Voice Search

1. What is Voice Search?

Voice search is the action of issuing a search engine search query by speaking to your smartphone or to a desktop search engine.  Voice search is a topic and a concern in its own right because the way people formulate a voice search is very different from the way they formulate a search that they type.  Such a difference has an impact on what the search engine returns if the website does not take these differences into consideration.

2. Why should I care about Voice Search?

First, some facts:

• 71% of consumers prefer to perform search queries by voice instead of typing.
• Most (three-quarters) businesses say they’ve already realized quantifiable benefits from voice- or chat-assistant initiatives. Those benefits have included a 20%+ reduction in customer-service costs (Capgemini)
• Voice-driven shopping is expected to hit $40 billion (way up from $2 billion) by 2022 (Siteefy)
• 76% of smart speaker owners use local voice search at least once a week. The majority of smart speaker users search for local businesses by voice every week. 46% of users do the same daily.

Second, given two websites that are equally performing for typed queries, the website that takes into account how people speak their search queries will perform better -- that is, will rank higher -- when users search using their voice than the website that does not take into account how people speak their search queries.

3. What are some popular applications for voice search:

According to WhatIs.com, popular applications for voice search include:

• Search engine queries
• Requesting specific information, such as stock quotes or sports scores
• Launching programs and applications
• Selecting search options
• Searching for content in audio or video files
• Hands-free voice dialing

4. What should I do next?

Engage with the Witlingo team and we will work directly with your SEO team to make sure that you are doing what you need to do to optimize your web presence for voice search.