2023 saw an explosion of AI usage for content generation and marketing in the SME sector. Before we jumped in, we spent time listening to customers to learn how AI might assist them in their day-to-day business activities. 

We firmly believe there is a great opportunity for small businesses to harness AI but also believe there are many risks in adopting AI badly. 

So our story began with a frank discussion on challenges around merchandising for SDS London. We explored how AI might play an assistive role in some areas. 

"AI has allowed us to improve content quality and new processes, helping us divert resources to other areas of the business. We've also seen a solid improvement in organic ranking and traffic in 2023."

Simon Ayers, SDS London

Working in the Ironmongery sector, SDS London have some pretty complex and technical products, paying close attention to that data is key for consumer confidence and upholding their reputation as a leader. This was a great opportunity for us to see how AI could assist in certain areas which might lack the time and attention required to drive online traffic.

Starting Simple - SEO synopsis

We noticed that historically the client had been ill-informed, loading keywords into Meta Descriptions with poor grammar and repetition. This was a great place to start. We produced a lightweight Magento extension which could be fed technical product information along with a concise directive to write a compelling summary which would suit the Meta Description field. 

Creating alternative summaries or abbreviated versions is a fantastic way to have AI assist merchandising teams to take core content and produce suitably edited variations for different purposes.

"We see tremendous opportunities to further utilize AI to improve our position of leadership in the instrustry and are looking forward to working closely with ZERO-1 to exploit this."

Simon Ayers, SDS London

The result

As a result of this tight agency/merchant relationship we have been able to produce a powerful yet simple extension which can be configured and directed to populate any product or category content under certain conditions. Many of our other customers are now taking advantage of this and we continue to improve the functionality.