There are probably some voice search skeptics among the readers of this article. For what? – you may ask. Let the numbers do the talking:
- Humans can speak 150 words per minute vs. 40 words written per minute.
- 28% of people believe that voice search is a more accurate way to find an answer.
- 43% of people say that using voice search is faster than using a website or an app.
- 42% say driving is a good reason to use voice search.
- 21% of search engine users simply don't like to type on their mobile phones, and for this reason, they resort to voice search.(Statistics source: Hubspot Statistics).
In 2016, Google launched the equivalent of Amazon's Echo or Alexa, called Google Home, which has been dubbed the new "Genie in a Bottle" of the 21st century.
So, let's get to the point.
How Does Voice Search Affect SEO Optimization?
The good news is this: Voice search doesn't mean you have to overhaul your entire SEO strategy or website content. But it does mean you'll need to make some small changes to be more successful in voice searches.
First of all, you need to have a mobile-friendly website. Not that this is new, but now you also lose the Voice Search segment without a responsive version of your site. Of course, you already know that without a responsive design, Google doesn't even promote you in the results of searches performed on mobile phones (analysis shows that about 55% of searches now take place on a mobile phone).
Indeed, people don’t search the same way in text and Voice Search. In the latter case, it’s a natural expression, almost like a human-to-human conversation, and that changes the game a bit.
Voice search keywords usually start with a question: "What," "How," "Who," or "Where."
Back to SEO, our advice would be to create a Q&A page that contains this particular format.
Of course, Google is smart enough to show your site in relevant search results even when you don't formulate your content in the form of questions and answers. But let’s not forget that we are still talking about robots. As smart as they are, they can still make mistakes sometimes. That's where SEO steps in to fix the imperfections.
How Do You Integrate Q&A Content?
- Structure your text with headings and formulate each heading in such a way that it begins with a question. This is easy to do and easy for users and search engine bots to understand. Win-win-win.
- Create an FAQ page—it will not only be useful for voice searches but also save you some work with potential partners or customers.
- Structure the whole site well: provide a robust site architecture with clear, intuitive categories, subcategories, and well-linked internal content.
- In addition to good site architecture, add microdata (business location, phone number, price) and schema markup. These work in desktop searches and analysis shows they matter a lot when it comes to voice searches as well.
Out of 10,000 popular searches starting with question words (who, what, where, why, when, how), it was found that over half (53%) of the results had Rich Snippets.
Experiment: 1,000 voice searches were performed with Google Home. Let's see how many of the 1,000 searches yielded voice responses equivalent to the top charts that appear on the desktop.
The short answer is: 71%.
Looking deeper, it seems that this percentage depends on the type of Snippet:
- "Text" snippets in the 1K search data set yielded voice responses 87% of the time.
- "List" snippets dropped to just under half.
- "Table" type snippets generated only one-third of the voice responses.
This makes sense—long lists and most tables are simply harder to translate into voice.
How Does Voice Search Work?
Many people use voice search to get information about local businesses they want to visit. For example, someone might search for something like: "Where is the best restaurant in Chisinau?"
In this case, you want to make sure you optimize the content of your pages for "best restaurant in Moldova," right? Adding natural language to your website content will help you not only with voice search results but also to be closer to the average user.
The Bottom Line: As voice searches move even more to long-tail queries, they will require you to think "like a human."
As strange as this may sound, for a long time SEO was designed primarily for search engines, a bit spammy and robotic.
Now, the user is at the forefront. You must address them directly.
That should be easy enough, right?
Gone are the days when you simply tried to influence an algorithmic bot by focusing content on a few keywords.
Instead of focusing on single keywords, it is better to use a longer sequence of words for voice search (long-tail keywords).
You need to focus on phrases that a person would naturally use in speech.
Let’s say you own a travel agency and want to optimize the "Romania - Thailand" page. You are probably very interested in these words:
- Thailand
- Thailand plane tickets
- Thailand vacation
To better capture the voice search segment, try adding longer, more natural keywords like:
- The cost of plane tickets to Thailand
- Thailand holiday information
- The best holiday package for Thailand
In other words, "humanizing" the content and selecting keyword structures that are based on a natural conversational tone will have a higher chance of success.
Also, check out Rand Fishkin's video on this topic. For those who do not know English, I have translated the ideas from Rand's presentation below.