Will Siri Forever Change Your SEO Strategy?

Before you can begin to understand an answer to this SEO question, you should be sure you are familiar with what Siri is. Siri is the market’s first system that could be considered a ‘personal assistant.’ Siri is a speech recognition system that helps users locate things online or answer certain questions. From personal stock results, facts about animals or how to locate directions to a certain place, Siri works to find whatever you are looking for. To be more specific Siri works to find whatever it is you ask of it by voice.

Siri is based on the based on the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, and it has three components – a conversational interface, personal context awareness and service delegation

The speech of a user is translated into text, which a computer is able to understand and then run queries on. From there the answer comes from a variety of places, depending on what you ask. Most of the data, however, does come as a result of Siri connecting back to Apple databases. Siri relies upon the processing power of the dual-core A5 chip that comes standard in iPhone 4S. It also uses 3G and Wi-Fi networks to interact with the Apple data centers rapidly. All of this means the personal assistant on your Smartphone can make your life that much easier.

Ignore The Database Service Behind The Curtain

Siri is proprietary to Apple but that means a good majority of the smartphone world is on board using Siri or will be soon. The numbers seem to indicate that 200 million devices have been sold, including 25 million of the newest addition of the iPad. Although the numbers continue to increase in favor of Apple, currently the company holds about 25% of the smartphone market. While this is far from market domination, it is certainly a steady increase over the quarters prior to this data.

Some people are concerned about how all of this affects search engines and SEO. Those who put effort into their mobile marketing want to know if the game has changed now, thanks to Siri. The thing is Siri is not meant to be a search engine, but that doesn’t change the idea that it could impact Google.

Siri’s intelligence is actually reaching into major databases already the target of a good Search Engine Optimization strategy, including several Google properties (Google Search, Google Maps, Google Local), Yelp, Wolfram Alpha in addition to Siri’s own database.

There is a fear that it won’t be long before Apple starts taking these services in-house. And that before long, Apple will own mobile search out right. So what’s an inbound marketer to do? If we invest all of our efforts into growing our organic search traffic will it all be in vain?

The Sky May Not Be Falling After All

Most experts believe Siri will not radically change the basic approach to ‘search’ and SEO strategy. After all, if the key focus of your content marketing strategy is to provide unique, great and relevant content about what you and your company have to offer. And if you create a great content, people will share and seek that content out. If the search tool, whatever the platform, does not deliver relevant results then users will abandon it in droves. (Just ask Yahoo! )

It’s about the final product offering what consumers want and staying competitive so one does not become obsolete.

One of the major points experts and consumers are raising is how necessary is a voice activated personal assistant?While it may be a fun new feature, the novelty may wear off. Only time will tell for certain whether consumers find the voice activated Siri companion worth it or not. Already many users admit to using Siri a great deal at first and then growing tired of it. Most feel the few extra seconds they must invest to type in a question or certain SEO terms is acceptable over yelling at their phone in public.

But either way, the voice translation aspect of Siri itself is not changing the underlying technology used to locate appropriate content and deliver it to your user. The bottom line is that it is not time to panic and readjust your mobile marketing and SEO platform.