Voice Is Essential – How Are You Responding?

Last year, I blogged about the rise of voice assistants to help people manage tasks ranging from checking the weather to searching online for answers to every kind of question imaginable. The world has changed a lot since then and people are using voice search more than ever, as a result. With 2020 nearly at the halfway point, voice has moved past being “on the rise” to becoming an essential part of everyday life for people confined to their homes. Businesses need to take note and respond accordingly.

People Are Using Voice More Frequently

Edison Research and NPR surveyed 1,660 adults across the United States. The survey found during the COVID-19 pandemic, voice assistants are being used much more frequently than before. As reported in Voicebot.AI, for the first time ever more than half of the people who own voice devices are using voice commands at least twice a day to several times a day. Meanwhile, the percentage of people who use voice commands less frequently is dropping – showing a clear shift in usage.

In addition, Voicebot.AI reported that:

• Smart speaker owners request an average of 10.8 different tasks from their voice assistant a week in 2020, compared to 9.4 different tasks last year.

• About 59 percent of smart speaker owners with a smartphone voice assistant use each AI for different duties. 

“With tens of millions of Americans no longer commuting, smart speakers are becoming even more important as a conduit for news and information,” Edison Research senior vice president Tom Webster told Voicebot.AI, “and this increased usage and facility with voice assistants will likely increase demand for this technology in vehicles once our commutes resume.”

These findings are consistent with Euromonitor International research that pointed to consumer acceptance of voice assistants during the pandemic. As the Wall Street Journal reported,

Euromonitor earlier this year noted that consumers were buying more AI-enabled home appliances and virtual assistants, like Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa. But now, such devices have a new draw, says [Head of Euromonitor’s lifestyle research Alison] Angus. “Voice-control technology limits the need to touch surfaces so much, so that’s why they are appealing,” she says.

Even as shelter-in-place orders ease up in some states, widespread concerns about health and safety will make the surface-free interface of voice more appealing from here on out. Here’s how your business can respond to this uptick in voice search numbers.

Ways Businesses Can Adapt to Voice

As I have noted in past blog posts, businesses can do a number of things to become found more readily as people use their voices to manage their lives. One way is to write content that answers the more complex questions people search using their voices. Go beyond trying to rank for a simple phrase such as “Summer hats” (how one might search using text) and instead provide answers to more complex questions such as “Which summer hats offer the best coverage?”

This content needs to be precise and dedicated to answering the one main question along with any related questions you can think of. For example, goodeyes.com’s page on dry eyes at night is able to secure the featured snippet for “dry eyes at night” along with the featured snippet for “do eye masks help with dry eyes” and other related queries because their page is a one-stop-shop for information on the possible causes and remedies of dry eyes at night. (See my September 2019 post for more insight.)

In addition, consider ways to use voice assistants to provide useful content that improves the way people live.  For instance, the Mayo Clinic recently introduced an Alexa skill for people to get answers to questions about COVID-19. Google introduced a new voice assistant and app to help parents who are home-schooling their kids in the aftermath of schools shutting down. Snack maker MoonPie created a MoonMate Alexa skill to make life under quarantine more bearable with entertaining content.

By doing things like writing meaningful, helpful content geared toward voice queries or creating interesting apps to entertain or inform, businesses can capitalize on the rise in voice search while also doing their part to help during these unprecedented times.

Contact Investis Digital

At Investis Digital, we help businesses optimize content for all forms of search in order to make your content more pronounced in every aspect. For further insight into how we can help you, contact us.