Voice search has exploded. We’re moving beyond the keyboard and the touchscreen. More and more people are asking their digital assistants – whether that be Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Home, or Amazon’s Echo – what the weather is like in Boise or where you can find three-piece suits at a discount.
Already, more than 40 percent of adults and 50 percent of teens use voice search on a daily basis, according to a study commissioned by Google and conducted by Northstar Research. Other voice search statistics paint a similar picture.
Way back in 2016, voice search accounted for one out of every five queries on Google Assistant—a figure that’s already outdated, given the rapid rate of adoption. By 2019, the country will be awash in 67 million voice-assisted devices, and that doesn’t include smartphones with voice-assisted search apps.
Given how many people use voice search, it’s clear we’re on the cusp of a major transformation. Even if voice won’t replace text, it will become too big to ignore. So what does it mean for marketers? Why is voice search so important in 2018, and how can you leverage its power to expand awareness and increase profits?
How to Optimize for Voice Search
Getting ahead in the voice search game means rethinking your digital marketing strategy, or at the very least updating your SEO practices and fine-tuning your keywords and keyword phrases. If you want to stay on top of voice search trends to realize your full marketing potential, you’ll need to adopt the following strategies for voice search optimization.
1) Use Full Phrases
How will voice search will change SEO? Consider the difference between how you write and how you speak. Just as the written word differs from the spoken word, so text search differs from voice search.
When typing, people rarely input full questions. Instead, most text-based queries rely on some form of shorthand, phrases like “discount loafers” or choppy terms like “luxury apartments downtown Los Angeles.”
Voice searchers, on the other hand, tend to speak in full phrases. “Who sells discount loafers?” “Where can I find luxury apartments in downtown Los Angeles?”
As more people cozy up to their mobile devices and get comfortable with voice search, those types of long-tail keywords will take center stage.
The Takeaway?
From now on, digital marketers will need to emphasize keywords in the form of full phrases—the kind people use when they’re speaking conversationally, rather than the kind they use when formulating a written question.
2) Answer Questions
Voice searchers tend to ask more questions than their text searching counterparts. That’s because we’ve been conditioned to rely on isolated words when typing in a query, but we have no such bias when speaking. In the age of voice, your job is to answer those questions, rather than merely fill a page with keywords.
The Takeaway?
Marketers need to think of creative ways to answer their customers’ questions. In addition to replacing choppy keywords with more natural, flowing sentences, they should consider writing up FAQ pages and other informative articles that answer their target audience’s questions in great detail, with industry-specific knowledge.
3) Consider Natural (and Cultural) Speech Patterns
The difference between the spoken word and the written word doesn’t just come down to length and syntax. There’s also a small matter of how people speak. Between regional dialects, accents, generational differences (think millennials versus boomers), and cultural differences, speech discrepancies constitute one of the major problems plaguing voice search.
Variations in speech patterns are a key reason industry leaders like Amazon and Google rely increasingly on advanced A.I. capabilities to refine their technology. Eventually, the goal is to create search engines that can interpret the underlying meaning and context of a query, regardless of the speaker.
The Takeaway
As machine learning advances, the connection between A.I. and voice search will become stronger, and it will become easier to pair voice searches with the right results. Already, voice search has gone from less than 80 percent accurate to more than 90 percent accurate.
In the meantime, marketers should take some time to understand people’s natural speech patterns, those turns of phrases, colloquialisms, and speech quirks that define our daily language. That’s particularly important for local businesses who cater to well-defined cultures that may have slightly different ways of speaking.
In short, in order to succeed in the voice search arena, businesses should anticipate how their audience asks questions and then plan accordingly.
4) Think Local
Voice search means more to local businesses than to large, international conglomerates, at least in these early days before rapid voice search growth makes it the norm. Voice queries referencing locations also accounts for 80% of search on mobile devices and this number continues to grow.
That’s because people often turn to their phones for help while they’re on the go (e.g. driving) or while they’re busy doing other things (e.g. cooking). “Where’s the nearest DIY store?” “Where can I find a tire shop near me?”
The Takeaway
Local businesses ignoring voice search will do so at their own peril. As more people ask their devices to point them in the right direction, it will be incumbent upon marketers to enhance their local SEO toolkit.
5) Demands Trump Queries
Questions may take priorities over keywords, but action-oriented demands may soon take precedence over questions. Rather than ask, “Where’s the next pizza shop?” people who use voice search on the go are likely to say, “Order me a pizza.”
If you’ve ever run out of pasta sauce while cooking for a dinner party that’s ten minutes away from your doorstep, then you know the power of the imperative sentence. “Alexa, deliver two jars of Bolognese!”
The Takeaway
Think beyond search queries, to the world of on-demand ordering and delivery. That may mean developing content specifically for platforms such as Amazon’s Echo or Google Home, which rely less on paid search ads and organic results than they do on other types of exclusive content. In the short-term, that may put small businesses at a disadvantage, and they should be prepared to adapt to the new landscape.
“Alexa, where do we go from here?”
As marketers explore the best strategy for voice in 2018, they’ll have to navigate uncharted territory. On the bright side, voice search has become smarter and more reliable over the past few years, which makes it easier to see impressive results with even modest SEO tweaks.
Want to prepare yourself for the future of search? Get in touch with a digital growth agency that can help you master the science – and the art – of voice search.
