Voice Search Could Be Your Missing Factor!

Remember when it had been considered weird to use a Bluetooth device in public? A while back, the last thing people wanted was for others to think they were ranting to themselves on the road. Today, using voice search on a mobile publicly can still have a stigma attached, especially in certain settings (like the restroom, etc.), but that stigma is disappearing rapidly.

Google Ramps Up for Voice Search

Google has been preparing for a voice search for quite a while. The increase in mobile usage and voice commands, in fact, have led to some pretty significant changes in how Google’s program interprets queries.

In 2016, Google officially stated that 20 percent of mobile queries had become voice searches.

The percentage of voice search queries is predicted to rise, especially because the younger generations still adopt voice search.

How People Use Voice Search

Until mass adoption, trying to know why people do and don’t use voice search can enlighten our marketing strategies and help us understand how voice commands impact how search engines work to supply the foremost relevant results. Recently conducted studies of quite 900 users to ascertain how they use voice search.

The results were fascinating. For instance, did you recognize that two-thirds of individuals feel comfortable using voice search at home alone? That number drops to 54 percent when using it at home with people they know.

Then there are the pioneers of public voice search adoption—those who felt comfortable conducting voice searches regardless of who was around. Quite one-fifth of these surveyed were fine using voice commands in additional public situations, like amongst co-workers, in a restaurant, on public transportation, or at a celebration.

A smaller amount of individuals were okay using voice commands in places just like the gym or within the bathroom (which, understandably, might be awkward, to be muttering commands from the toilet), where 13 percent of individuals seem comfortable with speaking searches to their phone.

Men were far more willing than women to take risks in places just like the bathroom, with men twice as likely to use the phone for a voice search within the restroom than women! Men were also 3 times as likely to use voice search in a theatre than women.

Age plays a role in public voice search adoption, too. Our survey found that people within the Generation Z category (under age 24) were 33 percent more likely to use voice commands in a number of those more “taboo” public settings than those older than 24.

Voice Search Will Grow Even More

Because we see comfort levels using voice commands on mobile devices are significantly higher among the younger generation, it’s reasonable to expect that voice command usage will increase over time. Other reasons for growing adoption will likely include improved technology, as outlined within the Internet Trends Report:

Different folks prefer different technologies when performing their voice searches. If you've got an iPhone and know that Siri can lookout for what you would like, then you’ll likely ask Siri and not bother opening up a fanatical app or browser.

In fact, the Internet Trends Report showed Siri processed quite one billion voice commands per week by June 2015.

Also of interest therein, data are the forecasts for the continued growth of voice search.

How to Prepare

Search boxes and browsers will remain with us for the foreseeable future, but their importance goes to say no significantly over the subsequent decade.

What will those other devices be? They’ll be watches, thermostats, TVs, refrigerators, cars, game consoles, and lots of other sorts of devices. Most of those won't have a browser, and therefore the main interface is going to be via voice.

Digital personal assistants could also be the most connecting tissue that binds these things together. Those are tools like Google Assistant, Cortana, Amazon Alexa, and Siri. This then will become the new key focus of your optimization efforts. When someone tells a private assistant, “Find an Italian restaurant near me,” you’ll need to have taken the proper steps to be included in those results.

Some of these new steps will have tons in common with those needed to show up in today’s search results, but not all are going to be that straightforward. For instance, if the query is, “How do I change a tire?”, the private assistant may only return one single response. This might come from what Google calls a “featured snippet,” the direct answer the program gives to queries above the regular search results. It’s the primary of three ideas I have for you on the way to ready yourself for this new world:

Learn how to urge featured snippets for your site. the good thing about this is often that it both prepares you for the longer term, and it also will assist you to drive a traffic increase to your site immediately.

Learn the foremost common questions prospective customers have about products and services like yours. Get out there and learn what they need to understand, then start building content to answer those questions proactively. Being one among the highest information sources in your market space is going to be critical to surviving and thriving.

Start experimenting with conversational interfaces. These are different than traditional web interfaces. For instance, on an internet site, users often navigate to what they need during a step-by-step process. If I would like a shoe, I’d navigate in steps like this:

• Pick sneakers within the menu

• Pick running sneakers within the menu

• Pick a brand

• Pick a size and color

• Pick a specific product

Imagine a world where I simply say what I would like, starting with, “Give me a list of Nike Air

trainers for men, size 10.” During this world, I skip many steps within the process to obtain what I would like much faster. We won’t get to this overnight, but we'll get there, and therefore the time to start learning is now. you'll do that by experimenting with the Amazon Echo (learn the way to build an Amazon Skill here) and Google Home (learn the way to build an Action on Google here).

The world is changing fast, and we’re approaching some extent of major disruption in our industry once more. While this will be frightening, it also can be exciting. One thing is for sure: It’s a time of great opportunity. Start exploring the proper ways to line yourself up for fulfillment now, and you’ll be in a far better position to try to do well because the events of the following year unfold.

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