The Time Has Come to Get Serious About Doing SEO for Voice Searches

Change will possibly be crucial for local businesses.

One of the star gifts of the last Christmas was the smart speakers. Companies that occupy key positions in that market, such as Amazon, congratulated themselves on the number of devices sold at times like the Black Friday campaign.

The sales boom made smart speakers also star in not a few analyzes and become one of those elements that appeared in all forecasts of things that company managers should know as they outlined what they were going to do with their marketing strategy , advertising and communication.

The truth, however, is that the voice did not just reach the market and did not just settle among the options that consumers had available.

Actually, things had been going much longer now.

Voice assistants had become an element already present in recent years on mobile devices, as was the case with Siri, Apple’s assistant, and consumers had begun using them.

What the smart speakers had done and their moment of bombing had been to make it clear that the change was underway and, above all, that companies had to start acting on that basis.

They had to start to settle their voice strategy and think in those terms.

And one of the key pieces to position in this new environment was to understand how things worked and how they changed what companies could be doing or should do.

That is, once consumers start using these tools, the way things work and how the strategy has to be organized.

And one of the key points is to understand how all this impacts searches.

After all, consumers who use these tools and these devices have ‘conversations’ with Siri, Alexa, Cortana and the like for many things, such as asking to be reminded of things, to put certain songs on them or to add things to their lists of the purchase but, above all, they do it to ask specific things, concrete data.

They are asked questions and those attendees search the net for the correct answer.

The usage data of voice searches

One of the latest studies on the subject, conducted by Uberall on a sample of American consumers, shows that, although there is still a lot to grow (57% of respondents have not yet performed voice searches) the market is already emerging.

20% of respondents are doing voice searches at least weekly, although with different frequencies (9.8% of all respondents acknowledge that they do voice searches every day).

But even those who don’t do voice searches right now see different things when talking about the future.

60% of all respondents say they believe voice searches will be important in the future.

Those responsible for the study also believe that the growth in the use of voice assistants in smart speakers and in the technology designed for vehicles will make it grow even more.

Right now, 37% of those who use this technology frequently do so at home and 34% in their car when they cannot use their hands.

And, very relevant for companies, 11% use voice searches to ask for directions to reach a site.

This point is not only crucial because it marks how your consumers can get to you but also intersects with another of the study data.

According to their conclusions, consumers who use these tools use it intensively (48% of all) to find information about local businesses.

SEO for Voice Search

That implies that consumers are starting to look for information about companies on the network using the voice and that this becomes much more crucial and prominent for local businesses, which are usually also SMEs.

Companies have to start preparing for this change, especially since as the voice becomes more present in cars it will be even more important.

They have to begin to understand the needs of SEO for voice searches and establish their strategy in this field.

Voice searches are different from ‘old’ searches and companies need to take their needs and work for them.

Just as the jump to the mobile involved making adjustments, the jump to the voice will also do it.

Companies will have to work using natural language and assume what information their consumers really want to find there.