Getting Your Business Found on Siri

Apple first introduced Siri (a speech-recognition “personal assistant”) to the world on the iPhone 4s. Siri attempts to translate human speech and provide relevant responses to the requests it receives.

Siri allows you set appointments, get the weather forecast and search for many other things, including businesses in your local area. How can this new Apple feature help your business? Well, think about how many iPhone users are out there and are currently using Siri to locate information or get directions using their voice. If your business isn’t showing up in Siri’s results, there’s a chance that you’re missing out on some new customers.

Have you searched for your business yet on Siri? When I search for our own company, Digital Dogs, I get asked if I am looking for dog breeders or kennels. We all know that Digital Dogs is neither of those, so I tried searching all businesses within walking distance of our location – still no luck! Many other businesses are running into the same issue, so I started searching around to see if I could find the solution to showing up on Siri.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer.

A large part of the problem is that Siri still has a lot of kinks that need to get worked out. Its system isn’t as refined as, say Google, in returning relevant results for users. In fact, some of the results (or lack of) that Siri provides have been the cause of recent controversy. As a result, many businesses will probably start to see improvement in their visibility on Siri only as Apple continues to work on and refine the program.

Even with Siri’s flukes, there are still some things you can do to help increase the chances of your business showing up in the results. From my research so far, here are some of the top factors you should address:

Purchase the Premium Version of Yelp
Many business owners have commented that upgrading to the premium service offered by Yelp seems to have helped their companies appear on Siri. However, this may not be a viable option for small companies with tight marketing budgets. If upgrading to the premium service isn’t an option for your company, make sure that you create a free Yelp account or check up on your current one to make sure it lists your company in the appropriate business categories and contains your company’s most current information.

Get Online Customer Reviews
Some business owners and webmasters have also noticed a difference once getting some customer reviews on Yelp. This clearly isn’t a hard set rule for showing up in Siri, since some searches bring up companies without reviews. Nevertheless, it’s always a good idea to get positive reviews about your business online, so if you haven’t been encouraging customers to post reviews on Yelp and other websites, now’s the time to start.

Include Keywords in Your Company Name
Having the keywords that people search for in your company name seems to help businesses be found better on Siri. However, I’m not recommending that you randomly include keywords in your company name. Only do it if they’re already a part of your company name. For example, if you’re the owner of Teaching Kids Elementary School, make sure that you include the words “Elementary School” in your Yelp listing and not just “Teaching Kids.”

Once again, none of these recommendations are guaranteed to get your company showing up in Siri. However, they can help, and they don’t require much effort to start implementing.