How Amazon Is Disrupting SEO

As seen on State Of Digital.

As a constantly changing industry, it’s worth being aware of some major companies affecting the way SEO works. Amazon, for instance, has recently hit a market value of a trillion US dollars just shy of a month ago and has sneakily weaved its way into the SEO realm.

More People Are Searching Directly On Amazon

What is it? Amazon is primarily a retail ecommerce platform where they receive a commission off each sale as well as through serving advertisements on their website.

How did it get so popular? Essentially anyone can sign up to Amazon and begin selling their products. As a result, they offer such a diverse range of products their consumers are served a catalog of seemingly endless products for the general population. This in particular has driven their business, as products can be shipped domestically and internationally with such ease.

How this affects SEO? Consumers are given a single platform where they can find almost any product that they are looking for, especially ones which are not available to buy in their particular area. This generates appeal for consumers to shop all their products collectively on their website without visiting several stores or even searching on Google.

It has become a consumer trend to go directly to the amazon website for shopping tangible products than searching for them and browsing in Google SERPs. Not only does this potentially affect SEO search demand, but PPC shopping in particular.

What next? Amazon is continuously growing as a business and there’s no signs of them slowing down. We may start seeing changes in search demand in some industries, especially the food and retail sector. To be specific, a potential reduction in search demand. This of course depends on the growth rate of search demand within the sector in comparison to growth rate of searches within Amazon to see which is higher.

The Voice Search Craze

What is it? Voice search is when users can make a search on a system using their voice. This can refer to Google Voice Search, Siri for apple products or home devices such as the Amazon Echo with Alexa as the voice.

How did it get so popular? Voice search is nothing new, with Siri being launched in 2010 for example. However, this trend has appeared to take off in recent years with the increasing popularity of smart home devices – particularly the Amazon Echo product range which are especially fashionable holiday gifts.

How this affects SEO? Voice search tends to be more conversational, with longer tail search queries being made. You could expect someone to ask a full question, such as “What is the weather?” in voice search as opposed to simply saying “Weather” as one would normally type into Google.

For this reason we may see searching behaviour shift over time to longer tail keywords, which can affect the way content is written when we optimise for SEO. In the immediate term, it’s unlikely that we will expect a drastic change. However, this is definitely something to be aware of.

What next? One of the bigger controversies in the search world is around whether or not voice search is the future. With predictions such as “Half all search is going to be voice by 2020” thrown around, it makes sense for SEOs to debate this and prepare (just in case) first and foremost with featured snippet optimisation.

Until we can measure search volumes for voice search, it appears that all that can be done for now is optimisation for longer tail keywords in hopes of securing an increasing number of rich snippets which may or may not be served to a voice search user.

Cloud Computing Is Taking Off

What is it? Cloud computing is computing over the internet. This includes storage, servers, databases, analytics and more. Amazon offer a product called amazon web services which has captured 49% of the public cloud market this year in Q2. This product is made available to customers as a paid subscription platform.

How did it get so popular? Cloud computing is flexible, efficient, global and reliable amongst many other benefits. As a result, it is more cost efficient for businesses and more secure. Amazon are on the forefront of this movement owning nearly have of the market share revenue and managing a large portion of the cloud computing service available to consumers.

How this affects SEO? This is not as well known to many, but cloud computing can help improve page load speed. Cloud hosting means your website is accessible from anywhere, so when a person loads your website, they will be loading the one closest to them – saving time. As a ranking factor, this can increase user retention from reduced bounce rate as well as rankings.

As a knock on effect, the improved page load speed quickens the process of converting a website to the mobile friendly version if using a mobile device. With mobile-first indexation, there is increasing importance for a seamless user experience and easy accessibility in addition to usability.

The cloud computing industry continues to grow with AWS being a core component. However, competitor Microsoft’s Azure is growing at a faster rate than AWS although had a smaller base market share. It may be possible that Azure will be the leading service in this field as some point in the future, something to watch out for.