How Amazon’s Alexa is changing the SEO landscape

As home devices such as Alexa take a more prevalent role in our lives, their presence and service are likely to heavily change the way we behave at home and how we operate. Given recent headlines that “Amazon wants Alexa to be the operating system for your life” it fair to assume that Alexa won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.

In light of this our habits such as shopping, for example, will become more influenced by our interactions with Alexa. The options available to us, how we search for them and how they are presented to us can all be dictated by this digital personal assistant. So it is no surprise that “Alexa is the future of Amazon’s consumer business”

To get a better understanding of what this future might look like we spoke with Hamlet Batista, CEO of RankSense, an SEO automation platform for e-commerce sites, who says “Voice searches use longer phrases so while that eliminates the focus on keyword optimization, it opens other opportunities. One interesting opportunity is publishing content as actions for Google Assistant, or Alexa Skills. The number of actions or skills will eventually grow to a number where your choice of key phrases will affect how easy it is to discover your content.

He adds “Some SEO experts recommend optimizing for natural language queries, but I don’t think it makes sense.  Natural language processing is about helping search engines understand content whether it is optimized or not. It is better to make sure that visitors coming from voice phrases are relevant. I explained how to track voice searchers in this article.”

SEO experts would be smart to adjust to this behavioral change now before our Alexa powered Amazon homes become a modern norm, most likely bought with valuable cryptocurrencies in the not too distant future. Until then SEO experts can continue to focus on the many ways we still search, including the laborious methods of typing in each word ourselves.