Voice search is the latest buzz in the digital marketing community. With companies like Gartner predicting that by 2020, 30% of searches will be voice, hotel marketers are eager to know if their businesses are optimized for this new channel.
While it may be the shiniest new marketing object to catch your attention – it’s important to first understand what this technology is, how it works and how it may disrupt the market in order to determine how it will (or won’t) change the way you need to approach your hotel’s digital marketing strategies.
First, What is Voice Search & How Does it Work?
When people use the term “voice search” they are usually speaking of one of two different areas –home assistants (think Google Home, Amazon Echo with Alexa) and voice search using your phone’s technology such as Siri to return results on a screen. The latter technically being defined as “dictated search”. We’ll dive into both to make sure your best prepared for the latest disruption in search engine marketing for hotels.
How Do Home Assistants Work?
Amazon Echo/Alexa and Google Home are currently leading the market for voice assistant devices. This area of voice search is, at its core, screen-less. That means one-answer responses, not a list of responses presented in search engine results format. It wasn’t until Amazon launched its Echo Show that home assistants started to incorporate screens into their devices. Now more home assistant devices, like Google Home, are incorporating or planning to incorporate screens into home assistant devices.
How Does Dictated Search Work?
The other area included under the topic of “voice search” is search that uses voice command to pull up search engine results on a screen. This is more accurately defined as dictated search. This includes the use of Siri on your iPhone or Google Voice Search on your android or other devices. Does the use of voice dictated search change the way Google returns results?
Home assistant devices and dictated search through Siri (and other mobile devices) are two very different voice search experiences. One relies on providing a variety of results on a screen and one relies on voice responses to answer your questions. Next, let’s dive into how consumers are using voice search with each of these device types.
