Why Voice Search Matters: Local Search, Not Voice Commerce
The real business case for voice search in 2018: a local visibility and featured-snippet story, not voice commerce, and why that changes where you invest.
Every business owner weighing where to spend a 2018 marketing budget eventually asked some version of the same question about voice search: does this make me money, or is it noise? The honest answer depends entirely on which part of “voice search” you mean.
The part that doesn’t move revenue yet: voice commerce
If your bottom-line case rests on customers asking a smart speaker to buy your product, be skeptical. Ordering physical goods by voice existed in 2018, mostly for reordering household basics people had already bought before, but it wasn’t a meaningful new sales channel for most businesses. Building a custom Alexa skill hoping it would drive purchases was, for almost everyone who tried it, a cost center with no measurable return.
The part that does move revenue: local discovery
The real financial case for voice search in 2018 was local. A huge share of spoken queries are local by nature, “is there a pharmacy open near me,” “what’s the closest auto shop,” and those queries convert into real visits and calls the same way a typed local search does. If your business depends on people finding you nearby, a complete and accurate Google My Business listing and a fast, mobile-friendly site were already paying for themselves through voice, whether or not you’d done anything “voice-specific.”
The other part that does move revenue: owning the answer
When a smart speaker answers a question out loud, it’s almost always reading the same content Google already surfaces as a featured snippet for that query on a normal search. That means the businesses capturing real value from voice search in 2018 weren’t running a separate voice campaign, they were the ones already ranking for well-structured, directly-answerable content that happened to double as the voice answer. Owning that answer is worth pursuing regardless of whether the customer ever picks up a speaker, because the same content also wins the click on a typed search.
What this means for your budget
Don’t fund a “voice search initiative” as a separate line item chasing sales that speakers weren’t yet delivering. Fund the two things underneath it that were already proven: accurate, complete local listings and clear, well-structured content that answers real customer questions directly. Both pay off in ordinary search too, so the incremental cost of also winning voice answers is close to nothing. That’s the actual bottom-line case: not a new channel to build, but an existing investment that was quietly paying an extra dividend.
Keep reading in the SEO archive or see everything published in 2018.
