SEO in the Era of Applied IoT

IoT, or the Internet of Things, is an industry that is still in its infancy. We are far from the life envisioned in the movie “Back to the Future”, where everything around us is connected and automated.

Smart houses or smart cities are the first things that pop up in one’s mind instead of industrial IoT, and pop culture is most probably to be blamed for that. Smart home devices are the most common example, and one of the most recognizable is a smart fridge. The principles are generally the same for all home appliances, but let’s take the refrigerator as an example.

While a few years ago we could read about how a smart fridge would order groceries for us, and how it would know what to order, few wondered how exactly would a smart fridge order groceries. How would it choose the supplier?

How would a smart fridge search Google to find out who to order the groceries from?

There are several options for a smart fridge to order groceries. One possibility is that there is only one supplier. This is not so practical, however, since a person from India could buy this fridge as well as a person from Canada or Madagascar, and the question is whether there would be a partner company in just about every location in the world. Also, one manufacturer, such as Bosch, would have to have partner companies for every appliance of this type and for each type of food, which is an almost impossible job.

So a much more practical solution would be for a smart device to look for the right supplier on its own. So, in addition to communication between each other, the machine would now use the Internet to find the right products through Google and order them for its user.

What could a smart device search for through Google?

In the case of our smart fridge, these would definitely be products (food and drinks). Other times it could be some other things. A smart air conditioner might want to know what the optimal room temperature is for training – if given such a command, etc. … But now let’s get back to our smart fridge. The information that may interest him is, for example, whether there are products in stock, the price, the time of delivery and the price of transport (proximity to the warehouse).

How would we optimize the sites for machines (smart devices) in the future)?

In the case of the above-mentioned air conditioner, it only needs one piece of information. Specifically, no site has direct benefits from ranking for such phrase, but there could probably be situations where this type of results can bring some benefit to the site (say a movie suggestion to watch). In these cases, the site is optimized in the same way as it is optimized for “voice search” or featured snippets.

On the other hand, in the case of our smart fridge, a local search can be very important. Your smart fridge certainly won’t spend weeks comparing different prices on different sites. So it will take the opportunity to visit the most authoritative sites or browse a certain number of sites that qualify for “near me” searches, but at the same time, Google will not allow the ranking of sites that need forever to be read (or forever to load) by a smart device.

In the end, the site code comprehensible for smart devices will be of great importance to smart devices. Well described structured data, perhaps even special pages created for smart devices (with less text and images and more structured data) – something like AMP only specifically designed for smart devices will play a major role in this field.

So to summarize (TLDR), in the future, there is a great chance that we will have smart devices that will search the internet for us. In that case, the same factors that influence voice search or featured snippets will be important. Site authority will continue to be relevant, and local searches, page load speed and structured data (which may also be developed specifically for IoT purposes) will also be relevant. It is very likely that for the sake of easy and fast crawling of pages by smart devices, we will have specific pages created for smart devices only.