Siri and SEO
For those of you who are unfamiliar with her, Siri is Apple’s new voice recognition app that allows users to control their cell phones verbally. She can update your calendar, check the weather, set reminders, play music, and even write and send emails and texts. Pretty cool, but the real impact of Siri isn’t just that she acts like a personal assistant. The potentially huge implications for SEO come from the information Siri is able to access and the range of actions she can perform.
For example, Siri can locate the nearest Italian restaurant by automatically processing information about local Italian restaurants in response to the query, ‘Italian restaurants Port Jefferson’. Automating the search process means you never type ‘Italian restaurants Port Jefferson’ into Google, avoiding the traditional search engine results pages and pay-per-click advertisements entirely.
How exactly Siri collects and processes information is not fully known, but it’s reasonable to assume that the program is drawing on well-cultivated public data sources, including Google Places, Yelp and similar sites. If Siri is eventually able to pull information from third party apps — as many predict she will be — she could effectively eliminate traffic to traditional websites.
So what do you need to do to make your business website as accessible as possible to Siri and related voice recognition tools?
- Optimize your website for mobile. This isn’t new advice, as the rules for mobile SEO have been around for years. But as some sources estimate that 30 percent of all searches could include a local component by 2015, it’s more important than ever to make local SEO a priority for your business.
- Add a mobile site template. Having users land on a mobile version of your website will make them much happier, and it isn’t difficult to do, as mobile-ready themes already exist for publishing platforms including Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal.
- Enhance your local SEO. Prominently feature your physical address, local phone number and operating hours on the home page of your site for maximum local SEO benefits.
- Remove obstructions. Yes, Flash graphics and Javascript are already “no-no’s” when it comes to mobile optimization, but also consider how easily Siri can access the information on your site. Burying pertinent information in PDFs and sub-pages could put your site at a disadvantage.
- Diversify your digital presence. It’s no longer enough to simply set up profiles on Facebook and Twitter and call it a day. Instead, establish a profile on any of the following directories and review sites and encourage customers to rate your business there for maximum exposure. To determine which of these options are the best fit for your business, do a quick search to see which business sites in your geographic area and industry are ranking well in Google and create profiles on whichever of the following sites they’re using.
- Google Places
- Yahoo Local
- Bing Local
- Yelp
- Foursquare
- Citysearch
- Superpages
- Yellow Pages









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