Editors’ Note:
We asked one of these Artificial Intelligence machines to write us a 1,500 word article on the benefits and challenges of AI for Voice Search (don’t tell the boss), and it sent us back only 700 words. Needless to say, we now fully understand Zoek’s approach to this newer digital marketing technology for small businesses: AI with a human touch.
In this article we’ll explore:
Voice Search, the Futuristic Strategy for Small Business Growth
Wait, What Exactly Is Voice Search?
Staying Prepared: The Benefits and Challenges of Voice Search
How to Optimize Your SEO With Voice Search
Introduction: Voice Search, the Futuristic Strategy for Small Business Growth
Imagine being alive in 1877 in Somerville, Massachusetts. It was mostly agricultural. There weren’t any sidewalks or streetlights and men would sometimes travel to Boston for work. It was here that the first telephone was installed in a home – a line connecting a man and his small business.
Some 30 years before, Samuel F. B. Morse had dispatched the first ever telegraphic message from Washington, DC to a piece of paper tape in Baltimore, MD. From the Bible, Numbers 23:23, he chose the words, “What hath God wrought?”
It was exciting and strange. Gone were the days when we were limited to learning calligraphy and waiting for the delivery of our handwritten letters via horseback. It changed the way we love, the way we war, the way we do business.
Miracle, genius, or common sense inspired the next evolution – relaying human voice over a wire. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876 and within a year, Charles Williams Jr., an electrical telegraph equipment manufacturer, had a phone in his Somervillle house connected to one at his factory.
The curious mind won’t allow technology to die, it seems. Although now, in 2024, there is significant side eye towards tech – from fear of it taking our jobs to fear of it stealing our purse like in “I, Robot” – the use of it is so common in households around the world, it has nearly caught up with our wildest imaginations of what it means for man to be one with his tool.
Wait, What Exactly Is Voice Search?
Voice search is a quick way to find information. The moment you think of a question, you can simply ask it out loud, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will answer. No need to call mom or visit the library! No more typing!
Of course, the response comes through a device (not quite the voice of God, but you could probably get AI Morgan Freeman on the line). These devices include your smartphone, computer, or the smart speaker in your car and uses a virtual assistant like Apple's Siri or Amazon’s Alexa to recognize human speech patterns and produce the best possible reply to your voice command.
The same way you would type a query into Google’s “Search” bar and get possibly hundreds or thousands of results is how Google’s Voice Search uses what’s called, “natural language processing” (NLP). It not only interprets your words but also your intent, in order to give you a fast one answer to life’s most pressing needs, like, “Where’s the best coffee?”
Staying Prepared: The Benefits and Challenges of Voice Search
Customers are always looking for convenient and easy ways to find the local businesses they love. The first phone book was published in 1878 (two years after the phone was invented). It was a single piece of cardboard that included the name and number of 50 businesses and individuals in Connecticut. Now, more than 50% of adults are using Voice Search daily with 88% of all “near me” searches conducted via voice. Let’s explore more about why it’s catching on and what the risks are.
Benefits of Voice Search
Improved Accessibility and Customer Experience
Not everyone can or wants to type. The children these days aren’t learning cursive, but they are figuring out how to communicate in depth with emojis. With AI-driven voice search, users can simply speak, making the access to information faster and easier for people with visual, learning, or dexterity disabilities. It bridges the gaps that technical literacy and regular literacy creates, giving more customers the opportunity to connect with you.
Customization
You can use the AI algorithm in your favor. With enough data about your preferences, voice search can process information faster than you can think of a question, and personalize responses and recommendations according to your innermost thoughts — in a non-scary way, if you’re mindful about your privacy settings. For small businesses that means you can reach the customers most likely to buy what you’re selling, instead of investing a huge marketing budget into blanket coverage of a particular area or industry.
Efficiency and Productivity
For small business owners, voice assistants can streamline customer support. It lets you live hands free. It gives you time to focus on growing your business without losing a beat on customer experience. You can “greet” more customers with accurate, updated information about your business. Plus, you can interact with them every step of their customer journey, starting from their first step of searching for an enterprise like yours.
Challenges of Voice Search
Reliability, Accuracy, and Ethical Implications
Voice recognition systems were first introduced in the 1950s – not long ago, considering how far we’ve come. Bell Laboratories designed the “Audrey,” which could recognize the digits 1-9 spoken aloud. Since then, banks and phone and cable companies, and other big businesses have all used it to streamline customer service (despite how much we’ve all been yelling, “speak to a representative” into the phone).
The systems aren’t infallible, of course. The AI may misinterpret accents, dialects, or background noise and render inaccurate results. More recently, it’s also been discovered that AI algorithms may even perpetuate biases, leading to discriminatory outcomes.
Job Displacement
Perhaps the biggest disruption is that automation replaces certain jobs, potentially entirely eliminating positions for routine or manual tasks. Artificial Intelligence demands growth from humans. If we herald technology as the foundation, there has to be human upward mobility to address the socioeconomic impact. Or, the robots really will run the world.
Dependency and Overreliance
Learning cursive really wasn’t that bad. Using AI for decision-making and information retrieval could diminish our own cognitive abilities, such as critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. To be able to depend on the results from your voice search as reliable information, it requires robust testing, validation, and regulation.
"From the Yellow Pages to Google to Voice Search and AI, businesses must be where their consumers are searching. Early adoption of technologies like voice search isn't just beneficial — it's necessary for maintaining a competitive edge."
– Sam Riemer, Zoek CEO
How to Optimize Your SEO With Voice Search
Search engine optimization (SEO) is already about optimizing your digital presence, so why is Voice Search any different? In simple terms, the use of AI is not something that all businesses are ready for or need. It immediately raises your Local SEO visibility and needs to be customized to fit within your growth landscape and to facilitate the “right” customers finding you.
“The number of voice assistant-enabled devices in use has increased by 146%, from 3.25 billion in 2019 to 8 billion in 2023,” reports Semrush. “Local businesses that embrace voice search registration can gain a competitive edge…”
Only 10% of businesses are currently registered, so that edge is thick. On average, businesses see a 3x increase in customer traffic with voice search. While it can be free and “easy” to register, once your business is online, your voice search registration has to be amplified to be heard.
At Zoek, we’ve done the research to identify the best AI platforms to submit our clients to, and we register your business on AI networks (including Chat GPT, Google Gemini, and Raka) and Voice channels (including Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri).
To ensure your peace of mind, we also provide each business with its own dashboard so you can see the work done as we ensure that the correct NAP (name, address, phone number) data for your biz is out there and that reputation management is under control.
A quick recap of the stats:
Voice Search is used daily by more than 50% of adults worldwide.
Every month, more than 1 Billion voice searches are made by users.
125 Million people around the globe used voice assistants in 2023.
Some 71% of internet users prefer to conduct queries through voice search over typing.
6 out of 10 consumers reported using voice search to find a local business.
In 2023, there were 8 Billion voice assistant enabled devices, a 146% increase in just 4 years.
Businesses see on average a 3x customer traffic increase with voice search.
The competitive edge is huge right now with only 10% of businesses registered so far.
Conclusion
Let’s face it. The techies are still working out the quirks, and the politicians are still figuring out what guidelines and standards are needed to regulate Artificial Intelligence. But history is not made neatly and tidily. Your customers are already using voice search with more than 1 billion searches performed each month. At this point, we can dive in on the demand and adjust our strategy to stay ahead of the curve – and the bots.
"Consumers have and always will look for information as efficiently as possible. The only thing that has changed over time is how they obtain that information," says Zoek CEO, Sam Riemer. "From the Yellow Pages to Google to Voice Search and AI, businesses must be where their consumers are searching. Early adoption of technologies like voice search isn't just beneficial — it's necessary for maintaining a competitive edge.
"A logical fallacy I've experienced in my time in the industry is business owners applying their own bias to their marketing strategy: 'I don't use voice search, so why be there' or, in the early days of Google, 'Word of mouth and flyers have always worked for me, why do I care about being on Google?' can be a fatal decision for a business. We strive to make it easy and affordable for our clients to mitigate their risk and not miss any potential business, no matter how or where their customers search."
Voice search technologies can once again change how we love, how we compete, how we do business. It can transform industries, enhance customer experiences, and inspire innovation. However, for it to stay on the side of beneficial, it requires regulated frameworks for privacy, ethics, reliability, and impact.
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