Episode 186 · May 31, 2025 · with Jason Sierra
Jason Sierra of Jason Sierra Design on how AI rewrote his workflow, why organic traffic is cratering under Google’s AI results, and why a website is an operational expense, not a marketing one.
The episode
Jason Sierra has spent close to fifteen years designing and building websites, and he told Nick Constantino that the last twelve months changed his workflow more than the previous decade combined. Sierra is both designer and developer, and his clients almost never want to write their own content, so he now coaches them through AI prompts to generate copy he can shape rather than hiring a copywriter for tens of thousands of dollars. The tool that once felt like a threat to his business became the thing that let him serve more clients at his existing price point.
Nick built his own case study inside the conversation: he found the podcast’s growth by treating AI as an SEO research partner rather than a content generator, running roughly 300 iterations on a single prompt before he landed on the phrasing that actually surfaced good topics. His conclusion, echoed by Sierra, is that AI has no patience for whimsy. It wants a clear definition of the business and the audience, not adjectives and emotion, and the marketers getting real value from it are the ones who learned to have an actual conversation with the machine instead of demanding a magic answer on the first try.
The harder subject was what AI is doing to search itself. Sierra cited a claim making the rounds that AI-driven search results have cut organic traffic to some sites by as much as 95%, as Google increasingly answers the query itself instead of sending a click through. His response was to stop chasing content-volume SEO years ago and refocus clients on the fundamentals that still move the needle for a human visitor: a complete, consistent Google Business Profile, real reviews, and a site built around Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework, where the business is the guide solving the customer’s problem rather than the hero listing its own credentials.
Both men agreed the most common failure is simply too much content and not enough clarity. Visitors decide whether to stay in twenty to thirty seconds, and a five-paragraph homepage or a buried call to action loses them before the pitch even starts. Sierra’s fix is persona work: understanding exactly who is landing on the page, in granular and sometimes uncomfortable detail, so the copy, photography and offer speak to one person instead of everyone. He closed with the framing he gives every new client: a website is an operational expense that has to keep working, not a one-time marketing purchase you check off a list.
“I think AI doesn’t like whimsy. It wants a definition of what you’re talking about in the least amount of words possible, or it’s not going to work.”
Nick Constantino
What to take from it
“Websites need to be thought of as operational expenses, not marketing expenses.”
Nick Constantino
In their words
“My clients want to write content, they don’t want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for copywriters, so with all these AI tools available, you can put in prompts and spit out content you can use on your website.”
Jason Sierra
“Brevity, in my opinion, is key for a really successful and effective website.”
Jason Sierra
“I don’t need the traffic to have traffic. I need the traffic to vet out who the right customer is and get them in the store to purchase something.”
Nick Constantino
Questions this episode answers
Welcome to the Marketing MadMen. Nick Constantino here, and I’m with Jason Sierra of Jason Sierra Design, and we’re talking websites today. It’s a broad, overarching topic, so we’re going to approach this like a complete ADD-addled conversation and hopefully some of these snippets help people. Jason, how you doing, man?
Doing awesome, good. Glad to have you here.
So let’s hit it. AI is the buzzword everyone’s talking about. First and foremost, anyone who thinks the machines are taking over, we’re years away from that happening, because it can’t even perform some basic tasks. So besides that, talk about just in the past year, how much AI has changed and what your conversations with clients are like right now.
Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me is that AI has changed the way I run my business. I’m a designer and developer, which is kind of a unique combination, and one thing I don’t do is write content for my clients. My clients want to write content, they don’t want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for copywriters. So with all these AI tools available, you can put in prompts, or use services that coach you through the prompts, and spit out content you can use on your website.
My advice is you’ve got to learn how to write prompts, and the prompt should evolve. You get a good prompt, save it, and don’t share it with anybody, because that prompt has value these days.
Where it’s really changed my workflow is getting content from clients. I’ve been doing this about 15 years, and getting content from clients is the hardest part of my job. If I can coach them through some questions, I can use the answers for the prompts I’ll use for the AI platform I use day to day, and spit out their value proposition, because I’m not a writer. I’m a designer and developer.
About a year ago I had a local meetup group for web designers and developers, and we had this exact conversation about AI. Three months after that meetup, AI had completely changed. There are products now where if I don’t feel like being hands-on with the design, I can go to AI and spit out a wireframe layout for an entire website in minutes.
And in theory you can set up agents that will code that website for you if you give it the right parameters.
I work within the WordPress ecosystem, and I know it well, but for the things I can’t figure out, I can go to AI and say, I need a plugin to do this, this and this, and it’ll spit out code that works within minutes. It’s a tool I use for my clients, and they don’t want to deal with any of this. They just want a website that’s going to convert and be effective.
One of the things I found is that I used AI for this show, to build summaries and topics. My approach was simple: I don’t care about topics that just interest me, I want topics that are good for SEO to make this podcast do well. Once I started reverse-engineering and parameterizing that, plugging it back into Google, the show took off, because I wasn’t guessing anymore. AI doesn’t like whimsy. It wants a definition of what you’re talking about in the least amount of words possible, or it’s not going to work.
It really made my job easier. I’ve got a project right now with the Ian Fleming Foundation, cataloging all the James Bond vehicles, and I was doing research trying to find stock photos I could license. I couldn’t tell the difference between AI-generated images and real ones anymore. It’s not good at spelling, the more words you put on an image the more it screws up, but for photography, it’s gotten so good.
I saw somebody on YouTube say 95% of traffic to websites just tanked, because Google’s AI results are farming that content the way Google used to, but without the influence of advertising dollars. Eventually that changes too, once they figure out how to monetize it.
It’s crazy interesting. I think the biggest part is there doesn’t seem to be people in the middle anymore, either you’re really in the camp of learning how to prompt or you’re not. It took me probably 300 tries to get the prompt I needed for this show to succeed.
It’s a conversation with a machine. You’re saying please, you’re saying I want it a little more this way. And it doesn’t understand emotion. I tried to get more empathy into something and it just sounded fake.
All right, let’s rewind and go practical. You’ve done this about 15 years, so talk about how web design has evolved in waves. First it was just, have a decent website with easy navigation. Then Google became the money maker, so we played Google’s game, that was the SEO era. Now you’re seeing it switch to the AI revolution.
When I started 15 years ago, I’d tell clients you have to have dynamic content, blog three times a week, hit a certain word count, all the things Google was telling us mattered. My clients barely had time to run their business, they weren’t going to write three blogs a week. That evolved into the social-proof model: reviews are really important, Google reviews, local SEO, especially if you have a service area or a physical location.
A lot of that was Google countering fraud too, because people were faking reviews, so they started verifying purchases. Google’s telling you it wants to make search more fair, but what it really means is it wants to make itself more money. Still, I think if you look at it holistically, all Google is trying to figure out is whether you’re worth a damn, whether people actually engage with what you’ve built.
I don’t really care about Google. I care about the person who lands on the site and converting them into a client, because that’s what matters for my clients. I do follow best practices for technical SEO, but I stopped years ago trying to force clients to have content written by an SEO specialist. I ask my clients how people are finding their website. Most of it is direct traffic and referrals, so the question becomes: when they land on your site, are you telling them where to go, what you sell, what the call to action is?
The role I’m in now, you’re talking about a brand that’s been around 40 years, hundreds of thousands of visits. My 30,000-foot view is I want to use e-commerce techniques and tactics, but I want you in the store. You can’t see a diamond sparkle online, and nobody actually understands how diamonds work, so we use e-commerce tactics to bring you to the site but give you just enough to bring you into the store.
I saw a stat recently that a QuickBooks competitor increased sales 20% just by putting testimonials on the homepage. Social proof matters. Most of my clients don’t even have analytics set up, they don’t know what kind of traffic they’re getting.
If you’re not looking for a million customers, it’s easier to ignore the Google stuff, because you’re running on word of mouth. As you design websites, what’s the end goal for your clients? What does success look like to them?
For most of my service-based clients, it’s the initial lead, the initial contact. I had a client, one of the best dietitians in a very competitive area, doing great on local and national media, getting the visits but not the conversions. Her business model has also shifted in the last six to twelve months because of new weight-loss drugs, so we’re rewriting the content and calls to action for the new client she’s actually attracting now.
Most people who come to a website the first time don’t become a lead right away, they have to be moved down the funnel. But most websites just say ‘schedule a free consultation’ once and call it a day. There’s an old attorney, Ray Juche, who gave his cell phone number out on public radio for 40 years and crushed it, because in that moment you don’t need a receptionist or a website, you need him.
Right, and if someone lands on a DUI attorney’s website, they’re freaking out, they have twenty to thirty seconds to feel understood and know how to contact you.
We’ve gotten so distracted by KPIs and metrics that we don’t understand call to action anymore. I’m dealing with a case now where a client is capturing branded search, people already searching the brand’s name by name, and celebrating it like an accomplishment. You’re not achieving anything, that traffic was already coming to you.
That’s why I position myself as wanting the client’s business to actually increase, whatever that metric is. I’m building a website for my own church right now, and our pastor wants to increase attendance by 20% over the next year, so we start with that metric and work backward.
How much money have you spent on quality photography for your business? That’s the real question. I had a restaurant client with a classically trained French chef and amazing food, but iPhone photography on the website and the menu. Hiring a real photographer completely changed his business, because it’s not the phone that’s the problem, it’s the lighting.
The biggest mistake I see is people putting too much content on their website. You have twenty to thirty seconds to capture attention and there are five or six paragraphs about why someone should use them.
AI is actually great at condensing that. Put six paragraphs in and ask it to make it SEO-compelling in three sentences.
I do that, I coach clients through the right questions, plug it in, and then polish what comes out. But brevity, in my opinion, is key for a really successful and effective website. The other mistake is not truly understanding your client. I’ve gotten good at helping clients develop personas, even oddly specific ones, because knowing exactly who you’re marketing to makes everything else easier.
People like a curated experience for everything in life. If you know your avatar is a specific person, don’t put six generic stock photos on the homepage that don’t speak to them.
That’s the whole story-brand framework I use from Donald Miller: you position yourself as the guide, the client has a problem and you help solve it, instead of just listing your own years of experience.
So how do people know when it’s time to evaluate their digital strategy?
If your business is just doing okay but could be doing better, if you’re not seeing conversions, it’s time to evaluate whether your website has the right content, the right reviews, the right foundation, before things stop being okay entirely.
Well appreciate it, man. Glad we got to a website design episode. Go poke around, find something you like, imitation is the finest form of flattery, don’t try to reinvent the wheel. You’ve been listening to the Marketing MadMen, and we’ll catch you next week.
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