Voice Search is not a Fad

At the begining of the year we shared an article about SEO voice search and how we can learn voice SEO from Google Assistant — which is now on 400 million devices. In today’s article we refocus on the relevance of voice search and how you really only need to make a slight recalibration to your SEO strategy.

Don’t Ignore Voice Search

Maybe voice search just doesn’t make that much sense yet, but you don’t want to ignore it’s relevance. Here’s a few statistics to help put things in perspective:

• 55 percent of teens and 40 percent of adults use voice search daily
• 20% of all searches using the Google App are voice (Google Data, U.S., Google App, Android, May 2016)
• the ratio of voice search is growing faster than type search (Google’s Behshad Behzadi - Principal Engineer, Google Zurich)
• Google voice search queries in 2016 are up 35x over 2008 (Google Trends)

Get Chatty SEO for voice search doesn’t shift the paradigm of search marketing. It really just calls for a small adjustment to how we approach our SEO, like how we do our keyword research. Voice ‘keywords’ are more conversational, natural sounding language. Back to Basics The Google search engine results page (SERP) is continually evolving and winning at featured snippets is getting more important than ever. Google’s People Also Asked boxes are a great example. The PAA boxes continuously expand with new questions and can reveal at least 20 different search results depending on the question asked.

Start Paying Closer Attention

• voice search is a legitimate. It is not a fad. It’s had enough early adopters and gained enough mileage because:
• voice search technology is getting incredibly smart
• voice search technology is almost everywhere
• voice search is faster, and a better user experience

Here are 3 great resources to help you with creating content for voice search.

How to Optimize for Voice Search: 4 Simple SEO Strategies Don't make the mistake of equating voice search optimization to using long-tail keywords in your content.

Voice Search: Is Your Content Ready? Statistics on usage are difficult to come by, but in mid-2016, voice search represented 20% of queries on Google's mobile app.

Key notes on optimizing for voice search: Conversation, content and context Content should be structured and written so as to provide traditional SEO value and ensure that a voice engine recognizes and understands the content's context and meaning.

At the end of the day much of what stands as the best, and most reliable practices for SEO still applies to voice search. Yes, you will still be doing keyword research. Yes, your content has to be uniques and useful, and your content should also focus more on trying to make it as easy for Google to understand the context of the information. Just like if you are to write your content in a way that it could be read aloud — and understoud. Kind of like getting back to the basics of writing for the web…

Main photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash