I never really noticed wearable technology creeping into our lives until this week.
It started when I was browsing the net on my Mac with the TV on in the background (I immerse myself in the “multi screen world” on a regular basis!)
The film being shown was James Bonds’ – ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ (1977). Not being hugely knowledgeable about James Bond movies I glanced up as I hear a strange ticking noise. James Bonds’ watch was printing a message on ticker tape!
Having not seen this film before I was amazed at this execution of future technology so many years ago! His watch was printing a secret message! Sadly the idea was quite far ahead of its time that the watch was so loud I have no doubt his Bond girl heard it – as well as the people next door! But the concept is so forward thinking that it’s now, almost 40 years on, a reality!
We love gadgets and we love communication so it was inevitable that a day would arrive where the two are combined and reasonably priced – you don’t have to be James Bond – you just need a hundred quid!
Yesterday I attended a meeting with a client (Alarm Traders Direct) and their marketing manager Dan had his very own ‘Spy Watch’!
Ladies and Gentlemen – I introduce – the modern James Bond spy watch!
Ok so it’s not exciting to those of you who are used to wearable technology such as Nike running bands and Bluetooth headphones but to those of us in the SEO world this is a game changer.
Wearable technology will change everything about the way we search. There’s no keyboard, there’s no screen! This is an entirely voice actuated gadget manufactured with only usability in mind.
The result of a voice search isn’t a long page of listings with positions 1 – 10, its card-based SERP’s with only one result displayed.
Vocal searches will have a huge impact on keyword targeting. For example – if you search ‘U2’ – most likely it will bring up the website youtoo.com rather than the band. If you search ‘Band U2’ you will get the correct result. This is an influential change on the keyword research process, which marketers will have to adapt to.
Not just the SEO-ers among us but also the PPC-ers. At the moment if you write bad ad copy the worst that will happen is your ads will under perform and you’ll get a low CTR and waste a little budget. With something like Google Glass – you will potentially aggravate customers, as your advert won’t just be on their screen it’ll be right in front of their eyes. This could cause more harm than good.
Research has been carried out at Gartner and they believe that over the next few years 50% of all app interaction will be from wearable devices.
So what do we do? We prepare our websites and our campaigns for this huge change in technology. We get micro tagging and ensure our sites are as adaptable as possible to as many different devices as possible to ensure our users are having the best journey possible.
