Language is the boundary that differentiates human beings from other species. Though, some intelligent creatures such as dolphins know how to use communication sounds. The human being can enjoy rich language just a couple of letters, ten thousand words can express an indefinite number of thoughts.
Since ages, scientists have dreamed of machine that can listen and talk just like a human. Speech recognition technology was developed many years back but currently exists in PCs and Smartphones. Nowadays many people are using Voice search because it’s exciting and quick. People who are using voice search gets quick answers to their queries. Let’s take a keen look and find out what are the importance, reason for voice search and how to optimize your website pertaining to voice search.
Importance of voice search
Voice search has evolved over the years, now it’s the most successful new marketing trends which started very slowly but now it has gathered momentum. In the recent years, Voice search techniques hold a significant chunk of market. Voice search is a commonplace and its user base is growing very fast.
Google has already invested heavily in Voice Search as it is the fasted growing form of search. Website owners are waking up to the importance of voice search while creating content for search engine optimization (SEO). According to research 55% of teens and 41% of adults are already using voice search. Some of the major trendsetters in voice search are Siri from Apple, Google Now, Alexa from Amazon, Cortana from Microsoft and many more. Evolving of Voice Search technology these companies have reduced their error rate for positive user experiences.
With voice search, website owners can easily provide an answer that users need. Voice search will gradually increase traffic on your landing pages. Users are hungry for faster answers, voice search serves this need and it is also an attractive alternative to web search.
Voice search is a new way to boost traffic on your website; it’s the right time to leverage voice search. Voice search not only helps in improving ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs) but also improves the user experience. Google is emphasizing today’s ranking on the basis of user experience. Voice search users are getting their answers very fast, which results in reducing negative signals like a high bounce rate. The developments on digital assistant technology are still under process, there is no doubt that these tools are now more refined as agents of voice search. A user can easily correct spelling mistakes and get the right answers through voice. The users may get answers on their previous searches, many users will find it more convenient to use voice search. As a website owner, it’s very important to understand how you can capitalize on the myriad benefits of this technology presents to your business. It is also important to leverage the services of SEO because these experts already realize the trend and they know how to optimize your website for voice search. Now, you can concentrate on your core business while these professionals will work on your website.
The massive popularity of Smartphone is fairly old news at this time. The development of voice search, cellular has become even more significant. Over half of search queries coming from cellular and marketers are focusing in a context of voice search to boost their Google SEO. The best entrepreneurs will understand that cellular should come before desktop. Make sure that your website is optimized for mobile devices as many voice searches have come from Smartphones. This will also help you to appear higher on voice search position. You can simply take a Google mobile-friendly test, which will inform your web page ranking.
Voice search will continue to grow, and focus on finding the best possible answers for the users. This will become crucial in near future.
Reason to optimize your website for voice search
Google, Amazon Echo, and Bing are giving a lot of importance to voice search and they are continuously developing their voice personal assistant. People love changes and they also want more interactive search answers at the same moment, this will save a lot of time. Nowadays more and more users want direct answers rather than links because of which a voice search SEO strategy is very important in future online businesses.
Very few people type the way they speak, normally while typing people use shorthand language for example “ New York weather”, but in voice search, people will ask a complete question like “ What is the weather in New York?”. Many voice search program is functioning successfully like Cortana, Google Now and Siri and they are becoming more refined in near future.
It’s very important for SEO to optimize their website for voice search because:
- Natural keyword integration will remain critical
Over the past few years, brands have started to warm to the fact that natural keyword integration is the only way to achieve the holy trinity of increased search ranking, conversation, and positive customer experience. Voice search has heightened the importance on this, very few high-intent searches the terms like “Levis store in the UK”. Even very few customers will utter these words to their virtual assistant. The use of integrating keywords more naturally into on-site copy will include keyword synonym and other varied phrases. This will ensure that brands are performing well in both traditional and voice search.
- Useful information is still important
Making sure that the search results are actually answering user’s queries has always been Google’s first priority. The recent algorithm updates have made this crystal clear. It is no longer important to optimize a category page for a keyword; the content provided must contain useful information or advice which will engage the readers in some way. As the top results are read out by a virtual assistant, the value of ensuring the information more useful becomes even more obvious.
- Optimization strategies for Voice Search
In early 2018, Google unveiled some dimensions by which their Voice Search quality team evaluates results from Google Assistant. The dimension includes:
1. Information Satisfaction: The content of the answer should meet the information that the user needs. The information should be right.
2. Length: When the displayed information is too long, users can quickly scan it visually and locate the information, but for a voice answer, that is not possible. It is much more important to ensure that you provide a helpful amount of information, not too much or too little.
3. Formulation: It is very much easier to understand a badly formulated written answer than a grammatical poor spoken answer. The utmost care should be taken in ensuring grammatical correctness.
4. Elocution: Pronunciation and prosody must be proper in spoken answers. Improvement in text-to-speech generation has quickly reduced the gap of human performance. It’s clear from reading Google Voice Search guidelines that they want voice search results that are brief and to-the-point. Content that is easy to read and understandable performs better in voice search.
5. Long Tail Keywords: Long tail keywords are important because many people are asking questions in complete sentences. This is very different from desktop and mobile. To bring searchers for your local businesses, make sure that you write more conversationally in your content so that it could match keywords that people are likely searching.
6. Quick Answer Optimization: Google Quick Answers are the hub of information that appears at the top of the search engine results page. These contain certain queries that provide users with the information and the answers that they are looking for. Most of the time, these answers are pulled from a website that is displayed at the bottom of the quick answer box.
7. FAQ Pages: FAQ pages are the best way of ranking better for Quick Answers and showing up in voice search. It’s a great place to incorporate your long tail keywords research by structuring questions and answers around them. You need to find out what people are looking for, write down those questions and try to answer them clearly and perfectly. If your answer to your question is simple then you don’t have to write a long paragraph about it. Voice assistants are looking for direct answers for their users. So if your answer is long and spread across the several sentences, then you are not going to be selected as voice search results. Make sure you keep your answers short and sweet.
8. Mobile Voice Search: Over half of search queries are coming from mobile devices and it has been found that 20% of mobile searches are voice searches. These numbers are likely to grow, so mobile optimization is very important for incorporating voice search into your overall strategy. There are a few simple strategies that you need to ensure while achieving a proper mobile optimization:
- Ensure that your site has a mobile friendly design
- Focus on local content
- Be particular about title tags and Meta descriptions
9. Scheme Markup: Scheme markup is a code that adds to your website or the page. It provides search engines with more information and content. We can take an example, while crawling an E-commerce product page, Google may not understand each element of the product such as the price or in-stock status just like a human would. This is where schema markup comes into the play. You don’t have to leave Google to guess that the product you are selling is $12. You can specify it by using schema. Google then sometimes rewards you by highlighting that information on search engine result pages for your listing.
With so much development and research going on the Google algorithm, the expected changes in the Google search engine have become more futuristic. The only aim that Google has is to provide users with direct answers for which voice search plays a vital role. Voice search will make the Google search engine more user-friendly and interactive. Google will be favoring that website which adds better functionality to integrate and support conversational and voice search in Google search engine.
