What You Need to Know About Voice Search
More than half of all searches will be voice-based by 2020. Here’s how every brand should prepare for the upcoming SEO revolution.
Voice search used to be a technological parlor trick. Remember early Siri and its frustratingly hilarious inability to answer simple questions? Today, voice search is no longer a novelty — it’s table stakes. People ask voice assistants more than a billion questions a month, according to Alpine AI, and that number is only going to increase.
If voice search isn’t on your mind, it should be. Over the next five years, the way people access information will shift from being predominantly visual (think website and FAQ page) to increasingly voice-centric. This means search strategy should evolve, too.
Voice search is still the Wild West of SEO, though. There are more questions around it and what it means than answers at this point. With that in mind, here are answers to four of the biggest questions you and your company should be asking about the future of voice search.
1. Why should I care about voice search?
It’s a numbers game. Voice search is already big, and it’s getting bigger. First, some stats: It’s estimated that more than 40 percent of adults in the U.S. make a voice search every day. By 2020, ComScore predicts more than 50% of all searches will be voice. Google, creator of the world’s most effective text and visual search, says 20 percent of all mobile searches are done via voice, and at Huge we’ve already seen that number increase to closer to 30 percent this quarter.
It might be obvious to say it, but companies should be where their customers are, even if that means in a limited capacity. Voice search is still new. There’s only so much Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and Google Assistant can do or say. But that simplicity is worth taking advantage of. One of the biggest opportunities around voice search is harnessing its limitations and using those limitations to have a focused, clear conversation with the people on the other end.
Searching on Google today is like wading through an ocean of information. Even with the best SEO, the onus is still on consumers to figure out what they’re looking for. The promise and the pitfall of voice search is that it drastically limits the amount of information presented to a person. If someone is looking for a simple, factual answer, voice is by far the most efficient way to go about it.
One of the biggest opportunities around voice search is harnessing its limitations and using those limitations to have a focused, clear conversation with the people on the other end.
The good news is that the technology behind the Google, Amazon’s, Apple & Microsoft’s voice assistants is finally catching up with the companies’ ambitions. Voice search results are becoming more reliably accurate. At 84 percent accuracy, Google provides, by far, the most accurate voice search experience, but other platforms are on the upswing, too. This means you can invest in voice search with confidence that the outcome will be useful, not a gimmick.
2. How is voice search behavior different than text search behavior?
As we move from typing to speaking, our search behavior is changing, too. The average search through typing is around two to three words; with speaking, it’s closer to five to seven words. People communicate with voice assistants as if they’re human. They imbue their questions with personal information and use natural language. This might seem like an insignificant difference, but those extra words can provide much richer context around a person’s intent when they’re asking a question.
Most significantly, people who use voice search are more likely to be looking for an answer based on locality. According to Search Engine Watch voice searches are three times as likely to be locally-based than text searches, which makes sense when you consider that many voice searches are happening through a mobile phone. This creates an interesting opportunity for brands who offer high-touch products like smartwatches, which benefit from a hands-on experience. For those companies, voice search is going to be an important channel to connect their brand to a flagship retail experience where people can engage with the product in real life.
Eventually, voice search will break free of our mobile phones and nightstand devices and enter the larger physical world. It’s likely that in the not-too-distant future voice search will be part of the social fabric, providing a layer of invisible interactivity to everything from parking meters to grocery stores. The takeaway is that voice search behavior — the way humans verbalize their thoughts and questions — will constantly evolve as the capabilities of the technology evolves as well.
3. Where do voice assistants get their answers?
In a word: micro-data. Don’t let that word scare you, though; this is something your SEO strategy is already accounting. Explained simply, micro-data (also known as schema) refers to code on a website that allows search engines to return the most relevant information for readers. While a search engine like Google will use schema to surface a laundry list of links or a featured snippet in response to a query, voice search answers are more concise.
Voice search responses average between 26–35 words, which means the content they pull from must also be just as concise. Current voice assistants don’t have the ability to read a 600-word blog post and distill the most important ideas down to a simple, verbalized answer. What does this mean for a brand’s content strategy? Think smaller. We’ve been identifying possible questions a brand might encounter and then building the answers into tagged “nugget” experiences that live on websites in FAQ and module form. Things like health features, retail locations, and user guides are easy places to start.
It might feel counterintuitive to embrace brevity, but think about how people will be accessing information in the future. As more people use voice search to answer straightforward who, what, and “how questions, fewer of them will navigate to the website itself. Creating an aggressive strategy around tagging up your content with micro-data is fundamental. This data helps trigger rich snippets and provides an opportunity to give these assistants a quick, snappy answer.
4. Can you optimize this content?
The short answer is yes, but it’s more complicated than that. Many aspects of traditional SEO strategy apply to voice search as well. Every good strategy around search begins with some good ole keyword research. When people ask questions verbally, they tend to add more words into their search, pushing the golden area of your research farther down the line with long-tail keywords and focusing in on question- based keywords.
Knowing what people are searching for and how is the first step toward a sound strategy, but with voice search it’s also about understanding intent. A lot of what we do is try to define the questions a person might ask about a product or brand. Granted, there are thousands of questions around any given product that are worth answering, but the trick is figuring out how to distill those questions down to the needs people have.
Doing that requires a two-fold approach. First, it’s important to figure out what people are asking about the most. Those high-volume questions will likely require content to be created around them. The less intuitive part of this process is defining what questions you don’t want to answer. Queries like “How can I find a cheaper version?” or service-oriented questions like “Why doesn’t this work?” can fall into the negative keyword bucket and will quickly filter out a large number of questions to answer. We’ve found that more than 30 percent of questions asked around a product are duplicate in sentiment or fall into the negative keyword category.
This isn’t a one-time effort, though. Refreshing your must-answer questions on a monthly basis will ensure that your voice answers are up-to-date. Like all effective optimization, it comes down to crafting a solid content strategy plan and then relentlessly sticking to it.
As voice search continues to grow, brands can stay ahead of the curve by knowing how their users’ questions are evolving. A great resource for doing that is Answer the Public, which helps marketers find out what queries are being asked about brands, so that they can start crafting the best answers.
Magenta is a publication of Huge.
