Welcome to the voice activated era – and while the battle between Alexa, Siri and Google Home is still on – one of the major impact of this will be felt in the SEO industry.
Here is how I look at the future of voice platforms.
Right now, they are playing you music, reading news and several smaller chores. In US, Alexa has already started ordering products and it’s just a matter of time when this reaches the other part of the world.
How will SEO get impacted?
The SEO industry, which is largely at the mercy of Google might face a tough time ahead as the voice platforms will start either integrating with their own partner ecommerce platforms (and Amazon will win this war) or just go with the first paid ad on the search query.
Organic SEO will lose out to paid ads (by the way, majority of highly monetizable web searches happen around product queries) – and the ones who own the ecommerce integration will win most (Amazon), followed by the ones who own search results (Google).
Everybody else: Keep ordering toilet papers on your Echo/Google Home.
Voice platforms will kill discovery – largely because of the form factor constraint (+ partner ecosystem); and frankly, you won’t complain because you are anyways too distracted to know what you don’t know.