The grow­ing adop­tion of voice search is fun­da­men­tal­ly chang­ing the con­sumer jour­ney. For many brands, respond­ing to this shift in behav­ior is going to demand a far more mobile and local strat­e­gy to engage cus­tomers. So what do you need to know?

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What is voice search?

Voice search is when users uti­lize voice recog­ni­tion soft­ware to con­duct their search queries, either via smart­phones and desk­top com­put­ers which pro­vide a dig­i­tal per­son­al assis­tant, or via an entry point (or hub) that uses voice such as Google’s micro­phone or Amazon’s Echo.

In most cas­es, if you’re using a per­son­al assis­tant and acti­vat­ing these devices with your voice, you’re doing some kind of voice search.

Who is using it and what for?

Google com­mis­sioned a study in 2014, con­duct­ed by North­star Research, to under­stand who, when, and where peo­ple use voice search. The study sur­veyed 1,400 Amer­i­cans across all ages.

As you can see, as ear­ly as eigh­teen months ago both teens and adults were already using voice search in a wide range of their dai­ly activ­i­ties.

So as the tech­nol­o­gy devel­ops, dra­mat­i­cal­ly improv­ing accu­ra­cy and we all begin to feel less awk­ward using voice com­mands, it appears that we are rush­ing to embrace the con­ve­nience of these dig­i­tal per­son­al assis­tants.

And accord­ing to a sur­vey con­duct­ed in Octo­ber 2015 by Mind­Meld, adop­tion rates are mov­ing fast, with 41.6% of us start­ing to use voice search and voice com­mands with­in the last 6 months.

So what?

So, a lot!

Com­bine these sta­tis­tics with the over­all fore­cast for mobile phone search (eMar­keter esti­mates that in 2015 there will be 81.8 bil­lion annu­al mobile phone search queries in the US) and the size of the prize – or the penal­ty for miss­ing out – becomes clear.

But Text? Voice? Isn’t it all ‘just’ search?

No. We uncon­scious­ly change our behav­iour when using voice search.
When we are search­ing for a restau­rant a desk­top or phone, we might type in “best lunch in High­gate.” But when we use voice search we change your behav­iour and ask a ques­tion, like “What restau­rant has the best Sun­day lunch in High­gate?” or “What restau­rants are open for lunch right now?”

As a result, voice search queries are longer than their text coun­ter­parts – they tend to be three-to-five key­words in length, and they tend to explic­it­ly ask a ques­tion, char­ac­ter­ized by words like who, how, what, where, why and when, with the expec­ta­tion that the search engines will pro­vide an answer back.

Voice Search Shows True Intent

But that is great news for busi­ness­es, as this ‘nat­ur­al lan­guage’ shows you the real intent of the con­sumer. If I were to search for “dig­i­tal cam­era,” a brand would have no idea whether I want­ed to buy one, have one repaired, or was sim­ply look­ing for stock images of cam­eras.

Here’s where the nat­ur­al lan­guage usage with­in con­ver­sa­tion­al search changes everything.The type of voice search ques­tion asked can reveal the degree of intent:

Of course this has real con­se­quences on bid­ding strat­e­gy. I can bid high­er for ques­tion phras­es with the high­est like­li­hood of action, e.g. “Where’s my near­est Shuh store?” vs. “What brands does the Shuh store sell?”

By under­stand­ing and design­ing bid strate­gies around this intent, voice search will allows brands with more lim­it­ed bud­gets to com­pete with larg­er, heavy spend­ing brands because they can choose when to com­pete for cus­tom, and focus their more lim­it­ed bud­gets at exact­ly this moment when the user shows their spe­cif­ic intent.

Voice search is local

Data shows that mobile voice search is three times more like­ly to be local-based than text search. This is large­ly due to the fact that most smart­phone search­es are local, as they’re car­ried out while on the move. If you’re a busi­ness with a local phys­i­cal pres­ence, or a mul­ti-loca­tion busi­ness, it’s impor­tant to be con­sid­er­ing the impli­ca­tions. Think care­ful­ly about the key­words that would be rel­e­vant to a local searcher, and the nat­ur­al lan­guage they might use to describe the area.

If you haven’t already, cre­ate a land­ing page for each indi­vid­ual loca­tion, build­ing in loca­tion-based key­words. These could include local places of inter­est, land­marks, pop­u­lar schools and sports cen­tres, etc. So if a voice searcher enquires, “what’s the near­est cof­fee shop to Dun­combe School in Hert­ford”, you’ll be pre­pared for that and ready to appear with a rel­e­vant SERP list­ing.

And just as a foot­note, Bing search in this case was way more gran­u­lar & help­ful than Google search.

So get smart with key­words rel­e­vant to your local searcher:

• Are there land­marks you need to call out, such as “in old city” or the sta­di­ums or any­thing else sig­nif­i­cant that will be a cue for your searcher?
• What are the local places of inter­est that mat­ter to your com­pa­ny?
• How do folks describe your neigh­bor­hood in nat­ur­al speak?

Voice search gets quick answers

Voice search trig­gers more quick answers in the SERPs. This is because ques­tion words are close­ly relat­ed to local search­es. For exam­ple, “Where is the best Thai food near me?” and “Where can I rent a car today?”

These are dis­tinct­ly local search­es and they trig­ger ads in the SERP that allow the user to act with­out going to a web page.

You can see reviews, a phone call but­ton, and a “book now” but­ton. Users don’t have to come to your web­site to com­plete their inten­tion. This will have a strong impact on crowd-sourced sites, such as Yelp and Tri­pAd­vi­sor, where it’s your company’s respon­si­bil­i­ty to update hours and phone info, as well as to mon­i­tor and respond appro­pri­ate­ly to cus­tomer reviews.

Make it a pri­or­i­ty to keep your local list­ing, your busi­ness list­ing, and your crowd-sourced sites updat­ed and active. These sites have a great deal of pow­er when the search doesn’t leave the SERP.

For exam­ple, is your address cor­rect? What about your hours and your phone num­ber? Are there cus­tomer reviews you need to man­age?

Take Local Seriously

Local and small­er retail brands spend more time on their local foot­print (they don’t have as many). They under­stand their local audi­ences bet­ter and build bet­ter con­nec­tions with them. Big retail brands are going to have to work hard­er to engage these cus­tomers at the hyper local lev­el to pre­vent fur­ther dis­rup­tion to their busi­ness mod­el.

As a final small exam­ple, see the local search result below for a ‘phar­ma­cy in Hert­ford’.

In what oth­er media chan­nel could 3 sole traders be the only vis­i­ble pres­ence? Where are the big phar­ma­cy chains?

Brands, it is time to get seri­ous & local about voice search.