"VSO" What It Is And Why It Matters

Most of us reading this are familiar with SEO. It's been essential to keeping the new-age of digitally savy consumers informed on what's going on, but what exactly is VSO?

According to Amy Webb, a professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business, VSO (Voice Search Optimization) is the future of marketing. "By 2020 more than half of all internet searches will be made without the use of screens." She's referring to searches being made through Google Homes, Alexas and other devices like them.

"By the end of this year, almost half of U.S. Households will own a smart speaker. Among those that already do, three-quarters of them use it daily"

In many ways VSO seems to be the next digital gold rush. Companies like Michaels Organization, a property management firm out of New Jersey, have already started using it to help their student communities stand out according to NAA.

The tech prophets at Google are already aware of the potential of VSO, which is why they just created a tool called Speakable which "identifies sections within an article or webpage that are best suited for audio playback using text-to-speech (TTS)" according to Google's reference page.

The real question is: does your community/company have a VSO strategy in place?

All data and quotes, unless cited otherwise, is from the the June 2019 issue of Inc. Magazine page. 64