the time, Greg.

Speaker A: Pleasure. Thank you, Ger. Thank you.