With the implementation of a significant capability to their latest version of their iPhone, Apple may have redefined online search and forever changed the way we as consumers seek out businesses in our local areas. If you’re a business owner or strive to be found online, this is a change that you should be taking very seriously.

Siri is a digitally voice commanded virtual personal assistant with numerous abilities. For the purposes of this post, we’re going to talk about the features that will have a direct effect on your business being found by your prospective customer now and in the future. Keep in mind that Android (Google’s mobile operating system for smart phones) and Windows mobile operating systems already have abilities that are inferior but similar in some ways to what Siri has and are planning even more advanced capabilities. In the long run, Siri represents a capability that will be ubiquitous to all smart phones within the next couple of years.

Siri (and similar future platforms) will affect your business in the following ways:

– Local Search Marketing: If you don’t have a plan that allows your business to be found online locally, applications like Siri will make it even more difficult for prospective buyers to find your business. It’s absolutely crucial that you have a local search marketing plan that allows your prospects to consider you within a 30 to 60 mile radius; services like Siri will further underscore the importance of having a plan that gets your company noticed online. In part, Siri’s high satisfaction rate is due to the fact that the app can find businesses and services that are conveniently close to your potential customer.

– Siri does not always use popular search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing: With a 66% search market share, it’s fair to say that Google will be the dominant search engine for many years to come. With that in mind, it’s becoming apparent that local and vertical search engines will eventually eat away at Google’s market share. Using a different search engine for a specific task will be no more difficult than speaking into your phone or tablet. Depending on the search task, your device may side step the major search engines and use a service that you may not be aware of. At Business Listing Center we emphasize that it’s important to be listed in as many useful local directories as possible (which is why we list you in over 190 local search directories specific to your area) services like Siri only reinforce that belief further.

– Fragmentation of the Search Market: To expand on the point above, there are literally hundreds of local search directories that your company can be listed in. None of them come close to the search volume that Google handles but many can and are very useful to helping customers find you. Yelp is such a good directory that Siri in certain circumstances uses the search engine to provide search results to a person that is trying to find a local product or service.

Whether you’ve heard of Yelp or not, tens of millions of people are using the service (some unknowingly because their search app uses Yelp as a source) on a monthly basis. According to Yelp’s latest metrics, close to 40% of their web traffic is mobile. Siri and similar voice controlled apps now and in the future will continue to introduce customers to vertical search engines that they probably would not have have found without the assistance of these mobile apps.

– Trust Transference: As I’m sure you’re aware, people trust the results from Google so much that they often don’t look past the first or second page of the results. Taking this to the mobile world, I believe it’s fair to assume that if Siri and other comparable services recommend an Italian restaurant close by; that recommendation is going to be good enough for a lot of potential customers. Consider the fact that iOS (Apple’s mobile operating system) and Android are two very capable platforms that most consumers are reasonably satisfied with.

– Siri will do an “end around” your Pay Per Click ads: If you’re operating a business that relies heavily on PPC campaigns, now would be a great time to start the process of diversifying your online marketing plan. For example, if you ask Siri “what is the closest Chinese restaurant?” Siri will present results from Yelp for this query. The money you’re spending on your Google PPC program can’t help you if Siri chooses to use Yelp for the search query.

Ultimately what this means to you is that if you’re in business, it is of utmost importance to have an online local marketing plan that makes it easy for local customers to find you regardless of the platform, type of phone or search engine they use. If you haven’t started, now is as good a time as any to start working on this. If you’re already marketing your business online, don’t be complacent. Googling your business online and being satisfied with seeing your name in the results is no longer close to being enough.