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<p>Voice Search Trends: Is Your Business Ready?<br />
<br />When Google launched the Voice Search app for the iPhone in 2008, it was far from perfect. Over the years, speak-activated technology has become much more accurate and human-like. Stats show that Google&#8217;s English recognition accuracy rate is now over 95%.</p>
<p>People want instant solutions when they&#8217;re searching for something online.</p>
<p>While typing a query into a search bar is quick, simply speaking into your device and getting the same results is even quicker. On average, a person can type around 40 words per minute and speak around 150 words per minute.</p>
<p>To try a spoken search, you can activate your phone&#8217;s assistant (Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, for example). Or, try it online: click on the microphone icon to the right of the Google search bar, to the left of the magnifying glass.</p>
<p>You&#8217;ll be prompted to &#8220;Speak now&#8221; and you&#8217;ll see the results come up after you&#8217;ve made your request.</p>
<p>What Voice Search Means for your Business<br />
<br />If you&#8217;re a small business owner, it&#8217;s a good idea to start thinking of ways to optimize your website for voice search.</p>
<p>Many consumers already use it to find what they&#8217;re looking for and according to ComScore, 50% of searches will be performed this way by 2020.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s how to make it work for your business:<br />
<br /><strong>Think phrases, not keywords</strong>. When we type something into the search bar, we tend to keep it short, like &#8220;Canada Food Guide fruit servings.&#8221;</p>
<p>However, when we talk to a device, we use a conversational tone, so it would be more like &#8220;How many servings of fruit each day does the Canada Food Guide recommend?&#8221; Before optimizing your site, research longtail keywords that someone might use to find your products or services.</p>
<p><strong>Stay local</strong>. Mobile voice-related searches are three times more likely to be locally based. Use your location with keywords in your site content, and don&#8217;t forget to keep your Google My Business page updated.</p>
<p>If you have accolades or awards, include those too &#8211; users are often searching for the &#8220;best of&#8221; or &#8220;top&#8221; products or services in the area.</p>
<p><strong>Be overly informative.</strong> A virtual assistant pulls information from the Internet, so you want to make sure there&#8217;s lots of it to be found.</p>
<p>Keep your website, Google My Business, Yelp and other third-party sites updated with things like your contact info, hours of operation, location and menu.</p>
<p>However, that&#8217;s just the basics. Dive even deeper &#8211; does your business accept American Express? Does your boutique sell clothing by local designers? Is your business a good place to take kids, pets or a date?</p>
<p>The more you can put out there, the more questions you can answer. Creating a FAQ page is a great way to provide both typers and talkers with relevant info.</p>
<p><strong>Speed up.</strong> Your mobile page load time matters. The average spoken search results page loads almost twice as fast as a web page, so you&#8217;ll have to keep up if you want to get noticed.</p>
<p>Google also includes page speed as a ranking factor, so faster is always better. Check your site&#8217;s speed.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s going to become more and more relevant &#8211; and necessary &#8211; to make it easy for customers to &#8220;talk&#8221; to your business. Instead of waiting for your competitors to catch up and outrun you, start working on optimizing your site now.</p>
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