Rabbit & Pork at Brighton SEO

We were invited to speak at Brighton SEO this year about how to quantify the opportunity within voice search for brands.

Voice is top of the agenda for most marketeers in 2019. However, finding a starting point is difficult due to a lack of reporting tools and the infancy of the market. In this presentation, we discuss how our research can help brands to understand where to focus from Google Actions to Alexa Skills to SEO and other methods.

Key Takeaways from Steff’s Talk at Brighton SEO

• There are now 1 billion voice searches per month and 65% of smart speaker owners can’t imagine going back to life without them
• More UK households own a smart speaker than a pet rabbit
• There are 25 different types of Google Assistant results
• Answer boxes do not always equal assistant results, Google My Business and Knowledge Graph are also important
• Some phrases are “whitelisted” on Google voice search, so they can’t be targeted by third parties. For example, flights queries will always take you to Google Flights
• Our custom built tool allowed us to run 10,000 queries across 23 different verticals to assess the Google Assistant’s performance
• The results showed huge variance in answer rates across verticals
• Actions can be activated by either explicit or implicit invocations
• We built an action to test whether our implicit invocations could trump answer box results. With time and optimisation they did!
• In the vertical we were testing in, we found that 22% of searches were done via Voice

7 Things to Remember:

1. The landscape will change
2. Several methods are being used to grow the market
3. Check voice results to decide if there is an opportunity
4. More to gaining voice results than Answer Boxes
5. Find a useful reason for an Action/Skill
6. Track and optimise
7. It’s not just Google