Voice search, its future and SEO tips

OK Google, Hey Siri, ALEXA PLEASE.

Josh Peat
Josh Peat
Aug 28, 2017 · 5 min read

When I think of voice search, I immediately picture my Dad repeatedly shouting phrases at his phone to no effective avail. I think novelty and I think it’s not something I’d be interested in using. Then I tried to set my alarm with voice, learned a recipe with voice and found myself talking to the things around me more than I talk to some of my close friends. It’s inevitable and much like any new technology, once you start using it — you can’t stop. Particularly for me, I find voice interesting as it caters to my lazy personality. With most devices having wake commands I don’t even need to lift my arms to reach my phone. Brilliant.

In a forecast by Google, they anticipated 50% of searches will be made by voice by the year 2020. That’s huge. That’s revolutionary. In this day and age I think voice search is an obvious candidate in our next logical step to automating any mundane task we can think of and just how regular search changed the face of the e-business world, I would wager voice search will too.

How are we searching?

As you can imagine this question is pivotal in determining how to reverse engineer the voice search process and ultimately use it to optimise our websites. We should think about the tools we’re using for voice search, or at least the most common choices right now. These exist in the form of digital assistants. The current popular choices being;

  • Google Assistant
  • Apple’s Siri
  • Amazon’s Alexa
  • Microsoft’s Cortana
  • Samsung’s Bixby

Another key player to consider is Facebook’s Jarvis AI which replicates home automation like Iron Man does and is currently in testing.

What are we searching for and when do we use voice to do it?

It’s clear from the above graphic that we use voice search at times where we would prefer our hands to be doing something else or the device we want to use is inconvenient to access. That or when we’re sunk so deeply into the sofa that getting up is no longer an option. The types of queries we tend to make currently play focus mostly to operating our mobiles rather than our homes and other queries tend to be strictly informational.

Those of you who have tried voice searching already will know that the best results tend to come from informational queries in the form of questions or ‘show me’ requests. OK Google, what’s the weather like today? Hey Siri, show me the weather forecast. That kind of thing. The reason this is so effective is mostly down to use of Google’s Quick Answers feature.

Google’s quick answers are a great way to find what you’re looking for without leaving the SERP.

Quick Answers or Featured Snippets are probably one of the most useful things ever created in terms of user experience in search. No longer do you have to trawl through walls of text in boring blog posts to find the answer you’re looking for, instead it is presented to you as a direct answer to your query. This is particularly compatible with voice search. The reason for this is that voice searches tend to be more conversational than the way which we have started using manual searches. Typically if you want to find out what movies came out in 2017, manually you’d probably go to Google and enter ‘2017 movies’. By voice, however, you’re more likely to phrase this as a question — ‘which movies came out in 2017?’. This difference is fairly insignificant at a glance but at a macro level this is key in understanding how to optimise your website for voice search. Voice queries are nearly always longer form and often take the form of a who, what, when, why type question. For best results try changing the headers and titles of your web pages to better reflect what your audience is searching for.

Notably, nearly all voice searches are performed via mobile device (this includes devices like the Amazon Echo or Google Home). Many of you will have already optimised your websites to look and function great on a mobile device and that’s more important than ever as search becomes voice dominated. To win results and importantly to gain those much desired Quick Answer positions, you’re going to need to be as mobile friendly as possible. Make sure your site has a mobile version that functions just as well as the desktop site and for search purposes try to answer the questions you’re being asked as closely to your home page as you can. I want to see the answer in a click or two, not ten links through a confusing category and subcategory system.

Another way in which you can prepare for voice search is adding schema-markup to your website’s HTML. This is a great way to structure the data you are trying to present and allows search engines like Google to display your information more effectively. Consequently, having this is likely to boost your SERP ranking against pages that do not utilise it. To explain what I mean by this here’s an example of a Google search result;

Notice the star rating and published date? These appear because the author, in this case, Tech Radar, has opted to use schema markup to better display their meta description and give you a good idea of what you’re likely to find should you click on their review. Though this sounds like it could be complicated to implement, Google has a great tool to make this process significantly easier for you.

With 60% of users who have used voice search saying they have only started doing so in the last 12 months and increasingly high projections in numbers of voice searches per month, it is clear that voice search is no longer something that will happen in the future or that is ‘not quite there yet’. If you’re not optimising your website for voice, then you may as well not be optimising your website at all.

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Josh Peat

Written by

Josh Peat

Yorkshire based small business enthusiast & idea sharer. Still learning, but everybody is.

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