Do you know how customers find your business online? Chances are they are using voice searches. It’s estimated that a billion voice searches are conducted each month, and most mobile voice searches focus on local businesses. That’s why every business should optimize its local voice search on platforms like Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Assistant. It’s not just about optimizing voice searches for general questions but helping customers find your business. A 2018 survey by BrightLocal found that:
- 50% of people used voice search to look for local businesses over the past year
- 74% of people using voice searches looked for a local business every week
- 46% of the voice searches done daily looked for a local business
How to Optimize a Local Business for Voice Searches
Two years down the line and voice searches are growing exponentially. Here’s a brief overview of how brands still figuring out how to capture and engage voice search visitors should optimize their searches:
- Understand the Local Voice Search Ecosystem
The first step to optimizing a business for local searches is identifying the output devices customers use frequently. Many consumers use mobile devices, but research shows that tablets, desktop computers, and laptops have become essential voice search devices too. The same BrightLocal survey found that smart speakers were the least used for local business searches.
- Identify the Types of Local Business Voice Searches
There are three types of voice search queries:
- Direct: This kind of search occurs when people ask for information about a certain local business
- Discovery: The search involves looking for the types of local businesses offering a particular product or service or in a certain location
- Knowledge: This kind doesn’t have local business intent, but businesses can provide information that answers such search questions
Optimizing your searches for discovery searches is critical to finding new customers while direct searches are more important because they guide the customer to your business directly. Knowledge searches, however, direct the customer to your business when looking for expertise in a particular subject.
- Optimize Your Business for Searches on the Different Platforms
The Voice Search Criteria
- Apple’s Siri
With Apple’s Siri touting 36% market share for voice searches, you need to optimize your searches on the platform. Normally Siri relies on Google search results for most queries except location-based results. When asked for the location of a particular business, Siri uses data on Apple Maps. This means you should optimize your presence of Apple Maps too. Note, Apple Maps Connect doesn’t have photos or reviews; Apple extracts such data from Yelp. As such, it would help if you optimized your searches on Yelp business listing to make the most out of Apple’s Siri and Maps.
- Amazon Alexa
While Alexa dominates the smart speaker market (70%), it has a relatively small market share when it comes to voice searches for local businesses. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t optimize your business on the platform. On the contrary, you should optimize your business on its two primary sources to increase the chances of getting found. They include:
- Yelp: It provides data in the form of photos, local business information, and reviews for Alexa’s searches
- Yext: The platform started submitting business listings directly to Alexa in mid-2018
- Bing: For content searches, Alexa relies on Bing. As such, you’d need to optimize your searches for long-tail keywords, different types of content, and natural language queries. This kind of optimization is best done in the form of questions
- Microsoft’s Cortana
The platform touts a 20% market share on voice searches. Since it’s embedded in Microsoft Windows, Xbox, and Microsoft Office, one in five searches are bound to be done through Cortana. The primary source of information (photos and business reviews) for Cortana is Bing Places. However, Bing doesn’t have any mobile market share as it primarily focused on desktop web searches.
- Yelp Listing
Yelp listing is critical to optimizing local voice searches on most of the platforms. It provides reviews and images used on Apple Maps that powers Siri, generates data to Alexa, Bing Maps, and Microsoft Cortana too. This means critical business information should be complete, accurate and accompanied by a set of photos.
The proliferation of voice searches on mobile devices, desktops and tablets emphasize the need for businesses to position themselves on the different voice search platforms. They should be ready to tackle this new form of search optimization challenge to remain ahead of the competition.