How Does Voice Search Impact Your Business?

Voice search radically changes the way results are provided to consumers. The consumer asks a question and hears an answer, which means there is essentially just one spoken result. Unlike traditional web-based search, voice search is all about the one best answer. This means the pressure has never been greater to:

• Get your business's digital knowledge in order
• Optimize it correctly
• Employ every option you can to secure a search engine's trust

Ideally, if you've done everything you can and gained the trust, you'll be the one answer trusted enough to be spoken out loud on intelligent devices like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri. However, just like in regular search, the engines are always testing — always seeking to refine and present even better "best" answers to their searchers.

On top of this, consumers are being taught how to ask devices for answers, which is a natural extension of their current behavior. People type questions differently than they say them out loud. This is because we can speak more words per minute than we can type and also because we are less deliberate with our words when we speak than we are when we type out a traditional query. So we see the rise of conversational search spreading.

Deeper adoptions by older generations starts at home through Alexa and Google Home. These devices make it easier for people with growing, age-related challenges to accomplish simple tasks. Order more dog food, check the weather, understand their calendar for the day, and so on.

Younger generations start with mobile devices and transition everywhere easily. Today's teens and children know of no time in their lives when they didn't have access to the internet, and most have always had access through a mobile device. It's critical to understand the behaviors of younger generations — and how they are using voice search.

Intelligent services powered by voice rely on your business's structured data to provide rich experiences — so you need to ensure the data about your brand is structured in a way these services understand. Schema Markup helps your website speak the language of intelligent services so they can understand, categorize, and structure the information about your brand. And enhanced, consistent, and accurate digital knowledge published everywhere can help offer an excellent consumer experience. By complying with these best practices, businesses become a part of that circle of trust around the content showcased to consumers via voice search.

In our latest eBook, How Voice Search Changes Everything, Yext VP of Industry Insights, Duane Forrester, breaks down the world of voice search. Download it now for even more insight into how it impacts your business and what you can do to reach more consumers through this technology.