It's early,
but Google will soon need to rank Assistant apps, too.
Google is
making the Assistant available via SDK to third parties to integrate into their
appliances and devices. It’s also quickly ramping up third-party content
integration into the Assistant. The company announced this week at its
developer conference that the Google Assistant is available on more than 100
million devices and has more than 70 smart home partners.
Alexa has
more than 13,000 skills, already creating an app discovery problem. While the
number of third-party Google Assistant apps is currently much smaller, it will
grow rapidly because of the strength of Google’s assets and ecosystem.
Google
formally launched an Assistant Directory yesterday where users can discover
third-party content. Some of this can be done through the Google Home app as
well.
Yesterday,
in a Google I/O session called “Building Apps for the Google Assistant,” company
speakers outlined the three primary ways that developers can get their
Assistant apps in front of users. Google’s Vera Tzoneva also spoke broadly
about some Assistant app ranking factors that might apply when there are
multiple apps that can fulfill a request.
Here are the three primary discovery channels:
- Verbal app invocation (explicit or implicit)
- Assistant Directory
- Weblinks, which can be promoted or shared as another URL would be
The last
category, weblinks, is the most straightforward. Just like any URL, a developer
or publisher can put this link on social media, a search landing page, direct
mail, on TV, on a website and so on. You get the weblink from the developer
project overview page.
The
Assistant Directory, which is accessed through the Assistant itself, features
numerous categories (e.g., Music, Productivity, Education, Local). The
categories will likely grow, there will certainly be a growing number of apps
in each category. These apps can be manually discovered by browsing, or they
can be invoked verbally.
There are no
downloads or apps to install per se. All Assistant apps are available to the
user at any time. They can be explicitly invoked by asking for them by name:
“Let me talk/speak to OpenTable” (among other phrases that can be used). They
might also be presented in response to a request or question without a specific
app mention (implicit invocation). An example would be, “I want to fly to New
York next week.”
What about Assistant app SEO?
Now come the
interesting SEO questions. How will Google decide when to use its own knowledge
base vs. third-party apps for a category query or implicit invocation (travel
for example)? If there are numerous third-party apps in the same category to
choose from, which one will get the nod? For example, which Travel app would be
used to fulfill a question such as, “I’d like to make a hotel reservation in
Seattle next week”?
Beyond this,
will Google allow me to choose a default app for certain categories? It sort of
does now, with a feature called Shortcuts, in which customizable trigger
phrases invoke specific Assistant apps.
Google’s
Vera Tzoneva said that a number of signals would potentially be considered in
presenting third-party content to users. Among them she identified:
- the quality of the app.
- user preferences and context (though neither of these were elaborated).
- reviews could also matter, as might the quality of the app’s presentation (e.g., descriptions and images).
Google Play
has a ranking algorithm, and some of those considerations (e.g., user
engagement) might influence ranking factors for Google Assistant. Regardless,
there are multiple questions and scenarios that Google will need to consider in
presenting and ranking third-party content.
I got a very
strong sense from talking to several people at Google that it was actively
thinking through all these scenarios but hadn’t figured everything out. For
marketers and publishers, however, it pays to get in early and learn what
works.
Google
Assistant is likely to be the front door to content on across several platforms
and may ultimately eclipse the search box itself.
Source: - http://searchengineland.com/google-announces-assistant-app-discovery-channels-broad-ranking-factors-275360
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