Voice Search Arrives in Canadian Living Rooms

What went on sale yesterday

Google Home, Google's smart speaker, went on sale in Canada yesterday. It sits on a kitchen counter or a shelf, waits for its wake phrase, and answers spoken questions out loud.

Some of those questions are about local businesses. Is the hardware store open, where is the nearest pharmacy, what time does the pool close.

Voice search is not new; people have spoken into their phones' search box for years. What is new is a device with no screen, so the answer arrives as a sentence and nothing else.

That changes less than the excitement suggests, and a little more than nothing.

Where a spoken answer comes from

For a question about a local business, the answer is assembled from information Google already holds.

• Your listing's hours, including any holiday hours you entered.
• Your address, used to judge what is nearby.
• Your phone number, read out when someone asks for it.
• Your categories, which decide which questions match you at all.
• Short passages from web pages, for questions that need an explanation.

The first matters most. A spoken "open until six" is taken as fact by someone deciding whether to get in the car, and it comes straight from whatever hours your listing shows.

One answer, not ten

A results page offers ten links, a map and three listings. A speaker reads one answer, or at most a short list of nearby places, and stops.

There is no scanning of alternatives and no noticing that another listing has newer reviews. For a quick factual question, the first answer is the whole result.

That raises the cost of wrong information. A wrong hour on a screen might be caught by someone who also checks the website; a wrong hour read aloud gets acted on.

What a local question sounds like

Typed searches are clipped: "screen repair near me". Spoken ones are sentences: "where can I get a cracked phone screen fixed today".

Words like "today", "now" and "near me" turn up constantly, because people ask a speaker about what they intend to do shortly, not about next month.

Hours and distance answer most of those. The rest are questions of fact: do you take walk-ins, do you fix this model, is there parking.

The second group is where your website comes in, because those answers can only come from your own pages.

Hours are the first test

If you do one thing because of voice search, compare your hours on Google with the hours on your door.

Then look ahead. Canada Day is Saturday, and the long weekend changes hours for many businesses. Google My Business has a place for holiday hours that leaves your regular ones untouched.

Holiday hours entered a few days ahead are what gets read out on the day; corrected afterwards, they are too late for anyone who already drove over.

A worked example

A phone repair shop in a shopping centre keeps the centre's hours, which change on holidays and through December.

Its Google listing showed only the regular hours. On Victoria Day the centre opened late and closed early, and the listing said nothing about it.

People searching that morning were told the shop opened at ten. Several arrived at a locked gate, and two said so in reviews, one with a photograph of the shutter.

The cause was ordinary. The centre emailed its holiday schedule to tenants each month, and nobody at the shop had the job of copying it onto the listing.

Now the person who receives that email enters the dates as holiday hours the same day, starting with this weekend, and checks the listing on a phone afterwards.

A customer with a broken phone is more likely than most to ask a speaker whether the shop is open, and the listing supplies the answer.

Pages that answer in sentences

For questions beyond hours, a spoken answer sometimes comes from a passage on a web page, read aloud with the site's name.

There is no way to request this. What helps is what helps a human reader: common questions answered directly, in a sentence or two, under a heading that asks them.

A repair page that says "Most screen repairs take about an hour, and walk-ins are welcome" can be read aloud. A page that says "Contact us for turnaround information" cannot.

Write those answers for the customer first. If a speaker uses them too, that is a bonus, not a strategy.

What voice does not change

Voice answers quick questions. It does not choose a dentist, a roofer or a wedding venue for anyone.

Anything involving comparison, prices, photographs or trust still ends on a screen, usually your website, and that page has to work.

There is no separate voice version of a site to build. The work that helps is the work your listing and pages needed anyway: accurate facts, plain answers, and quick loading on a phone.

Treat confident forecasts about how much searching will move to voice, and by when, with caution. Nobody knows yet, and the speaker has been on sale here for one day.

What you can measure

Analytics does not label voice searches, and Search Console does not separate spoken queries from typed ones.

What you can see are longer queries phrased as questions in Search Console's query list, and the calls and direction requests in your listing's Insights, which is where most spoken local questions end.

The counter-case

For many businesses voice changes almost nothing this year.

A business chosen after careful comparison, such as a law firm or a renovation contractor, is rarely the subject of a spoken question. Its effort belongs on its pages and its reviews.

A business whose listing is already accurate, with holiday hours entered as a habit, has done the main work already.

And the phone in a pocket remains the main way people look a business up; the speaker is one more device asking the same listing.

Accurate listing details and plainly answered questions serve every searcher, spoken or typed, so check them now.

Before the long weekend

1. Look yourself up on a phone, the way customers do.
2. Compare the listed hours with your door.
3. Enter Canada Day hours in Google My Business.
4. Give one person the job of holiday hours.
5. Check the phone number and address on the listing.
6. Answer common questions plainly on your pages.
7. Ignore forecasts about voice taking over.

Step four is what keeps the hours right. They go wrong not because nobody knows them, but because nobody owns copying each change onto the listing.

Checking what Google still holds after your own site changes is covered in old pages still in Google after a redesign.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.