Get to Know the 46% of Consumers Who Use Voice Search Every Day

You’re probably among the thousands of consumers who take advantage of the virtual assistants available on your phone. Siri and Cortana make conducting searches easier and it’s fun to ask them silly questions. But did you know that 46% of people who use smartphone voice search do so to look up local businesses every single day?

Bright Local surveyed over one thousand consumers in the U.S. for its Voice Search For Local Business Study 2018. According to this study, here’s the percentage within each demographic that has conducted voice searches on their smartphones within the past year:

Ages 18 to 34: 77%
Ages 35–54: 63%
Ages 55+: 30%
Male: 61%
Female: 50%

The survey also found that the top three reasons people use voice search on any device are to get the address, directions to and phone number of a business. Roughly 45% of those surveyed report having searched for that information. After searching for a local business, 28% of searchers’ next move is to call the business. Another 27% say that they’ll visit the business’ website after searching for them and 19% will actually visit the store’s physical location.

What kind of businesses are voice searchers on any device typically looking for? Most of the time, these consumers have food on their minds. Fifty-one percent of those surveyed said they’d use voice search to locate a restaurant, 41% said they’d look for a grocery store and 35% would be searching for food delivery. Aside from food, the most common industries voice searchers look up are clothing stores (32%) and hotels (30%).

For more information on both voice-activated assistant users and voice-activated smart speaker users, head to their AudienceSCAN profiles in AdMall by SalesFuel.

Voice-activated assistants are readily available to most consumers and those consumers are taking advantage of the ease the assistants grant to searching the web. Is your client’s strategy prepared for voice searches? If not, it’s time you approached them about adding some more conversational words to their search terms.