Could an AI chatbot, trained on your content, help your website visitors?

Let's talk about something that's creating a new way to interact with websites: AI chatbots. They aren’t a replacement for customer service and sales people but they can help take care of the typical and routine issues, especially on ecommerce websites where the product information is often published in detail but may be hard to find.

We'll use Chatbase as an example to show you what's possible. There’s lots of other options but what we will not do is just connect the website to ChatGPT and hope for the best. Ideally we want the chatbot to stick to its topic area!

AI chatbots are like digital assistants that can chat with your customers 24/7. They can handle routine questions and reduce emails and support requests. The dream of having someone always ready to help your customers, even when you're sleeping is within reach… maybe.

Chatbase makes it easy to create a chatbot tailored to your business. You can train it using your website content, FAQs, or other information you want it to know. Training the bot is the process of ingesting and indexing the text which then forms the basis for the answers it can give. That could be the pages of your website, technical documentation, MSDS or pages about pricing, warranty etc.

A reasonable concern is that an AI can be run off the rails and start answering all sorts of weird and wonderful questions. There’s no absolute guarantee that it can’t be made to say something silly but it is configured to minimise out of context responses and to refer back to the text you trained it on for each message.

For example, if i ask the Jezweb bot, is cheese blue, why are pineapples spikey…

Event with repeated poking with non tech related questions it keeps pushing back.

Here are some common types of training materials you can utilise:

1. FAQs: Compile frequently asked questions and their answers.
   

2. Website Content: Use text from your website, including product descriptions, service details, or any other published text like blog posts.
   

3. User Manuals and Guides: Product manuals or user guide can be uploaded to help with specific product or technical queries.
   

4. Other Documents: IScripts, guidelines or processes about your business these can help the bots knowledge and tone.
   

5. Notion Databases: Easy to edit and keep updated, link Notion to Chatbase.

Instead of relying on whatever knowledge the Large Language Model (LLM) has you are training it on text created by / for your business with information specific to your products, services, team, advice, pricing etc that you wish to upload.

A chat bot like Chatbase can potentially help with:

1. Answering customer questions

2. Collecting leads and enquiries

3. Advising on product / service options

Chatbots aren't perfect. They might misunderstand complex questions or lack the human touch in certain situations. It's important to find the right balance between AI assistance and personal interaction and it may be they just help outside of the usual customer service hours when staff are available.

In the Chatbase dashboard there is a history kept of the interactions so that you could review what people are asking the chatbot and add new content and optimise the responses if you see it has a knoweldge gap.

Want to give it a try? Start small.

Set up a chatbot to handle your most common customer queries. Give it your website content and some product or service documents to train on.

See how it goes, and adjust as needed.

AI chatbots are tools to enhance your customer service, not replace it entirely.

Have you tried using an AI chatbot?

I'd love to hear about your experience! Whart platform did you use? Why?

If you’d like us to help build a chatbot for your website let me know.

Recent Website Launch

Hunter Region Botanic Gardens
www.huntergardens.org.au

🌿 Introducing the New Hunter Region Botanic Gardens Website! 🌿
I’m happy to share the new website we’ve built for the Hunter Region Botanic Gardens. Our goal was to create a site that showcases the beauty of the Gardens while making it easy for visitors to find information and plan their day.

Whether it’s exploring the grounds, attending a workshop, or grabbing a coffee at the Kookaburra Café, the new site is designed to make the visitor experience seamless.

Here are a few key features we’re proud of:

• Stunning Visuals: The homepage features a nature-inspired hero image and beautiful photography throughout provided by Kevin Stokes, capturing the lush greenery of the Gardens.
  

• Google Map: Visitors can locate the Gardens and plan their route with the integrated Google Map. This will be even more important with the upcoming changes to the roads around the M1 Motorway extension to Raymond Terrace.
  

• Upcoming Events Section: Colourful, easy-to-read highlights of workshops and special activities give visitors a clear view of what’s happening.
  

• Kookaburra Café Spotlight: A dedicated section highlights the café’s fresh menu and relaxed atmosphere, perfect for a break during a visit.

Lachlan and Karen worked with the team at the gardens to understand what they and prospective visitors would be looking for and created the site accordingly.🌱

Jezweb Website Refresh

We switched over to a new look for our main website, www.jezweb.com.au just in time for 2025 after working on draft ideas for months. The team and I super happy with how it’s looking and we’re turning our attention next to making the help section easier to navigate and search, updating our how to guides and configuring a help chatbot.

Aside from the design we optimised the text for humans AND Google and check that we are accurately describing the services we are focusing on: website design, web development, website hosting and search optimisation.

Google Core Algorithm Updates

A few impressions of the Google Core Updates in November and December:

• Google is targeting obvious, subjective, or fluff content that lacks clear, precise info and may confuse or be unhelpful to readers.

• Local backlinks appear to hold more weight than random blog sites.

• The December update is making rankings move a lot both up and down. Full roll-out might take up to a month, similar to November's update.

We’ve seen gains with updating and refreshing blog content recently, but this new update is impacting rankings again. Google seems to be detecting AI-style patterns like repetitive info, excessive colons/bullet points, predictable or patterned content. We’re monitoring closely to adapt. Our recommendation about what to do with your website text is to revise it periodically, make sure it is concise, meaningful and aligned with the topics and purpose of your business, in a tone that speaks to your customers in a natural language format. Don’t go overboard with adjectives and reiteration.

Definitely do not shovel paragraphs of generic ChatGPT content onto your site!

The November update had a lot to do with site reputation abuse which isn’t something that a business website would usually do but consider it a reminder to keep your website on the topics that Google trusts you to know about.

Site reputation abuse as Google defines it involves having pages on a site that manipulate search rankings by exploiting the site's authority. Examples include irrelevant pages like payday loan reviews on an educational site, supplement reviews on a sporting website or casino topics on a medical site. A lot of that content was created with the intention of getting affiliate revenue, à la cash for comment.

This practice violates Google's policies, they are specifically targeting blog networks and high-ranking sites with content unrelated to the websites main topics. Avoid publishing unrelated third-party content to stay compliant. Like it or not this is how Google’s brightest engineers are trying to keep Google relevant in the AI age.

Thank you Julie!

Got a question? Hit reply and let us know.

PS. Need a nice gift for your clients in 2025? We can get a box of 100 designed, full colour printed, stitched, stubby holders delivered to you for $390+GST.