I had a recent event that was quite interesting, and an event that I had somewhat predicted just a week prior.  Several weeks ago I was speaking to an industry group on the topic of Websites and Digital Marketing.  During my presentation I highlighted the rise of voice search and how it might be a trend worth considering.  Voice search on mobile phones and tablets, voice search on computers, and voice search on the new internet enabled virtual assistant devices (more on these in a later article).  The image I used in the presentation is shown above. A couple quick stats I shared in my presentation is that web search activity on mobile devices is now greater than 50% of all web search activity (since 2016).

• The younger demographic of 18 to 34 uses their phone as their primary device
• 55% of Millennials use voice search at least once a day
• In the 35 to 50 demographic, 49% search the web on their phone at least occasionally

The main point I was making on the topic is that search activity is changing, the devices are changing and the way that people respond to search results is changing.  In my example, I described how I am seeing more people contacting Netnotic Marketing from their phones ( and other non-desktop devices) as ever before but also that the search strings resulting in traffic to my site is changing.  The example I used talked about a recent customer who called me because "Siri told me to call you".  This new customer was looking to improve the Search Engine Optimization for their website in Saskatoon so they queued up Siri on their mobile phone and asked for "Saskatoon SEO".  Siri returned a list of results, of which my website was the top results, so the customer called me.  In the following conversation, I asked the customer what brought them to Netnotic and their response was, "because Siri told me to call you".  I always ask customers (and new leads) what lead them to contact us and we are definitely noticing a upswing in the interaction with new search devices. So the key point for digital marketing here, in my case for Saskatoon SEO, is that we need to be very aware of how devices lead to new behavior, and new behavior may be changing how we optimize our websites to capitalize on these new trends.  We will be talking about both the rise of new devices that act like mobile (sort of) as well as the rise of voice search in a couple of coming articles.