Will We Talk to Search Instead of Typing? (Recorded 2020)

Testing this out live, asking a smart assistant who the best YouTube advertising agency in the world is gets nothing back, "sorry, I didn't understand", but asking where to buy red shoes gets a proper answer, complete with named nearby shops such as Shoezone, Next and Clarks. Google and similar assistants can't yet answer every question, but they can already answer plenty of them, and that gap is closing. My own mum is a perfect example of someone who doesn't like typing and just asks her device questions all day long instead, which says something about how normal this is already becoming for a lot of people, not just early adopters.

The point is that we've all got these devices in our homes now, and we're increasingly reaching for voice instead of picking up a phone to type. If you have a brand or business, the real question is whether you come up when people ask questions like this, and whether they find you as a recommendation, and for most businesses right now the honest answer is probably not. This is effectively a new wave of SEO that not everyone has caught onto yet, and one of the easiest ways into it is video: making a video around a common question your audience genuinely wants answered, one that's also highly googled, gives you a real chance of appearing at the top of page one, regardless of where you'd normally rank. As Google keeps improving voice search, being one of the businesses already answering that question on video means you're likely to be one of the first names that comes up when people start asking instead of typing.