57% of Smart Speaker Owners Have Voice Purchased

I love the idea of being able to yell out “Alexa / Siri / Google, buy more beer!”, and having it delivered pronto to my house.

The reality however, much like actually trying to work on an iPad Pro is somewhat more prosaic.

With all the repetitions, misunderstandings, clarifications and apologies: it could just be a conversation with my partner.

Read more about this puff piece from a proponent of Voice Search in this extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates 29 September 2017.

#SEO #SEONews #VoiceSearch #KnowYourNumbers #DodgyData

Summary:

• Mmmmm. 57% of smart speaker owners have made a voice purchase you say?
• 7% of the US population have one (20 million in market, apparently).
• 65% of owners wouldn’t go back to life without one.
• 50% of all search will be voice by 2020 says comScore. (Hmmmm).
• So says the National Public Media research done by Edison, the leading podcast research company. All with a nice repeatable methodology, I’m sure.
• Some of these stats may have been written up to be brilliant stats for speaker manufacturers to trumpet.

Actions to take:

1. Prepare to go back to the future, as smart speaker manufacturers slips screens onto their devices as we are visual beings.
2. (A number of versions of these hub devices have already been and gone).
3. Prepare to do voice searches galore to get to comScore’s 50%.
4. Until the tech gets better, prepare to say what you want multiple, multiple times before adopting a strange, stilted, stultified version of your voice to try and get what you want.
5. Think about structuring content around natural language search queries as they will be the keywords of the future.
6. Click here to contact me to discuss preparing your content for voice search.

Discussion:

50% of all search will be voice? By 2020? That will probably be 10% of actual search volume, but repeated 5 times due to mis-hearings, or poor results, unfortunately. Or it will be a case of voice search being so easy, that we do it naturally to answer absolutely anything.

I’m quite intrigued by the stats in this report (you may be able to tell). 57% of the owners have made a voice purchase is not unfeasible. Most of them are likely to be early-adopters willing to give it a try (I know I would). The interesting stat would be how regularly they do it and if voice-purchase has replaced another form of in-person or online purchase. I’m guessing not (yet), but the figures don’t tell that story.

The other interesting stat is how 20 million devices is 7% of the population. I think that figure is likely over-stated due to multiple purchases of the same system (wire up the house) and testing different systems. Dividing the US population by the numbers of speakers apparently sold doesn’t necessarily give you the % of the population who own one.

More info:

• NPR Smart Audio Report
• SE Land Coverage
• Millennials Making Voice Device Purchases
• 33% Increase in Google Voice Search Languages

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I recently wrote about how Google’s Mobile First is Not Mobile Friendly. Read it now.

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• Voice Search will be cool, when it arrives properly and works properly. Can’t wait for that.
• The people doing it at the moment are the early adopters, the triers, the people willing to give it a shot.
• Note the research doesn’t say how many did it again, or do it often.
• Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
• Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
• Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.

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