{"id":125577,"date":"2019-04-18T17:03:59","date_gmt":"2019-04-18T17:03:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.searchenginewatch.com\/?p=125577"},"modified":"2020-02-18T06:31:53","modified_gmt":"2020-02-18T06:31:53","slug":"voice-search-study-uberall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/2019\/04\/18\/voice-search-study-uberall\/","title":{"rendered":"Study: How ready are businesses for voice search?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“So… most businesses know about voice search. But has this knowledge helped them optimize for it?”<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a>, and even how to optimize for it<\/a> — are people actually doing it?<\/p>\n

In this report, researchers analyzed 73,000 business locations (using the Boston Metro area as their sample set), across 37 different voice search<\/a> directories, as well as across SMBs, mid-market, and enterprise.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In order, this was how they weighted the importance of a listing’s information:<\/p>\n

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And pictured below are “the 37 most important voice search directories” that they accounted for.<\/p>\n

Uberall analysts did note, however, that Google (search + maps), Yelp, and Bing together represent about 90% of the score’s weight.<\/p>\n

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How ready are businesses for voice search?<\/h2>\n

The ultimate question. Here, we’ll dive into a few key findings from this report.<\/p>\n

1. Over 96% of all business locations fail to list their business information correctly<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In other words, more than 96% of all business locations failed to list their business information correctly.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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2. The four most common types of listing errors<\/h3>\n

In their analysis, here’s the breakdown of most common types of missing or incorrect information:<\/p>\n