Svenn Andersen | 26/04/2018
Mobile and voice search: The impact on SMB websites
Powered by machine learning and big data, the rise of mobile- and voice search is not only changing the way consumers search, but also impacting the technology that ensures websites are optimized for these new types of online search.
Our search behavior has dramatically changed over the past few years. Already in 2015, Google announced that search on mobile devices overtook traditional search via computers in 10 countries, including the USA and Japan. A BrightEdge (2017) survey from last year found that 57% of traffic was from smartphones or tablets. The use of voice search is also rapidly increasing, and people are using voice search both at home (via voice assistants), as well as on-the-go (via mobile devices), with a recent survey from Navars showing a 42% increase in voice assistant ownership, and 51% of surveyed consumers using voice to research products prior to purchase. Furthermore, a projection by ComScore estimates that 50% of all search queries will be voice search queries by 2020.
With the proliferation of local and voice search queries, search engine optimization (SEO) of small business websites must keep pace, in order for SMBs to remain relevant and visible in search results.
How search has changed
To succeed, search engines need to ensure that they can deliver the best quality results to the user and this has required a strong focus on technology to ensure algorithms are up to par. Search engines like Google have focused on four critical components of search for the past few years:
It’s a matchmaking game
To put it simply, search is a matchmaking game where search engines need to understand the consumer’s search query and then match it with the most relevant online content. The quality of the match is dependent on a number of factors, on the consumer-side (user location, time of day, specific query) and the content-side (indexed quality content, what other users searched, most popular destinations). So how do small businesses meet their match?
Optimizing the SMB website for mobile- and voice search
For an SMB website this means:
Mono websites and voice search
The Mono Platform allows you to create data-rich websites that are lightning fast, fully W3C certified with rich schema.org markup, and optimized for local, voice and traditional search.
Voice search is, without a doubt, an increasingly important technology that needs to be accounted for by big and small businesses, alike. With the right platform, SMBs can rest assured that not only their website is optimized for voice search, but also their content is properly structured to meet Google’s standards.