The next generation is shaking the foundation of the internet. Follow these four steps to keep them delighted and engaged.

Remember when all a company had to do was run a store or manage a website? Turning a profit seemed as straightforward as building a campaign or keeping a site updated. That’s not the case anymore. As digital natives claim 40% of the buying power and spend over $144 billion a year, according to Barkley, brands will have to raise their standards to perform well across a growing landscape of touch points.

The shift.

In 1980, we received our first spaceship — the internet — which we didn’t use for much more than messaging and email. Then, in the late 1990s, we received our second spaceship: Search engines took off, moving users from communication to information seeking. By the late 2000s, Google and Wikipedia had 1 billion visits each a month and e-commerce hit $164 billion. Boom, we’re all aliens now. That brought everyone to the intergalactic party, with companies giving newly minted digital agencies millions to build them sites. Fast forward to 2020, and roughly 12 sites (or planets, to keep the metaphor going) receive the bulk of internet tourism — a combined 20 billion visits a month and growing.

What does this mean for brands? Google is no longer the gatekeeper of internet users, and building a website does not make a company digital. The so-called connected generation (those born in the late 1990s) has moved from searches to discovery — a promotion on Instagram, an article in their newsfeed, a recommendation from Amazon. The only way to effectively connect with users is by getting to know them and how they receive information.

How to connect.

1. Identify your users.
   The first step to connecting with your users is understanding what drives them. Don’t box them into stakeholder interviews; go where they go. Aggregate your users’ site, media, search, and social data, and connect it with outside sources like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Youtube, and Netflix. Something interesting we found is that your tolerance for video grows by 15 seconds every five years you age. Other things we’ve discovered:

• 80% of social buying is done on Facebook, yet engagement rates are 40% higher on Instagram.
• Only 15% of audiences use Facebook stories.
• The more words you type into Google, the higher the rate of conversion.

Facebook is fantasy, Google is real life, Amazon is our day to day, Youtube is aspirational. Combining this picture is powerful for changing your engagement strategy across each touch point. For Google, be direct and provide two to three product options. On Amazon, offer products within $3–$5 dollars of your competition. On Facebook, be light and long-form. On Instagram, be indirect and use your community’s stories to carry the message.

2. Define the need.
What pain points do users have? Where is the friction in their experience? Crawling reviews and comments is a great place to start, and pairing this with stakeholder feedback and company interviews is a fun exercise to start making the picture clearer. For one technology company we found that a couple of their charter stores were getting a wealth of comments around wait time and customer service. We were able to increase staff by 25%, provide training, and install kiosks to improve the experience. The stores’ ratings went from three to five stars on Google within a month across five locations.

3. Figure out what they use.
What are the common platforms users frequent, and why? (I personally use 10 to 12 platforms, whereas my brother, who is 10 years younger, uses 15 to 20.) How do these fit into the need we’re trying to solve? Where many people go wrong is by outsourcing this step to a media or research team. This should be led by your strategy and experience teams to ensure you’re testing your hypotheses through users, rather than receiving an information dump you have to rustle through for relevant data.

4. Stay connected.
Digital natives need to be delighted, and if you don’t commit to keeping those users engaged, someone else will. Delightful offerings can take the form of a feature showcasing light and busy store hours, loyalty rewards for a favorite salad, or a personalized image of your product. You should have a list of features you’re rolling out to enchant. Use Google as a cautionary tale: Amazon stepped in to provide two-day shipping, and now it owns $.40 of every dollar spent online. And check out these valuations of disruptive startups: $800M for Betterment, $1.1 billion for Casper, and $1.7 billion for Warby Parker. Need I say more? They all got this last point right, and their competitors didn’t.

Accept it.

Companies fail at transformation, because they consider it a thing when it’s actually a way of doing things. Some companies just won’t transform. Innosight predicts that about 50% of the S&P 500 will be replaced over the next 10 years if its forecasted churn rate holds. Even new companies are failing at digital. But there’s a clearly defined path to success, and it’s not a redesigned website. It’s about finding and delighting the users you want.

Magenta is a publication of Huge.

Building a Website Doesn’t Make You Digital was originally published in Magenta on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

More than half of all searches will be voice-based by 2020. Here’s how every brand should prepare for the upcoming SEO revolution.

Voice search used to be a technological parlor trick. Remember early Siri and its frustratingly hilarious inability to answer simple questions? Today, voice search is no longer a novelty — it’s table stakes. People ask voice assistants more than a billion questions a month, according to Alpine AI, and that number is only going to increase.

If voice search isn’t on your mind, it should be. Over the next five years, the way people access information will shift from being predominantly visual (think website and FAQ page) to increasingly voice-centric. This means search strategy should evolve, too.

Voice search is still the Wild West of SEO, though. There are more questions around it and what it means than answers at this point. With that in mind, here are answers to four of the biggest questions you and your company should be asking about the future of voice search.

1. Why should I care about voice search?
It’s a numbers game. Voice search is already big, and it’s getting bigger. First, some stats: It’s estimated that more than 40 percent of adults in the U.S. make a voice search every day. By 2020, ComScore predicts more than 50% of all searches will be voice. Google, creator of the world’s most effective text and visual search, says 20 percent of all mobile searches are done via voice, and at Huge we’ve already seen that number increase to closer to 30 percent this quarter.

It might be obvious to say it, but companies should be where their customers are, even if that means in a limited capacity. Voice search is still new. There’s only so much Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and Google Assistant can do or say. But that simplicity is worth taking advantage of. One of the biggest opportunities around voice search is harnessing its limitations and using those limitations to have a focused, clear conversation with the people on the other end.

Searching on Google today is like wading through an ocean of information. Even with the best SEO, the onus is still on consumers to figure out what they’re looking for. The promise and the pitfall of voice search is that it drastically limits the amount of information presented to a person. If someone is looking for a simple, factual answer, voice is by far the most efficient way to go about it.

One of the biggest opportunities around voice search is harnessing its limitations and using those limitations to have a focused, clear conversation with the people on the other end.

The good news is that the technology behind the Google, Amazon’s, Apple & Microsoft’s voice assistants is finally catching up with the companies’ ambitions. Voice search results are becoming more reliably accurate. At 84 percent accuracy, Google provides, by far, the most accurate voice search experience, but other platforms are on the upswing, too. This means you can invest in voice search with confidence that the outcome will be useful, not a gimmick.

2. How is voice search behavior different than text search behavior?
As we move from typing to speaking, our search behavior is changing, too. The average search through typing is around two to three words; with speaking, it’s closer to five to seven words. People communicate with voice assistants as if they’re human. They imbue their questions with personal information and use natural language. This might seem like an insignificant difference, but those extra words can provide much richer context around a person’s intent when they’re asking a question.

Most significantly, people who use voice search are more likely to be looking for an answer based on locality. According to Search Engine Watch voice searches are three times as likely to be locally-based than text searches, which makes sense when you consider that many voice searches are happening through a mobile phone. This creates an interesting opportunity for brands who offer high-touch products like smartwatches, which benefit from a hands-on experience. For those companies, voice search is going to be an important channel to connect their brand to a flagship retail experience where people can engage with the product in real life.

Eventually, voice search will break free of our mobile phones and nightstand devices and enter the larger physical world. It’s likely that in the not-too-distant future voice search will be part of the social fabric, providing a layer of invisible interactivity to everything from parking meters to grocery stores. The takeaway is that voice search behavior — the way humans verbalize their thoughts and questions — will constantly evolve as the capabilities of the technology evolves as well.

3. Where do voice assistants get their answers?
In a word: micro-data. Don’t let that word scare you, though; this is something your SEO strategy is already accounting. Explained simply, micro-data (also known as schema) refers to code on a website that allows search engines to return the most relevant information for readers. While a search engine like Google will use schema to surface a laundry list of links or a featured snippet in response to a query, voice search answers are more concise.

Voice search responses average between 26–35 words, which means the content they pull from must also be just as concise. Current voice assistants don’t have the ability to read a 600-word blog post and distill the most important ideas down to a simple, verbalized answer. What does this mean for a brand’s content strategy? Think smaller. We’ve been identifying possible questions a brand might encounter and then building the answers into tagged “nugget” experiences that live on websites in FAQ and module form. Things like health features, retail locations, and user guides are easy places to start.

It might feel counterintuitive to embrace brevity, but think about how people will be accessing information in the future. As more people use voice search to answer straightforward who, what, and “how questions, fewer of them will navigate to the website itself. Creating an aggressive strategy around tagging up your content with micro-data is fundamental. This data helps trigger rich snippets and provides an opportunity to give these assistants a quick, snappy answer.

4. Can you optimize this content?
The short answer is yes, but it’s more complicated than that. Many aspects of traditional SEO strategy apply to voice search as well. Every good strategy around search begins with some good ole keyword research. When people ask questions verbally, they tend to add more words into their search, pushing the golden area of your research farther down the line with long-tail keywords and focusing in on question- based keywords.

Knowing what people are searching for and how is the first step toward a sound strategy, but with voice search it’s also about understanding intent. A lot of what we do is try to define the questions a person might ask about a product or brand. Granted, there are thousands of questions around any given product that are worth answering, but the trick is figuring out how to distill those questions down to the needs people have.

Doing that requires a two-fold approach. First, it’s important to figure out what people are asking about the most. Those high-volume questions will likely require content to be created around them. The less intuitive part of this process is defining what questions you don’t want to answer. Queries like “How can I find a cheaper version?” or service-oriented questions like “Why doesn’t this work?” can fall into the negative keyword bucket and will quickly filter out a large number of questions to answer. We’ve found that more than 30 percent of questions asked around a product are duplicate in sentiment or fall into the negative keyword category.

This isn’t a one-time effort, though. Refreshing your must-answer questions on a monthly basis will ensure that your voice answers are up-to-date. Like all effective optimization, it comes down to crafting a solid content strategy plan and then relentlessly sticking to it.

As voice search continues to grow, brands can stay ahead of the curve by knowing how their users’ questions are evolving. A great resource for doing that is Answer the Public, which helps marketers find out what queries are being asked about brands, so that they can start crafting the best answers.

Magenta is a publication of Huge.

What You Need to Know About Voice Search was originally published in Magenta on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

SEO has two fundamental functions–search engine guidelines and strategic initiatives. Falling into separate categories, most agencies opt for SEO expertise in one, rather than embracing the necessity of both. An easy way to spot these shortcomings is through statements that claim that SEO is all about one thing. For instance, “SEO is all about content” or “SEO is all about technology”. Any well-rounded SEO knows it’s about much more.

A foundation for SEO is developed through search engine guidelines, and the most notable are Google’s webmaster guidelines, broken down by design, technology and quality. These guidelines are in place to help Google crawl and index your site properly, and if they can’t, it hinders your site’s ability to be found by and served its users. These guidelines can become a bit vague, though, as they have to cover a foundation for everyone on the internet.

The basic steps of logically optimizing your site: being sure your header structures are layered and consistent, anchors are defined, meta data is proper and content is unique are simply requirements from Google, rather than a long term growth strategy, with most seeing a growth of 10–30%. The fun comes with strategic initiatives–this is where a truly strong SEO gets to flex their muscles. For our Fortune 500 clients, we usually see results from 40%-100% year-over-year (YoY). SEO superiority is all in performance–if you can get and grow results you’ll go a long way.

Two recent client examples illustrate the strength of SEO when both essential factors–search engine guidelines and strategic initiatives–play a role in its development.

Search Engine Requirements

The Challenge.

A client came to us citing record low SEO performance, which was extremely odd as they create large amount of great content. When we got into the data, we saw wildly erratic monthly year-over-year data — +2%, -9%, +9%. This is an instant “we have holes” moment for any good SEO, as this is almost always due to some sort of search engine confusion.

The Plan.

Whenever you encounter something like this, the best move is to launch a technical audit, starting out with crawl of your site with Google Bot and pairing that data with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tool outputs.

The Findings.

1. When the site was migrated to its latest version search engines were not correctly passing the value from the old version to the new.
2. New styles of pages were introduced paired with a CMS functionality that was creating content duplication.

The Results.

The client went from record low organic traffic YoY of -9% to record highs of +60%. The real thing this showed us is that they had the value and were just being held back by technical hiccups.

Strategic Initiatives

The Challenge.

An ambitious brand approached us looking to become a player in an ultra-competitive SEO vertical.

The Plan.

In order to better understand the space, we did a Search Engine Marketing Competitive Analysis–breaking down every strong player in the space by what they own, how they do it and where their gaps are. From there, we created a six-month SEO strategy cohesion plan dedicated to technology, communications, social and content workstreams.

The Findings.

1. The key players were all focusing their efforts on five key phrase categories.
2. Link acquisition strategies were very strong through partnerships and content marketing, which created a large barrier as links play a large role in search engine ranking.
3. There were many untapped opportunities for growth in the form of better technology frameworks, indexation strategies and more meaningful content.

The Results.

Soon after launch we brought in 49% more users through organic search, and are ranking in the top three for over 200 new non-branded keywords. This is after just 30 days, so we anticipate even greater results to come as the site matures.

People and companies that truly excel in SEO know that no one key–whether its technology, content, communication or social–holds the power to unlock sustainable SEO growth. At its core, it is about setting up a good foundation through search engine guidelines and advancing it through strategic initiatives.

SEO performance is better, much better, when it works alongside other disciplines. Almost everything we do in digital can make SEO more efficient, if we’re making the most of it. You can use social marketing to index content faster, technology to increase crawl performance, content to expand your keyword targeting, communications to acquire links, and UX to increase user signals.

Understanding best practices is simple, and appealing to different disciplines to join forces is nothing new, but expanding on what we know in order to innovate means bridging those gaps from the beginning. Fueling your SEO by focusing on areas like social, communications and UX calls for true integration.

I found you.

For content-forward businesses, it’s all about indexation. You can find the number of pages search engines catalogue and serve to users by typing “site:” in front on your domain in a search bar. It’s tricky, though, because Google only has so much bandwidth, as it has to index billions of pages a day. This is where social marketing comes in. Let’s say you’re working at a news organization and are about to release an article on the latest iPhone. That’s great, but you’re likely doing the same thing as 100,000 other outlets. Since Google has limited bandwidth, the challenge is getting the search engine to index your story so that it ranks ahead of your competition.

Search engines, like everything, prioritize content that people love. So if we drive a successful social launch for promoting our content, Google will find it and feel the same way, index it and rank it.

The SEO factor.

Promoting content strategically through social makes it more likely for readers to find and more likely for them to share. If your content gets enough exposure, it’ll get indexed and picked up by search engines.

The honest link.

We’re frequently hearing about the diminished value of public relations links. This is true, but one of the goals of PR is to distribute to partners in the hopes that they create a natural viral feed on the internet. So, if you do your job well, virality creates natural links. By working with communications and PR teams, and feeding them information, you can build a marketing initiative that means something. Here are a few questions that help gain momentum:

1. Wouldn’t your team members love to know all the sites that naturally pick up that type of information?
2. What do your competitors use inside and outside their network for certain content?
3. What are some of the most successful campaigns launched? Who shared the content?

You can use this information to increase your reach and forge partnerships that strengthen your natural distribution network. This is where you see the win-win: larger targeted networks pushing out your content, and more links pointing back to your site.

The SEO factor.

Links are one of the strongest signal markers used to rank a website. By increasing the site’s amount of natural links you increase your site’s authority in search engines.

“The new cool is lean and mean, and it’s all based on the evolution of search engines being able to understand content on a deeper level, moving beyond keywords.”

Better together.

We’ve finally reached the point where UX and SEO are friends more often than not. For a long time, this was not the case as spammy SEOs optimized for search engines and users separately. Both sides–UX and SEO–have learned that we’re all in this together. As search engines become more intelligent, they will use signals like bounce rate and time spent on a site to judge its viability.

Think about it: If your bounce rate is low, but you drive only ten people to your site a month, what is it’s real value? Search engines are starting to understand this more and more, and as most sites rely on over 50% of their traffic to come from search engines, the reality hopefully sinks in. One common initiative we love working with UX on is architecture condensing. Long gone are the days of the behemoth site with dozens of pages. The new cool is lean and mean, and it’s all based on the evolution of search engines being able to understand content on a deeper level, moving beyond keywords. You no longer need a million nets (pages), to catch 10 million fish (users). If a page doesn’t add clear value to a user, lose it or repurpose it.

The SEO factor.

By reducing the number of pages on your site to only the essentials, you increase the ability for search engines to index and understand your content, leading to stronger keyword rankings. Live outside the box. Some of the most basic concepts have strategic genius waiting to be yielded out.

Algorithms are getting smarter at knowing what a user wants to get out of a search. It’s less about keywords and more about conversations, less about page views and more about simple navigation. These changes are happening quickly, and setting new standards for how to think about SEO. Understanding the most fundamental principles of SEO can help you get in front of these industry shifts.

How should I be thinking of keyword research?

Keyword research is not about excel files, it’s about understanding how people speak online. Ask yourself questions that will help identify how users communicate with search engines. For instance:

1. Do people search “online” or “internet” more when it comes to marketing?
2. Are people looking more for “quantitative” or “qualitative” research?
3. How many people are typing in “dinner recipe” in the U.S. and Canada?

Ask your team to bring back a set of insights they found when exploring your website and social presence. Start by throwing random terms into the Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Once your team has their findings compiled, discuss and share. Findings like these give a better idea of how users search, helping your team understand how to reach a wider audience.

How should I integrate my paid and organic search programs?

Integrating search programs don’t work well when you have two programs fighting for their own growth. If you truly want to bridge the gap between organic and paid search, you need teams that are willing to think of search as a unit rather than two separate classes. After recently taking this task on while expanding the global presence of an e-commerce client, we’ve established a method for integrating the two channels.

First, align your paid and organic search teams by creating a combined goal to drive 50% more conversions in Q3 and Q4.

Next, create a keyword targeting strategy focused on maximizing conversion. For instance, in a recent project, we started by using paid search to own new entry searches like “jackets” and brand conversions while organic search handled mid-funnel searchers around categories and long-tail searches like “warm hiking jacket black.” By doing this we drove overall conversions up 20% without increasing our spend.

Finally, test and optimize. In this phase, we found that we could dial back brand paid search around certain products without losing conversions and organic picked it up, allowing us to spend in new areas.

What are the most fundamental factors of SEO?

SEO will always be an ever-evolving channel of trends and tactics as it adapts to serve humans. Yet, some things are so essential to how search engines operate that they likely won’t change: indexation, code, content and links.

There are many things that fall into these categories and overlap, but focusing on these factors will ensure you’re avoiding fads like acquiring links from blogger networks, sending out emails asking for links and stuffing content with keywords.

Consider approaching your SEO strategy in a few steps.

• Understand how you can improve indexation of your site through using Google Webmaster tools.
• Task your SEO and technology teams to enhance coding elements.
• Work with your content teams to make sure your voice matches how your audience is searching through keyword research.
• Monitor links coming into your site with tools like Ahrefs and teach your content, communication and social teams on the importance of links.

Do I need to 301 redirect everything?

No, when redirecting outdated or old pages only worry about redirecting valuable pages. In this case, consider value in terms of traffic to a page and backlinks. This is because traffic shows you how valuable a user finds a certain page, and the more they visit the site, the more they value it. Backlinks matter because they are one of the strongest signal search engines use to rank pages. By using these two factors together, you’ll do the right thing for users and search engines. Take all your potential redirect URLs and filter them by backlinks and traffic. Odds are you will see many links that have little to no value, 410 them.

How many times should I include a keyword?

Don’t worry about it. Search engines are incredibly smart and getting smarter. If you have a SEO strategy focused on great technology and content, keyword inclusion will never be the question. Start by connecting your content strategy and SEO teams. We recently helped a large content producer bridge these gaps by holding a series of training sessions focused on how different teams affect organic search. They are now seeing 100%+ growth in organic visits to their new content.

Stop worrying about including keywords a certain amount of times or using a certain tense. Don’t write for search engines. They are becoming as crafty as users and don’t need dated repetition tactics. Use keyword research to understand what types of things people are looking for and have someone with an SEO background markup the code for you.

What is the most important on-page SEO factor?

URLs. It’s how search engines find pages. The internet has trillions of pages, so make sure you have an information architecture strategy that matches the content taxonomy of your site.

What should I be doing with social to enhance my SEO?

When it comes to SEO and social you should be focusing on three core strategies:

• Connect your website to your social channels through tags. These are most commonly used to set the image, title, description and link used when user paste a link into social channel.
• Connect a message to a prospective user by search behavior (keyword research) through a channel that sends them off to do something. For example, if your target users are moms looking for cooking ideas you may discover, through keyword research, that search for chicken recipes. You target them through Facebook with a “Baked Coconut Tenders with Strawberry-Mango Salsa” recipe that sends them to a 5 minute video your site.
• Be timely and share your message on the appropriate social channels. For example, you may find that working parents look for recipes as soon as they get home from work around 5:30 p.m., so push your social posts out at 5:28 p.m. so that it’s at top of their feed.

A spreadsheet like this means nothing to most people:

And it shouldn’t. Documents highlighting high-volume keywords instead of user intention regularly find their way into meetings with search teams and potential clients. With search being one of the most trusted mediums for users to get information — Google facilitates over 3.5 billion searches per day and search is the source of over 64% of all web traffic — marketers have been getting lost in the weeds fretting about keywords, often forgetting about the individual asking the question.

This sort of common misstep can often lead brands to chase keywords rather than consumers, landing themselves with the wrong audience. For instance, the first instinct for an exclusive credit card company looking to improve their search numbers may be to simply optimize for the words “credit cards”, casting a wide net that may seem effective, yet actually brings in many people who fall into the wrong consumer category.

The need to understand your users when designing and developing new platforms isn’t new, but many people are less familiar with taking similar steps to create a smoother SEO experience. Like designing a digital application, understanding your audience’s intention will push you to create the proper modules and content every page needs.

Say you find through your research that travel rewards are a top priority for potential credit card adopters. Search intent can help you break down these larger needs, like travel rewards, into useful pieces of information that directs the right people to your site. Good search comes down to working alongside design and strategy teams to build platforms that already offer what users are looking for, rather than making SEO an afterthought only discussed after a site is launched.

Once SEO strategy is built into the design process, it’s the marketer’s job to define the best ways of landing the right type of user. For that, there are three simple hacks that use tools SEOs are already familiar with, just in a smarter way.

For insight into what users are searching for:

Open an incognito window (⌘-Shift-N or Ctrl+Shift+N ) and simply type a product name into your search bar.

This instantly shows that people are thinking about travel and customer service. Knowing this, you can alter how you present content to users. Based on this information, perhaps you create a content module about the travel benefits of an American Express Platinum card.

To spot red flags:

Throw your potential keywords into Google Keyword Planner. The image below should scare you if you are like the exclusive credit card company optimizing for the word “credit cards.” It’s all about spotting words and phrases that seem off-brand to your users. In this case, terms like “cards for bad” and “bad credit” show that the keyword will attract the wrong audience.

So what should they be going after? Based on what we see in the image below — a more specific search that focuses on travel cards — an exclusive consumer is an advanced credit card user. They’re extravagant, they care about reward points and ease of use. They are not a newbie just praying they get approved. Our results show that the most accurate terms are: rewards, airlines, travel.

To test potential search terms once you have them:

Though there are free ways of testing your hypothesis, one very simple method is to buy keywords through paid search and measure the user stats — click through rate, bounce rate, time spent, conversion rate — to gauge if it is the right fit for your users.

Buying terms can give you a good sense of what does and doesn’t fit your audience, which then allows you to understand key intentions of your users. Going back to the travel example, if we buy terms like airlines miles, hotel rewards, and flat-rate travel rewards, we can compare conversion rates to alter our messaging and increase conversion rates.

Voice fizzled as a reality without Google before 2000 and became real when search engines powered it with AI in 2017. In 2018, it’s going to start changing our behavior.

With Google Assistant’s strong showing at CES, the search engine reigns supreme. From speakers to phones, apps, cars, TVs, technology is changing the landscape. The information held within these systems will connect us deeper with users, as we move from typing queries to speaking in questions. The insights captured from behaviors, unlock the “why” and the new perceptions, feelings, needs, fears and details observed when you tune in are truly remarkable.

User Impact

Voice with the power of machine intelligence will change us, in a world where your watch can be your phone and the need for large screens to get lost in can be secondary. Environments are being created where machines assist us as we cycle through life with voice connecting us to them. Power without constant self immersion. From smart meters instructing us on parking and asking how long we’ll be, to sensors pre-ordering our morning coffee, to stores that assist us in purchasing.

Not only will this break our unhealthy relationship with our phone, it will reduce waste. As we communicate with these new assistants they will begin to know us. From helping with the routine efficiency of our homes, to the scary cool where it alerts me that my wife is over me surfing by her heart rate. When you think about the mass amount of daily efficiency opportunities the potential is society shifting.

Industry Impact

Imagine a world where cities understand their people. Rerouting traffic flows based on commuters vs rogues providing multiple unique routes to reduce density, alerting us that the garage we normally park in is full, educating us as we explore new areas.

The beauty of this archetype is voice systems will create intelligent machines that will learn from us. Understanding patterns, empowering us. A setting on your watch could ask you at the beginning of the day for routine, adventurous, or new. From your past behavior it adjusts your day to challenge you, lead you to new places. Personalization you’ll want.

Marketing Impact

With voice we will switch from a visual experience that lists options to a single voice answer, options diminished. For brands, this means your tolerance for error narrows drastically, provide a couple wrong answers and you’re AOL. A blip, gimmick in the past forever forgotten. Connect and you’re in the friend group.

For users voice will aggressively continue to assist in daily tasks, connecting us to it. For companies it will empower reduction of menial work, fighting the ever chasing need for time. Within all of this comes the power of personalization, assistance and predicting behavior, which when paired with marketing feels NASA esque.

For most people, Google is search, and search is Google. It’s a common belief that the Silicon Valley giant powers nearly every aspect of the web, but in fact, it couldn’t be farther from the truth. Inside the internet’s universe there are a handful of galaxies that are powered by their own search engines. Apple has Spotlight; Microsoft has Bing; IBM has Watson. Dozens of website use Apache Solr technology. And Amazon has the fastest growing search engine of all — A9.

Never heard of it? You’re not alone. A9 is a hidden powerhouse in the search world despite impacting every interaction you have with Amazon. Unlike to Google, which crawls the entire web to feed its ever-shifting optimization algorithm, A9 pulls directly from Amazon’s coffer of webpages and looks at a distinctly different set of criteria to determine which pages rank highest. The good news is that optimizing for Amazon’s algorithm is, in many ways, far easier than optimizing for Google’s. When it comes to determining what you see first on Amazon, the company really only has one goal: get you to buy stuff.

If you’re a company that sells goods on Amazon, this single-minded goal makes your life a little easier. But don’t get too excited about the prospect of totally beating the system; optimizing A9 is still an imperfect science that takes a lot of know-how and a healthy dose of trial and error.

Search engines keep their algorithms opaque so that you can’t game them , but if you understand the levers to pull, you’ll find that you can take an aggressive stance on optimizing for A9. Here, we’ll discuss the four main components that drive Amazon search: conversion rate, relevancy, pricing, and reviews. And we’ll give you tips on how you can start bending them to get the search results you want.

The Right Way to Product Relevancy

All search algorithms are an attempt to tie visitor intent to some kind of end product. With A9, it’s about understanding what any given person might search for on Amazon and serving that to them as efficiently as possible. Unlike Google, where website creators have no boundaries or guidelines when it comes to what kind of content they make, Amazon removes some of the guesswork by providing shop owners with a template that outlines exactly what they need to have on their page. This includes: Product Title, Key Product Features, Product Description, Product Picture file name.

When someone searches on Amazon, the algorithm scrapes the pages looking for the most relevant content to the query. The trick to relevancy is understanding keywords. A good keyword in the product title can take a generic product and turn it into something that’s highly searchable. Amazon doesn’t have its own keyword research engine (there are plenty of external to choose from), but even without a specialized tool you can ask yourself questions like, what are some of the specific attributes around the product I’m selling? What is the color? In what context might someone use the product?

Think about the last search any consumer might do to get them to Amazon — those are your keywords.

For companies trying to sell their goods on Amazon, it’s important to remember that Amazon is the last step in a consumer’s long purchasing journey. Some people might search Amazon for a generic term like “running shoes,” but more often than not, people do their early research and browsing on Google. By the time they get to Amazon, they’re ready to click buy. Most people have a set hierarchy while searching. They start broad and narrow it down until they find what they’re looking for. Think about the last search any consumer might do to get them to Amazon — those are your keywords. Instead of titling your product “Adidas Running Shoes, Size 11,” try “Adidas Running Shoes, Size 11, Blue, Track.” The great thing about Amazon is that you have absolute control over what you enter into the product page fields. If keywords aren’t registering, change them up and try again.

Finding the Pricing Sweet Spot

Search Amazon for “running shoes” and scroll down. Notice something? The prices at the top are cheap, and all are within a $10–15 band of each other. This isn’t done by accident. Amazon knows you’re more likely to convert at these prices. As you scroll down the page, the options (for the most part), get systematically more expensive.

Knowing how to set prices is a key factor in pushing your product to the top of Amazon’s search ranking. But how do you know where to set your price? Let’s go back to our running shoes search. A price that falls between the highest and lowest on the first couple rows of products is your ballpark. Staying within this band is particularly important when it comes to commoditized, easily substituted products like razors or batteries. Customers aren’t willing to pay an extra few dollars on something they have no personal connection to.

Making it easy for people to leave reviews in the first place. This comes down to communicating with your customers.

Building a Community Through Reviews

You can do all the keyword research in the world, skyrocket your relevancy, and set your prices dirt cheap, but a bad review can still kill a product. Reviews are proof that people should invest in your product, and Amazon takes them seriously when determining search rankings. The best and simplest way to garner positive reviews is to produce a good product, but the savviest companies know that it’s really about making it easy for people to leave reviews in the first place. This comes down to communicating with your customers. Set an email strategy for reaching out after a purchase, and give your customers them ample incentive to take the time to review a product.

For items to which the consumer has a personal connection — beauty products, furniture, clothing — fostering an easy review process is crucial. The goal is to build what feels like an organic community around your product. If successful, reviews can not only increase your conversion rate, but they can provide companies valuable research insight into how they can position and market their product going forward.

Test and Learn

Keep in mind that all of the previous factors — relevancy, pricing, and reviews — are in service of increasing a store’s click-to-conversion rate, or the rate at which people buy stuff. Conversion rate is the holy grail of A9 since Amazon’s algorithms are designed to turn visitors into customers. Everything you do should be an effort to increase the number of sales, which will in part increase your page’s visibility. If that feels a little like a Catch-22, you’re not wrong. In order to increase your conversion rate, you have to get all of the other factors right. And because Amazon doesn’t allow A/B testing or duplicate posting, it can be challenging to understand what’s working and what’s not. The hard truth is that there’s no playbook for getting it exactly right. If there was, everyone would set up a shop, pull the right levers, and create a monopoly selling black running shoes.

Instead, selling effectively on Amazon requires constant attention to detail. You can’t write the product description and walk away. Someone needs to be there gauging how keywords are performing, how pricing is shifting, and fostering a sense of community. Optimizing for Amazon’s algorithms might — for the time being — be simple compared to doing the same for Google, but to truly maximize your reach, it’s something you’ll constantly have to invest in and nurture.

Magenta is a publication of Huge.

Amazon Rules E-Commerce. Here’s the Secret to Winning on Its Platform was originally published in Magenta on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.