True Sea Change opportunities come rarely but I wanted to share a recent conversation I had with one of our client CEO’s. She was just back from an industry conference where a speaker had asked: “Was anyone optimizing for voice search?” She was the only person who tentatively raised her hand as her company is in the early goings of deploying programmatic pages. She was excited that she was now leading her peers after her brand’s history of being a laggard.

Why bother with Voice Search?

A voice based assistant is going to be as ubiquitous in your day to day life as your TV remote to dropping a package off to your parked car. There are already a billion devices with voice assistants connected to them. We can count on people to be lazy. It is just easier to say hey siri/google/alexa then type out your request into a phone or computer.

This represents a huge opportunity for your business to be found as tectonic shifts happen rarely. The last major Sea Change was the adoption of mobile. Voice is going to be on an equally rapid growth path because #1 it will be easier and #2 it will be everywhere.

10:3:1

I coined the term 10:3:1 to help explain how your business is going to be impacted by this shift. On a typical desktop Google search results page there are 10 results and on a mobile page 3 and for voice you ONLY get 1 answer from Alexa. You want to be that one answer. The most exciting part is that you can be, as most of the world is still focused on those 10 desktop results. We spend our time thinking about how someone is going to find your brand today. For example, we see a lot of consumers now saying “nearest ______ to me” as they commute to work.

In-Car Voice Assistant Total Audience Reach

Imagine if your brand was what they easily discovered during their 54 minutes worth of daily commuting time! It would change your business and it can. How? These voice queries are longer, which makes them significantly easier to rank your brand.