Users want accurate results – and they want them quickly and conveniently. AI assistants from Siri, Google, Amazon’s Alexa, Cortana, Bixby to Dragon Mobile and Hound are increasingly becoming a core feature of our day-to-day lives. Over the past months, have you noticed how much more you’ve been personally using voice commands instead of manually typing into your devices? From a simple Google search, asking Alexa to run your favorite playlist, queries on the weather, using Siri to check traffic alerts, or Bixby to look up a number in your contacts list, getting the latest news updates, or finding a restaurant near you – voice searches have gone mainstream. It’s no surprise that every best SEO company in Ireland is making voice optimization part of their product offering.
Just how popular have voice searches become? Results from a PwC consumer survey published in 2018 already saw 59% of 18–24-year-olds being heavy daily users of voice assistants with their devices. The 50+ year-olds were not left behind, with 57% using the voice assistants at least once a day, and 40% a couple of times a month. By the end of 2020, smart speakers alone had sold over 150 million units, with Amazon and Google taking the lion’s share:
It’s so convenient that 53% of people use mobile voice searches while driving. Granted, most of the voice searches at home are made with standalone speakers and while watching TV. Whether it’s during exercises, socializing, operating machinery – the trend is set to continue. With capabilities like Google’s speech recognition now supporting over 100 languages to enable users to carry out voice search in their native language, it will continue becoming popular.
Source: PwC
Gartner had already projected that 30% of web browsing would have been screenless by 2020. The year saw the voice recognition market reach $10.7 billion dollars, with the Statista numbers projecting it will more than double to $27 billion by 2026.
While voice searches are popular for carrying out basic tasks like setting phone reminders and getting weather updates, it also allows advanced features ranging from controlling smart home devices to buying goods online – and your eCommerce store needs to optimize for the latter. Narvar’s Consumer Report showed that 43% of owners of voice-enabled devices use them for online shopping.
Sure, there is still some skepticism since when one is shopping online, they need to examine different products, compare their prices and go through reviews. Actually, more shoppers are increasingly relying on the voice assistance features during the pre-checkout stages as they research the products, as opposed to the actual checkout where the products are added to carts and the purchase made. For instance, 51% of USA’s online shoppers actively use voice search to shop and find new products, 30% to track packages, 18% to contact customer support, and 17% to reorder items. So what measures are you putting in place for your online store to tap into this potential?
Source: Narvar
Voice Search Optimization For Ecommerce Stores
You already know about the value of SEO services, where your website is optimized to score higher ranks on search engine results for the queries that an internet user makes. Voice search optimization now focuses on the verbal part of this. Basically, when the user makes a voice search, the webpages that are landed on can be easily read out by the voice assistant of the device the customer is using. This is part of the broader SEO, since the content will only be read if it gets to the top of the results in the first place. Our ecommerce SEO services Ireland team is here to get you started. Get in touch with us today to audit the performance of your online store, and put in place data-based strategies that will accelerate your growth.
