Here is today’s roundup of news related to local marketing and advertising, local media, technology, local commerce, consumer behavior and more.

Study: Now Nearly 120 Million Smart Speakers in U.S. (January 11, 2019)
LSA Insider: “The Smart Audio Report revealed that 21% of US adults (53 million) own a smart speaker, up from 18% (43 million) in the second half of 2018. The report states there was a total of 14 million new smart speaker owners in all of 2018.”

Voice search optimization guide: Six steps for 2019 (January 11, 2019)
Search Engine Watch: “According to PWC report, 71% of respondents would rather use their voice assistant to search for something than physically typing their queries.”

Study: Mobile garners 50% of holiday search budgets as campaign costs rise (January 11, 2019)
Mobile Marketer: “Kenshoo’s data indicates that marketers devoted more of their SEM budgets to mobile platforms during last year’s holiday season, especially on the heavily promoted days of the extended Thanksgiving weekend that typically see a jump in consumer purchasing.”

US Social Trends for 2019 (January 10, 2019)
eMarketer: “2018 was a turbulent year for social media, and we believe more fallout is ahead, especially for Facebook. Here is what we will be watching for in 2019.”

Google’s internal SEO strategy: Make small changes, embrace change, consolidate (January 10, 2019)
Search Engine Land: “Sean O’Keefe, a data scientist at Google, on Thursday shared how Google thinks about their own internal SEO efforts for the 7,000 websites they manage. O’Keefe said Google makes on average over 200 changes to these sites on a daily basis and managing the SEO for those changes can be complex.”