Voice Search
Voice Search is nothing new, it has been around for 10 years but only recently has its growing popularity popped up on SEO’s radars. So much so that I believe that voice search is the future of search.
Voice Search is; Conversational, Immediate and Localised. That means as SEO’s and web developers we will need to change the way we do things in the future.
What’s different about Voice Search?
Without realising it, Voice Search is changing the behaviour of people using it. Searchers are using what is known as long tail searches and they are using stop words (e.g. if, it, is, and, or) in their searches.
An example of this is if you wanted to know who the Prime Minister of England was. In a text based search, you would type in “prime minister england”. On a Voice Search you would say “Who is the Prime Minister of England?”.
Suddenly search has become conversational.
Natural Language
Voice Search will force SEO’s and Web Developers to change the way they write content for websites. People have felt that they need to write “fancy” or use big words for the content on their websites. Voice Search will force us and clients to write in a much more conversational manner and in a natural way like how we talk daily.
People are feeling like they are talking to a real person and that has changed our interaction. We want to have a conversation with Siri rather than only say a few words. Their responses are conversational so that may even be forcing you to interact with them in that way.
A recent keynote from Google’s Behshad Behzadi showed that voice search is growing quicker than text search. He attributed the results to people now starting to feel more comfortable talking to their devices and Googles speech recognition error rate down from 25% in 2015 to 8% at the start of 2017.
Google has seen that people are using natural sentences to search like the example above. Interestingly the highest amount of voice searches was for directions to a location.
Behzadi believes that in the future your mobiles will become your ultimate assistant helping you out with all aspects of your daily life allowing you to focus on what’s important in your life.
Who, What, Where, When and How
With Voice Search being conversational, questions have become the most common type of searches. Coupled with location, the largest number of searches made are people looking for directions to a location.
A recent study in the US showed that 71% of people aged 18-29 use voice search through their devices. 30-43 users are 59%. The interesting results were that 54+ year olds are at 38%. The study suspected this result was due to it being much easier for ‘older’ people to talk to their device rather than try and type a search.
What can you start doing now?
I am strongly recommending you try voice search and start getting comfortable with it. Start talking to Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant (when it becomes available in Oz). Try using the voice search on Google search. See if you get the same results with a text search and a voice search.
The more you know about it now the better you will be able to integrate it into your website in the future.
Make sure that your local SEO is up to scratch as Local searches are also much more common such as ‘show me the nearest café’ and ‘where is the closest petrol station’. Local SEO is going to be highly important.
Things aren’t going to change overnight but this is something we feel you need to start thinking about, so when the change does happen you will be prepared.
Written by David Stansfield - 13 July 2017