Siri isn't a Google killer, but the beginning of a trend in search toward contextual relevance and artificial intelligence. My presentation from SMX East 2012.
2. MEET SIRI: APPLE’S GOOGLE KILLER?
Implications of Siri, Voice Search and AI for Marketers
Bryson Meunier
Director, SEO Strategy
Resolution Media
10/2/2012
3. PROBING SIRI FOR GOOGLECIDAL TENDENCIES
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4. PROBING SIRI FOR GOOGLECIDAL TENDENCIES
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5. PROBING SIRI FOR GOOGLECIDAL TENDENCIES
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6. SIRI IS NOT A SEARCH ENGINE
Currently Siri gets 60% of its answers from Google (source: PiperJaffray)
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7. SIRI IS NOT A SEARCH ENGINE
Siri assumes local intent when the query is not local in nature
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8. SIRI IS NOT A SEARCH ENGINE
When in doubt, Siri assumes local intent.
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9. SIRI IS NOT A SEARCH ENGINE
Potential Search Usage by Siri Users
iPhone 4S Users
Who Don't Search
with Siri
iPhone 4S Users
Who Might Search
with Siri
Roughly a third of 4S owners use Siri to place phone calls, send text messages, or look up information daily or almost
daily. (Source: Parks Associates)
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)
11. SIRI DOESN’T CURRENTLY HAVE THE REACH
• Siri currently available on iPhone
4S, iPhone 5 (3.78% of total iPhone Percent of Total Market
web traffic*) and new iPad
(16.82% of total iPad web traffic*). 1.5% 1%
• iOS represents 2.86% of web Siri iPad
traffic from all operating systems
world wide (source: Statcounter)
• iPhone search accounts for Siri
about 3% of total site traffic iPhone
(source: internal client data) All other
• iPad search accounts for about devices
4% of total site traffic (source:
internal client data) 97.5
Source: Chitika Live Tracker, 9/28/12
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12. SIMPLE SIRI OPTIMIZATION BEST PRACTICES
• Think local. Yelp inclusion and
optimization is essential.
• Think relevance and usefulness
(contextual relevance)
• Since Google powers 60% of Siri
responses, traditional SEO is
necessary.
• Understand user intent and adjust
keyword targeting accordingly
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13. SIRI NOT THE END OF VOICE SEARCH/AI
Apps APIs
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15. VOICE SEARCH CHANGES SEARCH BEHAVIOR
• “Say What? Why users choose to speak their web
queries”, Maryam Kamvar Garret and Doug
Beeferman, 2010:
http://www.maryamgarrett.com/Interspeech_v4.pdf
• Google Logs-based study of “factors that are correlated
with a decision to speak a web search query rather than
type it”
• Data from 75,000 random users speaking 1MM queries into
Google Blackberry app in Summer 2009
• Intended for voice navigation interface design, but useful to
marketers looking to understand voice search
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16. VOICE SEARCH CHANGES SEARCH BEHAVIOR
• Local and shopping queries most
likely to be spoken
• Need for hands-free navigation
(e.g. searcher is driving)
• Adult queries least likely to be
spoken
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17. VOICE SEARCH CHANGES SEARCH BEHAVIOR
• Maps results most likely to be
returned from spoken queries
• Queries longer than 6 words more
likely to be typed
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18. SUMMARY
1. Siri has limited reach, but is the start of larger trend toward
voice search and artificial intelligence
2. Understand relevance of query to user intent and context
3. Optimize for Google, not just Siri
4. Optimize for local search, as voice search users most likely
to be looking for information around them
5. Provide a simple, mobile interface, as voice searchers most
likely to require a hands-free experience
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19. THANK YOU!
Bryson Meunier
Director, SEO Strategy
Resolution Media
bmeunier@resolutionmedia.com
http://www.brysonmeunier.com
http://www.resolutionmedia.com
@brysonmeunier
+Bryson Meunier Scan to visit
m.brysonmeunier.com
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Editor's Notes
Thank you, Greg, and thank you to my fellow panelists. I’m Bryson Meunier, the Director of SEO Strategy at Resolution Media. Some of you may be here because of a directive from the C-suite to figure out this Siri thing and whether or not you should be shifting budgets from SEO to Siri optimization. The answer is no, you shouldn’t. Certainly not in the next five years. However, there are some things that marketers can be doing today to get ahead of their competition, and that’s what I’ll be discussing here today.
So it seems to me that the best way to understand whether or not Siri is a Google killer, or to put it another way, has “Googlecidal” tendencies, is to ask her. So I asked her point blank if she was a Google killer, and she tried to avoid the question.
Some analysts have said that iPhone 5 is a game changer for Siri, as she’ll have access to more information like sports scores, but I asked her if she was a Google killer on iPhone 5 and she dodged the question yet again. So I rephrased the question.
And she sent me to Google.
And this isn’t an isolated episode. According to a study PiperJaffray did this year comparing Siri to Google, Siri sent 60% of the queries that they were given to Google. It’s really hard to displace Google when you are sending so many of your queries to them.
Part of the reason they do this is because Siri is not great at search. For one, she assumes local intent, even when that intent doesn’t exist, and often for queries that are obvious to Google. Here’s the query [freddie mercury], which Google knows is about the lead singer of Queen, but Siri thinks I want to buy a car at a dealership.
And it’s really hard to search for something on Siri if you’re not looking for local information, as Siri assumes you are. Here’s an example of a query I did when I was looking for a gift for my daughter’s first birthday. I was just researching, but Siri assumed that I was ready to buy, and gave me a list of gift shops where I could find something today. But this was all based on the keyword “gift” and at this point Siri is not smart enough to understand that these gift shops are unlikely to have anything that my one year old daughter would like. This type of experience probably begins to explain why Siri received a D (with 68% accuracy) to Google Now’s B+ (with 86% accuracy) in Piper Jaffray’s 1600 question study.
Siri’s difficulty with search is probably why those who use Siri monthly don’t use her to search. According to a survey by Parks Associates of iPhone 4S users, only a third of them use Siri to place phone calls, send text messages or look up information (which includes search). 84% of iPhone 4S users, according to the same study, use Siri on a monthly basis, but a smaller percentage of those users are actually searching with her.
These problems with search are likely to be short-lived. Apple will get better at search, as will Google, and someday we may see the equivalent of IBM’s Jeopardy-winning AI on our smartphones. But for marketers making decisions today, it’s clear that this is at least five years in the future, if not more.
When you think about Siri today, you really need to think about the audience for Siri, and currently it’s extremely limited. Greg showed David Mihm’s quick math. Doing a similar operation you can see that potential search from Siri on iPad and iPhone models with Siri enabled accounts for 2.5% of total traffic.
Right now you can reach these people without doing anything all that different for Siri. The other panelists are going to go into detail on Siri optimization with regard to Yelp et al; but here are four high level best practices.
Those are some of the things you can do to optimize for Siri; but if you want to be optimized for voice search and AI, you also need to think about things like competing apps. Skyvi and Vlingo are two of the most popular. These don’t have the reach even of Siri at this point, but with APIs like Zypr (read: zipper) and AT&T’s speech recognition ‘Watson’ engine, developers now have access to technologies similar to what Siri uses to help them build competing or similar apps. And speaking of, most people at this point know of Google’s Siri-like interface in Jelly Bean called Google Now. Rather than be killed by Siri, it seems Google has adapted its interface to compete with Siri and proved Nietzsche right.
Siri also trains consumers to ask questions that they weren’t able to ask search engines before. This has the potential to add new categories of queries that previously didn’t exist.
There’s no evidence of this currently, but when it comes to understanding how voice search changes search behavior it’s important to look at Maryam Garret of Google’s research called ‘Say What…?’
One of the big findings was that many people choose to search by voice while driving, and their queries indicate that they are en route to somewhere. The implications for user interface designers, the researchers said, is to create an interface that works with hands-free navigation, or one that doesn’t require a lot of interaction to be usable. Marketers and designers can apply this to their own sites this way: if you want to reach voice searchers you should give them a simple mobile user experience that is focused on local information if you have a local business as that’s what the majority of voice searchers are looking for. If you have an adult business, voice search probably shouldn’t be something you should be concerned about at this point.
Similar to the last slide, the researchers also measured what types of results came up most often in voice search, and maps results came up more than any other. If you’re optimizing for Siri, this means Yelp optimization, but for other types of voice search you also want to consider other sources of local information such as Google+ Local. Also, while average query length wasn’t given in this study, the researchers found that voice searchers generally don’t speak queries longer than six words. As the technology improves this may change, but today most people appear to be using voice search like a traditional search engine, but focusing on local information.
Hope this has been valuable for you. If you remember only five things from my presentation, please remember these.
Thanks. I hope this was interesting and educational. If you have any questions, you can contact me here, and I look forward to more discussion at the end of the presentations. Thanks!