How Voice Search is Going to Change Your 2018 SEO Strategies
Voice queries have come into the world of SEO, and one thing is for sure, SEO will never be the same again. About 5 years ago, voice queries were nothing more than a quizzical feature on your phone. Now, that very same feature is about to re-invent SEO as we know it, with the majority of the users between the ages of 18–43. Voice queries are about to become dominant for two primary reasons: the way you search for information is natural and conversational; and, users prefer direct answers to cold links.. In this post we’re going to take a look at Voice Search SEO, how its change is taking hold and why, as well as a few best practices along the way.
Virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Home are driving this change. These vocally-driven virtual assistants have made sourcing and managing information more intuitive, but they have also changed the way search engines work.
Below are some of the top devices that use voice search:
- Google Home
- Google Assistant
- Siri
- Amazon Echo — Alexa
- Microsoft Cortana
How will search engines think?
In a far more sophisticated way than they have in the past. With Google’s introduction of Google Hummingbird a term called semantic context has entered center stage. Semantic context is about understanding each word that is used in the search and how it relates to the next.
This is an attempt to understand the MEANING behind the search. India is leading the way with over 50% of the population using Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs), closely followed by the US with 46%. Not only will this elegant process deliver direct results to the user but it will also be in a better position to understand the user psychologically.
Image taken from: Facebook IQ
The consequences of this kind of system has profound implications for search advertising, long-tail keywords and content marketing.
Three Qualities of a Voice Search SEO:
There are three important characteristics of voice search SEO that are worth mentioning. The overarching principle is that marketing tactics will need to become more natural and intuitive like the way we speak normally.
The first is that questions such as “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “how” and “why” are the most popular voice queries. According to Search Engine Land, from year-to-year there has been an over 60% increase in the growth of question phrases. People have an insatiable thirst to learn about the world around them.
Questions will help search engines truly understand what a person wants, which will make things far more specific and customized.
The second aspect of voice queries is the emphasis that local businesses will need to have in their SEO strategies. If one were to search “show me cool things to do here” Google would provide you with a map showing the attractions in your area. According to Meditative Spotlight over 50% of people search for a local business on their smartphone daily.
The third aspect of voice search SEO is the length. It has been shown that the queries with the most clicks and impressions were around 1–3 words, which is strange since questions are usually longer. There is no evidence to suggest word or character length will increase in the future either.
- Best Practice: Play around with long tail and short keywords, open a Google My Businesses account, It’s free and can get you substantial exposure if you’re optimized enough to show up in Google’s local three-pack. 20% of local searches lead to a sale within a day.
Three Types of Voice Search Requests:
Three dominant voice queries have surfaced as part of this adoption: navigational, informational and transactional.
Informational requests are processed by Hound for example, with its live API which is based on semantic understanding. These type of requests generate direct results.
If someone was going to use an IPA such as Siri for a transaction a lot of the steps could actually happen before the app was opened.
A navigational query is perhaps the most straightforward since the user wants to go somewhere, the only variable is the destination.
More on Voice Requests:
This is going to make competition hyperconcentrated. So, let’s take a look at how getting more traffic and appearing in the results of voice search SEO can be done effectively.
Scrape sites that are relevant to yours in order to find questions asked by concerned users. Pay attention to the conversational way in which a question can be asked since that can sometimes give you a lot of insight into how far down the funnel someone is.
If someone were to ask “where can I get cool socks”, you know that this person is ready to make a purchase. It would make sense to bid aggressively for “where” transactional requests in your business’s area on AdWords.
According to Google’s official blog by 2020 more than half of all queries will be done by voice search. Create your content so that it answers users questions. As I mentioned earlier, people are inherently inquisitive. There is an effective tool on the market by WebPageFX called FAQFox. If you enter a keyword FAQFox will find all the relevant questions asked about this topic on the internet by the people you are targeting. You can then use these questions in your content.
- Best Practice: Ensure that any ads you have, as well as your landing page contain the search query your target audience could use. This will increase your overall relevance and quality score of your ad.
It’s important that you include microdata in your site on your content and location. This will optimize the search engine to display results fast and more effectively. There will also need to be more awareness around how search engines translate the spoken word into the written word.
One of the reasons IPAs didn’t rocket into stardom in the beginning was because of inaccuracies in translation. However, as is the habit with technology, things improve. With Google’s recent update to Google Translate it can now deliver an accuracy rate of above 90%. The accuracy rate is far better, but there are still some weaknesses.
Brands that are puns, acronyms or aren’t English are going to struggle in this new landscape. If you are stuck in this position, the best thing to do is to do test bidding for these incorrect key words. This will sharpen the results until the search engineers have sorted the problem out.
According to data released by StatCounter in 2016 mobile usage has now surpassed laptop usage by 51.3%.
Here are some of the best ways to gear your website towards mobile:
- Include long-tail keywords that are relevant to your content.
- There are three design templates to keep in mind. You can choose responsive, a separate mobile site or dynamic.
- Keep your attention on SEO techniques such as inserting proper metadata and creating quality links to your website.
- Images that are too big are going to make your website download time lag. Making the images the appropriate size will save you a lot more visitors.
- It’s also important that the design of your app isn’t too sensitive to finger movement. It is very irritating for a user to keep accidentally tapping ads as they scroll.
The SEO landscape is about to change dramatically. Search engines are thinking in a very sophisticated way by trying to understand the psychology of the user. We’ve taken a look at the key aspects of voice queries as well as the types. Making your sites mobile friendly and submitting an effective sitemap to Google are a key part to a successful strategy. It’s important to understand how and why voiceless SEO is on the rise and how to integrate these details into your business.
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