Are you marketing online for your local business and trying all that you can to get it listed in all of the major search engines and business page listings? Well, then you must think and answer one vital question. Is your business voice search ready?

This is one of the most vital questions affections a significant percentage of your traffic, conversion rates, and revenue generation on a broader scale. After all, why are you trying this and that and whatever possible to get listed as the business? The main reason is that you need to be part of the growing online market so that you can capture the traffic and send it to your site and get business success.

And in the process, voice searches have started playing a very important role. You must know of it now and make necessary changes on your website to get voice search ready. Know more why it is important and how it affects your business listing and presence online.

What does it mean to be voice search ready?

If you ask this question to the various search engine optimizers and marketing experts, you are going to get different answers. Some may tell about enhanced content, some may tell of schema, and many others would highlight having FAQs. But after analyzing businesses over 73000 locations, which was conducted by Uberall, some important things come to the view. It says, the businesses which are totally offline location-based and consist of 96% of the analyzed businesses, and includes enterprise businesses, SMBs, and mid-market businesses, actually do not fulfill the Voice Search Readiness (VSR) criteria.

How VSR got calculated

As Uberall calculated for VSR, it found that there are 37 directories which feed the voice search platforms directly. The feeds mainly go to the biggest virtual assistants. Among them, Yelp and Bing come after the search giant Google/Maps. Many other names which get the feed and yet have very insignificant consumer traffic from that are Foursquare, Facebook, Factual, etc.

Uberall then compared the business listings in all of these sites, and according to the study the following report was generated which scores the entries as per their profile completeness and accuracy:

• Address
• Contact number
• Business name
• Operating hours
• Website
• Zip code

The report speaks of the profile items which must be present in listing. But still, nowhere Google or anyone has clearly stated, that how each of them relates to voice search. But it’s a known thing that voice searches are conducted mainly on mobile phones, and from such devices only searches for local services and businesses are conducted.

As per the study shared above, it’s evident that when local optimization is poor, then voice search readiness is also poor. And for the justification of this view or conclusion, it must be understood that while voice is only a user interface, but the searches made using the UI will be different and varied. Also, voice searches can include long tail keywords, long queries, etc. Hence if the site has to be optimized for voice queries, then simple strategies for the traditional style of optimization would not work. Much elaborate optimization has to be done for this.

What businesses failed to include in their VSR

In voice search readiness, businesses have been studied to include some details poorly. They are the website, the opening hours, contact address in details, and the business name. Most of the businesses claiming to be voice search ready are not actually not fully ready.

Consumer behavior on voice searches

More searches were done by taking consumer opinion, where consumers were asked about how much they use voice search. One thousand customers were analyzed. 57% of the consumers reported that they never did use voice search ever. The other 43% said they use it, but the frequency is varying and on and off. 21% of the consumers said that they use voice searching weekly. Those who were the frequent users of voice search said that they used it mostly at homes and next in their cars. 31% of the consumers of the studied 1000 said that they use voice searches for finding local businesses and information.

What do the studies on voice searches help to understand?

From studies on voice searches, it can be understood that the tendency to search on voice media is increasing among users. More users are experiencing the convenience of voice searching with time and getting accustomed and habituated with it. Exact volumes are not known, but through queries done through virtual assistants, more and voice searches are performed globally every day. The popular virtual assistant devices in the market contribute to a great exposure in business, and the popular names are Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana.

Today a small percentage of population doing voice searches is not stagnant at that rate, and this percentage is gradually and consistently growing. Users of virtual assistants are increasing, and more mobile device users are also getting easier with voice searching. All this is making voice search readiness to be a very important inclusion for marketing and search engine optimization. Therefore if you are still lagging behind here, then talk to your SEO service, and get this sorted at the earliest.

Concluding it

If you do not want your business to underperform simply for this reason that it’s not voice search ready over the web, then you should get this fixed at the earliest. Your marketing specialist can help you with this, and optimize the business website and listings accordingly. VSR is more of a growing demand than a fascinating add-on.

Hence understanding the demand of the situation and the coming future, you should get ready with this. Also, one important thing to note is that many visually challenged people have fewer options to search for what they are looking for, and for the voice is the most potent medium to search on the web or through a virtual assistant. Hence, get ready for voice search readiness to succeed.