Google Now comes to iOS - What now for SEOs?

I was reading Metro today and saw an article titled “Google Now comes to iPhone, challenging Apple Inc’s Siri” and thought it was worth sharing. Here’s the original publication in Reuters http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/04/29/google-iphone-apple-siri-idINDEE93S0AC20130429

Why is this important to SEOs?

Predictive search technology is intended to speed up the content discovery process, eliminating the need to browse through multiple results. With Google Now being available to a wider audience of smartphone & tablet users, the number of people using the Google Search App to discover content on their mobile device will rise. This puts even more importance on being the most relevant result in a mobile context.

From Brafton.com

“Google looks to gain some mobile search ground by bolstering its Google Search App for iOS devices…​ ​The hope would be to drive Google Search App downloads upward, as it has yet to break into the top 10 downloads in iTunes…Google Now is the search engine’s predictive search assistant…When a user begins entering​ ​a query in a search box, Google Now tries to anticipate answers to speed up the digital content discovery process. For example, asking for travel times will generate a list of flights, train departures etc.”

Takeaways…

1. It’s important to have a deep understanding of what relevancy means to Google today, and that’s going beyond technical/page level optimizations used to influence the link graph to incorporate SEO strategies aimed at exploiting the social and knowledge graphs.
2. As Google continues to put greater focus on mobile, creating mobile content will become a major priority for SEOs in the near future.