Google Home went on sale in the United States on November 4. Amazon has been selling the Echo there since last year, and this fall it released a smaller, less expensive Echo Dot. Both companies are promoting their devices heavily for the holidays, and many American households will unwrap a speaker that answers questions.
Neither device is officially sold in Canada yet, and in Indonesia one would have to be brought back from abroad. The direction is nevertheless clear: people will soon ask a device in their kitchen where to eat, and the device will choose a single answer.
What does voice search look like today?
Voice search is not new. Siri has been on the iPhone since 2011, and Google offered voice search on phones even earlier. Google stated this spring that about one in five searches in its mobile app and on Android are now spoken. People are therefore already accustomed to speaking to their phones, to a greater extent than one might expect.
What is new is the setting. A phone displays a screen of results; the user scrolls, compares and chooses. A speaker in the living room displays nothing. It reads one answer, perhaps two, and stops.
For a local business, this changes the competitive landscape. On a screen, third place is acceptable. Spoken aloud, third place is effectively last.
The technology behind Google Home is the new Google Assistant, announced at the I/O conference in May and already available on Pixel phones and in the Allo messaging app. The Wikipedia page on Google Assistant maintains a list of the products where it appears. Amazon's Alexa, for its part, relies on Yelp for much of its information about local businesses.
For a small business, then, the question is not how to "optimize for voice" in some special sense. It is simpler: where do these assistants obtain their information about the business, and is that information correct?
Where do voice assistants get their information about a business?
For Google, mainly from Google My Business: hours, phone number, address, category and reviews. When someone asks "is the dive shop open now?" or "call the pizza place downtown," that listing is the source.
An incorrect hour on the listing is therefore no longer a minor error on a web page. It becomes a voice in someone's kitchen stating that the business is open when it is closed. The customer travels there and finds the doors closed. The result is a lost customer and probably a negative review.
Our recommendations:
- Check the hours on the Google listing every season, and set special hours for every public holiday, including those in the next two weeks.
- Use the same name, address and phone number everywhere: Google, Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Apple Maps, local directories and the business's own website.
- Choose the most precise category available. "Restaurant" is too vague for a warung serving seafood on the beach.
- Respond to reviews. They influence how search engines, and now assistants, assess the business.
None of this advice is new. Voice simply makes the cost of neglecting it much more visible.
Which website content gets read aloud?
Short, direct answers. The website is the other half of the equation. When Google Home answers a general question, such as "how long does it take to get certified to dive?", it often reads a short excerpt from a web page, the same kind of excerpt Google already displays in a box at the top of some results. Searching a practical question on a phone will usually reveal one of these boxes.
The pages selected share a common structure. They state the question clearly in a heading and answer it in the first one or two sentences below, with no introduction and no preliminary marketing paragraph: the answer first, then the details.
This is also an effective way to write for human readers. A FAQ page with real questions, phrased as customers actually ask them, answered in plain language. If a FAQ sounds like a brochure when read aloud, it should be rewritten. The blog offers further guidance on writing pages that people can actually use.
How much of the voice search forecast is reliable?
Caution is warranted, because the enthusiasm is considerable. A frequently repeated claim states that half of all searches will be spoken by 2020. The source of that figure is unclear, including to many who cite it. The likely trend is that many of these speakers will be used mainly for music, timers, weather and news, and much less for requests such as "find me a plumber."
We therefore do not recommend rebuilding an entire website for "voice SEO," regardless of how such services are marketed. We do recommend cleaning up listings and writing clearer answers on web pages. That work is worthwhile whether or not voice search expands, because it improves results on phones and in regular search today.
Where are voice assistants heading?
The speaker itself is not the main development. The main development is that people are becoming accustomed to asking a question and receiving a single, confident answer instead of a page of ten links. That habit is likely to extend to every device, including the phone. As assistants become more capable, and they are improving quickly, the gap between "search results" and "the answer" narrows.
For a business, this leaves less room to be the fourth option a user scrolls down to. A business is either the answer or absent from the exchange. Effective local SEO was once about ranking on a page; increasingly, it will be about being the answer the machine provides aloud.
When a machine answers on a business's behalf, it must have the correct information to give. The holiday hours are the place to start.