The Growth of Voice-Enabled Speaker Usage & Search

Viewed as the next frontier for tech companies, voice-enabled speaker usage is expected to grow by 130% this year. This growth doesn’t even include the voice assistants on smartphones. Amazon is dominating the market with a 70.6% share, while Google Home is trailing behind with 23.8% share.

“Consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with the technology, which is driving engagement,” said Martín Utreras, eMarketer’s vice president of forecasting. With 60.5 million U.S. users, which is over a quarter of smartphone users, or nearly one in five Americans.

Leading in voice-enabled adoption, and representing 26.3% of virtual assistant users, are people between the ages of 25 and 34.

The voice-enabled speaker market is expected to grow to $2.1 Billion by 2020, and companies are entering the competitive fold seeking to capitalize on the momentum. But the race to establish early market share brings with it risks of prematurely releasing a voice-enabled device that is full of software issues and a poor user experience. Which is why eMarketer says that though Amazon’s share will fall somewhat, it is not expected anytime soon.

Online Marketing & Voice Search

There is no denying that voice-enabled devices are changing the way people search, which creates a challenge for marketers. As more consumers use voice-based software, and 50% of searches expected to be voice-enabled by 2020, the digital marketing and advertising landscape will change. Marketers need to gain deeper insights into how digital campaigns will need to evolve to reflect voice search patterns, search type, and search location. Gone are the days where we simply optimize our website for specific keywords.

Voice-enabled search devices now engage with natural conversational phrases by better interpreting the meaning and context behind them. Taking into consideration the personal context surrounding the searcher, including their search history and location. An effective way that marketers can provide context to website content is to use structured data.

Since searches will be more conversational, marketers will need to increase the amount of quality, conversational content that they produce, to maintain visibility in searches. Short tail keywords no longer fit with the natural, conversational tone used in voice searches, which is why we need to focus more on the semantics of search and personalized long-tail form queries.

Websites that adapt to voice search early on, are likely to reap benefits similar to those we saw in 2001, which were the early days of keyword rich content.

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