“So… most businesses know about voice search. But has this knowledge helped them optimize for it?”
An interesting report recently released by Uberall sought to address that exact question. For as much as we talk about the importance of voice search, and even how to optimize for it[1] — are people actually doing it?
In this report, researchers analyzed 73,000 business locations (using the Boston Metro area as their sample set), across 37 different voice search directories, as well as across SMBs, mid-market, and enterprise.
They looked at a number of factors including accuracy of address, business hours, phone number, name, website, and zip code, as well as accuracy across various voice search directories.
In order, this was how they weighted the importance of a listing’s information:
And pictured below are “the 37 most important voice search directories” that they accounted for.
Uberall analysts did note, however, that Google (search + maps), Yelp, and Bing together represent about 90% of the score’s weight.
How ready are businesses for voice search?
The ultimate question. Here, we’ll dive into a few key findings from this report.
1. Over 96% of all business locations fail to list their business information correctly
When looking just at the three primary listings locations (Google, Yelp, Bing), Uberall found that only 3.82% of business locations had no critical errors.
In other words, more than 96% of all business locations failed to list their business information correctly.
Breaking down those 3.82% of perfect business location listings, they were somewhat evenly split across enterprise, mid-market, and SMB, with enterprise having the largest share as one might expect.
