Chauncey: Welcome back to the Being Found show. We are discussing what is changing in online marketing in 2018 and specifically what small businesses can do about it. I am your host Chauncey Haworth filling in for Cloud Wise Joe and filling in for me is Jake. We are going to talk about screenless SEO, a topic that most small businesses don’t understand how it will affect their business. You know this probably makes entirely no sense to anybody.
What does Screenless Seo mean? Well, voice-activated assistants like Siri , Alexa , and Google Home are working directly with search engines to help consumers with their online questions and needs. This technology has moved SEO from screens to virtual assistant devices that wait for our every command. While they simplify our lives in many ways, they are also changing how customers shop, which in turn changes how businesses are being found by their customers.
So the forecast is that there were 22 million Amazon Echo sales in 2017 alone here in the United States and 66 million U.S. households will have them by 2022. I bet that number is going to be higher. But even 66 million U.S. households are crazy.
You know this Thanksgiving I went down to my in-laws, and they have one of these things. The fascinating thing about it was how their kid talks to it. Their kid speaks to it like it’s an idiot. So if there is going to be some AI attack, it’s the next generation because just the tone in this kid’s voice is demeaning towards the poor google device. You know Yolanda, my wife’s sister, is very polite to it and kind of treats it like it’s a member of the family. She says “please” and “thank you” to the device which is equally as funny on the opposite side. But my point of saying that is that these are called informal search queries.
So what business owners need to know is, people are going to start searching the internet for products and services using their virtual assistants, and they’re going to use informal search queries. Over the years we have kind of learned that to use search engines. We’ve learned how to type things to get the results that we want and search engines in tow have changed to match that. 
A good example for people to understand how technology evolves us and we change technology at the same time is movies. We sort of take movies for granted but movies are only about 100 years old maybe 120 at this point. In the beginning, when movies first started they would show people on a porch playing the banjo, and then they’d show a bunch of riders on horses coming across a field and then they’d show the people on the porch playing the banjo again.
In the beginning, people had never seen a movie before so they didn’t know to make the connection that these writers were riding towards the banjo. No story had been told this way before. Books don’t tell it this way; stage performances didn’t tell it this way, it’s only movies that set up the shot. Here’s what’s happening, here’s what’s coming, and here’s what’s happening. So as people learned to watch movies, we also learned how to show them movies, and that’s the way movies evolved in the storytelling process.
It’s going to be the same for informal search queries. So even at this point with my in-laws who are maybe five years older than my wife and I and not tech savvy. They are talking to this thing in a very natural way. This is going to change what search is. Say you’re looking for a sushi restaurant. Instead of typing into Google what the best sushi restaurant in Redding is and then going to the site and looking for the time, in voice we may say, Hey Google what time does the local sushi restaurant open or how early can I get some sushi? We’re going to be asking entirely different questions.
So what this means for small businesses? We have to optimize our website to deliver content in the ways that people are asking for it. For those loyal Being Found listeners out there, you know that being found is all about making yourself available and providing the outlets to the consumers that we want to serve. Now we might think that how does this affect local small business? Well, my in-laws have one, and I’m a local guy. Everybody is going to be using these things to search. So it affects you, and it is based on our comfort with it. So let’s get into precisely how do we deal with it as a small business?
Jake: In search, you have an idea of the key phrase that people are typing in because you can look at Google and see the key phrase that people are typing. Then what you have to do is make sure Google understands this is what this page is about and make that connection. Is the data available yet for voice search and how do we find it and how do we optimize that?
Chauncey: Well I’m glad you asked. Brand recognition is going to be huge in situations even for local business because when I say my brand, that is what is going to show up. That’s going to make the search very easy with screenless search to know brands and then get into contact with them. At this point optimizing for what’s called Google home is the search algorithm or search engine Google is using per home. Results are not geared toward shopping unless you ask specifically. So one way to utilize that is to answer people’s questions that pertain to your industry.
My dryer died a couple of years back, and my wife and I took this thing apart, and we looked it all up online, and we got some help from some local people online. We couldn’t put it back together, so we ended up calling one of those people that were giving us the help that we were reading about to do that for us. Putting your information out there and helping people help themselves, they’re going to do that anyway so they might as well be doing it on your website. When the stuff hits the fan, they call you for the help because that’s where they’re already at and they know you’re local.
Another way to understand how you can use this to your benefit is to get a device and use it. That’s going to help you know how people are asking for things and it’s going to help you to understand how people would be asking things that pertained to your industry. Once again this is happening, and it is happening for small and local business.
A final thing would be to provide audio transcriptions of your websites. So with websites, an up and coming thing for search is accessibility. Helping people with disabilities interact with your website. For example, you could have quick links at the top of your website that offer an audio transcription of the website, somebody could play that from their device.
We’re coming to the end of this segment. Thanks for listening to the Being Found Show, listen to the full show here: Being Found Show Episode #41
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