Over the past few years, the way we interact with our technology has completely evolved. Looking back 10 years ago, who would have thought we would have a personal assistant in our pockets? With the increased accessibility to instant information, technology leaders like Google have been focusing heavily on delivering information to the user at the drop of a hat, or should I say at the drop of “OK, Google”?
The popularity of voice search has increased immensely since the introduction of Siri in 2011. Fifty-eight percent of consumers have used voice search to find a local business in the past 12 months. And, out of those voice-search users, 46 percent use this feature to find local businesses every single day! So, with the frequency of consumers using voice search to find local businesses like yourself, isn’t this where you want to be?
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Big Opportunities for Local Businesses: Researchers predict that 50% of searches will be performed by voice search by 2020! |
How Consumers Are Using Voice Search
Typically, a consumer is using voice search to find businesses they already know. Branded searches through voice search are usually done when a consumer is looking to make reservations, learn more about product pricing, or identify products or services at your business. After making the voice search, 27 percent of users will visit the business. Although the user is normally using this way of searching for branded terms, there is a ton of potential for discovery searches in the future.
As Google becomes more and more accurate with their voice search results, users are becoming more comfortable with searching through voice. Through AI, Google’s voice recognition accuracy has risen to over 95 percent for the English language, and we will only continue to see this accuracy rate rise. Due to this, discovery searches through voice search have a lot of potential to grow in the near future.
But How Does This Affect My Business?
Those stats are great and all, but how does this affect your local business and what can be done to ensure you are showing up when a consumer makes a voice search?
As this trend continues to rise, it is vital for local businesses to be found in these voice search results. Redirecting your digital marketing strategy to focus on voice search will be vital in the upcoming years. Top industries that are seeing the most engagement with voice search range from restaurants and hotels to car dealers. But, even if you are an accountant or builder, which has less voice search engagement now, you still want to focus your strategy on voice search, because you could be losing out on leads if you can’t be found.
By focusing your content strategy on featured snippets, you will only increase your visibility on the SERPS. Google Home usually pulls from these results, so your content strategy should heavily focus on answering your consumers’ questions. Also, it is more important than ever to make sure all your business’ information, including name, address, and phone number, is correct across the web.
Being ahead of the pack within your industry and focusing on improving the likeliness of showing up will just increase your likeliness of being found. Voice-related searches are three times more likely to be locally based, so don’t let your competitor be the first to scoop up those voice search consumers.
Are you ready to increase your visibility on voice search and leads? If so, let’s chat.
Stat Sources:
https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/voice-search-for-local-business-study/