Google Assistant answers all your local questions; whether it’s about a local business or traffic in the area.

The average human speaks around 3 times faster than they can type. With voice assistants easily able to recognise and understand your query, and provide answers and actions that matches your intent, soon all smartphone users will be talking to their phones.

Google Assistant (which has been around for awhile) is a virtual personal assistant developed by Google that is able to have two-way conversations with users – Like Siri is for Apple devices. I, personally, only use Google Assistant when doing a search on my mobile. And I love it!

So what’s new you may ask?

Well, in December, Google Assistant has gotten better at helping users find nearby local services such as a plumber or an electrician. This has only rolled out in the US and is only a matter of time before it’s rolled out across the globe.

If you’re telling the Google Assistant that you need a particular service, the Google Assistant will then ask you a few follow up questions to hone in on the exact type of service you need, the location it’s needed, provide a list of service providers and even get them on the phone for you.

Why should you care?

Although, for now, this is only for home services, it just shows how important it is that you start optimising for local and voice search, which were two of my key takeaways from a digital marketing conference that I attended last month.

Being one of the very few (trusted) search results that appear for a location intent voice search query would (obviously) result in a high click through rate and a drive lot more traffic to your website, especially as more and more people adopt voice search. If you’re not there but your competitors are, you’ll be losing out!

References: 

https://www.blog.google/products/assistant/get-local-help-from-your-google-assistant/

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/30/16720632/google-assistant-connect-local-home-services

Tags: local search, Voice search