Getting Along with Siri
Today, 90 percent of mobile searches result in an action such as visiting a business location or purchasing a product. Increasingly, a majority of consumers are becoming more comfortable shopping from their mobile devices. In fact, a full 60 percent of shoppers with smartphones search for a product on their mobile device before buying. These aren’t rare occurrences, either; 50 percent of mobile searchers made a mobile purchase in the last six months.
Siri and other mobile search assistants have been pegged by search catastrophists as the death of search optimisation, but this is a dramatic overreaction.
The truth is that Siri presents unique challenges and opportunities to marketers, which should be approached intelligently when optimising for mobile web search.
Siri often bypasses traditional search
- For many searches, such as for stores and restaurants, Siri will ignore the traditional search results and compare your location with Yelp listings.
- The Solution: Ensure that your mobile SEO strategy pays appropriate attention to optimisation in places like Yelp, Google Places, Yahoo Places, etc.
- Siri affects the social landscape
- Siri and similar global search aids are programmed to draw results from particular social services. If you aren’t equally relevant on all the majors, you risk being left behind.
- The Solution: Build your following on all relevant social networks and influential communities to ensure relevancy.
- Siri ignores PPC altogether
- Pay-per-click might as well not exist to Siri; none of the results the software returns contain ads.
The Solution: If your current strategy focuses strongly on pay-per-click, you’ll need to broaden your strokes and cover more ground in the mobile search space.