Did you know that over 53 million Americans own a smart speaker? These devices used to be considered a luxury, but a survey of these owners revealed that their speakers play essential roles in their daily routines. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that smart speakers boast of one of the fastest adoption rates in the history of consumer technology—and any marketer should take note if they want to leverage these devices to attract more laser-targeted traffic.
Delve into the stats
The number of smart speaker owners jumped from 39 million last year to 53 million this year, equivalent to a 36% increase. Google Home and Amazon Echo are leading the race, though other voice assistants refuse to lag, including Samsung Bixby, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple’s Siri.
According to estimates, voice searches will account for 50% of the total searches by 2020. There has also been a considerable increase in the number of smart speakers who own at least two devices, proving how much, they value this technology.
Amazon and Google aim to embed voice content technology into a wide selection of devices, including clock radios, vehicles, the Chrome browser, and Bose speakers. MAXPlaces, a New York City-based digital marketing company, says that it wouldn’t take long for voice interfaces to be ubiquitous. The agency has started to integrate voice-activated content into their overall strategy, future-proofing the digital presence of its clients by crafting content optimized for voice searches.
Voice-Driven SEO
Since voice searches will dominate the search landscape in 2020, it’s prudent to stay ahead of the curve and figure out how Google, Siri, Cortana, and Alexa can be the best sources of traffic.
When looking at the search engine results page, 10 options are given to the user, including some multimedia options and customer reviews. Getting the top spot is the goal but ranking on the first page usually equates to decent traffic.
Things are different for voice searches. You only get one result. For businesses, it’s all or nothing. Voice-activated content works by optimizing for invocation phrases. For instance, Alexa uses its own Alexa Skills Store to find a skill that supplies the most relevant answer. Some voice assistants allow for several invocation phrases, but Google doesn’t. There can be only one result for each voice search on Google and creating the right voice-activated content can spell the difference between reaching your target audience and being invisible to them.
Consumer Engagement
Consumers are relying less on websites and more on user-generated content, social media, and third-party aggregators. It no longer makes sense to put all your resources into optimizing your website. Recognize the endless opportunities that voice-activated content presents to your brand. Clearly, consumers love this new kind of content, precisely because it’s easier to consume compared to reading blogs, checking emails, following social media posts, and launching mobile apps.
A voice-activated content strategy gives your business an edge, helping you become one of the early adopters of this exciting era in digital marketing. The numbers speak for themselves. And while voice isn’t going to render your website useless or kick Facebook out of the picture, it’s clearly the next big thing.
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